Chapter Five Ree
Chapter Five
Ree
The farther Ree rode from the city, the more her unbidden thoughts of Henryk Broussard grew.
When Ree was just eight years old, Marie had taken her through the nunnery’s sick ward after a plague outbreak to aid the afflicted.
There, she’d met a shivering, plague-riddled boy with strange gray eyes, hovering on the cusp of death.
She’d coaxed him back to life, and after, Henryk Broussard had become her first friend, and really, if she were being honest with herself—and whiskey tended to have that effect on her—her first love.
But she had never admitted that to him. Never had the chance.
In the years since, she’d often wondered what had become of him, what path he had set for himself. And now…now she knew.
Ree rode onward, following in her mother’s trail.
The bayou held different magic at night.
The cypress trees grew long in the gathering shadows, their branches jutting outward, pointing for her to turn backward with gnarled fingers.
She wasn’t much of a tracker, having neither the patience nor the talent, but she could still follow her mother’s magic well enough.
Here, she was beyond the city’s rules concerning magic but also their protection.
Out this far, there were no lawmen to protect against snatchers and bounty men who were itching to get their hands on wayward Les Magiques.
It was here in the bayou where Ree had first undergone her mother’s lessons in preparation for her initiation rites.
She’d been eight years old, in dewy-eyed wonder of her mother, the Great Marie Laveau, the beautiful Quarter Queen.
Her mother had seemed different during her childhood, larger than life, a goddess descended from the heavens just for her.
On the first night of her initiation training, her mother had poured salt and rose petals in odd crisscrossing shapes, magical runes known as veves, each one with its own meaning for a different loa, that Ree could no more name than she could tell apart the stars in the sky.
Voodoo was many things to many folks, but to Ree it was the magic of connection to the loa—the old gods from the old lands.
Folks who practiced Voodoo like her mother were conduits for these gods and ancestors, who worked through them viscerally and often violently.
Papa Legba, the loa of crossroads, favored her mother, she knew, as did others.
Ayizan, wife of Legba and keeper of sacred knowledge and mysteries.
Ogoun, god of the forge and fire. Bade, spirit of wind and brother to Sogbo, diviner of lightning.
There were more than Ree could count, a pantheon of beings who whispered at her ear, begging for invitation into her body as a willing vessel.
Her mother had warned her the initiation would be painful. In the following weeks, Ree would die many times over, and then she would be born again, in her mother’s name, as a Voodoo Priestess. So her training had to be adequate and in many ways more brutal than the ritual itself.
The star-shaped magical veve had burst into flames all around them, and Ree had been flooded with pain and suffering, spiritual visions so vivid she thought she was going mad.
Wild whispers had filled her head, the voices too numerous to pick apart.
The spirits of her ancestors, her mother told her later.
For many nights, Ree’s training had seemed one long, hopeless cycle.
She’d walked along the grass barefoot, pouring salt from a jar into the shapes of the veves she’d spent hours hunched over her spell books studying, again and again until her mother was satisfied.
Surrounded by unlit candles, Ree and her mother chanted in a mixture of Latin and French until the candles bent to their will and flickered to life.
Other times, she and her mother sat back-to-back, cross-legged in the bayou grass in deep spiritual meditation, and Marie would swat her if she cracked an eye open.
Marie demonstrated spells with her hand, enchantments meant to bind or harm or manipulate an opponent, which Ree would mimic clumsily.
She taught her to channel, to borrow power from the loa while still in control of herself.
A handful of dancing fire from Ogoun. A slice of wind from Bade.
A lulling kiss deepened by Erzulie’s coquettish charm.
Channeling a loa was one thing—but letting one mount you? That was the magic of complete and total spiritual surrender.
Mounting was the magic of possession, either by loa or by ancestral spirit, the power of becoming a living conduit for the divine’s absolute will.
Ree had watched her mother’s demonstration in frightful fascination.
Deep in this state, her mother glowed, and when she opened her eyes, they were not their usual dark brown, but pure white.
Ree was beholding the Quarter Queen in all her terrifying power.
Then, it was her turn.
Her mother described mounting as akin to sailing a ship, albeit on violent waters.
Her soul was the ship, and the spirit was the captain.
But nothing could prepare Ree for the feeling of full-on possession, which felt more like someone mad had seized control and was steering with no wheel into a storm.
A thousand voices attacked her, some of them pitiful moans, the haunted sounds of souls recounting their greatest pains and sorrows. Others were terrible screams, distorted and stretched in ways beyond her imagination.
Then, something else reached for her. A darkness unknown to even her mother.
Ree had hardly registered her body lifting from the ground, and she felt something hot and wet pool behind her eyelids.
At first, she thought it was only tears, but one swipe to her eyes and her hand came away wet with blood.
She could barely see her mother below, yelling for her to come down. But the pain ebbed and fell away.
Channeling that dark feeling had begun to feel, well…good.
Come to me, the dark whispered. The deep, commanding voice of a man. Let me in.
“Ree!” her mother cried.
Startled, Ree snapped to, tumbling from the sky like a falling star.
She landed hard enough to rattle her teeth.
A small black bird circled overhead, tracing the air around Ree, cawing in sharp warning.
It flew low, landing directly on her shoulder, its claw seizing her skin.
It stared at Ree, its golden eyes unblinking.
They were not the eyes of a crow, Ree thought.
These were the eyes of something ancient.
Something she felt she had known before, somehow.
I know you too, those eyes said. For I am yours.
Her mother swatted at the bird, driving it away in a flurry. She gathered a trembling Ree into her arms, who stared after the bird in wonder. She knew it would come back for her.
“Maman,” said Ree. “I heard a voice.”
“Whose voice?”
“His.” It hadn’t been the first time Ree had heard this voice, this inner darkness. When her mother said nothing, her face carefully barren of any emotion, Ree said, “The things I heard…I saw. What am I?”
The voice had told her that she wasn’t just the child of Marie Laveau.
It told her she was something else. And meant for so much more.
Her mother had hesitated. Finally, she said, “You are my heir. My body and my soul. We are spirit and flesh. Two and one. Within and without. You are my namesake. You are Marie Laveau.” She stood and held out a hand to Ree. “Get up, my love. A queen never kneels.”
The crunch of bramble underfoot pulled Ree back to the present—she had reached Marie at last in an old fur-trapping camp, where the Cajuns liked to move from time to time to trap the red wolves that roamed these parts.
Her mother was sitting around a small fire, her long dark hair loosed from its golden cloth.
She’d know her mother’s magic anywhere, of course.
Every mystic had a specific scent to their magic.
Some sweeter than others, some as pungent as a bulb of garlic or as sour as a bag of lemons.
Marie Laveau’s magic was sweet as the biggest beignet in New Orleans and hot as the Louisiana sun in the ides of summer.
To her shock, she scented another magic—the bitter, resinous notes of foxglove, the trickster flower. Beside Marie sat an alchemist, his long white hair trailing down his back. And not just any alchemist. Silas Favreau, the Grand Wizard of the Brotherhood of the White Hand.
Once, her mother and the Grand Wizard had been great enemies, though her mother never discussed him.
Now the rules meant they never crossed paths, as far as Ree knew.
She herself had seen Silas only in passing, caught flashes of his long silvery hair and dark spangled robes as he came and went from his private carriage to the Brotherhood’s cloistered halls and to the city’s various pleasure houses, heard the drunken praises of Brotherhood fledglings celebrating their leader’s latest magical advancement when she visited the alehouses and music houses.
Out of caution, Ree stopped Thistle some distance away from the camp and tied her to a tree.
Footfalls crunched in the underbrush behind her. Ree froze. She had been followed.
But it was already too late.
She was yanked up by the hair and roughly dragged backward, deeper into the damp darkness.
A swaying gas lamp was jutted into her face, bright enough that she was blinded.
It took one horrifyingly long moment for her vision to adjust, and when it finally did, she saw three grubby faces peering back at her. Snatchers.
The truth struck her like a thunderbolt to the chest: They’d come to snatch her.
Ree kicked and twisted, but she was outnumbered, and they were much bigger than her.