Chapter Six Ree
Chapter Six
Ree
Ree didn’t dare utter a word the whole way home.
Her mother watched her, mouth pressed into a flat, displeased line, Silas sitting quietly beside her.
Their carriage passed into the city gates, and soon enough they were trundling over the French Quarter’s cobbled roads, back into the warmth of torchlight and tinkling laughter that carried down from the tangle of terraces above.
Soon, the carriage had turned onto St. Ann, where it rattled to a stop outside of the Laveau home.
Their house was a modest cottage once owned by a judge whose ailing son Marie Laveau had brought back from the brink of yellow fever.
Now it was Marie’s, her name signed to the deed, an ode to her days as a young plague nurse.
The silence stretched between them until Ree couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“You’ve done enough.” Her mother’s tone made it perfectly clear that there would be hell to pay for her insolence, just not in front of an audience.
“Marie,” Silas began quietly. “You mustn’t be too hard on the child. Better for her to see with her own eyes the violence of bigots than to learn from a book.”
“Do not feign innocence, Silas,” Marie snapped. “Your kind carry enough bigotry of their own for my people on matters outside of magic. Or did you forget?”
Silas leaned on his great staff, touching a hand to the black stone dragon coiled upon the end, its fanged jaws clenched upon its own tail—the ouroboros, the beast that consumed itself. “How could I, when I have you, my dear queen, for a friend?”
If asked just yesterday, Ree would have never believed that her mother and Silas could be friends. But now she wasn’t so sure. They’d killed three white men together, burned them down to nothing. That wasn’t exactly the business of enemies.
But Marie said nothing, just yanked open the carriage door, gesturing for Ree to quickly get out first, then following and snapping the door to a close behind her. After a moment, the carriage set off down St. Ann before it turned into the Quarter’s shadowed alleys.
Ree went inside their home. She knew what people whispered about her mother—that their house’s modest exterior was but one more illusion the eternally self-serving witch Marie Laveau had cast upon the city and its people.
That it was really a palace, a hidden chateau filled with expensive baubles, cursed objects, and trinkets she’d conned from the men she’d hexed for her own amusement.
But there was nothing remotely palatial about their home.
Her mother scrubbed the hardwood floors with oil and soap herself, sewed simple lace curtains with her own needle and thread, purchased rugs from enslaved women at the French Market.
In the kitchen, Marie kept a tin pot of cinnamon, orange peel, and bay leaves boiling all night and day for luck and protection.
Ree smelled it now, that familiar autumnal scent.
The only space Marie Laveau had indulged in was the front parlor, where she’d covered the walls in oil paintings of black folks going about their lives in a variety of ways: A grandmother in a blue cotton skirt and tattered head rag washing her fussing petit-bébé in a wooden wash bucket.
A newly married couple gleefully jumping the broom.
And Marie’s favorite, a mother and her young daughter hand in hand walking down a long stretch of dusty magnolia-lined road, on their way into the sunlit unknown together.
Real people, she’d told Ree when she was just a little girl. Real freedom.
Ree stood in the parlor now, feeling very much like that same little girl about to be scolded.
With a wave of her jeweled hand and just a thought, Marie started a fire in the grate.
It was with Ogoun’s blessing, of course.
The great metalsmith god favored her mother and would gladly lend the fire from his sacred forge for her whims. Sosie came slithering out from beneath the settee, and Marie stooped to pick her up; she wound her way up Marie’s arm until she settled comfortably around her shoulders.
“This is why,” Marie snarled, leveling a ringed finger at her, “I insist on your training. The spirits are not compelled to simply serve you because you ask, little girl. You must serve them too. Prayer. Fasting. Sacrifice. It is a relationship, like any other. One that depends on fairness, upon the utmost equilibrium.”
“Because you know all about fairness in relationships, Mother.”
“I know better than you. Clearly.”
Ree’s eyes stayed on Sosie, the way her mother stroked her scales, cradling the snake close like a child at her breast. For some reason, the sight of this made her positively seethe. “Do you? Because every relationship you have, you manipulate to your advantage,” she retorted.
“And you’d be wise to do the very same. This city’s rules are not made for us, Ree.
They never were. Before either you or I were even born, this city had profited from our people’s pain, suffering, and forced labor.
And I was determined for that to not be our fate.
And so, yes, I am guilty of everything that you say.
I manipulated. I plotted. I’ve even killed.
” Her eyes were cold. “But all of my whims have had ends. And what of yours, hm? What are your reasons, daughter? Simply to spite me?”
Ree froze.
Marie sighed, turned away, and massaged her aching temples. “Like it or not, the safest place for you is this city.”
“It is a gilded cage,” Ree said, her voice suddenly small, nearly shy.
“Look around, child. Better a gilded cage than a collar.” Marie closed her eyes, and Ree knew she was trying to shut out the image of her kneeling in the dirt, a collar bound to her neck.
She lay both hands on Ree’s shoulders. “The safest place for you is New Orleans, because here, whether you like it or not, you are a Laveau. And that means something. Holds power. But outside of these walls? Your power would be used against you, and you would be forever hunted. Always running. Imagine the kind of power a slaver could wield with a girl like you under their thumb.”
Ree shook free from her mother’s grasp. “And yet here I am, Mother, right under yours.”
It was an awful thing to say. But sometimes her mother could be a truly awful woman.
But was it an awful woman who had saved her life today?
Her mother had risked everything, her own life, without so much as blinking an eye.
Ree knew she should be grateful, but somehow, standing there with her shoulders squared and facing down Marie Laveau, she felt anything but. She felt…resentful.
It was a wound that had always been there, she knew.
When she was much younger, it had caused her sorrow.
Why couldn’t her mother be like the other mothers at church, passing their children sweets and cookies wrapped in wax paper?
Why couldn’t her mother stay home at night, like the others, to read her a bedtime story?
Why did she need to leave by moonlight to gather with her precious followers in Congo Square?
What exactly in this godforsaken city pulled her so?
What could she love more than her own daughter?
In time, as she aged, the answer became crystal clear to Ree: Voodoo.
Marie released a frustrated breath. “When will you be done with this spoiled princess performance and play the part you are meant to? You are my heir, Ree. It is time you behaved as such.”
“Oh, maman. You mean your puppet.”
“Mind your tongue, little girl.”
“No, I don’t think I will.”
She wasn’t a little girl, despite her mother’s insistence otherwise. She was the same age, if not a few years older, even, as when her mother had ascended to Queen of the Voodoos.
“You see, I never minded being your puppet as a little girl. Just like a marionette down in the Quarter shows. Their strings pulled by cruel masters. And then I grew up…” Ree stared her mother down. “…and I began to see your strings too.”
“Not another word.”
“Oh, I think one more will do just fine. It’s your turn to explain yourself—why did you meet with Silas?
What is your relationship to the Grand Wizard of the Brotherhood?
” Ree was going to be fair about it. She was going to offer her the chance to come clean, to do away with all of her secrets and plots.
A flash of glittering anger in Marie’s eyes. But still she said nothing.
“Silence still makes you a liar, Marie. But since you are so quiet, perhaps I should tell you that I overheard you with Father Antoine, discussing the Harbinger and the Inquisition. And…” She hesitated, then said the name anyway: “Jon.”
“Enough!” her mother commanded, vibrant anger radiating from her. The fire flared, smoke filling their small parlor, backlighting her mother in the hearth’s orange-gold light, her face twisted first with sorrow, then with fury.
No, it was not Ree’s mother staring at her. It was the Quarter Queen, her bone-white eyes, the tignon upon her head coming undone, transfiguring itself into her golden fleur-de-lis crown, her long curls floating about her cheeks like seaweed swaying in black water.
“I am your queen,” she spat. “It’s high time you acknowledged that.”
“You are my mother! It’s high time you acknowledged that.”
And there it was. The real trouble between them.
When her mother spoke again, her voice had grown unusually soft, carrying an unmistakable bitter note. “The ways in which I have failed you as a mother are but small sacrifices to the ways in which I have succeeded as Queen of the Quarter. One day you will understand, when you have taken my place.”
“You might fancy yourself a queen, Mother. But you still bend the knee to these white men and the Church like everyone else in this fucking city.”