Sarah D'Almeida - Dying by the Sword

“And what happened?” a voice asked. He thought it was Porthos. “Did they find her?”

Athos heard a very odd sound, half cackle, half sob escape his lips. “No. No, my friend. I found her. Today. Outside the Palais Cardinal.”

“What?” another voice asked, almost certainly D’Artagnan’s. “But how can her body…”

“It wasn’t her body. Or rather, yes, it was, but she had moved it herself, she still being very much alive.”

“You never verified that you had killed her?” Porthos asked.

Athos shook his head. “I couldn’t. Even such as I did… it has tormented my mind and heart… all these years.”

“And are you sure it was her?” Aramis asked. “You know women can look devilishly alike, and after all this time…”

Athos nodded. “Aramis, I’ve dreamed about her every night since it happened. In my heart, I’ve never really stopped thinking about her. Her image is etched in my heart and seared in my soul. I could never not recognize her. It was her, but she went by me as if she didn’t recognize me… which… perhaps she didn’t, but… Why the Palais Cardinal?”

There was another soft bout of swearing. From its definite near-pious characteristics, and the soft voice in which it was pronounced, Athos was sure it was Aramis. He tried to protest that he truly wanted to know, but his tongue had, unaccountably gone thick and unyielding. So had his legs, which presently stopped obeying him and lost all force under him.

“Porthos,” Aramis’s voice said, as though from a long way off. “You help me carry him to the bed. And you’d best stay here. I think both he and D’Artagnan are quite out of human reach, just now. I… I have some things to do, and I will return in the morning.”

“Things to do?”

“I know a man,” Aramis said, “who might tell me who this blond servant of the Cardinal is. I’m hoping, I’m almost praying, that she is not… whom Athos thought she was.”

And Athos, lost between consciousness and a deep, black abyss of nothing, wanted to explain he wouldn’t prefer that. Then he would still be waiting for them to find her body.

But his mouth could form no more than a long, low moan, and, as he felt Porthos lift him, he plunged fully into the black nothingness.

ARAMIS stepped out into the cool night, to find himself as if in a prefiguration of the Garden of Eden. Granted, at best Paris was a built-over garden of Eden, but now at the end of winter, when the night wasn’t quite as icy as it had been, it was possible to imagine the night perfumed with newly grown flowers, with soft, ripe grass, with the promise of the coming spring.

He looked at the stars above, and thought of his friends, up in Athos’s lodging. Porthos, perhaps because he had heard Athos’s story, had felt unusually fearful of attack. He’d told Aramis, in a perfectly serious tone, that since they still didn’t know why they’d been attacked in the gardens of the royal palace, it was not unheard of for them to be attacked in their own lodgings. And he did not feel confident with the three of them being in separate rooms.

Aramis had thought of explaining that people who broke into musketeer lodgings were, by definition, desperate enough to face practically anyone or anything. Or of pointing out that he doubted anyone at all, who knew Athos well enough to know where he lived, would find it a good idea to break into his house.

He did neither. Both of those might be true and sensible, but, in point of fact, neither mattered. Porthos felt threatened, and therefore they’d managed to lay Athos and D’Artagnan, side by side, on Athos’s bed, which had, fortunately, been brought from his domain and was therefore large and sturdy enough to fit another two musketeers, if needed, without their needing to touch.

Porthos had brought a chair from the sitting room, and half lain upon it, wrapped in his cloak. For good measure, Grimaud, who clearly felt as threatened as Porthos did, even without hearing Athos’s story-which he possibly already knew-had set a rotation of servants on guard outside the door.

So, Aramis thought, this was a paradise where the fall had occurred. And a serpent lurked somewhere out of sight. This thought sharpened his eyes, as he looked around. And he saw enough shadows lurking that he tightened his pace. And when the shadows detached from doorways and the darkened mouths of alleys, he started running, to avoid them.

It rankled to run, as he’d never before turned from offered combat. But he remembered the fight all too vividly, and he was not about to allow himself to be caught. There were far more of them than of him, and under those circumstances, it would not be a fight, but a slaughter.

He took various turns, blindly, with only one thought in mind-to get to the portions of the town where taverns were still busy and the streets thronged with strangers. There, even should his pursuers set on him, he would be more than able to call to his aid those musketeers nearby-and in the area where taverns clustered, there would be a lot of musketeers.

By the time he reached the nearest of these streets-Saint Antoine-he was running full force, and careened into the crowd of prostitutes and late-night drinkers like a man diving into a tawdry sea. Like water, they closed about him, carrying him along, in their revels.

He took several turns at random, and whenever he could, he turned to look back. Soon he was glad to note not a single man cloaked in black in sight. Not that there might not be black-cloaked people who were in no way related to those pursuing him, but on these streets you were more likely to find peacock colors and a blazing display of jewels that would shame Porthos himself.

He turned and turned again, surrounded by the smell of wine, of perfume, of sweaty bodies, taking care always to be in the thick of the crowd. A woman’s hand-at least he hoped it was a woman’s-took rather disconcerting liberties with his breeches, and a wishful sigh echoed from the direction the hand emerged.

Aramis resisted curiosity, which told him to turn and look, and walked on. At one of the edges of the drinking district, the one closest to the Palais Cardinal, he found himself quite free of pursuers.

He headed at a fast clip for the Palais Cardinal, or rather for a small tavern near it, where some of the Cardinal’s more… assiduous servants ate their evening meals, and often stayed by to drink their evening drinks. It wasn’t frequented by guards, as such. Or even by the Cardinal’s secretaries. No. Here came the keepers of the Cardinal’s clothes, the people who cleaned the Palais Cardinal and those who cooked for him.

While Aramis stuck out in there, like a lion at a congregation of ants, he’d been coming to the place for so many years that his entrance, in his well-cut suit, his plume-trimmed hat, occasioned not even a stare. The men ignored him. They usually did. The truth was that, for all that Aramis claimed to know a man, mostly-as Porthos was always quick to point out-he knew women. And women who made their living from scrubbing and cleaning were still, and ultimately, women. Women who had trouble resisting Aramis’s pale blond hair, his sparkling green eyes, his well-molded lips and his soft, whispering voice.

Aramis had first come in here out of a fascinated interest, like a man who sets out to explore an unknown jungle. He wasn’t of Porthos’s cut. He didn’t view these places, attended by laborers and humble artificers, as the true source of humanity’s best. Aramis thought that, all other things being equal, the best of humanity should come better washed, and, if at all possible, more fashionably attired.