by Leda Swann
“Your young friend promised that whoever won the wager would pay double the cost of a new door from his winnings.”
Rigid with fury, he grabbed a handful of gold pistoles from his pocket and tossed them in the man’s general direction. He had been utterly outwitted, and his defeat did not sit lightly on his shoulders.
The landlord protested his generosity. “This is far more than double what the door is worth.”
“Keep them,” Lamotte said, his face taut with rage. “Thanks to that young rascal and his quick knife, there’s a corpse in the chamber overhead that needs burying. Use it to bribe the surgeon to swear that he died in his sleep.”
He threw a saddle on the best post horse in the stable. Sophie had at least an hour’s start of him again. He would ride without stopping, changing horses as often as he could, until he caught up with her. He would not be tricked again.
Sophie turned her head to watch Courtney struggling up behind her, slipping and sliding on the bare back of her mare. She tried to stifle her impatience and not let it show in her manner that she was ready to scream with frustration at the slowness of their progress. Courtney could not help that she never ridden bareback before and was finding it hard to keep upright.
Courtney was gripping her horse’s mane with a death grip. “Go on ahead,” she called as soon as Sophie was within earshot. “I am holding you back. You will be able to travel much faster alone.”
“All for one and one for all,” Sophie reminded her. “Two of us are stronger than one alone.”
Courtney nodded with relief. Then the look on her face turned to dismay as, for the second time already that afternoon, she slid slowly off the back of her horse and onto the grassy bank by the side of the road.
She sat up with a groan, rubbing her backside. “Ouch. I cannot get the hang of riding those damn slippery beasts without a saddle.”
Sophie wanted to laugh at the look on Courtney’s face, but she resisted the temptation. “Hold on with your thighs and calves, not with your hands.”
Courtney grunted as she heaved herself on to her mare’s back for a third time. “I was trying to.”
They rode on in silence for some time, until the light began to fail. Sophie cast a worried eye at the sky. They had not ridden as swiftly or gone as far as she would have liked. “We cannot afford to stop just yet. We’ll ride on until we can swap our horses for fresh.” How she hoped, and yet did not hope, that Lamotte was not far behind her.
Miriame would surely not have hurt him, she thought for the thousandth time that afternoon. Not when she knew I did not want him harmed. How she wished she had stayed behind to make sure that no evil had befallen him. Her mission was important to her, but not as important as the lives of her husband and of her friend. She would disobey his orders and run from him to do her duty, but not even her conscience could make her harm him in earnest once more.
The air was starting to cool down noticeably. Courtney let go of her horse’s mane for long enough to take her hat off and shake her hair down over her shoulders. “Anything you say, as long as they come with saddles.”
Sophie liked the feeling of riding bareback with nothing to come in the way of her and the raw power of the horse between her legs, but even she was feeling the chafing on her thighs by now. “With saddles,” she agreed.
Dusk was falling in earnest when they heard the hoof beats behind them. In a few moments, they caught sight of their pursuers, riding hard towards them. Sophie felt her heart leap up into her chest with fear. Where there had been three before, now there were only two.
Courtney’s face was set in a mask of determination. She nudged her horse into a trot. “Shall we try to outrun them?”
Sophie narrowed her eyes to see into the distance behind her. The gap between them and those who rode after them was closing slowly, but it was closing nonetheless. “We cannot outrun them all the way to England.” She could not run before making sure that Lamotte was one of the two. Besides, Courtney may well fall off again, and they would lose any advantage they had gained. “There’s no point in making a race of it when we have little chance of winning.”
She looked behind her once more. The foremost rider was Lamotte, she was sure of it. He was riding easily, with no sign of any wound. She felt a huge weight lift from her shoulders. Miriame had been true to her word and fought only the battle that she had felt due to her.
They were approaching a narrow part of road, where it wove a crooked path between a copse of trees. Their pursuers were so close now that Sophie could see Lamotte’s face clearly. His face was frozen in a look of fierce determination that made her quake in her boots. Never had she seen her husband look so wild.
Courtney pulled her horse to a standstill just before the path disappeared into the trees. “Ride as fast as your horse can carry you. I can hold the two of them off here for long enough to get you well away.”
Sophie shook her head. “I will not leave you behind.”
Courtney grinned. “Don’t be daft. I cannot ride on this damned beast any longer. I will never make it all the way to Calais. With me alongside you, you will be caught for sure. Without me, you stand a chance of getting there. The least I can do for you is hold them off for long enough to get you safe away.”
Lamotte wanted to shout with rage as he saw the hindmost rider stop in the narrowest part of the path and wheel about, sword raised in the air, as Sophie put her heels to her horse’s flanks and urged her mount away into the gloom of the forest. He would have to fight his way through yet another of his wife’s minions before he could reach her.
He spurred his horse on faster. God willing, he would dispatch this one in haste and catch his wife before she got into further trouble.
He yelled a battle cry, waved his sword around his head and pulled back tightly on the reins to make his horse rear up, her forelegs flailing in the air.
His opponent’s horse, spooked by his noise and the motion of his sword, reared up as well. The Musketeer on its back grabbed for its mane with his free hand and held on for dear life. With only one hand to hold on, he could not keep his grip. He slid unceremoniously off over its rump and landed with a thud on the ground, a look of utter consternation on his face.
Lamotte heard a thump as the hired thug behind him slid off his horse as well, intending no doubt to make short work of the fallen soldier. He wheeled around to protect him. He had no use for murder. If this Musketeer deserved to die for debauching his wife, then die he would, but in a fair fight, and knowing what he died for.
The Musketeer lay on his back on the ground, winded from his fall. Lamotte cantered up to his prone body and slipped off his horse just as the gruff-voiced assassin drew a wicked-looking knife from his belt and leaned over him with an attitude of menace.
“By God, it’s woman, not a soldier at all.” The face of the gruff-voiced assassin broke into an ugly leer. He ripped the Musketeer’s shirt open with the point of his knife and pawed at her breasts with greedy fingers. “I knew it,” he crowed with evil delight. “What a piece of luck, huh? We can have a bit of fun with her before I stick her with my pretty little knife.”
With his free hand, the killer fumbled with the lacings of his breeches, but they were knotted, and he could not get them free.
Lamotte saw a film of red appear before his eyes. His wife was a soldier, too. It could just as well be his wife that the killer was proposing to rape and then murder. “Let her go.”
The hired assassin looked up at him in puzzlement. “Let her what? Have you gone mad? I’m just going to have a bit of fun with her. It won’t take long, and then you can have your turn, too, afore I kill her nice and slow, like. We’ll catch up with the other one later.”
His dagger was in his hand, trembling with the will to leap out and strike of its own accord. “I said, let her go, or I shall…”
He never got the chance to finish his threat. With a lethal swish, a feathered bolt came hurtling out of the woods to one side, hurtling past him
mere inches from his chest, and burying itself deep in the killer’s throat.
The killer’s eyes grew wide and he gave just the beginning of a strangled cry before it was cut off with a choke. Clawing uselessly at the bolt with desperate fingers, he fell to one side with a gurgle, the bright red blood spurting out of him in a ghoulish fountain. His body twitched and then lay still.
Lamotte looked around in the direction from which the arrow had come. He saw nothing stirring in the trees, but it had to have come from Sophie. She had mentioned once what a crack shot she was with a bow and arrow. He put his hand on his chest in a protective gesture. He owed his life to the fact that she had not been making an idle boast.
The Musketeer on the ground pushed the bleeding body off her with a shudder and got shakily to her feet, her face as white as milk and her left arm dangling uselessly at her side. She looked at the dagger in Lamotte’s hand. “Ach, don’t make me fight you, too,” she said, her shoulders slumped and her voice weary. “I’m stiff as a board from falling off that damned horse all afternoon and I’d rather have a soak in a hot tub than a fight. Besides, it wouldn’t be worth it - Sophie made me promise not to hurt you anyways.”
Lamotte dropped his dagger arm. It seemed that Sophie was not the only Amazon in France. Here was another, a regal blonde beauty, for all that her face was smudged and her shirt torn and one of her hands hung limply from a broken wrist. “You’re a woman. I do not need to kill you after all.”
There was a crashing behind them in the bushes to the side of the path. He turned around and held out his hands as Sophie, his errant Sophie, appeared, a short bow in her hands and a look that mingled horror and relief in equal parts on her face.
Sophie peered through the leaves and took the most careful aim she had ever made with her bow. She forced her hands to stop shaking so her aim would be true. The only sounds she could hear were the pounding of her heart and the harsh rasp of her breath as she forced the air in and out of her chest. This was one time she could not afford to miss.
“Do not move,” she whispered to herself, her eyes glued to her intended victim, willing him to stay steady with the force of her thoughts. Her eyes fixed on her target, she loosed her arrow with a twang. It flew through the air almost faster than her eye could follow it, and buried itself exactly where she had aimed.
People were harder to shoot than ducks, she thought, her arms wobbling with relief. Just a few inches off target and she would have buried the arrow in Lamotte’s chest. She bowed her head for a moment, giving thanks to the Lord that he had guided her arrow swiftly and surely to its intended mark.
Her heart still pounding with the aftereffects of her fear, she ran to her husband, ignoring the hands he held out to her, and flung herself into his arms instead. “I didn’t miss. I didn’t miss,” she babbled as she hugged him tightly to her. She looked at the corpse on the ground over his shoulder. She had killed a man.
Her stomach heaved at the sight of so much blood. She stepped back out of Lamotte’s embrace and was promptly sick all over his boots. “I killed him.”
“You saved me the trouble.” Courtney and Lamotte both spoke at once, and then grinned at each other.
Courtney handed her a flask of water and a clean handkerchief. “I wouldn’t shed any tears over that beast. He was a vile worm like all of his kind. He deserved to die.”
Sophie rinsed her mouth out with the brackish water and spat it on to the ground. “Eugh,” she said with feeling as she wiped her mouth and tossed the handkerchief on to the ground. Thank the Lord she had slipped off her mare and doubled back through the woods to help her friend. She looked searchingly into Courtney’s face as she handed back the flask of water. “Are you alright?”
Courtney rubbed her buttocks a trifle gingerly with her good hand. “I’m not getting on any damn horse bareback again for as long as I live.” Sophie gasped as she held out a wrist that flopped at an unnatural angle. “I don’t know which pains me more – a broken wrist or a pair of very sore buttocks.”
“I got the bastard who would’ve raped you,” Sophie said, with grim satisfaction, now that her stomach had stopped heaving. “I’d rather shoot a villain like him than a brace of ducks any day.” Still, she avoided looking at the body again. Knowing that he deserved to die did not take away the horror of his death.
Courtney looked sideways at Lamotte. “You should have ridden off,” she said to Sophie. “They would never have caught you.”
Sopihe was too relieved at Courtney’s rescue to care that she herself was caught. “I would not leave you to fight the pair of them alone. We are sisters, remember?”
Lamotte wrapped his arms around her from behind. “You are my wife. I will never fight you again, however much you provoke me.”
Sophie sighed at his words even as she took comfort from the feeling of his arms wrapped around her body. “Can you please give that wife stuff a rest for now? Courtney needs a doctor to set her arm.”
The three of them rode in silence back along the path they had just come. Courtney perched on the pommel of Lamotte’s saddle, in too much pain from the break in her arm to manage on her own. Lamotte guided his mare with one hand, while with the other he held her tightly against his chest.
Sophie felt a gnawing sensation in the pit of her belly at the sight of his arm wrapped around Courtney’s middle. She knew that he did it merely to keep her upright on the horse and to stop her from falling if she fainted with the pain, but she couldn’t help wishing that she was the one he was cradling in his arms. She wanted to be the one he held on to, his strong hand around her waist to clasp her closely to him. She wanted to be the one to whom he bent his head to whisper in her ear. She wanted to feel the touch of his body pressing against hers.
She had a moment of secret gladness that Courtney was in too much pain to enjoy her position, and then chided herself for her mean spirit. She would spend no energy harboring jealous thoughts of her friend, or waste her spirit in delighting at her friend’s misfortunes. She had troubles enough of her own to deal with. Her husband had caught up with her and would no doubt try to drag her back to Paris by the ears as he had threatened. Once Courtney was safely settled, she would have to find some way of evading his guard and continuing on her quest to save Henrietta from the clutches of the Bastille.
She turned her head to look at Lamotte, and was absurdly gratified to see that he was watching her, rather than looking at the woman he carried in his arms. He is probably thinking only how he can keep ahold of me now that he has caught me, she thought with a grimace, but it still made her happy. She caught his eye and smiled at him.
He looked startled for a moment, and then smiled back. His smile softened the harsh angles of his face and eased the frown from his forehead. She felt as though she could go on looking at him for ever.
Courtney’s accusing voice suddenly broke the comfortable silence. “Why were you riding with such a scoundrel? Did you not care what manner of man he was?”
Lamotte gave a snort of disgust. “I was not so much riding with him as he was riding with me. We were both after my delightful wife – on the King’s orders. I was to stop her from completing her mission to England, and he and his erstwhile companion were to kill her once I had caught her.”
Sophie gasped, the smile well and truly wiped from her face with shock. “The King wants me dead?” Suddenly her mission to England took on a new and desperate gravity. This was no mere adventure now to win her brother honor. It had well and truly ceased to be a game of outwitting her husband in the race for England and become a matter of life and death. Lamotte was in deadly earnest. Her life, along with Henrietta’s, was at stake.
“So it would seem. He certainly sent a pair of thugs out to do the deed. He feared I lacked the stomach for it, so I believe.”
The King of France, the fount of all honor, had sent a pair of desperadoes, killers of the night, to murder her? She never would have believed it. Philippe of Orleans was right – his brother was a mo
nster who had to be stopped.
The King would murder her, who sought only to save a woman who had refused him? What worse deed would he do to Henrietta herself? She shuddered to think.
“A pair of thugs? What happened to the other one? Where is he now?”
Lamotte grunted. “Dead. Your companion took care of that with a slash of his knife from ear to ear.”
Miriame. Sophie gave a sudden gasp. In the furor and sickness of killing a man, she had forgot about Miriame. “And he is unharmed?”
Lamotte’s face was black and thunderous. “Why should you care? He is a scoundrel who deserves to be hanged from the yardarm.”
Sophie would not bow before his anger. He was her husband, not her keeper. She knew not how Miriame had managed to make an enemy of her husband. His quarrels did not concern her. “I care greatly, as it happens.”
“As do I,” Courtney chimed in.
Lamotte glared down at her. “He is unhurt – as yet. Until I find him again, that is.”
“So what are you going to do with us now?” Courtney asked wearily from her perch on the pommel of the saddle. “I doubt that we can count on your manly honor to protect us. If you are going to dispose of us as your King intended, why not do it right here and save me the bother of riding any further? There’s no point in getting my arm set if you intend to kill me a moment later.”
Lamotte’s face was set as if in stone. “The King may order me as he wishes, but I have honor enough not to harm either of you. I am a Musketeer. I do not make war on women.”
Sophie felt the heat of his gaze as he glared at her.
“Much as they might deserve it,” he added under his breath, looking straight at her still.
She looked him straight in the eye. “I have done nothing but what my conscience demanded of me. I shall live in honor, or I shall not live.”
He harrumphed at her, and they continued again through the fading light in silence.
Lamotte was relieved when they came to signs of habitation, a village big enough to boast at least a wise woman skilled in herbs, if not an apothecary. He directed his step to the wise woman’s cottage, which lay on the outskirts of the hamlet, separated from the other shabby dwellings by several large fields.