Normally, I suffer from not even a jot of stage fright, but tonight I find myself unnerved by all these nobles’ oglingeyes. Their powdered faces glow a dreadful white against the dark swathe of their hoods, beauty patches standing out like pox marks against pale skin, as if they are the restive spirits I feigned for them so many times.
And though this is the same banquet hall I have presided over for so many a Black Mass, the very air in the room seems to have turned ominous and strange, somehow imbued with an unfamiliar horror. The twining vines of the wallpaper seem to surge and coil like unruly snakes, thrown into relief by the lick of candlelight, forming uncanny shapes like leering faces. Once again I am reminded of how often I have entreated darker deities, prayed to demonic powers for their favor in rituals both sincere and feigned. Who is to say that some of them did not hear me and choose to finally attend? Especially tonight, when my very life hangs in the balance as it has never before done?
Why should infernal creatures not teem behind my wallpaper to watch, to see if they may yet sup on my sinner’s blood?
What a rich meal my soul would make for them.
I stagger in place a bit, my head rushing with a bout of dizziness, feeling as though I am already halfway to somewhere else; somewhere beyond our mortal plane. Stranded between and betwixt, one foot already planted in hell.
As if he can feel the surging of my unease, Adam squeezes my cold hand, leaning over to brush a kiss across my cheek. I recoil from him a little, barely masking my twitch with a nervous shudder, somehow afraid he will sense my imminent betrayal as if it has a malodorous scent.
“Take heart, my priestess,” he whispers into my ear with genuine concern, and for a moment I feel that I will truly miss him. “Tonight will be nearly the same as all the others. And take no heed of their number, when they are as nothing to us. We all but own them already, do we not?”
I swallow hard, but nod, as if I am comforted instead of even more dismayed.
Once we begin, some of my discomfort begins to slip away, soothed by the familiarity of our mock rituals, our wicked kiss before the altar, our well-worn chants. The first departure comes when the marquise goes to serve as the living altar, rather than Camille or me. Adam escorts Athenais to the center and helps her lie upon the table, her golden swoop of hair tumbling to the floor as he sets the chalice upon her chest, the apple on her navel. Then I make my customary rounds about her, tilting a dripping candle over her smooth-skinned form as Adam leads the group in a rousing chant.
She is so beautifully arrayed, so lithe and lovely upon the table, that for a moment I am filled with an incandescent burst of rage. How can the king cast aside something so beautiful simply because it has come to bore him; as if the marquise, capricious and vicious and halfway demented though she is, does not have a feeling heart and soul enrobed by that pristine flesh?
As if she is not a woman but merely one of Antoine’s pretty trifles, a thing Louis can simply dispense with on a whim, eager for some new amusement with which to divert himself?
It occurs to me that she is doomed no matter what, whether I stay my chosen course or falter enough to carry out the king’s original plan.
She will face the king’s fury either way, and die all the same.
And though it makes very little sense, for a moment I am desperately sorry to know that Athenais will soon meet her own impending end.
As if she can sense my misgivings, the marquise opens her eyes as I approach her head, my shadow falling across her face. Her eyes glitter against the dark, vivid and unafraid, almost gleeful with malice; as if she can barely wait for the satanic demise this ritual will ostensibly bring down upon Louis’s head. Terrible as it is, it centers me a little to be reminded of how lost she is, how utterly depraved.
The marquise is already far beyond redemption, but perhaps I can still save myself.
The remainder of the ritual proceeds precisely as planned. The devil rears in Adam’s faux mirror, while Adam’s devilmakers fling a diabolic bestiary across the walls, painting them with the monsters I already imagined to be lurking there. All of it perversely calming, remembered steps in a well-practiced dance.
When the chalice makes its way to me for communion, I apply some of Adam’s own legerdemain. Slipping loose the dainty phial from between my stays, I bring it to my mouth as I take a sip of wine, tossing its contents back as well. Then I pass the chalice to Adam and drop my hand to my side, letting the empty glass tube slide down the folds of my skirts and to the floor, where I crush it firmly underfoot.
Should some unaccountably upstanding guest think to summon the searcher to establish my cause of death, I do not want the phial found anywhere on my person.
The concoction is bitter as gall, so revolting I struggle to gulp it down. It will slow my heart down to almost nothing and chill my limbs, mimicking the appearance of death—so that when I goad my Tisiphone into inflicting her harmless bite on me, I will appear to perish from the same coral snake venom that Adam and I intended for the marquise.
Once the apple has been shared by all the guests as well, Adam announces that tonight, we seek our master’s most profound blessing.
“Just as the serpent twined around Eve,” he intones, “so will our priestess’s familiar circle
