“Who are you?” I ask through mouthfuls of bread. “I know you’re someone of consequence.”
Nothing.
“My mother will never let you get away with this. She will hunt you and kill you. Lesage will torture you with désintégrer.”
Still nothing.
After several days, I blurt, “Are yourgirlsdead yet? They must be getting close. Supposing they weren’t hit directly by Lesage’s fire, they haven’t much time. The longest I’ve seen anyone survive is a month.”
His eyes flick down the tunnel—the only reaction I’ve been able to provoke. Which means I’m on the right path. “They’ll die a horrible, painful death. A deathIcould prevent, if only I could trust you… .”
But the boy doesn’t spare another glance for the tunnel. He is made of stone: cold and hard as granite.
It near kills me, but I refuse his bread and water the following morning. He grunts and scowls and even tries to wedge the bread between my lips, but I eat nothing and drink only from the puddle beneath me. The water tastes of silt and iron and all manner of dreck. With every swallow, I feel it tainting my innards and poisoning my humours. Sickness gathers in my chest. Fever heats my cheeks. My limbs grow steadily heavier until they become boulders, too dense to budge. My head is an anchor, an anvil, a cannonball. I don’t even have to remind myself to close my eyes and take only rasping breaths in the boy’s presence.
After I have refused food for four days, the boy doesn’t even attempt to feed me. He sighs and drags his feet to where I lie, nudging me with the toe of his boot. “Damn you,” he mutters. “Do youwantto die?”
When I don’t respond, he limps back across the chamber, but he doesn’t make it more than three steps before he halts, his breath quickening. I hear it too—the heavy tread of boots and garbled stream of cursing. I slit my eyes just enough to see his hateful friend burst into the cavern. His black hair is tangled across his face and he’s heaving for breath, waving a torch in one hand and an opened missive in the other. A bit of parchment stamped with a crimson double-headed eagle seal.
Mother’s seal.
Hope surges through my frostbitten body. Little as I wish to return to the Louvre and the Shadow Society, anything would be better than perishing of jail fever at the hands of my captors. A hint of a smile bends my lips at the thought of dry clothes and a full belly.
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 mymotherfirst: 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.
Unlessit 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 Françoise—” 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 Françoise are the names of Madame de Montespan’s daughters.The girlshe’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.
