“You faced danger of the sort that could be overcome, with the potential for a long life. But Prince Henri…” Regret flickered in his gaze. “His life will end too soon, in calamity. Surely you have read his stars.”
His words stole my breath. I had read the sinister signs, but I had never permitted myself to believe them.
“If simple magic will not do,” I persisted, “then what will? Exchange my life for his. You have the knowledge, surely.”
He recoiled from the suggestion. “I have the knowledge. But there are others in your dream, yes? What of them?”
“I don’t care,” I said, miserable.
“Then France will be torn apart,” he replied. “For they are as much your responsibility, as much a part of your fate, as Prince Henri is.”
“They are another reason, then, why I must stay,” I said. “But there are those at Court who intend to see me cast aside and Henri wed to another. He’ll be left unprotected without me. I must have his child. I
He considered this a long time before replying. “We cannot outwit fate forever. But we can bring Henri more years than he might otherwise have had.” He paused. “Is that truly your will? To bear the Dauphin’s child?”
It seemed a ridiculous question. “Of course. I would do anything. I already
He considered this, then said slowly, “And the child must be the Dauphin’s.”
It was a statement, yet I heard the question buried in it, and my face grew hot.
I blushed and said, “Yes, it must be. He is my husband. And… I love him.”
He cocked his head at the desperation in those last three words. “I am sorry to hear this,” he said softly. “It complicates matters.”
“How so?”
“Surely you have studied your own nativity in regard to children,” he said. “Surely you have studied Prince Henri’s. Scorpio rules your Fifth House,” he continued, “and that of your husband. You are far too intelligent to miss the implications: barrenness-or, if you wish, lies and deceit. The choice is yours.”
“I won’t accept either,” I countered.
“There has to be a third way.” “There always is.” He leaned forward, his skin sickly pale against his blue-black hair. “But it depends entirely on what you are willing to do.”
Despite the crookedness of his nose and the pitting in his cheeks, his voice and manner were magnetic, intoxicating. Beneath an icy surface ran a hot current, one that would pull me under if I dared test it.
“Anything,” I said, “except to lie with another man.”
He nodded slowly. “Then I warn you,
An unpleasant thrill coursed through me at his words: He spoke of the very darkest sort of magic. But I had always felt that my soul was already lost.
“I will give every last drop,” I said, “to save Henri.”
His gaze revealed nothing. “Ah, Madame. Here is where a strong will and a strong stomach are needed, for it is not your blood of which we speak.”
I resisted for weeks. I met with Ruggieri daily, consulting him on trivial matters and begging for instruction in the magical arts. As to the latter, he refused: I knew too little, and he too much; it was far safer for him to cast spells at my request.
“It is enough,” he said, “that one of our souls is imperiled.”
During those weeks, I lived in uneasy dread. Madame Gondi reported to me that the Guises-family of the nubile Louise-had met secretly with the King to discuss, again, the possibility of a marriage contract with Henri. It was almost enough to make me consider Ruggieri’s suggestion that I be impregnated by another man.
But even though Henri had betrayed me, I could not do the same to him. The House of Valois was mine now; and I longed for a son with Valois blood who would inherit the throne. I had found my home, and would not be taken from it.
In the end, I yielded to the unthinkable. In the middle of the night, I took up my quill and listened to the scratch of the nib as my hand wrote impossible, barbarous things.
I sent for Ruggieri early the next morning and met him in my cabinet. Behind the locked door, I handed him the paper, folded into eighths, as if that somehow decreased the enormity of the crime.
“I’ve thought it through carefully,” I said, “and these are my restrictions.”
The paper whispered in his fingers. He frowned at the message, then lifted his dark gaze from the page.
“If I follow them,” he said, “I cannot say what effect they might have upon the outcome.”
“So long as we meet with success,” I said.
He refolded the paper and slipped it inside his breast pocket, his gaze never straying from mine; his eyes were black, like my Henri’s, though they lacked any light. His lips moved faintly toward a smile.
“Oh, we shall meet with success, Catherine.”
I did not see his use of my given name as impertinence. We were equals now, after the grisliest of fashions. I had given Henri my heart, but only Ruggieri knew the evil it contained.
I trusted only Madame Gondi to make the arrangement directly with the Master of Horses. She ordered her own mount saddled and brought to the far side of the stables, where it could not been seen from the palace windows. A scandalous thing for a woman to be riding near dusk, alone; the Master no doubt assumed an illicit rendezvous was in the offing. He was not wrong.
Madame Gondi rode out of sight of the stables and past the gardens to the nearest copse of trees; beneath their shelter, she and I made the exchange. We both wore black; someone watching from a distance would think that the woman who rode into the woods was the same woman who rode out.
Hours earlier, morning had revealed the strangest of spring skies, troubled and overcast, with a diffuse coral glow where the sun should have hung; now, at dusk, that glow had slipped to the horizon. The air was cool and redolent of rain. I rode well beyond the woods; several times I reined my borrowed horse to a stop, thinking to turn around, but the thought of Henri spurred me on.
Eventually I came upon an unkempt vineyard flanked by an orchard of dying pear trees, their gnarled limbs speckled with feeble, struggling blossoms. On the outskirts of the orchard, a black figure held up a lantern. As I neared, I discerned Ruggieri’s face, phosphorescent in the yellow glow. He turned and walked slowly past the trees to a thatch-roofed cottage of crumbling brick. Candlelight shone dimly through cracks in the drawn shutters.
I dismounted; Ruggieri set the lantern on the ground and helped me down, catching both my hands in his. For an instant he stared at me, his complicitous gaze intent, searching for something he did not find.
He had not wanted me to come. I wasn’t needed, he said, and there was always the chance of danger, both magical and practical. I felt that his real reason was to spare me upset, and the revulsion of seeing firsthand what he was capable of, yet I had insisted. I did not want the crime I was about to commit to be distant, a mere tale without the attending visceral reality.
I did not want to be able to do such a thing again.
The sudden coldness in his gaze stole my breath; the talon touch of his fingers, separated though they were from mine by two layers of gloves, chilled me to the core. He was capable of acts worse than murder, and I was alone with him, where no one could hear my screams.
I thought to pull away, to jump onto Madame Gondi’s horse and ride off. But the magician’s eyes were powerful, compelling. With a dreamer’s languid helplessness, I followed him to the entrance of the cottage.
Ruggieri flung open the rotting portal to reveal a single room with a dirt floor half covered by a large piece of slate. The pale walls were covered in pigeon droppings, the hearth so long unused that greenish mold had sprouted from the bricks. Someone had painted a perfect black circle on the slate, one large enough to comfortably contain two men lying end to end. Unlit candles, each on a brass holder tall as a man, rested at four equidistant points on
