But I knew nothing of its hidden heart, the secret province of magicians and sorcerers.
The cité’s network of occult havens marked by sigils, in which diviners peddle past and future alike.
Some are more tumbledown than the chiromancy haven, far seedier and less ostentatiously arcane. Marie takes me to all of them nonetheless, introducing me to adepts who practice physiognomy and tarot, or bespy the future via the movement of celestial bodies. Their mystical trappings are of little use to me, when it is the sheer force of a client’s need that most reliably summons up the sight. The chiromancy haven remains my favored haunt, and in a handful of weeks I amass a tidy little clientele; apparently the irate nobleman chose not to speak ill of me after all.
Not all my clients are wealthy, nor do they need to be. Modest tradesmen and even peasants prove more than capable of mustering coin, when it comes to pressing matters like a child’s illness or the roving of a spouse’s eye. And with each night the contents of my strongbox swell, my stash of pistoles and louis d’or heaping steadily up.
Should the repossession men return, Antoine and I may still come out of it all right.
“You know, you are not at all as I expected,” Francoise-Athenais de Rochechouart informs me languidly, soon after she has seated herself for our assignation.
Unlike my more bashful clients, who balk at so much as looking me in the eye, the Marquise de Montespan seems unafraid to take my measure. Just as unfazed as she was to provide me with her name and rank, if it meant I would make time for an earlier session.
It seems very little in life gives the marquise any great pause.
“No?” I respond, lifting my eyebrows with cool curiosity. “And if I may, madame, what did you expect?”
She furrows her forehead, knitting fine blond brows. The marquise is exquisite, as clear-featured as a cameo and blessed with larkspur eyes, a rosebud mouth, and a soft swoop of honeyed curls. Under her brushed velvet cloak her décolletage is cut fashionably low, exposing rounded shoulders and a milky expanse of bosom. Everything about her appears delicately wrought, like the spun-sugar confections I’ve heard they prize so highly at the Sun King’s court.
But I recognize hers for a bayonet sort of beauty, shining with a dangerous edge. As inviting as it is likely to gut a careless lover.
“I confess I am not even sure,” she says in a conspiratorial tone, resting her chin on interlaced hands. “Someone … more wizened, I suppose. Perhaps more sagacious in appearance.”
“Is my lady implying that I do not seem clever?” I counter. “Perhaps I should consider taking offense.”
She bursts into a silvery peal of laughter, uncaring of the looks it draws in the haven’s hush.
“Come now, that is hardly necessary,” she drawls with a dismissive wave of the hand. “I suppose I only thought you would be much older, and less fetching. More crone than maypole maiden. What are you, barely eighteen?”
“Nineteen, my lady.”
“Such a lovely age, as I recall,” she says, a touch wistfully, as if she is a great deal more than five or six years older than me. “Do savor the youthful blush of your beauty, my dear. It will vanish in a wink.”
Though she says this in a flattering tone, there is a certain asperity to the words, a coolness to her scrutiny she cannot quite conceal. I make a note to myself; should I see the marquise again, it would be preferable to render myself more the dowdy divineress and less the alluring sibyl.
“May I ask what has brought you here tonight?” I ask, brushing past any further discussion of my appearance.
“Why don’t you tell me what might have brought me to this charmless place?” she responds, giving a dainty shudder as she glances around the haven’s incense-roiled expanse. “Surely an oracle can scry as much for herself. Believe me, I never would have ventured here at all had I not heard elusive little whispers of a talented divineress. Someone of a wholly different breed than the grifter scum that have the run of this place.”
“Then perhaps we had best begin,” I say, reaching for her hand. She obliges, still exuding that air of indolent hauteur. Yet I can feel her need writhing just below the surface almost as soon as I touch her, wriggling like an earthworm surfacing after a heavy rain.
There is something the marquise very badly wants to know.
“Someone stands in your path,” I begin, tracing my finger tips over her palm in the intricate pattern of a clarifying rune from Agnesot’s grimoire. Tonight it dredges up the hazy outline of a man, burning at the edges with a burnished glow, like the silhouette of the moon when it slides across the sun’s radiant face.
“A powerful man,” I continue, schooling my surprise. I have never before been visited by a vision quite so bright. “With a mantle of vast influence gathered about his shoulders. He seeks you out not only for your beauty, but for your esprit, your incomparable wit and lively tongue. You have been growing closer for some time now, but it seems something even more tender has recently come to pass between you.”
I glance up at her, raising a teasing eyebrow. “It seems, madame, you have fallen in love.”
She casts me a wide-eyed, girlish look, suppressing a grin. Of course I am right, I think, barely refraining from rolling my eyes. For this much, I scarcely needed the sight. She radiates new love, shining like a freshly minted coin.
“Oh, c’est vrai,” she exhales, fastening her lower lip with her pearly little teeth. “I cannot deny it. Though I have often thought myself impervious to Cupid’s bow, it appears my heart has finally bestirred itself.”
Her gaze grazes
