The Vine Witch (Vine Witch #1)(78)

Elena didn’t trust her legs to hold her up, but she took his hand when he offered it.

“Let us hope,” Grand-Mère answered.

“Madame. You’re all right? We’ve been looking for you.”

“Monsieur Martel, I hoped I might see you again.”

He slid into the empty booth across from them. “Of course. Why wouldn’t you?”

She gave him a weak smile that was interrupted by a fit of coughing. When she regained her composure, she smiled and patted his hand. “I fear my fate is tied up with the dead man’s on the floor. My heart is in retreat, but it can’t evade answering for what we did much longer,” she said with a c’est la vie flick of her hand. “I won’t be returning to Chateau Renard. But know that it was everything to me, and I leave the estate in the best of hands.”

“Madame?”

We?

The old woman cleared a tickle in her throat, then unhitched the silver chatelaine, with its keys, amulets, and small tastevin, and held it out to Elena. “I won’t ask for your forgiveness. That’s between the All Knowing and me. But I hope, in some way, I’ve given you the peace of mind you needed, knowing the person who cursed you is gone.”

“Grand-Mère, no.” Vertigo gripped Elena as if she were standing on a ledge overlooking a canyon of secrets too vast to see the bottom. She shook her head, willing the words to be a mistake, even as her mentor laid the silver chain in her hands.

“As for my part, I only wanted you to come to your senses. You were in such a rush to marry Bastien. You couldn’t see how he was manipulating you. Trying to steal you and your talents away from me. After everything I taught you? I couldn’t allow it. Joseph and I had worked too hard to build the vineyard up from nothing to have it stolen by that man. I just couldn’t let you leave to be his vine witch.”

“How could you think I would turn my back on you and Chateau Renard?”

Grand-Mère demurred. “I’m not proud of it, but for a time I worried your blood’s true calling had finally churned to the surface. Edmond warned it might happen when he first brought you to us as a child.”

Sympathy drained from Elena’s voice. “Because he’d sold you the daughter of a venefica?”

“Yes.”

The word deflated her, and she stared at her hands in her lap. But as much as she hated hearing it, there was a spark of truth in the admission. Hadn’t her first impulse been to brew a poison so she could get her revenge on Bastien? Wasn’t a man lying dead on the floor because of that compulsion?

“I know what you’re thinking, Elena. And, yes, you’ve always had an impeccable instinct for what deadly root went with which warty fungus. Or which spotted leaf was more potent steeped as a tea versus crushing it into powder. The art of poison has always come naturally to you. It’s probably what saved your life in that swamp.”

The old woman went silent for a moment but waved off any concern when Jean-Paul questioned if she was all right. The exchange made Elena look back up, and it was enough encouragement for Grand-Mère to reach out and take her hand.

“Even though you were an imp of a child when I first saw you, I recognized your potential. You didn’t belong on the back of a carnival wagon. And, I thought, alcohol is its own form of poison anyway. The disciplines aren’t as far apart as some might think. And you adapted brilliantly. No one could say otherwise. The art of poison might run in your blood, but never doubt you were meant to be a vine witch.” The old woman paused, closing her eyes again as she pressed her hand to her chest. “But then that damn Bastien came along, ambition and greed pulling him to our front door like a team of horses. I was so afraid . . .”

“Of what?”

“Of losing everything to his damnable greed.”

“So you had me cursed? Abandoning me to die alone and half out of my wits?”

“No,” said Grand-Mère. “I would never have done that. Not on purpose. That you must believe.” Grand-Mère removed a silk cloth from her sleeve and dabbed the corners of her eyes. “It was that man,” she said, eyeing Rackham’s body. “The carnival was pulling up stakes to leave town, and I thought if you just got some distance from Bastien you’d come to your senses. Time apart might help you see the truth. So I asked Edmond to take you with him. Only he said there wasn’t enough room in any of the wagons, and the money I offered would barely cover the expenses to take care of you for an entire year so . . . he asked if he could transform you as a matter of convenience. I thought he meant to keep you as a bird, or maybe a cat, just until he returned the next summer, and then he’d release you from the spell.”

“What were you thinking?”

“It was horribly wrong—I know that now. But then I was wrong about so many things.” She turned her head away to cough. “When the carnival returned to the valley the following year and you didn’t come home, I went to his wagon. He seemed surprised to see me. Made some excuse about you meeting someone and running off. I had no choice but to believe him, until you showed up years later and I learned the truth of his deception. I never dreamed he was capable of cursing you and dumping you on the side of the road like that. Not Esmé’s daughter.”

Grand-Mère held her handkerchief over her mouth, coughing until her eyes watered. When the fit passed she brought the cloth away and found the silk stained bright red. Her eyebrows rose with curiosity at the sight. “Blood and silk, mud and milk, never the twain should meet,” she muttered. “No, that’s not right, is it?”