“Now, on to more pressing business. You’ve been at the sickbeds for two weeks now, Marie. You’ve seen firsthand the signs,symptoms. Enough time has passed for your true observation of the plague. Who is really behind this whole matter?”
Wordlessly, Marie went to the oil portrait on the far wall of Papa Legba, holding his copper scales as he stared out, smiling, from a haze of purplish mist. She seized it by the sides with both hands and removed it, revealing dozens of parchment sheets hanging on the wall behind it. All were different sketches, some of veves and old Voodoo marks, others of patients’ faces and notable anatomy. Marie had arranged them over the last few weeks in order, then taken them down and hung them again in different patterns.
“This is no simple plague. Not an act of nature nor the will of God. This is punishment.”
Marie closed her eyes briefly, thinking back on that lady in the bed, laughing and laughing as she sang her wicked fever song.The Widow Paris.The woman who for all her magic couldn’t keep her husband from leaving her.She thought of all her other patients too, men and women who on any other day would walk the Quarter banquettes in their top hats and parasols to shield them from the lash of the sun, all those pale faces that blurred together into one face she knew well enough but did not recognize. It was the face of power, of the city’s cursed wealth. It was the face of a person who owned another, who did not fancy themselves king or queen, but another kind of royalty that dared rule only in the South. The face of a master.
“All of these people have slaves registered to their names as property. Check the city’s ledgers. It’s all there. Which makes them all masters of some kind.” Marie lifted a sketch from the wall and passed it to Sanite.
“A plague that only befell slave owners?” Sanite clapped her hands. “Perhaps it is true what they say about your god, Marie Laveau. Perhaps he is a merciful god yet.”
“Perhaps. But this is not the work of God, my queen. This is Voodoo.”
Sanite clicked her tongue, an incredulous little noise, but her eyes had flattened into vicious little lines. “Voodoo? If it is, then it is veiled. Cleverly hidden. A trick.”
“And who else in this city could have the power to call suchdarkness? To possess Voodoo unknown even to the likes of the Quarter Queen? Who else may not rival you in conjuring, but in trickery?”
Sanite gasped. “Jon.” She turned away, thinking. “The nerve of him! Just think, a man on the Voodoo throne. He dares not honor the sanctity of exile? Yet again, he spits in the face of Voodoo tradition! What am I saying?” Sanite laughed. “What tradition has a man like Jon the Conjurer ever honored in his blasphemous little life?”
Marie said nothing, instead returning her attention to the wall, to all the evidence of Jon’s spellwork. Crafty. Unorthodox. So different from Sanite’s careful magic, the magic that she kept bound to Voodoo’s traditions and rituals tighter than a Quarter whore’s corset.You could stand to learn from a teacher like that.Surely, Jon the Conjurer could teach her the forbidden magic she so desperately needed. After all, it was the very reason for his banishment. Marie had never known the full story—why Sanite had forced him from the city. But there were whispers of experiments so gruesome that it made the Brotherhood’s own pastimes look tame, of rituals and magic so taboo within New Orleans that the mere mention of it was considered a terrible trespass on its laws. Because Jon the Conjurer had tampered with the magic of death and resurrection—the magic of the zombi. The magic she desperately needed.
After Jacques had been declared dead, Marie, in her desperation, had invoked Papa Legba. He’d come to her at her crossroads ritual in the Dreadwood, a knowing gleam in his wizened red eyes.
She saw him, briefly, a glimmering apparition before her. Few could see the loa so. They much preferred to mount their vessels, to feel and experience the mortal world through the carnal flavor of human senses.
“Your love is gone, done passed on through. I helped him through the doorway myself when the Baron brought him,” Papa Legba had said. He spoke of Baron Samedi, Lord of Death.
Marie was crouched in the forest’s lone dirt path, her hands clenching and unclenching the bramble beneath her. She kept her eyes low in reverence. “Then you may yet help him back. To me, Papa.” She had heard such magic was possible.
Those red eyes had only twinkled with divine knowledge. “Come now, Marie. You don’t want that kind of magic. Veil magic comeswith a whole lot of consequences, child. I don’t think you’d like to pay them.”
“I do.” She paused. “And I would. Papa,please.”
“Then the one you seek is the Conjurer, the one who has bargained himself to death.”High Jon,thought Marie. The Conjurer who’d challenged the Quarter Queen. “Seek his power, and you may yet return poor Jacques Paris.”
Papa Legba began to fade away back to the spirit realm, a grizzled chuckle echoing in the air. “Be careful, child,” the loa of the crossroads said as the scales in his hand began to shake wildly. Out of time. Out of balance. “Some doors just shouldn’t be opened.”
Now Marie was certain that the slave-owner plague was Jon’s work. He was, after all, what Papa Legba had called him.The one who has bargained himself to death.
Sanite squared her shoulders, like a warrior maiden readying for battle. “Well, I will handle Jon.”
“Let us hope better than before.”
The force of Sanite’s backhand was swift, breaking across the hollows of the room like thunder, pain stinging her cheek. “You insolent little girl,” Sanite hissed. “Learn your place and show your elders some respect. You might be talented, but you are not queen yet.”
Marie licked the blood from her lips, strangely emboldened. “And when I am, you can be sure I will use every ounce of my magic to serve more than my own selfish whims!”
Sanite watched her, silent. Marie should apologize. She should recant. But today was different. She was different, somehow. Something had changed in her. She knew it the moment the woman had dared to speak of Jacques. She felt it the moment she’d nearly killed then saved that sorry excuse for a man from his deathbed. The truth was, maybe she’d been changing all along.
Sanite’s face hung low over Marie’s. But it was not Sanite’s face that was staring into hers, although it was a face Marie had come to know well enough in the time since her initiation. It was the face of the Quarter Queen. Sanite’s eyes flared, completely and utterly white, a terrifying picture of spiritual power. The force of her magicwas boiling hot, a furnace that roared to life and would gladly take her soul for tinder and coal.
“So long as I am queen, you will hear me, Marie Laveau, and hear me well,” Sanite spat. Marie’s face flushed, scalded from the intensity of that white-hot gaze. “Never,everchallenge me.”
Here was the woman who had taken her under her wing when Grand-mère had died when Marie was only twelve years old, leaving her newly orphaned. The same woman who’d taught Marie how to use and control the magic that had frightened her own mother from raising her, who’d generously positioned Marie as her successor to the crown. She was the closest thing she’d had to a proper maman, and she should be grateful for that. But now, in this moment, in the darkest parts of her heart, Marie resented the older priestess. She wouldn’t deny it. Some small part of her pitied her too. Sanite’s spirit was eternally strong as an ox, but her flesh had failed her. She was old, frailer still by the day.It won’t be long now.
Marie kept her eyes trained to the floor, swallowing the lump in her throat. “Apologies, my queen.”
“Hmph.” Sanite turned away, the offense forgiven, her attention already turned toward another pressing matter.
