“How would I help them? There’s no antidote for Viper’s Venom.”
He eyes my bodice—more specifically the grimoire hidden within it. “They deserve this. You know what they did to me.”
I look down at the board and fiddle with a bit of twine. I’ll never forget the day Mother brought Gris home—he was two years older than me, but so skinny and frightened, he looked a good deal younger than my six years. You could see every rib protruding through his thin, filthy skin, and bruises peppered his arms and legs. He didn’t speak to any of us for months, but Mother told me what happened. He’d been beaten and left in the gutter to die by his master, the Chevalier de Lorraine, after his father, a footman, was hanged for stealing a golden button from a waistcoat. A button that was later found in the rushes of the chevalier’s bedchamber.
Mother was Gris’s savior. The Shadow Society became his new family.
Gris viciously tugs an apron over his head and mutters aboutmerciless, cold-blooded courtiersas he ties the strings.
“I’m not helping them. I swear it,” I say, glad I can tell the truth. But guilt still squirms through my chest like a worm through a rotten apple, because part of mewantsto help them. Despite how the nobles mistreated Gris, despite how they look down on us rabble, I’d pity anyone who meets their end by Viper’s Venom.
Gris studies my face, and after a long, prickling silence, he cups my cheeks in his kettle-sized palms and plants a kiss on my forehead. “If you say you’re not helping them, I believe you. But I do wonder what you’re doing… .”
“Just experimenting,” I reply, busying my hands with the herbs.
His big eyes fall.You can trust me,they say.Haven’t I earned it?And he has—a thousand times over. When Marguerite was busy clawing through the ranks of the Society and hoarding Mother’s favor, Gris offered to apprentice with Father alongside me, claiming he shared my love of alchemy. I suspect he wanted to protect me from Father’s volatile moods. When we got older, he taught me to play quinze and let me tag along with him and the other boys. And he laughed and talked with me long into the night, the way my sister used to before she abandoned me in favor of Fernand.
There’s no one I love or trust more than Gris. Which is why I keep my lips pressed tight.
It’s the only way to protect him—in case I’m found out.
The only way to keep him from hating me.
“Sometimes you’re just like your father,” he grumbles as his knife cuts across the herbs.
Oh, Gris. If only you knew.
Over the next three days, Mother sends delegations to negotiate with the Duc de Vendôme, but he and his horde of incensed noblemen refuse to swear fealty to the Shadow Society. They continue their march, turning Champ de Mars into an army encampment, so Mother sends Fernand, Marguerite, and a contingent of Society members to poison their horses and food.
“It was horrific,” Marguerite whispers when they return later that night. We haven’t slept in the same chamber for several years now—atherinsistence—but she tucks herself beneath the counterpane and nestles in beside me. I stiffen, annoyed at her tears wetting my dressing gown and her hands quivering like leaves beneath the blankets.
“Go cry to Fernand,” I protest.
“Please. I can’t let him see me like this. Or Mother. I’ve nowhere else to go.”
I’m glad we can be sisters when it’s convenient for you,I imagine saying as I shove her to the cold floor. But I’m curious to hear what happened, so I let her take my hands. She responds with a faint squeeze of gratitude, and despite myself, I’m transported back to our childhood. To the nights we held each other like this, singing quietly to drown out our parents’ quarreling.
“There were so many of them,” Marguerite says in a choked voice. “Writhing like slugs across the ground—foaming and bloody and shrieking. I know they deserved to die—they were coming to attack us—but I keep thinking of the wives and children they’ll never return to.”
I gape at her through the darkness. My heart batters against my rib cage, and I tighten my grip on her clammy hands. I never dreamed my sister might be plagued by the same sliver of guilt. “Margot, do you think it’s wrong, what we’re doing?”
She stiffens, and when she speaks, her voice is careful and cold. “Of course not. Mother would never lead us astray. The massacre may have been difficult to witness, but that doesn’t mean it was wrong. Those men needed to die for the greater good of the people. Now that our hold is secure, all will be well. Mother plans to open the palace gates and welcome all to court. And there’s to be a victory procession.” She stitches a smile across her lips. Brittle and steely. Eerily similar to Mother’s.
I let out a breath and stare up at the lacy bed curtains, wondering how she can lie to herself. And whom I’m supposed to believe. And how I can possibly march in Mother’s procession when the last thing I feel is victorious.
4
JOSSE
I always imagined Hell would be hot—a lake of fire and brimstone and all that. But Hell, it turns out, is being trapped in these dank, freezing sewer tunnels, helpless to stop the eerie green specks from spreading like ink beneath my sisters’ skin. It’s hearing them cry my name and being unable to ease their suffering. It’s the feel of their brittle arms and legs withering beneath their dresses, smaller and smaller until I could snap them like twigs.
Every waking moment feels like a nightmare, and during the fleeting snatches when I accidentally nod off, I am bombarded by actual nightmares. Sometimes I’m carrying the girls through a blazing, endless forest, only to discover they’ve been dead all along, corpses clad in dresses. Other times I’m standing at the edge of the road, watching the blade sink into Rixenda’s back over and over again. But always, no matter the dream, Father’s voice taunts me, hissing and popping like the crackling flames:You wished for this. My death is on your head—as will be your sisters’.
I wake up sweating, shaking, and sometimes even sobbing. Yes, I wished for change, for acknowledgment, but never like this. Everything is twisted and wrong. I finally have access to my sisters only to watch them die. My siblings and I share the same status and accommodations, but they’re squalid and putrescent, even worse than the servants’ quarters.
The Devil must be having a good laugh.
“When can we go home?” Anne asks, as she has every morning for the past two weeks. Only today she coughs so violently between words, droplets of blood dapple her lips. Frowning, I offer her a sip of water we collected in a shoe and tug my waistcoat tighter around her shoulders, wishing, for the millionth time, we had a proper bed and blankets. A torn burlap sack in the corner of the chamber where the ceiling drips the least is the best we can manage.
