Poison Priestess by Lana Popovic (some good books to read TXT) 📗

this decadent frivolity the next time we are together. “Can you imagine being both so mad and so debased,” I can almost hear her say, her eyes glittering with gleeful contempt, “that you’re willing to spend your coin on enough ice to carve a gigantic randy goose?”

Though I spent a night with Marie only last week, a yearning for her and for our simpler nights in the cité caroms painfully through me. For a desperate, aching moment, I wonder if all this has been a terrible mistake. Perhaps I should never even have come to the ball.

Perhaps I do not belong here at all, marooned among these faithless libertines who know nothing of true friendship.

The maréchale descends upon me then, and plucks me from my melancholy.

“Madame La Voisin! You came after all, what magnificent fun!” she exclaims, rushing forward in a flurry of satin and perfume to swoop pecks on my cheeks. She is attired as some bird of paradise, a resplendence of feathers sewn into her scarlet gown and resting on her head. “And, mon Dieu, but you look stunning—I would not have known you, had the doormen not tipped me off! Does she not look incomparable, Geneviève?”

Madame Leferon fawns over me accordingly. Then the two link arms with me and lead me to the banquet table, chattering with each other like the fast friends they pretend to be. Still engaging in their own private little masquerade, I note wryly to myself, even as they vie to outdo each other in piling assorted delicacies on my plate.

“You must try the religieuses,” Madame Leferon urges. “Madeleine’s chef procured something called fruit de la passion for the filling, through some sorcery Madeleine will not reveal even upon pain of death, the wretch. The flavor is downright sublime.”

“It would hardly be special if I were to tell you where I got it, you greedy thing,” Madeleine retorts with a hint of sharpness to her smile. “A sorceress never reveals secrets of her craft—n’estce pas, Madame La Voisin?”

“It is singular,” I say as a burst of tart sweetness spreads across my tongue, a sunny tang infused into the silky cream. “In keeping with the ball itself, Maréchale.”

She glows with pride, dancing her shoulders delightedly. “I do try my best for my guests—and of course, once I thought even you might come, I made it my mission to outdo myself!”

Turning toward the dance floor, she tugs me with her into the fray. “Come now, you must meet everyone! They’ll scarcely believe I’ve managed to entice you here.”

Half an hour later, I escape to the powder room, my mind overstuffed with the new acquaintances, names I once knew only through Antoine’s most expensive commissions. I feel as if the maréchale has introduced me to half the court, from the Vicomte de Couserans with his roving eyes to the elderly Marquise de Vasse, who plied me with breathless questions of geomantic figures, as if I might lay claim to all possible knowledge of the arcane. And once sufficient wine filled the moat I’d dug around myself, they spoke to me as if I were truly one of them. Regaling me with bawdy jokes and gossip, prevailing upon me to dance, even insisting that I call them by their Christian names.

Drawing me ever deeper into their fanged fold and tucking themselves around me, like a Venus flytrap furling slyly closed.

Worse yet, I found myself a bit taken with it all quite despite myself.

Remember who you are, you little fool, I instruct my candlelit reflection in the powder room mirror, peering sternly at myself. And how far you’ve come to be here. Would you really risk it all just to feel as though they were your friends?

By the time I’ve gathered myself enough to return to the ball, I find the ballroom much darker than I left it, smothered in an expectant silence. Even the legion of birds seems to have gone abruptly rapt, the glistening beads of their eyes fixed upon the center of the room, where the ice sculpture on the podium has been removed. The crowd chatters excitedly to one another, sneaking glances at the empty podium, as if preparing for some new spectacle.

I’m wondering what all this may be about when an arm loops through mine, and I’m engulfed in a waft of the Marquise de Montespan’s heady attar-of-roses scent. She wheels me around to face her, arrayed in an azure gown that glints with some iridescent thread, a dramatic peacock masque concealing her dainty features.

“Madame La Voisin,” she coos in my ear with the slightest edge to her voice. “I had heard you were about, but could not quite bring myself to believe that Madeleine had managed to wheedle you here.”

“Marquise!” I exclaim, struggling to cover my surprise. “I thought you were otherwise engaged tonight.”

“I was, but then Marie-Thérèse took ill with the vapors yet again.” She gives a frustrated shrug, as if she finds the queen’s frailty infinitely tiresome. “So I thought I might as well not waste the remainder of my night. And you? How did Madeleine entice you to attend?”

“She was … quite insistent that I come,” I reply cautiously, knowing I must take care where I tread. “I hope I did not do aught amiss by agreeing, madame. I had no wish to offend one of your closer friends by turning down an invitation.”

“Oh, not at all, though I do wish you had at least thought to mention it to me.” Beneath her practiced pout, that edge sparkles in her voice again, like the glimmer of a knife blade spotted from the corner of an eye. “And since we are speaking of social calls, my dear, I would much prefer that you curtail your visits to the cité. Specifically to that disagreeable friend of yours, what was her name? The one I met, at that loathsome tavern in which I found you.”

“Marie,” I say through suddenly numb lips, my mind spinning like a whirling top. How did