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

With that, he stalks out the door, refusing to engage with me any further.

Once he’s gone, I lock myself away in my chambers with my snakes and sink into a sullen fury, enraged by my own impotence. What use is my vaunted sight or my well-honed wiles if neither of them can serve me now that I need them more desperately than ever?

Perhaps I would lose myself entirely to this hopeless lassitude, were the marquise suddenly not in such constant need of me. Though I can barely stand the sight of her face, she besieges me almost every day for new philters with which to ply the king, demanding that I scry incessantly for her.

“What do you see?” she asks me each time, in a desperate sort of fervor. “Tell me, am I still upon the battlements? Do I still wear my almost-crown?”

“Of course you do, my lady,” I reassure her, though the truth is that I see no such things—and I have not for a while. The marquise’s destiny increasingly forks away from the king’s, twisting from the light and into an ashy darkness I suspect is some tragedy of her own. “You are still with him, and so very beautiful.”

“Beautiful,” she spits bitterly. “Am I, still? For I am almost five and twenty, you know. Soon he will turn away from me, repulsed by my advancing age. Replace me with another, some rosy little apple with unlined skin, not yet shriveling on the vine.”

“This is not true,” I protest, although in truth, it likely is. The marquise is nothing like old, of course, and still amply lovely. But there is always someone younger to be had, and nothing so fickle as noblemen’s taste, when they deem it time to abandon and replace their mistresses. Had the marquise not killed poor Claude, she would likely have been ousted from the king’s bed already. I indulge her only because I am beholden, though I am sick to death of reassuring her that she is the fairest in all the land.

And there is something increasingly savage about her need to cling to Louis’s flagging affections, when it is clearly well past time to let him go.

The next time she calls on me, she storms back and forth across my study in a sweep of damask skirts like some demented hurricane.

“Truly he is no better than a rutting dog, for all the fidelity and regard he has for me,” she forces through clenched teeth, lifting her goblet to her lips. Though it is barely afternoon, she has already quaffed two glasses of my finest burgundy wine, and seems disinclined to stop.

“No matter that I have gone to such lengths on his behalf, showered him with such unrivaled gifts as a Messe Noire and your prophecies. No, it is as if he cannot be bothered to control his own baser impulses.”

I barely manage to hold my tongue, sorely tempted to remind her that the king has been faithless from the very start, given that she displaced both Louise de la Vallière and the queen herself to win his favor.

“And that is the trouble, you see,” she ruminates, twisting her curls around her fingers so tightly, it bleaches her knuckles white. “Even if I were to have you poison every simp that crossed his path, he would still find another one to woo. Even if it meant that he must make do with a pig farmer’s most ill-favored daughter. The relentless pursuit of debauchery is one of his foremost skills.”

“Perhaps it is time, then,” I suggest delicately, aware that I am treading on extremely brittle ice, “to consider breaking with the king?”

“Relinquish him, you mean?” She blinks at me with such shock and incredulity that I may as well have sprouted horns. “Of my own volition? Dieu merci, Catherine, surely you must be jesting. Are you so cruel as to suggest that I should simply resign myself to seeing him content in another’s arms?”

“Then what would you have me do, Marquise?” I ask, struggling to maintain my equanimity rather than giving in to sheer frustration. “There are always new philters we might try, of course. Different formulations.”

“Oh, hang your spells,” she spits, flicking a dismissive hand. “They are clearly no longer enough. No, if the philters have finally failed us, then I have all but lost him. I suspect he already yearns for that flighty twit Anne de Rohan, the Princesse de Soubise. Which leaves me with only one thing left to do.”

I shrink back against my chair, dreading this precipitous new turn. “And what might that be, Marquise?”

She hesitates for a moment, shifting her jaw from side to side, her eyes both wild and distant with some furious deliberation. Then she turns to me like a demon come to roaring life, a dreadful clarity of resolve blazing upon her face.

“He must die himself,” she pronounces. “If I am forced to live without him, then at least I will have been the last to know his love.”

I gape at her, stupefied, thinking I must surely have misheard her.

“You wish to … to kill the king?” I manage to eke out, my voice emerging an undignified squeak. I feel a vertiginous drop deep in my bowels, as if I am somehow falling through my seat. “But, Marquise, you cannot mean it. That is not only murder you are proposing, but the very worst sort of treason!”

“It is also self-preservation,” she says softly, sinking into a damask armchair as if all the weight has left her body now that her decision has been made. “Having known the ardor of his love, the searing glory of it, in his absence I would be left with nothing but cold and ash. I may yet recover from his death—but never from his betrayal. It would spell my own cruel end.”

“We all recover from such losses, at one time or another,” I offer