An Affair of Poisons(34)
Marie squeals and shields her face.
“Enough!” the bastard princeling shouts. “She isn’t going to harm anyone.” He glares at me, daring me to contradict him. “She’s here to help Anne and Franny.”
“Be reasonable, Josse! You can’t honestly believe that,” Louis says.
“I have to.” The bastard—named Josse, apparently—turns his back on the dauphin and sets the little girl down. He straightens her dress and tucks her mahogany hair behind her ear, his fingers surprisingly gentle as they skim across her cheek.
“This is another one of your doomed and reckless plans,” Louis says in a dangerous voice. “And I won’t allow it.”
Josse rounds on him. “Do you have a better suggestion? Shall we let the little ones die? Or perhaps you don’t care because we’re bastards.”
When Louis fails to respond, Marie steps forward, wringing her hands through her grime-coated skirts. “Of course we don’t want the girls to die. It’s just …” She looks at me again and winces.
I lift my chin and clench my fists. Can’t they see I’m trying to help?
You haven’t always helped.
The realization makes me retreat a step, and I’m suddenly unable to meet their eyes. Louis XIV wasn’t just a king. He was their father.
And I killed him.
Not intentionally. I couldn’t have known. I stab my nails into my palms to fend off the image of his bloated, foaming face. Then I blow out a breath and nod at the unconscious princess. “We should hurry… .”
Marie closes her eyes and presses her fingers against her lids—the perfect, poised aristocrat—but as soon as I move toward the little girl, she darts around me and flings her slender body over her younger sister. “Please don’t hurt her.”
My brows lift in shock. A full-blood sacrificing herself for a bastard. Marguerite wouldn’t do the same for me, and our blood is identical drop for drop. “Stop being ridiculous,” I bark to conceal my astonishment—and the thread of niggling guilt. “If you don’t let me work, the girl will die. I am not the risk here.”
Not anymore.
Marie blinks at me, and her tear-filled eyes scrutinize my every movement. It makes my skin prickle. “Fetch me a torch and a bowl,” I say, so she’ll stop staring like I’m inhuman. Something other. “Now!”
Covering her shriek with the back of her hand, she scurries across the chamber and brings me a torch. Josse procures the bowl, and I make quick work of mixing the paste. They’ve clearly been meddling with my supplies. I had enough herbs for half a dozen doses, but now there’s only enough for the girls and maybe one more.
“Your dagger,” I say to Josse in my most commanding voice.
“Don’t!” Louis shouts. “She can’t be trusted with a weapon.” But Josse flips his blade around and offers me the handle. He keeps hold of the hilt a touch longer than necessary, his eyes glinting with warning.
I yank the knife away, annoyed by his lack of confidence, and more so by how his worry leeches into me. My fingers tremble as I slather the ointment across the girl’s stomach. The blade slips when I press the tip to her flesh. I have done this only once before. What if it was luck? These girls have been deteriorating for weeks rather than minutes. What if it’s too late? What if I kill her?
You will be a great alchemist one day—greater even than I.
At the first sight of blood, Marie whimpers and clutches the small girl’s shoulders in a vise grip. Josse’s boots nudge up against my back. Even Louis falls silent and leans forward to watch.
I swallow hard and hold my breath as the blood swirls with the thick gray ointment. When the girl’s color finally returns, I let out a sigh of relief. I want to leap and dance and shout for joy, but I keep my head. “Press her dress tightly over the wound and apply constant pressure.” I show Marie how to go about it. “And bring me the other girl.”
My voice is stronger now. My hands steady.
This is who I am, what I was born to do.
I imagine Father sweeping me up in his arms and swinging me around the laboratory, as he did once long ago—the first time I correctly brewed a sleeping draught. The faint echo of his laughter rumbles in my ears as I repeat the process with the older girl, Fran?oise. But her treatment proves far more difficult. She squirms and kicks so violently, Josse has to pin her shoulders to the floor. I work as quickly as possible, and once both girls are bled and bandaged, I melt to the freezing ground. Despite the puddles and stench, I want to press my blazing face against the cold stone and sleep for days.
Marie leans against a wall and fans her flushed cheeks, watching me with alternating expressions of awe and mistrust. Josse stalks across the chamber like a lion guarding its cubs. And Louis continues glaring at Josse, cursing and muttering under his breath. I am all too familiar with the hard set of his jaw and unabashed sneer; it’s the same bitter expression I’ve seen a hundred times on my own sister. Though I doubt these two share the morsels of friendship that make the intolerable stretches bearable. My sister and I may quarrel more than we get on, but it’s underscored by love—I think.
What are you doing now, Margot? Is she worried for me? Did she beg Mother to negotiate with the royals on my behalf? Or is she relieved to be the only daughter of La Voisin?
Eventually, Josse tires of pacing and eases down beside the girls. His devotion is mesmerizing: the way he adjusts his coat over their shivering bodies and smooths their ratted curls; how the tenderness on his face softens his sharp cheekbones and pursed lips. I study the thin layer of stubble on his chin, the way his dark hair flops into his eyes. He’s younger than I thought—perhaps a year or two older than I am—and handsome, I suppose, now that he isn’t threatening to kill me.