“Are you truly not made even a little jealous by the prospect of sharing me with him?” I half tease, reaching out to run my fingers through his spiky hair. To my surprise, I find I want him to say yes.
“Jealous?” His brow creases with genuine consternation. “What a notion, Catherine. Why in the world would I be?”
I swallow against the unexpected pain that swells in my throat like a mouthful gone awry. It is not really that I want him to feel possessive of my affections; in truth, I would not care either if he were to woo someone else, even become another’s steadfast lover. The cool respect between us is no closer to the heat of love than it ever was.
But perhaps Marie would have cared, before I ruined everything between us, razed it down to its foundations.
And however she feels about me now that I have at least secured her freedom, I still miss her so terribly.
“Of course you would not,” I reply, forcing a smile. “I was only jesting. Now, let us decide how we shall proceed.”
As soon as I receive notice that the king has kept his word and Marie has been released, Adam and I set about curating the guest list to our blasphemous festival. We spend the next few weeks meticulously mapping out the marquise’s death. I have already secured her participation, having extended her the “honor” of serving as our living altar—a special offering to the devil to secure his blessing of our supposed, secret undertaking, the murder of the king.
As I expected, she had been only too eager to agree.
Rather than a ritual blade gone awry during the Messe, Adam and I settle on the use of a venomous snake instead—a demise even more easily presented as an accident. We also concoct an intoxicant incense, a mixture of belladonna, mugwort, and henbane to confound our audience’s senses, render them more credulous. More willing to believe that what befalls the marquise is of the devil’s doing. The rest of my time is spent training the chosen serpent—a coral snake so indistinguishable from my own king snakes that the marquise will not be alarmed by its presence—so that it will strike eagerly at the opportune moment.
A week before the Messe, all invitations have been sent and the necessary preparations made. We are ready as we will ever be to execute our plan. Though I am confident in our success, I have been so alive with nerves during our active plotting that I have barely slept for days. But now that there is no more to be done, I retire to sleep early for once, in hopes that I will actually find some rest.
I succumb to sleep as soon as my head touches the pillow and plunge immediately into a dream both vastly terrible and strange.
In it, I look down upon myself as I was at the fabrique—a young starveling with wax burns along her arms, standing in a torn shift against a backdrop of toppled cauldrons and writhing flames. Then the girl that was once me begins to walk, following a twisting path that leads her out of hell. Her road glitters with fragments of green glass, the crushed remnants of the many jars and bottles of ingredients I purchased from the alchemist Blessis. There are coins, too, along the way, warped and half melted, searing hot under her soles.
Though the broken glass and molten metal must torment her, the girl’s face remains adamant, betraying not a hint of pain.
I see her continue her journey as the road takes on an incline, beginning to wend around a mountain’s sheer face. She climbs and climbs, not sparing a glance for the vertiginous drop, still with that resolute look stamped across her face. By the time she crests the mountain’s summit, she has aged fully into a woman, several years older than I am today.
And the king waits for her upon the summit, his glorious hair billowing around him, his hand outstretched.
As soon as she takes it and moves to stand beside him, a black crown materializes upon her head. It wavers like a mirage, as if wrought not of any metal but of a poisonous inky mist, like snake venom turned to breath. Her ragged shift transforms into a grand habit both majestic and macabre, sewn of batwing leather and cobwebs instead of lace. A smile splits her face, wider than wide, a grin so grotesquely broad it contorts her features into something other than human.
Then my perspective shifts—and suddenly it is me gazing outward from the mountaintop, occupying her place. The king’s hand burns like an ember in mine, and all of France sprawls out before us: rows upon rows of vineyards with curling vines, swaths of grassy meadow, pools of glimmering lakes. A dark sun blazes above our heads amid a churn of clouds, like an eclipse shedding a noisome light.
And I understand that this no mere dream, but something more. A sleeping visitation of the sight. It tells me that, should I follow through with the deadly Messe, I will become much more than even what the marquise dreamed for herself. Louis will take me as a morganatic wife, a left-handed queen. Wearing his matching crown in all but name.
As triumph grips my heart like some crushing fist, I make the mistake of looking down—to meet the rictus grin of the skull that lies at my feet. Beneath it is another, and another, and another, along with yellowed piles of longer bones clustered haphazardly together.
Because the mountain is made not of stone, but of skeletons. The bodies of my murdered victims, the many dead I climbed over to ensure my own ascension.
And if I pledge myself to Louis XIV, there will only ever be more and more and more.
I rip myself awake with the sound of my own animal howls. My hands twist into my balled-up sheets, and tears sluice hotly down
