Chapter Ten Marie #3
Her eyes flickered to Silas, who lingered just behind Gailon.
Did she imagine the twitch of his lips, the shadow of amusement that flickered across his face hummingbird-fast?
There was some strange emotion burning in his eyes, something she’d need more than a few moments in a hallway to study.
Which Marie decided made this man, whoever he was, far more dangerous than the Grand Wizard.
Without another word, she strode away, their gazes prickling her back like needles.
Sanite Dede was waiting for her.
The bayou house was unusually cold at night, filled with puddles of silver moonlight and the clinking of mortars and pestles, the toiling of potion-brewing and spellwork that couldn’t be done by day.
The only light came from the sconces along the walls, where tiny candles had been enchanted to glow with violet and gold flame.
Marie and Claudette stepped through the beaded partition and crossed into the throne room.
Marie was grateful for the stinging brine of vinegar and lemon that rose from the freshly scoured floorboards, the balm of sage, so different from the stink of death that clung to the chateau. Sanite was on her throne, as always.
“Marie, you’ve idled much, my child,” Sanite Dede drawled. She was knitting, of all things. “Tell me, Marie, what did you learn?”
“Permission to speak freely?” Marie cast her eyes imperceptibly toward the right of the throne, where Claudette stood, hanging on to every word.
Sanite waved a hand, bidding Claudette leave.
She cast one last mistrusting green-eyed glare at Marie, the partition’s beaded veil rustling as she left.
Claudette was not to be privy to Voodoo’s inner workings because she was not beholden, per se, to the sacred laws of Sanite’s court, not when she already belonged to the court of the old blood.
She practiced Vodun—some might say the older, purer form of Voodoo—and served the Haitian Vodun Queen, Cécile Fatiman.
She was here purely as a matter of oversight, an ambassador of sorts between their courts.
“Go on, child,” Sanite said to Marie.
“Corbin did not just call on me—he called on the Brotherhood too.” She paused, thinking on Gailon’s spite. “The Grand Wizard made an appearance.”
Sanite Dede clicked her tongue. The violet flame cast her in an unflattering light—eyes beadier, the hollows of her cheeks ghostly.
“So, Gailon has seen fit to leave his dark hole for once. It makes sense. The mayor cannot heal himself, not from this. Even his own stock of mages could not temper the fever. He would have no choice. But he called on the Voodoos too. Meaning Gailon failed, didn’t he?
He is no closer to solving this mystery than the rest of us. ”
“Gailon believes, or at the very least insinuated, that this plague…is being perpetrated by you.”
Sanite Dede balked. It was not so much an incredible possibility as it was impossible for her to do at her age. Sanite Dede held power, true power. But at eighty-eight years old, she was nearing her end, and her power, for all its vicious glory, was waning.
“The Brotherhood has always fancied themselves thinking men, and yet they still need wooden sticks for conjuring.” Sanite’s lips curled.
“If I wanted to go about killing white folks, don’t you think I would have done that?
But what good would come from chaos? What would I rule then, but ash and bone? ”
But what if you did? What kind of world would rise from the ash? It was the briefest notion, a shooting star across the span of her darkest thoughts, fire-bright until it fell away.
Marie said only what was expected of her. “Of course not.”
“Now, on to more pressing business. You’ve been at the sickbeds for two weeks now, Marie. You’ve seen firsthand the signs, symptoms. Enough time has passed for your true observation of the plague. Who is really behind this whole matter?”
Wordlessly, Marie went to the oil portrait on the far wall of Papa Legba, holding his copper scales as he stared out, smiling, from a haze of purplish mist. She seized it by the sides with both hands and removed it, revealing dozens of parchment sheets hanging on the wall behind it.
All were different sketches, some of veves and old Voodoo marks, others of patients’ faces and notable anatomy.
Marie had arranged them over the last few weeks in order, then taken them down and hung them again in different patterns.
“This is no simple plague. Not an act of nature nor the will of God. This is punishment.”
Marie closed her eyes briefly, thinking back on that lady in the bed, laughing and laughing as she sang her wicked fever song.
The Widow Paris. The woman who for all her magic couldn’t keep her husband from leaving her.
She thought of all her other patients too, men and women who on any other day would walk the Quarter banquettes in their top hats and parasols to shield them from the lash of the sun, all those pale faces that blurred together into one face she knew well enough but did not recognize.
It was the face of power, of the city’s cursed wealth.
It was the face of a person who owned another, who did not fancy themselves king or queen, but another kind of royalty that dared rule only in the South. The face of a master.
“All of these people have slaves registered to their names as property. Check the city’s ledgers. It’s all there. Which makes them all masters of some kind.” Marie lifted a sketch from the wall and passed it to Sanite.
“A plague that only befell slave owners?” Sanite clapped her hands. “Perhaps it is true what they say about your god, Marie Laveau. Perhaps he is a merciful god yet.”
“Perhaps. But this is not the work of God, my queen. This is Voodoo.”
Sanite clicked her tongue, an incredulous little noise, but her eyes had flattened into vicious little lines. “Voodoo? If it is, then it is veiled. Cleverly hidden. A trick.”
“And who else in this city could have the power to call such darkness? To possess Voodoo unknown even to the likes of the Quarter Queen? Who else may not rival you in conjuring, but in trickery?”
Sanite gasped. “Jon.” She turned away, thinking.
“The nerve of him! Just think, a man on the Voodoo throne. He dares not honor the sanctity of exile? Yet again, he spits in the face of Voodoo tradition! What am I saying?” Sanite laughed.
“What tradition has a man like Jon the Conjurer ever honored in his blasphemous little life?”
Marie said nothing, instead returning her attention to the wall, to all the evidence of Jon’s spellwork.
Crafty. Unorthodox. So different from Sanite’s careful magic, the magic that she kept bound to Voodoo’s traditions and rituals tighter than a Quarter whore’s corset.
You could stand to learn from a teacher like that.
Surely, Jon the Conjurer could teach her the forbidden magic she so desperately needed.
After all, it was the very reason for his banishment.
Marie had never known the full story—why Sanite had forced him from the city.
But there were whispers of experiments so gruesome that it made the Brotherhood’s own pastimes look tame, of rituals and magic so taboo within New Orleans that the mere mention of it was considered a terrible trespass on its laws.
Because Jon the Conjurer had tampered with the magic of death and resurrection—the magic of the zombi. The magic she desperately needed.
After Jacques had been declared dead, Marie, in her desperation, had invoked Papa Legba. He’d come to her at her crossroads ritual in the Dreadwood, a knowing gleam in his wizened red eyes.
She saw him, briefly, a glimmering apparition before her. Few could see the loa so. They much preferred to mount their vessels, to feel and experience the mortal world through the carnal flavor of human senses.
“Your love is gone, done passed on through. I helped him through the doorway myself when the Baron brought him,” Papa Legba had said. He spoke of Baron Samedi, Lord of Death.
Marie was crouched in the forest’s lone dirt path, her hands clenching and unclenching the bramble beneath her. She kept her eyes low in reverence. “Then you may yet help him back. To me, Papa.” She had heard such magic was possible.
Those red eyes had only twinkled with divine knowledge. “Come now, Marie. You don’t want that kind of magic. Veil magic comes with a whole lot of consequences, child. I don’t think you’d like to pay them.”
“I do.” She paused. “And I would. Papa, please.”
“Then the one you seek is the Conjurer, the one who has bargained himself to death.” High Jon, thought Marie. The Conjurer who’d challenged the Quarter Queen. “Seek his power, and you may yet return poor Jacques Paris.”
Papa Legba began to fade away back to the spirit realm, a grizzled chuckle echoing in the air. “Be careful, child,” the loa of the crossroads said as the scales in his hand began to shake wildly. Out of time. Out of balance. “Some doors just shouldn’t be opened.”
Now Marie was certain that the slave-owner plague was Jon’s work. He was, after all, what Papa Legba had called him. The one who has bargained himself to death.
Sanite squared her shoulders, like a warrior maiden readying for battle. “Well, I will handle Jon.”
“Let us hope better than before.”
The force of Sanite’s backhand was swift, breaking across the hollows of the room like thunder, pain stinging her cheek. “You insolent little girl,” Sanite hissed. “Learn your place and show your elders some respect. You might be talented, but you are not queen yet.”
Marie licked the blood from her lips, strangely emboldened. “And when I am, you can be sure I will use every ounce of my magic to serve more than my own selfish whims!”
Sanite watched her, silent. Marie should apologize.
She should recant. But today was different.
She was different, somehow. Something had changed in her.
She knew it the moment the woman had dared to speak of Jacques.
She felt it the moment she’d nearly killed then saved that sorry excuse for a man from his deathbed.
The truth was, maybe she’d been changing all along.
Sanite’s face hung low over Marie’s. But it was not Sanite’s face that was staring into hers, although it was a face Marie had come to know well enough in the time since her initiation.
It was the face of the Quarter Queen. Sanite’s eyes flared, completely and utterly white, a terrifying picture of spiritual power.
The force of her magic was boiling hot, a furnace that roared to life and would gladly take her soul for tinder and coal.
“So long as I am queen, you will hear me, Marie Laveau, and hear me well,” Sanite spat. Marie’s face flushed, scalded from the intensity of that white-hot gaze. “Never, ever challenge me.”
Here was the woman who had taken her under her wing when Grand-mère had died when Marie was only twelve years old, leaving her newly orphaned.
The same woman who’d taught Marie how to use and control the magic that had frightened her own mother from raising her, who’d generously positioned Marie as her successor to the crown.
She was the closest thing she’d had to a proper maman, and she should be grateful for that.
But now, in this moment, in the darkest parts of her heart, Marie resented the older priestess.
She wouldn’t deny it. Some small part of her pitied her too.
Sanite’s spirit was eternally strong as an ox, but her flesh had failed her.
She was old, frailer still by the day. It won’t be long now.
Marie kept her eyes trained to the floor, swallowing the lump in her throat. “Apologies, my queen.”
“Hmph.” Sanite turned away, the offense forgiven, her attention already turned toward another pressing matter.
Marie put the portrait back in its place.
Everything as it was. The rest of the acolytes were flooding into the room, arms bursting with smoking vials and wicker baskets saddled with mountains of herbs and talismans.
Soon, the Quarter Queen would hold court, and the Voodoos would do as they had always done—plot how to live their lives in the shadow of another kingdom.
Was that what was waiting for her after Sanite’s passing?
A kingdom of servants who already served another master, one who kept them locked and chained? Such small lives, Marie thought.
Marie turned her gaze back toward the great picture of Papa Legba, the glowing red eyes that seemed to be staring directly at her, silently inviting her into his realm of mist and sky, a cloudy crossroads that only the divine dared walk. The Veil.
That old magic would be hers in the end. She would make sure of it.