An Affair of Poisons(30)

But then the boy I healed begins shouting. “She refuses to negotiate!” He thrusts the letter in the other boy’s face and points at me. “La Voisin doesn’t want her.”

What?

The smile melts off my lips. My heart ceases to beat. I’m tempted to launch up from the floor and demand to see the missive, but I bite my tongue at the last second and keep still, swallowing the bitter panic gathering in my throat.

“Impossible,” the boy who feeds me cries.

He’s lying, I assure myself. Of course Mother wants you. She needs you in the laboratory. Only that’s no longer true. I’ve been stripped of my title, barred from my concoctions. She caught me with Father’s grimoire.

“Give me that.” The boy snatches the letter from his friend and paces as he reads, silently mouthing the words. I wish he’d read aloud, and at the same time, I’m grateful he doesn’t.

Mother has always led the Society with an intensity bordering on ruthlessness, but she has always been my mother first: teaching Marguerite and me the arts of chiromancy and face reading, supporting our family with her fortune-telling when Father shirked the task, and even after he died, when her eyes brimmed with tears every time she looked at me, she protected me by enforcing stricter laboratory rules. I will never be her favorite, but she would never disown me like this. She wouldn’t.

Unless it was for the “greater good.”

The boy stops abruptly, crumples the terrible note in his fist, and hurls it across the chamber. When that doesn’t satisfy him, he snatches the tricorne hat off his head and slams it to the ground with a curse. His eyes are wild and manic in the torchlight, laced with strands of molten lead. His voice rumbles low and hoarse. “What do we do now?”

The boy I saved stares at the battered, soggy hat. “What can we do? We have no leverage to negotiate our way out of Paris and no allies within.”

“We have to do something,” the other boy shouts. “Anne and Fran?oise—” he cuts himself off and glances at me. I hold my breath, hold every muscle still.

“Is she dead?” the boy I healed asks.

“Probably,” the other says.

But I am not dead. And finally, finally, he has said something useful. Anne and Fran?oise are the names of Madame de Montespan’s daughters. The girls he’s been speaking of are the bastard daughters of the king. And without his hat, I can better see the prominent cheekbones and gooseberry green eyes of the boy who feeds me.

Devil’s claws, I could slap myself for being so blind!

For weeks, the Sun King’s face has haunted me, and the boy is his exact likeness. Not the dauphin, as he’s fair as a fawn, but undoubtedly a bastard son. And if three siblings survived, I’d wager the dauphin and Madame Royale are nearby as well.

All of the king’s children, here in the sewer.

And I helped them.

I bite the inside of my cheek, harder and harder until warm, rusty blood slides down my throat. I’d scream if I could. Even if I wanted to return to the Louvre, it’s impossible now. Mother knows I’ve been with the royals. The only way she will welcome me back is if I lead her to this hideout. Or if I kill them myself and return to the Louvre bearing their heads on a platter. It would be my ticket, my sanctuary. With that one act, I would secure her throne, become her favorite daughter and a hero to the Shadow Society.

“We’re out of options. Out of time,” the boy I healed says. “I say we abandon this hellhole and seek refuge and allies in Savoy. Between the two of us, perhaps we can best the rebels at the blockades.”

“You honestly think we can battle a dozen guards?”

The boy flashes a cocky grin. “I am captain of the watch now.”

Of course he’s a police captain. Only an officer would be so cruel and calculating. The screams of his comrades near drove me to tears during the siege of the Louvre, but now I happily imagine Lesage’s smoke beasts tearing this deplorable boy into a million bits. Guilt slowly creeps in and I scold myself for entertaining such wicked thoughts.

The bastard princeling casts a sidelong glance down the tunnel. “Do you think the girls can make it that far? They can hardly sit upright.”

“What other choice do we have?”

“She could help them, how she helped you… .”

The officer rubs the back of his neck. “She made it perfectly clear she won’t help. I say we finish her off, dump her in the Seine, and leave at first light.”

“First light?” the princeling sputters. “We haven’t any supplies or transportation. And we can’t simply dump her in the river. She helped us; I won’t have her blood on my hands.”

“Better hers than ours.” The officer turns on his heel and knocks the princeling’s shoulder as he saunters down the tunnel. “Like you said, she’s half dead already. It will only be half our fault.”

I close my eyes and press against the jagged floor until pain blossoms across my forehead. If I do nothing, the royals will kill me at first light. If I return to the Louvre without their bodies in tow, Mother will do the same.

This is hopeless. Impossible.

Nothing is impossible. Father’s defiant voice pricks my memory. Think!

My heartbeat quickens. My thoughts whir. In an abstract way, my situation is similar to developing new compounds in the laboratory. All I have to do is run the calculations, find the proper ingredients, and make the circumstances combine to my benefit.