Page 37 of The Spy’s Song

He glanced at Louise. "Also not news."

Gaetan at least looked built for misplaced loyalty: enormous, battle-scarred, with a regiment at his back and enough muscle to argue with artillery personally. Louise was small enough to fit against Rodrick's chest, pale enough to make starvation seem like a personal insult, and possessed of the alarming habit of offering herself to causes as though no one had explained that she was breakable. He couldn't say why this offended him. He only knew that every time she spoke of sacrifice, some primitive part of him wanted to put her on his lap and forbid Europe from requiring anything further.

Hélène lifted her chin, eyes shining with tears. "What is your excuse?"

His hand moved toward his coat pocket, toward the small weight on the chain. Rodrick shook his head.

Hélène took both his hands in hers. "I hope that you find the answers you seek."

He looked at her—this petite woman who had survived London and a duke and was being asked to leave her home again because the world could not arrange itself conveniently around the people it contained—and felt the warmth of her hands around his.

"Don't believe I'm an angel, Your Grace," he said. "My goals are not honorable in the least."

"Then promise me that you will take care of her."

He looked at Louise. Napoleon's daughter, the spy thought. The most loyal woman in France. Going north because she had decided to go north, and the fact that the arithmetic was terrible was entirely irrelevant to her.

He brought Hélène's hand to his lips. "That I can do."

'With my life', a voice supplied inside his head, and he realized it was his own.

Hélène exhaled, then squeezed his hand before letting go. He opened the carriage door and handed her up. He waited while she settled the child against her, while she arranged herself, while she looked back through the window at her brother standing in the courtyard, arms still folded and jaw still set.

"Send my regards to Will," Rodrick said, and closed the door.

Hélène pressed her palm to the glass. Rodrick watched the carriage take the southern road, wheels finding the ruts as the horses settled into their pace. Hélène remained visible through the window for a while, a pale shape behind the glass, then the road curved and swallowed her.

Rodrick found the chain beneath his coat. That small piece of metal had dragged him across Europe, brought him to Louise, and would now take him north toward an emperor, a war, and, if he survived, the end of a question he had spent fifteen years asking. A remarkably heavy burden for something that fit beneath two fingers.

Louise still faced the road, and when she brushed a tear from her cheek she did it impatiently, as though the thing had appeared there without authorization.

Gaetan strode away. There were horses to inspect, orders to issue, a regiment to prepare for the military custom of marching men toward cannon and calling the arrangement duty.

That left Rodrick and Louise alone in the courtyard. He crossed to her. Ordinarily he would have supplied something. A joke. An observation.

Nothing came to mind that would improve the silence. Perhaps there were occasions when standing beside another person while a decision hurt was sufficient.

After a while Louise drew a slow breath. "We should begin the training."

They turned away from the southern road together.

The northern one was waiting.

***

Rodrick had kept Louise to blunted practice sabers, which had proved increasingly pointless. She learned too quickly. Once shown a cut, she remembered it. Once corrected, she rarely repeated the mistake, and the balance drilled into years of ballet seemed to understand a blade almost before the rest of her did. So Rodrick had finally put a cavalry saber into her hand. She would be carrying sharpened steel soon enough. Better that its weight, pull, and momentum surprised her here than on a battlefield.

Louise accepted the weapon with the concentration she brought to anything capable of injuring either her body or her pride. Sunlight ran along the blade and caught in her grey eyes.

Louise tested the saber’s balance, stepped forward and cut. Rodrick opened his mouth to correct her stance, but she pivoted before he could speak, bending low through the movement and coming up again with the easy strength of a dancer. The damned breeches pulled tight along her thighs.

Rodrick lost the correction entirely.

Christ. Those legs.

Louise shifted her weight again, and his imagination promptly put them somewhere they had no business being—around his waist, crossed behind his back, holding him against her with all that trained strength. The image arrived so vividly that heat punched low through him and left his nerves stretched another degree tighter.

"Cavalry fighting is not fencing. Two riders meet at speed. You use the saber to finish the encounter before the other man finishes you."