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

floored with splintered planks and furnished only with a listing table, two stools, and a straw-tick pallet, I find myself desperately wishing I had taken a different path. Rejected the marquise’s offer and come to live here with Marie instead, leaving Antoine to fend for himself. I almost even wish Agnesot had never given me the grimoire and instructed me to guard my evil, inspiring me to chase after power at any expense.

How different everything might have been.

Though I cannot pretend that, at bottom, I can truly blame anyone else for this ultimate predicament in which I now find myself. It was my choices that brought me here, one wicked step at a time. And it will have to be my own choices that walk me out of it as well.

“So, what is it that you’ve done?” Marie asks once she has set a kettle to boil on the cast-iron woodstove and turned to face me with her slim arms crossed over her chest. “Though given what La Reynie accused me of, I suppose I might hazard a guess.”

“You will hate me,” I whisper, hanging my head. “It is much worse than anything you have ever done. What is it you said once? That your evil was of the smallest sort, the kind just enough to keep you in wine and baguettes? This is not like that, Marie. Nothing like that.”

“Why don’t you tell me, all the same?” She shrugs, coming to sit across from me. “Clearly you’ve no other choice, anyway.”

So I do, sparing her no ugly detail, laying bare both the flawed and selfish reasoning that has brought me to this juncture, and all the crimes I committed with Adam at my side. I tell her of the false Black Masses and of Prudhomme’s death, then of the ones that followed. Even what I was forced to do to Claude, and finally, the king’s command that I kill the marquise for him.

“And so you were always right,” I breathe once I have finished, afraid to meet the judgment in her eyes. “About me and the grimoire, though it did not imperil my soul itself; I did as much entirely of my own volition. And you were right, too, that such a life would consume me in the end.”

It occurs to me that perhaps even Agnesot had some inkling of what end I might come to all those years ago, when she warned me that the freedom I yearned for came at a cost higher than most would choose to pay. Perhaps she should have been more clear as to just what I would be risking; but even if she had been, I doubt I would have chosen differently, forged anything other than my own willing path to here.

Across the table from me, Marie says nothing, turning to stare out her tiny window at the peaked roofs that flock beyond, still glistening with dew under a pewter sky that promises rain. A pigeon wings by her window with a long screech and ruffling of feathers, something painfully melancholic to its shrill cry.

“I see. And what sort of help is it that you would ask of me?” she says in a leaden tone, making no comment on all that I have told her.

I take a deep breath, and then sketch out my plan, detailing her minor but crucial role in it.

“Should it work, I would have to run afterward, of course,” I finish. “Paris would never be safe for me again. I would have to reinvent myself elsewhere, disappear from here.”

She nods once, teeth worrying at the inside of her lip, then turns back to the window.

“Well, what do you think, now that you have heard it all?” I prompt, my lungs feeling like an overinflated bellows, the taste of metal tanging in my mouth.

“What do I think of what, Catherine?”

“Of the plan. Of me, I suppose. Do you … do you hate me, Marie?”

She sighs at that, long and grievous, and when she turns back to face me, her eyes are pools of pain. There is a fatigue to her face, a kind of drawn exhaustion. As if she is beyond weary of contending with my foolishness.

“Of course I do not hate you,” she replies with a ghost of a smile. “Perhaps I wish I did; it would certainly be far easier on me. But I don’t, because I cannot, Catherine. I know you well enough to understand what it is you thought that you were doing, misguided though it was. And most of all, I cannot hate you because I love you still, foolish and driven and heedless though you have shown yourself to be. I have always loved even the very worst of you.”

“You … love me?” I whisper, my insides swooping with shock, half afraid to draw another breath. “Even now, after everything? Even though I left you?”

“Yes, even now. Such a painful irony, is it not, ma belle? That after all your fear of me, this should be the very freedom you have been questing for all this time,” she says ruefully, tilting her head. Her full lips tremble, a wealth of restrained emotion gleaming in her eyes. “That no matter what you do—no matter how far off course you find yourself—you can do anything you wish and still find safe harbor with me in the end.”

After my many months of meticulous give-and-take with Adam, I can barely fathom so unconditional a love. Much less that I should somehow be so fortunate as to find myself on its receiving end.

Overcome, but still terribly leery of overstepping, I reach across the table to Marie. When she does not twitch away, I take her hand and gently lift it to rest against my cheek.

“Have I truly not ruined everything with all my foolishness?” I whisper into her palm. “For all that I do not deserve you, you must know that I have loved you always. Loving you … it is my first real memory. I know that