An Affair of Poisons(29)
The boy grinds his teeth, and his voice rumbles low. “Consider your actions carefully. If you fail to oblige, we will have no reason to spare you.”
I shrug as if my own life is of little consequence, but in truth, I’m so terrified, my hands twitch and tremble behind my back. I don’t want to die, but it’s not that simple because I don’t want to return to my former life either—back to Mother and the Society to dole out poison and death. So where does that leave me?
I squeeze my eyes shut, wishing I had developed a draught to render myself invisible. How blissful it would be to vanish, to slip away to some other city and live some other life. To shed the skin of Mirabelle Monvoisin and become someone new, someone who doesn’t have to live in fear of her mother and compete with her sister and flounder every second, wondering if she’s crossed a line. Or if she was standing on the correct side of the line to begin with. At what point does gray bleed into black?
I wave the boy off. He can offer nothing I want. I don’t know the answer myself.
The boy’s face hardens. “You will help us, La Petite Voisin.” That cursed moniker makes me flinch. I am not Mother’s perfect miniature—not anymore—and that anyone thinks so, even this boy, makes me want to scream. He marches into the curling shadows down the tunnel, and my fury escalates with every step he puts between us. “I am not La Petite Voisin,” I shout.
To my surprise, he halts, shoulders tense, as if he’s forgotten to breathe. “What do you mean, you’re not her? Of course you’re her.”
Maybe the food in my belly is making me bold. Or maybe I know, deep down, it doesn’t matter what I say or do: I’m dead regardless. But I glare up at him and shake my head.
“Then who are you?”
“Mirabelle.”
The boy grips his forehead. “I don’t give a damn what your given name is. It makes no difference to me.”
But it makes a difference to me, and I shout my real name, Mirabelle, again and again as he vanishes into the blackness.
The boy returns with bread the next day. And the day after that. At least, I assume another day has come and gone. In the dark, there’s no telling how much time has passed, but I’ve noticed a pattern in the routine. Each time after I eat, the faint sounds of coughing and crying reach me from somewhere down the tunnel. It lasts for what feels like an eternity—through the day?—then it’s quiet as death until the boy comes again.
He hasn’t bothered retying my gag. I stopped screaming days ago because I lost my voice, and it’s pointless besides. No one can hear me in this dank, dripping place. After a week of imprisonment, my hips and back are covered in raw, oozing sores and my fingers and toes are so cold, I’m afraid they’ll need to be amputated.
But I haven’t given up.
Each time the boy comes to feed me and beg me to heal the girls—I still haven’t figured out which girls—I pepper him with questions of my own, hoping he’ll slip and say something I can use against him.
“Who are you?” I ask through mouthfuls of bread. “I know you’re someone of consequence.”
Nothing.
“My mother will never let you get away with this. She will hunt you and kill you. Lesage will torture you with désintégrer.”
Still nothing.
After several days, I blurt, “Are your girls dead yet? They must be getting close. Supposing they weren’t hit directly by Lesage’s fire, they haven’t much time. The longest I’ve seen anyone survive is a month.”
His eyes flick down the tunnel—the only reaction I’ve been able to provoke. Which means I’m on the right path. “They’ll die a horrible, painful death. A death I could prevent, if only I could trust you… .”
But the boy doesn’t spare another glance for the tunnel. He is made of stone: cold and hard as granite.
It near kills me, but I refuse his bread and water the following morning. He grunts and scowls and even tries to wedge the bread between my lips, but I eat nothing and drink only from the puddle beneath me. The water tastes of silt and iron and all manner of dreck. With every swallow, I feel it tainting my innards and poisoning my humours. Sickness gathers in my chest. Fever heats my cheeks. My limbs grow steadily heavier until they become boulders, too dense to budge. My head is an anchor, an anvil, a cannonball. I don’t even have to remind myself to close my eyes and take only rasping breaths in the boy’s presence.
After I have refused food for four days, the boy doesn’t even attempt to feed me. He sighs and drags his feet to where I lie, nudging me with the toe of his boot. “Damn you,” he mutters. “Do you want to die?”
When I don’t respond, he limps back across the chamber, but he doesn’t make it more than three steps before he halts, his breath quickening. I hear it too—the heavy tread of boots and garbled stream of cursing. I slit my eyes just enough to see his hateful friend burst into the cavern. His black hair is tangled across his face and he’s heaving for breath, waving a torch in one hand and an opened missive in the other. A bit of parchment stamped with a crimson double-headed eagle seal.
Mother’s seal.
Hope surges through my frostbitten body. Little as I wish to return to the Louvre and the Shadow Society, anything would be better than perishing of jail fever at the hands of my captors. A hint of a smile bends my lips at the thought of dry clothes and a full belly.