An Affair of Poisons(62)
“Fine,” I grumble, and skulk back to the counter. “But if this goes horribly—”
“You will be held blameless,” she promises. “Now take up a gallipot and set it on the fire, then pour two measures of hyssop into the mortar bowl and grind the leaves to a fine pulp. I think that’s what the previous antidote was missing.”
“Two measures of what?” I stare down at the cluster of herbs and instruments, most of which I can’t begin to describe, let alone operate. I wipe my palms down my breeches, but they’re as cold and clammy as a herring.
“Father’s notes should answer all of your questions.” Her lips are pinched and her hand hesitates, but Mirabelle eventually opens the grimoire and sets it on the tiny corner of the counter not overtaken by her beast.
I stare at the lines and lines of messy, cramped writing and puff out my cheeks, once again feeling like the incompetent little boy listening in on Louis’s lessons. Mirabelle is making a grand gesture including me like this, so I’m not about to ask her to read it to me, but I feel even more uncomfortable and out of place than I did among the courtiers at Versailles.
Take it one word at a time. Pretend you’re in the kitchens with Rixenda and her recipes. How hard could it be? But the thought of Rixenda makes my stomach twist with rage and grief. She’s dead because of Mirabelle.
The pain is still sharp, like the tip of a poker burning my flesh, but when I start to stagger back, I’m overwhelmed by the memory of Rixenda’s craggy face. The scent of her lavender soap tickles my nose, and her rasp of a voice fills the smoky shop.
Be strong, Josse.
Holding a grudge will help nothing. It’s not what she would have wanted.
I roll up my sleeves and lift the pestle and mortar bowl.
Despite my struggles reading, in an hour’s time I’ve made decent headway on the anti-venom. Turns out alchemy is quite similar to working in the kitchens, and I’m more proficient than I could have hoped. I know this because Mirabelle keeps checking my progress and humming with surprise. Or lifting her brows in shock.
We work like this for several hours. Neither of us say much, but the silence isn’t uncomfortable like before. And I no longer stand at an arm’s length as if she has the pox. I even ask her to pass me a stirring spoon and neither of us recoils when our fingers accidentally brush on the handle.
When the sun falls behind the buildings, melting like a pat of butter into the river, Mirabelle lights the tapers situated throughout the room. She pauses after lighting the final one beside me and whispers, “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. There’s a good chance I’ve fouled this up completely.”
“It couldn’t be worse than my first attempt.” She flashes a strained smile. “That’s not what I was thanking you for, anyway—at least not only that. Thank you for coming when I ran after the smoke beast. I would have died had you and Desgrez not followed.”
She waits for me to say something, but I didn’t make a conscious decision to follow her. My feet just carried me down the steps as if an invisible cord was tied around her waist and the other end was wrapped around mine. I’m not about to tell her that, though, so I mumble unintelligibly and return to spooning the antipoison into phials.
“Why did you come after me?” she presses, looking at me with those big black eyes. “You could have let me die and had your vengeance.”
I pound the phial down harder than necessary, partially to fend her off and partially to harden my focus. “You may be a liar, but aligning with you is still my sisters’ best shot at freedom. And our only chance of reclaiming the city from the Shadow Society.”
Mirabelle gives a tight nod and bustles behind the counter, biting her lips to conceal their slight trembling. I want to ignore it, I command myself to ignore it, but it’s so pitiable and heartbreaking, words spew from my lips. “And I suppose a small part of me might understand why you withheld the truth.”
Her knife clatters to the table, and she peers at me from beneath her messy curls, the brown turned to gold in the candlelight. “You do?”
I sigh and scrub my hand over my face. It would’ve been so easy for the common people to blame me for my father’s negligence, but they were willing to hear me out and judge me by my own merit. Doesn’t Mirabelle deserve the same?
“We were both blind,” I say slowly. “You may have brewed the poison, but you had no way of knowing how your mother planned to use it. You were doing what you thought was right. If I condemned you for that, I’d have to condemn myself too. I knew I was acting like a wretched miscreant. I tried to cause as much mayhem as possible. If I’d spent a little less time raising hell and a little more time educating myself on important matters, trying to be the prince the people needed, perhaps I would have seen how terribly my father was failing them. Perhaps none of this would have happened.”
“This situation is bigger than any one person,” Mirabelle says. “And you’re no wretched miscreant. A hoodlum, certainly. And a scoundrel, definitely. But not wholly wretched.” She gently knocks my shoulder, and our sides press together. To my astonishment, I don’t lean away. Neither does she. We shiver there beside each other for a breath of a moment before the millinery door slams open.
Mirabelle yelps and stiffens. I turn, the spoon still in my fist, expecting to see Gavril returning with additional demands, but it’s Mirabelle’s assistant from the Louvre.