Page 63 of The Spy’s Song

Now he watched the same disturbance move through this line. Men who had been prepared to kill her looked at the girl on the horse and found themselves unable to do it.

"Vive l'Empereur."

One voice. Then all of them.

Rodrick swallowed, but something perilously close to a sob caught there anyway.

A hand settled on his shoulder, large enough that Rodrick knew its owner before he turned.

De Brissac.

The Gascon stood beside him and looked at Louise—at Jean d'Arc on the horse, surrounded by thirty men who were stacking their muskets in the dirt. "Why is it that every time there is a commotion in this regiment, that enfant terrible is involved?"

Rodrick brushed his face, and his palms came away wet. "They didn't kill that enfant terrible," he said, and his voice came out wrong at the edges. "But by God I will."

***

The tent glowed faintly, a pale thread of light bleeding through drab canvas, and Rodrick stopped walking.

He had just given his report. The Prussian battery taken, the demolition party scattered, the charges beneath the bridge secured before they could be fired, the crossing open. He had stood before de Brissac and spoken in complete sentences. The words had come from some competent, functional part of him that operated independently of the rest.

He started walking again. He was aware of his own hands, and he pressed the right one against his sternum as he walked. Something inside required the pressure to stay put.

The tent flap was three strides away.

Then two.

He was going to say exactly what needed to be said. His voice would not be raised above the register of a man utterly in command of himself, and she was going to hear every word of it.

What she had done was reckless, indefensible, and outside the bounds of any operational agreement they had made. If she wanted to act like Napoleon's impossible daughter and decided that death was preferable to abandoning a post, she could do it alone. If she ever—ever—pulled something like that again, he was done. She could find another escort. He would leave her at the next crossroads with a horse and a map and his sincerest regards, and she could scream Vive la France to his retreating back.

He lifted the tent's flap. The meager light caught on her brass buttons. He heard the feverish scrape of cloth on wool, back and forth, back and forth. Louise brushed a stain of blood from her sleeve.

His insides liquefied. He hated the pain. Hated how it threatened to rob his knees again.

Fuck that.

"What the devil were you thinking, damn you?" His voice shook the tent poles.

She stopped brushing. Lifted her face. Her skin was the color of bleached linen. Her eyes were moving, skating across the canvas wall, the tent pole, the lamp, finding nothing to land on.

The sight killed his anger. Gone, like a flame when the oxygen ends.

Something was wrong. Poison. A fist closed around his sternum, a single hard blow, and then his legs were moving, and the distance between them vanished.

He took her hands. They were cold. He felt the shaking through his palms.

"What did you eat today?" He turned her hands over. "Did anyone offer you something to drink? At any point, before or after—"

She shook her head.

"I was there," she said, "and then they appeared, and I—I fought one, Rodrick." She looked at their joined hands, then back at his face. "I fought one, and Lefèvre went for de Brissac, and there were more coming, and they would have gone to you."

He pulled her closer. She came in stiffly. He rubbed her back. His soul flared, pushing against his skin, wanting to seep out of his pores and reach out to her. As if she cared to see inside him. His soul was delusional like that.

“I can’t stand still. I feel as if my heart will blow up. What is wrong with me?”

Rodrick watched the sweat slip down her neck and disappear beneath the open collar of her shirt.