Poison Priestess, Lana Popovic [romance novel chinese novels .txt] 📗

head graciously. “Were I to read only for those whom I know well, it might render my powers sluggish and stale.”

Her lips twitch at the mention of my powers, curling a little as if in skepticism. Something about the expression renders her face, large-eyed and dainty as a madonna’s, vaguely familiar. I squint at her for a moment, trying to pinpoint the source of this odd sense of recognition. Perhaps it is no more than her stylish aspect; surely a thousand well-bred women sport such tight curls, rouged cheeks, and velvet beauty marks speckling heavily powdered skin.

Even more oddly, she watches me with a bewildered crease between her own brows, as if I might be familiar to her, too.

“But enough about me, madame,” I say a bit uneasily, thrown off by her keen attention. “Shall we begin?”

She nods, though I can still feel her assessing eyes as I bend over her hands. A vision washes over me almost immediately, nearly painful in its force, yanked brutally forth by the ferocity of her need.

“Two men on either side of you,” I whisper, a little dizzy with the onslaught of the sight. It pounds in my skull like a pendulum swinging from side to side. The vision crystallizes before me in the form of an otherworldly chessboard, in which she appears as a queen flanked by both a bishop and a rook. “One, you are shackled to by the ring on your hand. The other, you long for, just as he yearns for you.”

I glance up to see her eyes widen with surprise, then narrow with satisfaction.

“Good,” she says shortly. “Good, so far. And what else?”

“The bishop,” I say hoarsely, the words sour in my mouth. I watch as the piece chivies the queen ruthlessly across the board, badgering her back and forth, never allowing her a moment’s rest. “Your husband. He … he uses you ill.”

“That he does,” she says with a terrible equanimity. As though this abuse has come to be simply a matter of course for her.

“And the other man …” I begin, trying to see beyond the vision’s symbolism. “Not only your lover, but an artist. His art is how you first fell in love.”

“The painter my own husband commissioned to paint my likeness, yes. And he is everything my husband is not,” she bites off with a shake of her head so furious it near unseats her wig. “Penniless yet rich in talent. So gentle, and unfathomably kind. A man the likes of which I did not even think existed.”

In my vision, the queen begins to shed a glow onto the dreamscape board, emanating a dreadful crackle of light like a thunderhead. Then she rears back and cracks into the bishop, sending him spinning off the board, which rives itself in two beneath the force of her quaking rage. But the solitary rook remains, safe by the queen’s side.

“And you wish your husband dead so you might be free of your torment—and free to wed this other man instead.” I sit back, letting the remnants of the vision slip away as I release her hands. “But since the law gives you no recourse, you have come to me for help.”

She nods ardently, eager eyes fastening to mine. There is a new light to them now, a sort of certainty. Something like recognition.

“They speak of your potions with such veneration at Versailles, you know,” she says, her voice taking on a wheedling tone. “I’ve heard rumor that the marquise even credits your love philters with having won her the king’s affections. And I thought, if you could manage something so grand and all-encompassing as love …”

“That I should not blink at a spot of murder,” I finish wryly, shaking my head. “I am sorry to disappoint you, but you have come knocking at the wrong door, madame. I am no widow-maker. Not even when it comes to heavy-fisted louts.”

She blinks at me, taken aback by the staunchness of my refusal. Then a small, strange smile overtakes her face, sparking an unnerving glimmer in her eyes.

“Not even at the request of an old friend, Madame La Voisin?” she says with deceptive lightness, tilting her head. “Not even then?”

“What are you saying?” I narrow my eyes, scrutinizing her in the pavilion’s flickering light, unease nudging in my belly. That eerie familiarity beckons to me again, crooking its finger at me from the shadows. “What friend?”

“Come, Catherine.” She leans forward, letting the candlelight bathe her face. “Have so many years passed since the fabrique that you truly do not recognize me?”

At the mention of the fabrique, my heart thrashes like a snared rabbit, fit to escape the confines of my chest. When I still say nothing, she shakes her head with mock disappointment, pushing her pointed sleeves up to her elbows.

“Here,” she says flatly, stretching her arms across the table for my inspection. “Perhaps this will help.”

My lungs suddenly shrunken with fear, I look down to find that the insides of her arms are silvery with scars. A gallery of little burns exactly like my own.

Where both of us were scalded by droplets of tallow spitting from a cauldron too vigorously stirred.

“Eugenie!” I breathe, my eyes flying up to her face—which seems to waver and then resolve, hardening like wax into the memory of the girl I knew at the fabrique. Pretty, sharp-tongued Eugenie, who once tended to the cauldron beside my own. “Is it—Could it truly be you?”

“I am afraid so,” she retorts, pulling back her arms and crossing them over her chest. “I was not sure of you, either, at first, but I could not mistake that hair for long. Little Catherine, grown up to be nothing less than the maîtresse-entitre’s divineress. You really have come up in the world, just as that bedamned Agnesot said you would.”

“And you wished for a husband!” I blurt out, remembering her mockery and taunts, her challenging scorn. “When Agnesot offered you a wish to prove her powers. A wealthy husband, so you