The Glamourist (The Vine Witch #2)(45)
Yvette danced over, humming that song of hers, and kissed Elena on top of her head. “You’ve been such a good friend to me,” Yvette said. She smiled, and Elena swore she felt the sun’s warmth against her cheek.
Did the All Knowing favor this girl? The radiance under her skin from the day before seemed to have only grown.
“What are you feeling? Inside. Can you describe the course of the energy?”
“It’s all aflutter. I feel like a dandelion floating on the breeze.”
“That’s not normal, Yvette. You need to find your center and harness that energy so that it knows you wield the direction of flow.”
“I don’t want to hold it back. I’ve never felt so . . . merveilleux!”
She was clearly aligning with the light, whereas Elena feared her own luminosity was quietly sinking into the bog of a bleak future creating poisons for housewives dealing with rat infestations and schoolmasters needing to rid their student populations of head lice.
She’d meant to walk Yvette through some basic tutoring to try and tap into her magic now that it was freely flowing, but she no longer had the stomach to deal with such optimistic buoyancy. And so she left, despite the cat clawing at her hem, begging her to stay, and Yvette promising they could sip wine and nibble cheese on the rooftop. Elena closed the door behind her as the girl began to sing once again.
Outside, with only the buzzing bees and flutter of leaves to guide her thoughts, Elena strolled the old cobblestone lanes of the butte to recalibrate her mood. The hilltop village wasn’t a place she had explored much on previous excursions to the city, except for two occasions with Grand-Mère when they’d been after some rare ingredient advertised as being effective against leaf rot or fruit mold when stirred into a potion under the right combination of moonrise and cloud cover. Sometimes the mixtures worked, sometimes they knew they’d been taken in by a hoax perpetuated by false advertising. The Charlatan sisters and their ilk came to mind. Grand-Mère had always warned the butte was full of hucksters. But then Elena’s own family had haunted the back lanes of the village too. She’d been too young then to remember much beyond the feel of the wagon rocking back and forth over the uneven lanes and the tincture bottles filled with cures and poisons clinking against each other in their wooden crates. The difference, of course, was that her parents were no sham potions artists. Their poisonous goods delivered as promised, and there were three dead mortals as proof.
A breeze blew from the west, so Elena turned east down a winding lane no wider than a mule cart. A witch’s lane. There, a single black door wedged between two larger buildings caught her attention. Written across the glass insert in an arc of scripted gold read ESSENCE DE FLEURS. Beneath the letters rested a single fleur-de-lis that glimmered with a pale opalescence when the sun hit it. The effect was hypnotizing.
Entering the shop, Elena caused the bell above the door to jingle. Still, no one came out to greet her right away, so she had a casual look around. The main counter exhibited a decorative ebony finish with a white marble top, while lace curtains hung in swags above the windows in a cheerful, sparse presentation. Despite the name, it was not a shop for perfume or flowers, though the remains of blooms were evident in the multiple bins of rose hips and dried potpourri mixes on display. A bowl of dragon flower seedpods sat on the counter, promising a remedy for inflammation. Elena picked up one of the tiny skull-like pods and shook it gently. The seeds rattled inside, still trapped within the skull’s tiny brain cavity by a holding spell.
“Tokens.” A woman in a black dress with a scarf draped over her head backed down a wrought-iron spiral staircase tucked in the back of the shop. An attic perhaps, where she kept her stores. “I give them away with each purchase. Take one if you like.”
“Thank you.” Elena did not take one, but she did find herself interested in several of the shop’s other offerings. She let her fingers sift through a metal bin brimming with nightshade seeds. A dozen belladonna potions came to mind. Combinations that could stop a ticking heart, inflame a fatty liver, or put a halo around a man’s sight so he only saw a crystalline version of the world before him.
“Careful with those; they’re likely to send you flying out the window if you pay them too much hands-on attention.”
“Or send me nose first against the floorboards.” It was a small jest among witches, none of whom could fly with or without the aid of herbal concoctions. Astral projection, on the other hand, was entirely possible and advantageous for those with the gift of seeing in the shadow world. Still, the feel of the poison on her fingertips gave her a pleasant tingling sensation.
Elena brushed off her hands and inspected a wicker basket half filled with tufts of dried chrysanthemum flowers. She sniffed them for potency and found them to be exceedingly fresh. Crushed and mixed with a little water, one could distill a powerful poison for insects. But such flowers she could grow for herself.
“Is there anything in particular you’re looking for?”
A solution to life’s problems would be a start. “I suppose I’m in the mood to browse and let the right substance come to me.”
“A shrewd strategy, that. I do hate to see people try and force things in spells they aren’t well adapted to.”
The shopkeeper had kept her back turned while she unloaded a small crate packed with straw behind the counter. But there was a mirror, a shop owner’s trick to keep an eye on customers even when they couldn’t face forward. In it, Elena saw the face of a middle-aged woman wearing a pair of round glasses with jade-green lenses. Blind? Light sensitive? Or simply the latest chic trend among city folk?