Page 28 of The Spy’s Song

Louise followed the line with her eyes.

"And where is the enemy?"

"The English are here." His finger rested near Brussels. "Wellington commands them. And the Prussians—Blücher—are around Namur and Liège."

Louise's gaze flickered between the two marks. "They are not together."

"No."

Louise traced the road from Charleroi with one finger. "If he crosses here, he stands between them."

"You know your father very well."

She looked away. Outside the library window, the countryside lay indifferent and beautiful, knowing nothing of campaigns or borders or the loneliness of a woman who had memorized a man's biography without ever hearing his voice.

"I know everything about him," she whispered. But she didn't know him. Not at all.

"If Wellington and Blücher join their armies, France won't be able to defeat them," he said, voice low.

She looked up, unprepared for the tender note in his voice.

"My father has broken better generals than him."

Rodrick folded the map halfway. "Perhaps. But Wellington has never yet been broken."

Louise looked back down at the map, jaw tight. "He will be."

He had to be. She had to arrive there in time. She had not come this far to see him defeated. France defeated.

"We will have one week. One week to turn you into a cavalry officer. The training will be grueling. Riding—fast, daily, at cavalry pace, not a morning constitutional. Drilling. Movement in uniform. How to respond to regimental commands without the half-second delay that will unmask you. How to fight an enemy with a saber and strike to kill."

She would learn her father's trade. Become one of his soldiers, and be closer to him than she had ever been. Her eyes had turned moist, so she kept her face toward the map and breathed carefully. She would not permit herself to reveal this much in a library in front of a spy.

"Do you hear me, Louise?"

She looked up, startled by the edge in his voice.

"We will go to war. Two forces moving toward each other across flat ground. A hundred and fifty thousand allied troops against whatever France has gathered in a hundred days—"

"The training," she said, lifting her chin. "When do we start?"

He stood up. They were face to face. His eyes flashed, and his lip twisted. He would deny her. He would mock her again and send her back. Let him try and scare her. She was well past fearing bedtime stories.

"We start now, Princess. As soon as you take off your dress."

The flutter she felt when she walked in returned with reinforcements. She opened her mouth, but words mutinied.

He crossed his arms. "Find some breeches and meet me outside in five minutes."

***

Louise restrained the urge to run across the field. Hélène had laughed herself breathless while buttoning her into the riding breeches, which clung to Louise's legs almost as closely as rehearsal stockings. At least today she had not dressed for anyone's entertainment.

Rodrick waited at the edge of the grass with two horses. Brutus had already trampled a dark circle around himself, striking the ground with the offended violence of a dancer forced to mark steps instead of perform them. The animal beside him looked considerably less theatrical: narrow-chested, brown fading toward dust, ears hanging as though life had disappointed him repeatedly. Louise would have trusted him to pull a coal cart through Covent Garden.

Rodrick folded his arms as she approached. The riding coat pulled across his shoulders, and tan breeches followed the long line of his legs into boots that seemed to continue upward without reasonable end. For once he looked less like a spy than the aristocrat he had been born to be, which was irritating enough. More irritating still was the small failure in Louise's breathing when her gaze reached the tops of those boots. They would come nearly to her hips. A completely useless observation, and therefore one her mind immediately chose to preserve.

Rodrick's gaze traveled over her, and that same treacherous flutter began in her stomach. She ignored it. Today had nothing to do with Rodrick's face, his hands, or what his mouth had done to hers aboard Freja. Today she would learn the soldiers' trade.