Page 47 of The Spy’s Song

Someone had taken the colors her father's armies carried through Europe and staged their death in the middle of a French village.

A trooper two files ahead glanced at the gibbet and spat into the road. Another cursed the villagers without slowing his horse.

"The Royalist bastards must have put it there. Knowing it would lower morale."

Under ordinary circumstances, Rodrick would have appreciated the joke: a British spy embedded in a French cavalry regiment, listening to one of Napoleon's generals discuss strategy at his elbow. It was almost elegant. Unfortunately, his pulse was battering his ribs, his lungs had forgotten their proper function, and every useful thought had been replaced by the effort required not to turn around.

Damn princess.

She was behind him. Somewhere in the column's middle section, riding with the junior officers. She had promised to be invisible. Apparently, she was extremely capable of being invisible when she chose to be.

Rodrick forced himself to listen to de Brissac's rant.

"He will strike at the junction between Wellington and Blücher before they can consolidate. Defeat them in detail." The Gascon flicked his riding crop as though two enemy armies were flies he expected Napoleon to swat from the European sky.

"Mm," Rodrick said.

He had heard the theory seventeen times since Avesnes, always delivered with the peculiar confidence of men repeating tomorrow's history. Apparently certainty was contagious. Seven hundred cavalrymen had buckled on sabers and ridden north with the comfortable conviction that Bonaparte would arrange victory before they arrived.

Rodrick studied de Brissac. Broad olive face, a jaw built to survive collision with cavalry, and that same fever in the eyes of every senior officer who had answered the Emperor's summons. Brilliant men. Seasoned men. Men who knew precisely what cannon did to flesh and had nevertheless come running when one Corsican crooked his finger.

What did Napoleon give them? What did he take? Where was the transaction? Fear explained some. Ambition explained more. Glory could account for a regiment or two.

Rodrick was still pondering this when small buildings crowded the narrow road, muffling the pounding of the cavalry's hooves.

The air became charged with an insidious eau de cologne—menace. He checked the shutters for rifles, listening for the creak of a casement opening, the silence that preceded a volley. He mapped the street. Exit points. Choke points. The well in the square, the church door, the narrow alley between the smithy and the tavern.

Louise was somewhere behind him, riding through the regiment without cover. Rodrick had the absurd sensation that his chest had been opened and something essential placed four lengths to his rear, entirely unarmored.

The column stopped, and the halt rippled backward through checked horses.

"Putain de merde—who in God's blistered hell thinks he can halt my column—" De Brissac's voice hit the air like a cannon discharge. The Gascon was already wheeling his horse, the riding crop raised high. "I will flog the bastard within an inch of his life—"

Rodrick scanned the junior officers. Lefèvre's red hair was where it ought to be. Louise's shako was not.

Then hoofbeats broke away to the left.

His head snapped toward the sound, and his stomach dropped hard enough to pull the breath from him. Louise was cantering away from the column.

What in Dante's nine circles of Hell was his deranged charge doing? A cavalryman did not simply peel away from formation without orders. At best it advertised incompetence. At worst it resembled desertion, which ended before a firing squad.

Rodrick put his heels to Brutus.

By the time the stallion surged past the next file, Rodrick had already mapped the shortest line to intercept her.

Then he saw the tricolor ahead, hanging pathetically from a crossbeam. While the horse still cantered, Louise kicked free of the stirrups and, with the dogged concentration of someone about to commit an act no sensible cavalryman would approve, rose out of the saddle.

Then, before Rodrick's increasingly offended eyes, she stood.

Fully upright.

On the back of a moving horse.

There was no elegant way to interpret this. She was going to break her neck. And if by some obscene favor of Providence she survived the stunt, Rodrick intended to do the honors himself.

He watched her bring the horse alongside the crossbeam. Her hand shot out. Fingers closed around the tricolor. She tore it free and dropped back into the saddle.

The entire road stopped. Every man within forty yards had forgotten to breathe. Including Rodrick, he noted with the detached honesty of a man conducting an internal audit.