An Affair of Poisons(14)
He scratches his sleep-tousled hair and studies the cluttered board. “It looks to me like you’re well under way. Since when do you rise before dawn?”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d get started.”
He frowns at the messy table, fingering the periwinkle petals and sniffing the mortar bowl where I ground the ambergris. “Get started making what, exactly? Obviously not Viper’s Venom. And what’s this?” He reaches for Father’s small red book, but I snatch it off the table and stuff it down my bodice.
“Nothing.”
“Mira?” Gris narrows his eyes.
I lunge across the table, extract a sprig of witch’s thimble from a jar, and bat the purple flowers against his nose. “Do you remember the first time my father taught us to use witch’s thimble?”
Suspicion and hurt flicker across his features and he pushes the sprig aside. “I know the unrest has lasted longer than expected, but please tell me you don’t pity Vend?me and his army of noblemen. That you’re not secretly helping them.”
“How would I help them? There’s no antidote for Viper’s Venom.”
He eyes my bodice—more specifically the grimoire hidden within it. “They deserve this. You know what they did to me.”
I look down at the board and fiddle with a bit of twine. I’ll never forget the day Mother brought Gris home—he was two years older than me, but so skinny and frightened, he looked a good deal younger than my six years. You could see every rib protruding through his thin, filthy skin, and bruises peppered his arms and legs. He didn’t speak to any of us for months, but Mother told me what happened. He’d been beaten and left in the gutter to die by his master, the Chevalier de Lorraine, after his father, a footman, was hanged for stealing a golden button from a waistcoat. A button that was later found in the rushes of the chevalier’s bedchamber.
Mother was Gris’s savior. The Shadow Society became his new family.
Gris viciously tugs an apron over his head and mutters about merciless, cold-blooded courtiers as he ties the strings.
“I’m not helping them. I swear it,” I say, glad I can tell the truth. But guilt still squirms through my chest like a worm through a rotten apple, because part of me wants to help them. Despite how the nobles mistreated Gris, despite how they look down on us rabble, I’d pity anyone who meets their end by Viper’s Venom.
Gris studies my face, and after a long, prickling silence, he cups my cheeks in his kettle-sized palms and plants a kiss on my forehead. “If you say you’re not helping them, I believe you. But I do wonder what you’re doing… .”
“Just experimenting,” I reply, busying my hands with the herbs.
His big eyes fall. You can trust me, they say. Haven’t I earned it? And he has—a thousand times over. When Marguerite was busy clawing through the ranks of the Society and hoarding Mother’s favor, Gris offered to apprentice with Father alongside me, claiming he shared my love of alchemy. I suspect he wanted to protect me from Father’s volatile moods. When we got older, he taught me to play quinze and let me tag along with him and the other boys. And he laughed and talked with me long into the night, the way my sister used to before she abandoned me in favor of Fernand.
There’s no one I love or trust more than Gris. Which is why I keep my lips pressed tight.
It’s the only way to protect him—in case I’m found out.
The only way to keep him from hating me.
“Sometimes you’re just like your father,” he grumbles as his knife cuts across the herbs.
Oh, Gris. If only you knew.
Over the next three days, Mother sends delegations to negotiate with the Duc de Vend?me, but he and his horde of incensed noblemen refuse to swear fealty to the Shadow Society. They continue their march, turning Champ de Mars into an army encampment, so Mother sends Fernand, Marguerite, and a contingent of Society members to poison their horses and food.
“It was horrific,” Marguerite whispers when they return later that night. We haven’t slept in the same chamber for several years now—at her insistence—but she tucks herself beneath the counterpane and nestles in beside me. I stiffen, annoyed at her tears wetting my dressing gown and her hands quivering like leaves beneath the blankets.
“Go cry to Fernand,” I protest.
“Please. I can’t let him see me like this. Or Mother. I’ve nowhere else to go.”
I’m glad we can be sisters when it’s convenient for you, I imagine saying as I shove her to the cold floor. But I’m curious to hear what happened, so I let her take my hands. She responds with a faint squeeze of gratitude, and despite myself, I’m transported back to our childhood. To the nights we held each other like this, singing quietly to drown out our parents’ quarreling.
“There were so many of them,” Marguerite says in a choked voice. “Writhing like slugs across the ground—foaming and bloody and shrieking. I know they deserved to die—they were coming to attack us—but I keep thinking of the wives and children they’ll never return to.”
I gape at her through the darkness. My heart batters against my rib cage, and I tighten my grip on her clammy hands. I never dreamed my sister might be plagued by the same sliver of guilt. “Margot, do you think it’s wrong, what we’re doing?”