The Vine Witch (Vine Witch #1)(3)

“It really is you.” The old woman held her hands in the sacred pose to thank the All Knowing before embracing her. “I always knew you’d return someday.”

“How did you know when I scarcely knew myself?”

Her mentor waved her inside and shut the door. “The All Knowing always favored you.”

Elena disagreed about which shadow had been cast over her at birth, but she held her tongue.

Stepping into the kitchen again after so long, she felt a tinge of strangeness, as if she were a guest. She blamed it on the unusual scents swirling among the familiar—the hint of men’s pomade, the turpentine of boot polish, and the slightly musty odor of leather-bound books mingling beneath the homey smells of bread and cheese and Grand-Mère’s lavender soap. Change was to be expected, but it only added to her unsettled feeling that more time had gone by than she knew.

The old woman pressed her hands to her cheeks in hopeless exasperation as she looked at the mess on the floor. She reached for a cloth and knelt to mop up the milk and slivers of broken porcelain. Before Elena could protest, the old woman sliced her finger on the first sharp edge she touched.

“Let me do that,” Elena said, kneeling. “I’ve startled you. I should have sent a dove to warn you I was coming.”

“Just clumsy old age.” Grand-Mère surrendered the dishcloth. “Mind yourself. Milk and blood together are a bad omen.”

At the prompt, a familiar childhood rhyme floated up in her mind. “Mud and silk, blood and milk, never the twain should meet.”

“For if they do.”

“Bad luck to you.”

“’Tis the Devil you’ll greet.” The old woman finished the rhyme and sucked at the drop of blood on her fingertip.

“I remember your lessons well, Grand-Mère.”

The old woman peered at her before removing her finger from her mouth. “I wasn’t sure I’d live long enough to hear anyone call me that again.”

They were not truly related, yet Elena’s connection to Grand-Mère often felt stronger than the bond of blood, held together by the terroir and magic of the work they did in the vineyard. They bowed their heads together, touching foreheads over the milk, as they often had when she was still a girl.

“I felt a quiver in my left hand when I got out of bed this morning,” Grand-Mère said. “I had no idea it was you I’d sensed. It’s been so long I thought it was just the change in the weather.”

Elena squeezed the dishrag, bracing herself. “How long?”

The old woman thought about it as she stood and dumped the broken shards in the rubbish bin. “Has to be seven years now.” Then she turned and squared her shoulders as if finding her own courage. “Where have you been all this time?”

Seven years!

Her heart gave a little kick at the news. She’d never dreamed she’d spent seven winters in that fetid pond, eating moths and slugs to survive. “It was a curse. I only just got free.”

“This whole time? I thought maybe you’d . . . started over somewhere else.”

“It was meant to be permanent.” Her eyebrows pinched together. “Only someone neglected to study their poisons. They miscalculated the counteractive potency of bufotoxins when self-ingested over time.”

“A permanent curse?” Grand-Mère drew her hand to her heart. “Good heavens, are you sure?”

Elena dumped the wet rag in the sink and took a seat at the kitchen table. Feeling safe for the first time in years, she described her ordeal, including how she’d held on to just enough of her wits to remember to eat the poison-laced skin every day and not gag it back up, even as the curse tried to swallow her memory of being human. While she spoke, Grand-Mère prepared her a simple meal of bread, cheese, and wine.

“A toad?” Grand-Mère was incredulous as she set the plate down in front of Elena. She took the chair opposite, a hand pressed to her cheek. “It’s been an age since that sort of transmogrification was practiced. Who could have done such a thing?”

“Bastien. Who else?”

“Bastien?” The old woman’s mouth fell open. “But you were going to be married. You were going to—”

“We had a fight.” Elena’s face flushed with shame. “Once he slipped the ring on my finger, he made demands.”

“Demands?”

Elena buried her face in her hands. “He said as his wife I’d be obligated to serve him. That it wasn’t my place to refuse.”

“Marriage is always a compromise. Often more for the woman, I admit, but—”

“He understood nothing about me. He knew I was a vine witch, that I had obligations of my own to uphold, that I couldn’t just fulfill his every whim. I’d finally mastered my first exceptional vintage, and he expected me to set all that aside to serve his dreams. The ambition and greed in that man! How could I have been so wrong about him?”

Grand-Mère shrugged diplomatically. “He always did have grand plans.”

“I told him I’d rather be a happy spinster than his miserable wife and threw his ring back at him.”

Grand-Mère bent her ear forward, as if she hadn’t heard correctly. “You broke off the engagement?”

“I had no choice,” she said, reaching for the glass of wine. It had been seven years since she’d held a glass in her hand or sniffed the silky bouquet of Chateau Renard’s pinot noir. She gave the wine a swirl and held it to her nose, needing its cleansing power more than ever. “He doesn’t like being told no, even when he’s wrong. And he cannot abide being made to look like a fool. Not by a woman. I’m convinced it’s why he paid some fly-by-night Fay to spellbind me and keep me silent. He must have.” She exhaled at the weight of the implication. “Whoever the witch was, she blindsided me in the road just before I reached home. I’d stopped to slip into the shadow world to see how he was faring. She attacked while my sight was focused elsewhere for the briefest of moments. That ‘no’ cost me everything.”