Devour the Moon

An adult stories – Devour the Moon by WinsomeWeb,WinsomeWeb Trigger warnings: murder/(non-spousal) violence, brief talk of a deceased child, descriptions of burning

********

I wrote this as a historical romance novel for a friend. It took me about two and a half years, but I finished it, and that makes this a miraculous endeavour. Now that she has it, though, I didn’t really know what to do with it, so I thought I would just share it.

It’s set in France in 1724, when Rochelle, a judge’s daughter, is kidnapped by a nefarious highwayman seeking her father’s assistance. By Literotica standards, it’s quite long, with a slow build-up for only a couple of ~spicy~ scenes. It’s kind of enemies-to-lovers, but there’s more lovers than enemies.

If even one person enjoys it, then I’m glad.

Thank you most gratefully to Kaitlyn and Harmony for their generous thoughts and feedback, and overall kindness.

Enjoy!

********

For Ashley–

The littlest, the mightiest, the finest of friends

********

CHAPTER 1

********

Rochelle’s father insisted she be given water before they departed the dusty inn. The pock-faced young porter wrung his hands, explaining that it was impossible. The well recharged from the same source as the empty river and, in the middle of a drought, that could take a full day.

Her father wouldn’t hear it. “You had enough water for the horse trough.”

“Monsieur… there is no more water.”

“Lower the bucket,” her father sneered.

“Monsieur, I cannot draw water from the mud. The well–it does not work so.”

“Listen to me, you cumberground.” Her father’s voice sizzled to a point. “Draw the damn bucket.”

“Papa, please,” Rochelle soothed. “I can drink from the trough.”

Her father ignored her and instead stabbed his finger at the boy. “Lower the bucket. Let it be what it is.”

The porter sighed. He redrew the bucket from the well, its side coated in muddy grime, and he poured a half-cup of clear water from it. Rochelle offered it to her father, but he drank from the trough instead.

The water rejuvenated her, but only an hour later her throat was parched once more from the itchy dust that bloomed amid trundling wheels and stepping horse hooves.

Ahead, hazy blue hills drew them forth, and still Dijon seemed no closer than the pale bowl of moon that hung over the world’s edge. It had been seven days they’d lurched along on the highroad, and though at first their journey had taken them over gentle green hills and past thin creeks of clear water, here drought had seized the land, and all around them the flat fields and orchards stretched on for leagues like the dry scapula of the earth.

Since that first day, Rochelle’s complaining had quieted, and so had her father’s snippy remarks about unladylike scowls. She would have rather ridden in a saddle than be swept onwards by the pull of a carriage, but her father had told her it would be unseemly for him, a man of newly appointed station, to ride in to Dijon by carriage while his daughter saddled a horse. There were expectations, after all, and women of some newfound privilege should not discard that privilege because it became momentarily inconvenient.

The fields stretched on as they drove. The grain was stunted. Orchard leaves drooped in mangled patterns over lanes of brittle grass. Ahead, a white windmill hunched on a fold of ground, the organ of its sails limp and unstirred, and as they passed under its shadow Rochelle looked to the fields of dark blue sky above, which laid as hopeless and dry as the land itself.

That whole hot morning she expected not to see another living soul, but all along the road peasants tilled the fields in their dirty dress, wiping their filthy brows and leaning on the long handles of their hoes. The carriage jostled by, and Rochelle watched them with admiration as it did. When the rivers ran so bare and the dry land showed no more care for them than the landlords for whom they worked it, their toil seemed pointless, but still they worked.

In the carriage opposite her, her father managed a stack of papers with empty care. Things would have been so much more comfortable if, for the entire trip, he had not insisted she wear her gown and petticoat and corset and all those other silks. Scarcely anyone would see her until the day they arrived, and it seemed cruel to be made to be so hot when a lighter dress would do just as well.

When he’d given the dress, he’d called it a gift–a celebration of his appointment as Provost Marshal of Dijon–and when she’d first seen it, she had been overjoyed. Its intricate stitching was beautiful, and the feel of the soft silk in her fingers was like a rich wax. By necessity, her father’s gifts were rare and modest, but with her dress he’d spared no expense. After seven days of bouncing in the choking dust and heat, though, it seemed more a gift for him than her.

Her small chin tilted back as he shuffled papers from one leather case to another. He stopped. He read one word here, another there. The complacency on his wrinkling brow annoyed her, and her own eyebrows knitted together in frustration. He would have her play the role of beatified daughter so that his subordinates may look well upon him, yet here he was, free to dress as comfortably as he pleased.

They passed into woods which sprung up thin and green around them. They would not arrive in Dijon even by nightfall, and tomorrow there would be another day of heavy petticoats and a confusion of sweaty silk stuck to her legs. That thought pressed on the bone atop her spine with an indelicate weight. And so, delicately, she folded her hand fan, placed it in her lap between her fingers, and she looked with a sigh to the virgin woods around them.

“I will consider Monsieur Toussaint’s proposal,” she said.

Like the laying of a cannon, her father raised his head. “Wonderful.” His voice was solid oak. “Shall we stop the carriage here, that you may begin the walk back to Strasbourg?”

She scoffed. “Even that would hardly worsen my day.” The hand fan snapped open, and she cooled herself once more.

Her father pulled off his thin, round glasses and set them on the papers in his hands. “How long would it take, do you think?”

Her fanning stopped. “To what?”

“To walk back to Strasbourg.”

She made an annoyed sound and looked away.

Harrumphing, he fit the glasses back to the bridge of his nose, their hooks latching around his wobbly ears, and he looked back to his papers. Her father’s face was weathered and tanned, wrinkles breaking out along the folds of his face. Under his right eye were the same three beauty marks that she had on her left cheek–what he’d sometimes called the cascade of their family history.

“Monsieur Toussaint will likely have already made a half-dozen more proposals by the time we arrive in Dijon.” He peeked over the top of his glasses. “If it’s a rise you want out of me, you’re better off threatening to renew your vows.”

“I would not wish to make you so hopeful to be rid of me.”

A smile grew beneath his downwardly pointed nose. “But, now that it has been mentioned…”

“Oh stop!” She huffed. The fan snapped shut. “I hate this carriage. This dress. This heat! I am tired of everything so violently shaking.” She leaned to the window, calling to Monsieur Batton, the coachman. “Do you not know how to avoid any of these craters?”

Only the wheels creaked on, unconcerned.

“Yet you would have me believe you would do all of this again to be returned to Strasbourg and Monsieur Toussaint?”

Rochelle eeped, hands folding in her lap. “Well… perhaps not right away.”

Her father looked down and chuckled.

She laid her head back on the leather seat cushion and loosed a more pointed sigh. At the back of her head, the thin feathers of her dark brown hair tickled her damp neck. She strained to ignore them, fidgeting with her fan once more.

Monsieur Toussaint was not a good match. He lacked charm, and the way his eyes raked over other women had always made her uncomfortable. One could do far worse than marrying a man with a wandering eye, though, and she knew him well–the way she’d known the city of Strasbourg. Even for his faults, and the faults of that city she’d so long called home, it filled her with dread to leave behind the familiar for something so unknowable.

“There will be other offers,” her father consoled. “My position here will afford me greater opportunities than Strasbourg. I will not be without cordial inventions on our new friends, and, in meeting new people, you will find better opportunities for yourself as well. Though not without some social grace, Monsieur Toussaint is not the kind of man I would hope for you.”

“No,” she said, “you would hope for princes that they might benefit you.”

He didn’t deign to look up. “Which, again, of the cardinal sins is ambition?”

“Are those now the only sins?”

“Go then,” he snorted, waving the back of his hand towards her. “Marry your weaver. Live in a house of wool, and wear wool, and eat wool, and sew yourself into a bed of wool each night until you have wool children, and all you dream of is–”

“Wool?”

He eyed her suspiciously. “Sheep.”

Her head tilted from him, and she fanned even harder. A strand of hair fluttered over her left ear with each gust, and that annoyed her even more.

The carriage lurched between the trees of a small wood, long shadows silently bumping and stretching over the carriage top as it rolled. She hoped there might be some relief among the shade, but soon they pulled on through and the landscape fell again to fields and distant hills. Even under the sun, though, there was no comfortable difference between it or shade. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad had there been relief from the commotions of the carriage, but the violent jarring made her unwell.

She let a breath out.

That her father hadn’t resisted her threat to marry Monsieur Toussaint had brought upon her a light concern. “You would truly let me marry him?”

Her father looked over the rims of his glasses. “I would not hold you so tight, not when the years run on so fast.” He turned over a stack of papers. “You are not a child. If Monsieur Toussaint’s courtship is what you desire, then have it. You are already nearing spinsterhood, and I would not deprive you of your life based only on my misgivings of a man.”

She frowned.

“And besides,” he continued, “who knows the shape of a man’s heart, but the man himself? He might, in some way, grand or small, be more well-suited to you than I could imagine.”

Her frown only grew as the papers flapped, and restlessly, he tucked them into the leather case at his side.

“But then,” he sighed, “perhaps I only offer my blessing because I know you do not want it.”

She had never felt the need to accept any proposal. Yet, in her twenty-fifth year, she couldn’t deny that few of her friends remained unmarried. Perhaps there was less time to find the right husband than she would have liked.

Her father–though he had done well for himself as a soldier and now to be named Provost Marshal of Dijon–was not a noble of the sword. He was a noble of the robes, ennobled so that he could take the very position to which he’d been appointed, and the recency of his nobility and his wealth scarcely elevated him above a well-off peasant. She herself had not been raised among riches, and nor could she claim a lavish dowry. To the men her father served, she would always be a peasant, and no writ of the crown would change that. To them, she would always be good only for working rainless fields, and already those good men whom she might find relatable had paired off with better matches–and then who was to be left for her?

She had wasted a year as a postulant nun in the foolish cause to heal the sick and dying, but her bearing had always been too coarse, and she had found herself not well suited to that life. Nervously, she thought of the distance between her and thirty and again more seriously considered Monsieur Toussaint’s proposal. He may not have been a perfect prize, but was it not better to find poor shelter than none at all?

She swallowed, imagining the shame her mother might have felt had she lived to see her daughter still unmarried, and the weight of that thought settled on her chest along with the heat and the dust.

After noon they came to a small creek, where water trickled down flat stained stones. The horses drank and rested in the shade, and her father spoke with Monsieur Batton in hushed voices. Beside the carriage, she wandered to the edge of the road where a tangle of blueberry bushes lurked under a pair of tall oaks. Kneeling, she picked off one berry and tasted it. The leaves were yellowed, the berries over-ripened, but they were still tarty and delicious, and she ate a handful.

As she returned to the carriage, Monsieur Batton brushed back his light hair and offered both her and her father his tinkling canteen. Rochelle took it and drank down a gulp of the cool water. Tall with a square jaw, she watched as he joked with her father in an easy way and felt a lightness at his good nature. He was a gentle man, graceful for someone so tall, and he laughed so mirthfully as he spoke to her father that it set her at ease about the leg of the journey still before them.

Monsieur Batton clapped her father on the back. “Well, best get on with it. We’ll be at an inn tonight, but we should be in Dijon before noon tomorrow.”

“Another inn?” Rochelle sighed. “Can’t we just ride on in the dark a little longer? I should like to be done with all this.”

“These roads are dangerous at night,” Monsieur Batton said.

“The roads will be the least of your dangers if I must ride again tomorrow.”

“Rochelle,” her father scolded.

Monsieur Batton laughed, but she did not, and when he saw her seriousness, he rubbed the back of his neck. “Ah, you don’t enjoy it, eh?”

Farther down the road, small holes and the ruts of wagon wheels laid in ambush, waiting to be jostled over.

She grimaced. “These roads are unfit for me.”

“They’re rough,” he admitted. “And not well kept. But you won’t find a smoother ride than my carriage. I assure you.”

Rochelle turned to her father. “Please, let’s ride on tonight. I won’t survive one more day.”

“It is too dangerous. In the morning, we will make for Dijon.”

“Papa, please–I can’t.”

“Rochelle.”

She huffed.

“Please,” he said, “this–”

“No! I have suffered in miserable heat for seven days. I have been hot and sticky and feeling as if I am wrapped in fever–for seven days. No more.” She pointed to her father. “If you extend our carriage ride into tomorrow, I will not be wearing this dress. I will not be wearing anything. I would sooner come into Dijon naked than wear this any longer in such a wet heat.”

Monsieur Batton looked away.

Her father looked between them, then he shook his head. “Very well. We will ride on to Dijon tonight.”

“I must urge against it,” the coachman said. “These roads are rough in more than only their tread. It would not be wise to use them after dusk.”

“It would be even more unwise not to take serious my daughter’s threat.”

Monsieur Batton shrugged and took a swig from his canteen before throwing the strap over his shoulder. “It will cost more. For my troubles.”

Her father nodded. “Of course.”

The coachman shrugged again. “As you like it, then.”

Her father offered Rochelle his hand and assisted her back into the carriage.

At once, they set off. The creek disappeared behind them, and so did the blueberry bushes. After a few minutes, her father cleared his throat.

“I know you’re eager to be done with this,” he said. “But consider an inn tonight.”

She took a deep breath. “I am so uncomfortable I could scream.” She tightened her small hands into fists on her lap, then snatched the fan from beside her. More intensely than ever before, she fanned herself.

“You prefer riding to being a passenger, I know.”

The carriage struck an ugly bump. Her teeth gritted. “I would prefer anything to this.”

“Then tell me a story.”

She looked at him, caught off-guard. “A story?”

“That is something different.”

Out the window, they’d begun to climb a hill over the dry fields below, where lines of stones and trees crisscrossed over the open land like a quilt of green and yellow stitched together with blue rock.

“I hardly feel like our game now,” she said.

“Well then, let me tell you a story. About the time you were little, when your mother and I brought you and your brothers to Stuttgart. Do you remember?”

She had been young then and now remembered little about the trip. The carriage ride had only seemed half as long then, and she had slept through most of it, but each time her brother Tomas had been let out of the carriage, he had become wild and unhinged, and she smiled at the happy memory.

“I remember some.” Her chin tilted in thought. She smiled more widely. “And I remember you saying you weren’t half so brave to try it again. So where did this brave new father come from, hm?”

He reached for her, smiling, and she took his hand. “Should you like to hear my story or not?”

She nodded sympathetically.

“Your uncle Elias had asked us to visit, to meet your brothers. You were young–seven, eight maybe–and you were captivated by his wheat fields. Do you remember?”

She shrugged lightly. “Only a little perhaps.”

“We visited not long before harvest. The fields were ready for reaping and you would run through them, yelling and whooping. ‘Papa! Papa!’ you’d cry until finally you’d go quiet, and I would come and look for you. Then you would giggle and run deeper in.”

Out the window, they neared the top of their climb, but the trees obstructed the view of the fields below.

“The day we left–oh! I’ve never heard a child cry so. You were despondent to say your goodbyes to those fields.”

Rochelle made a face.

“You didn’t like things changing when you were little. You still don’t, I think. But your mother set you down on her lap, and she said–do you remember? She said, ‘Everything changes. You can’t live in a wheat field, because the wheat gets swept away. And people that don’t change along with everything else get swept away too.'”

Rochelle looked at the dress that laid over her knees. She could picture her mother’s beautiful blue eyes staring down at her. “Did it help when she spoke to me?”

Her father lifted his head to the side, smiling even more brightly. “It always helped.”

In the wooded scene around them, the memory came back to her half-formed, and as she watched it play out in her mind, she wasn’t sure if it was even real. She’d sat in her mother’s lap many times and listened, and who now could be sure if she were remembering or imagining?

The carriage bounced on, and for some time, they rode in silence. The only sounds were the slippage of the wheels as they found the ruts of the highroad, and the faint panting of horses. In the woods, thin rabbits and sleek ermines crept through the underbrush, shaking bushes as they skulked in and out of the leaves.

By the time the shadows were lengthened, the carriage rolled up to a weathered wayside inn. It was two floors and stood just off the dusty road next to a half-crooked stable that laid under a purpling shadow. A large apple tree lumbered in its front courtyard, a short wall of round stones stacked around it. The tree had the wisdom of years and the thick branches to prove it, but no apples had flowered there.

Monsieur Batton jumped from the pilot’s seat and walked next to the carriage door. He held his hand up to his eyes, blocking the low-angled sun. “I must say again, I recommend we rest here for the night.”

“How far on is Dijon?” she asked.

“Another couple of hours.”

She looked to her father and her voice became low. “We’re so close. Let’s go on.”

Her father sighed, pointing to the road. “We’ll go on.”

The coachman nodded, tapping his hand on the carriage door in understanding, and he turned back to the pilot’s seat. The carriage shook as he threw himself back atop it, and almost at once, horse hooves clopped on as they rolled away from the inn. Her father looked on wistfully, but Rochelle could only grin. It was almost over. They were so close to the end of their journey.

The sun balanced on the shoulder of the earth, and the air cooled as night seeped in to the edges of the woods. All around them the trees stood tall and perfect like black paladins, and in their dark green shadows predator and prey stepped lightly. The air was thick with the chittering and tweeting of birds, and the carriage groaned on as the horses moved with surefooted grace.

Then the sun set, and Batton hung two lanterns from his seat. An orange glow lashed out from the carriage, dimly illuminating the nearest trees of those dark woods. Above, a cold, full moon had risen, and now it lingered behind them, casting an eerie blue wake where the lantern light failed.

They passed into an open field, carriage wheels digging into a sandy road as it meandered through the high stalks of grass.

A horse neighed. “Whoa,” Batton called, drawing the word out as they slowed.

Rochelle shoved herself to the window, looking to see what might have paused them. In the darkness, there was nothing, only the circle of orange lantern light that fell around the carriage.

Her father opened the door on the other side, peering out. He dropped onto the step and raised a hand back towards Rochelle to preempt any protest.

“Stay here.” His voice was icy, and a dark chill filled the veins of her neck.

“What is it?” She looked again, but he waved her back.

“Rochelle, stay here.”

“I want to–”

“Rochelle,” he bade harshly. She slunk back to the seat, and he dropped to the soft ground. Fine sand crunched beneath him, and he walked forwards to Monsieur Batton and the horses.

She brought herself again to the window, peering out into the night, squinting until at last she saw them. Beyond the lantern light, six figures sat atop horseback, cloaked in blue darkness. Their beasts breathed hard, the silhouettes of their tails shaking and whipping.

“These roads are closed,” called one man from the dark. His voice was deep, rumbling in the clearing and extinguishing the warmth of her cheeks.

“I travel to Dijon on the king’s behalf,” her father said. He moved nearer. “Do not embroil yourself in the king’s business.”

“The king’s business?” the same man asked with the whisper of a laugh in his words. He swung off his horse. “Then our interests are aligned tonight. I, too, serve the king.”

Rochelle opened the carriage door and hung over the carriage step. The other men were tall on horseback, dressed darkly against the black brush.

A dry breeze rolled through. The high grass swayed, and as it did, the man who had dismounted took several measured steps forwards. With each step, he jingled and his scabbard bounced at his side.

“You will stand aside, then?” her father asked, a tremor in his voice.

“But, yes, of course.” The perilous man neared, and as he did Rochelle clutched the carriage door more tightly, fingers pressing into the soft wood. “We will stand aside so that you may take up your new appointment, provost marshal.”

Rochelle’s head tilted, her brow furrowing as she opened the door wider. The man knew who her father was?

“Preventing me from discharging my lawful duties would be a mistake.” Her father fell back.

“I come not for you, provost.” He pointed a gloved hand out and his finger extended towards Rochelle. “I come for her.”

Rochelle dropped from the carriage to the sand. Her heart thundered, barely contained within her breast. Behind the man on the hill, two more men dismounted.

“No,” her father said wanly. He stepped back towards the carriage and turned to face Rochelle, the light on his face like the flickering flames of Perdition. “I won’t allow it.”

“Your daughter will be safe,” the man crooned. He waved his hand and, like the fingers of the night given shape, two others advanced into the light. They wore dark black coats with scarves of red, blue cloaks fluttering at their backs. One drew his sword; the other, a pistol.

Her father stepped backwards still. “Stop. Stop this!” he cried. “I have money.”

“And a thing more valuable than that tonight.”

From the pilot’s seat, Monsieur Batton dropped to the ground. With only the driving whip in hand, the tip of it laying unpoised at his feet, he put himself in front of her and stared down the advancing men.

“Back–back, you!” Monsieur Batton called, but still they came on.

At last, the devil himself stepped into the light. From the folded black leather of his boots, to the villain-black curls that hung at his ears, to the dark-gloved hand that rested ripe with violence on his black hilt, here was a man who knew not love, nor pity, nor mercy–and all hope left her.

“Your daughter will be safe,” he said again. He spoke softer than moonlight, with no warmth to his words. “Come, my dear, let’s not draw this out.”

The two men moved past her father.

“Back,” Batton urged again. He cracked the short whip, shattering the stillness of the night.

“Come here, girl,” the swordsman called, his voice rough like wet, sliding rocks. He feinted towards the coachman, and Rochelle cried out, grabbing for him.

“Come here,” the swordsman called again. “Before I split his belly.”

Her father argued with the devil, but she could hear nothing as the two men before her neared with shot and steel. They circled to the side, away from the carriage, but Monsieur Batton kept himself between them and her.

Her father cried out as the man hoisted him by his collar. With the back of his hand, he struck her father, and as he did, the two men before her bent forward, as if to lunge.

A tension built, straining ever tighter.

Finally, Rochelle threw her hands out. “Stop! Stop!” Her panic reverberated through the clearing. “I’ll go. Please, I’ll go. Don’t hurt them.”

The men softened. The swordsman lowered his saber, and the devil dropped her father, kicking him hard while he was on the ground. He reached down, grabbing her father by his shirt and pitched him towards the carriage, where he stumbled forwards, dust kicking up with each awkward step.

With a cry, Rochelle reached out and caught him, falling to her knees as he groaned and clutched at her arm.

“Don’t go,” he begged. “I will pay.”

She put a hand on the side of his face, where the fine dry sand had stuck to his skin, and she cast a look back to the man who now had three more caped villains at his back. “They don’t want your money.”

She began to stand, but her father grabbed for a stronger hold on her. “Don’t.”

The devil neared, his hand out as well. Cool, winter-blue eyes stared at her, his stubble grey and green on his jaw like turbulent waters. “Your daughter will be safe, provost. You have my word.”

Rochelle kissed her father on his dirtied cheek. Batton took support of him, and–perhaps for the last time–she let her father go.

Her breaths became heavy as she reached for the man’s hand. The same hands that had beaten her father. She pulled back, hesitating, but he closed his long fingers around hers and doom crashed like a wave upon her.

He drew her close, and she became awash in the perfumed scent of all the sharp fruits of the Orient. One hand he put on the small of her back–the other grasped her hand–and he guided her up the hill. Her whole body felt airy. Her teeth chattered. The extents of her legs wobbled as if she were a block of melting ice, as if the whole ordeal were happening to someone else. She wanted to call back to her father not to worry, not to be afraid, but her voice had left her.

“Your daughter’s protection is a favour,” the man called over his shoulder. “If you wish me to extend this courtesy beyond tonight, then you will remember well who you serve.”

Standing as they reached the man’s buckskin horse atop the hill, her father called after them. “Who do I serve?”

The man offered his hand, but she ignored him and took hold of the horn. With grace, she leapt up and pulled herself into the saddle. She settled into position, chin tilted high. She was not afraid of him, she decided, but instead loathed him for the brigandish coward that he was.

Smiling cruelly, the man grabbed the horn between her legs and jumped into the saddle, their bodies colliding as he squeezed against her.

Rochelle’s breath hitched. Under the folds of her white dress that laid like scalloped snowdrifts, he took the black reins into his hands, his hips gyrating, and he wrapped his arms around her. She sucked in a deep breath, and all-too-easily, he picked her up and tucked her into his body.

“Who do I serve?” her father asked again, more frightened than she had ever heard.

The horse stirred with a snort. The man pulled on its reins. Warm breath passed by her ear, tickling her earlobe.

“You serve the Marquis de Maule,” the man said. “And if you wish to see your daughter again, you must never forget it.”

A horror-stricken look was etched on her father’s face, but he dared not move closer.

The horse lurched. The man’s thick arms strained, but secured Rochelle in her place against him. They completed a full turn, then again faced her father. “Theo–stay with the provost. Ensure he makes it to Dijon and keeps our arrangement to himself.”

“Aye, monsieur,” one of the others said.

The man turned his attention back to her father. “Be good to the marquis, provost, and he shall be good to you. Onward!”

With a cry, the man kicked in his heels and the horse leapt into a gallop, thundering down the dark side of the small hill. The circle of lantern light disappeared behind them and they rode into the night, pursued by nothing.

********

CHAPTER 2

********

The manor bulged like a dead boar against the grace of stars, the treat of life vacant in its glassy eyes. Up they galloped past the slack stone wall and the shattered gatehouse and the path that unrolled like a dry grey tongue–up and up and up, to the ruined abbey that laid mossy and moonlit, where grotesqueries and gargoyles feasted on the carrion of its stone and all that abandoned butchery.

The beating hooves slowed, then stopped. The others dismounted, and so did he. Through the dark ride, he had held Rochelle, his wicked body pressed against hers, and she swallowed, glad to be free of his grasp. At each step, her heart had pounded as if she were being driven to the very gates of Hell, yet he had said no words, he had offered no reprieve, and only the soft warmth of his breath had fallen in her ear as they rode.

Standing beneath her, he offered his hand, but she ignored it and stepped down into the stirrup. No sooner had she planted her foot before his arm moved around her waist, and he lifted her from the horse. Flustered, she eeped, her lips pressing together as the heat rose in her cheeks, and she wafted to the ground in his arms.

A lantern jumped to life near the horses. A short circle of light spread out around them, revealing the grass at their feet to be as dry and yellow as the flame. Ahead, a wide set of short stairs led to the haunted shell of the abbey, where the arched doorway loomed. On one side, it was flanked by beautiful stained glass that rippled in reds and yellows in an elegant web of stone tracery, but on the other side there was only a jagged hole where the memory of a window lingered.

“What is this place?” she asked.

Her captor offered his hand, but when she made no effort to reach for it, he snatched her arm and shoved her towards the abbey.

“Where are we?” she asked more loudly.

He turned to the other men, who were still tending to their horses. “We’ll rest till dawn. Lochlann, stow the horses and make ready.”

“Yes, monsieur,” one of the men said, gathering all the horses’ reins into his hands as he headed from the camp.

“Killian, you’ll take the first dogwatch.”

Another one nodded. “Monsieur.”

“Gosse.”

“Yes?” said a short, bespectacled man with matted hair.

“Camp forager.” Her captor took a waterskin from his belt and tossed it to Gosse, who began collecting canteens and waterskins from the others. “And Gosse–douse that lantern. No fires tonight.”

The man’s hand came back for Rochelle, but she jerked away.

“Where are we?” she demanded.

He looked hard at her. Even in the lantern light, his face betrayed no sense or emotion. Again he held his hand out, and she again refused. With a gentle, tired sigh, he tucked his arm under hers.

“Come now with these questions. It’s been a long ride tonight. You wouldn’t know this place if I told you, and besides, life is easier when you’re not athwart to it.”

Roughly, she freed herself from his grasp. “Don’t touch me.”

His face became stern. He grabbed her again, this time pulling her closer than she dared to be. “Your father will obey me so long as he assumes you are alive.” His lip pulled back into a snarl, eyes tracing down her body. “But he can be made to hold his assumptions long after you are buried in the woods.”

She tried to turn away, but he clutched her more tightly still.

“Do you understand?”

“What a cruel thing you are,” she muttered, recoiling from the ache in his voice. Closer he leaned, until he was less than a hand’s length away, and he forced her to meet his gaze, his blue eyes burning with the misery of frost.

“I may seem to you now the lowest, the cruelest a man can be,” he rasped, “but I assure you, it runs deeper still.” He unhanded her, and she staggered backwards. “And though I find a rustic charm in a bellicose little girl, I warn you to better guard your tongue with me.” He drew up to his full height and pointed towards the abbey door.

Reluctantly, she marched up the stairs, his hand on her arm, and he opened the door for her, which shuddered on its hinges and revealed the dark hole of the abbey’s innards. In the centre of the main chamber, the ceiling had collapsed in big chunks of stone, splintering pews into thin stabs of wood, and through the hole in the ceiling the moonlight poured in under the cold eyelets of white stars.

Rochelle wrapped her arms around her body, the silk of her dress cool where it freshly touched her skin.

“You will rest here.” He pointed to the corner with the least debris. “I’ll have blankets brought, though it is a warm night and you may not need them.”

“Alexandre!” one of the others called from outside.

Her captor offered a turgid bow, bending almost to his waist before turning on his heel with disgust.

The lumbering door closed, and she huffed.

Her thoughts turned to escape, but she quieted them. Her father must have been terrified to not know where she was, or if she was safe. She hoped his health was good after this… this… this Alexandre had struck him so savagely.

She hugged herself and looked around the abbey. In the dark, her eyes could pick out scant details. The shape of hard rock here. The tendrils of green hanging from a column there. As she searched in vain, though, her thoughts circled back to escape.

The woods were no place for her. Not at night. Not when she knew not where she was. In the chaos of Strasbourg, she knew her directions well enough, but in unfamiliar woods there was no way to know which colonnade of trees might lead home, and which might lead to wolves and misfortune.

But if she could get to a horse–if she could take any direction on the road–she was certain to find rescue. They might have the advantage of knowing the land better than her, and would know all shortcuts through it, but her instinct told her it would be foolish not to try. Her sense, though, told her to wait–to not aggravate her captors when she knew least their capability for violence, and not when the man’s threat still hung around her neck in the dark.

The door groaned. Another of the men came with a stack of blankets tucked under his arm. He was tall with hair that might have been dark, and she could see on his face he had sharp, gaunt features, like a man starved.

He motioned towards her with the blankets. “These will–”

“I need water.”

The man’s expression was unreadable, but he nodded and the blankets dropped at her feet. “Gosse will be back with water shortly.”

“And I should like to…” She cleared her throat. “Attend the privy, too.”

His hand went to his tall forehead, then he rubbed at his temples. “Come with me.”

He pointed to the door, and Rochelle darted out of the abbey ahead of him. He followed behind, directing her towards the woods with only grunts.

In front of the abbey, sleeping rolls had been unfurled. The lantern light was doused. In the dark, Alexandre faced away from her, speaking to another man. She was glad not to see his face, that she should see as little of him as possible.

The trees of the forest swallowed up the moonlight. A few steps short of the woods, her guardian stopped behind her and told her to do the same. At their feet, branches littered the ground and the dry grass mingled with spotty patches of grey dirt where the canopy overhung the field.

She turned over her shoulder. “I should ask you to turn around, please.”

He obeyed, his boots crunching on the dry grass as he turned. She took a heavy step forward, then glanced back. His back was still to her, and her heart pounded in her ears. She bent at the knees, snatching the largest branch she could lift from the ground, and, with all her might, she turned and swung it at the man’s head.

With a harsh cracking sound, the branch met his ear. Part of the stick broke, and the man crumpled to his knees.

She cast aside the branch and took off running, lifting the hem of her skirt and stepping as lightly as she could until the abbey was between her and the other men.

Her breath turned ragged as she picked up speed, but she kept running as quickly as she could in the direction the horses had gone. In the long field behind the ruined manor and abbey, the grass wavered in height, its long blades tickling her bare legs as she ran. With every other step, she fought more with her skirt, pulling it higher and higher each time it threatened to trip her.

Moony silver waters winked ahead, and she saw the black silhouettes of horses as they drank and grazed near a wide river. Slowing, she slunk low and crept along the water’s edge.

Three horses grazed in the grass on the bank’s upper lip. On the pebbled shore below, two other horses stood in the light of a lantern under a thin tree that leaned out over the river. The horses’ necks bent and raised as they drank, and between them, a man also hunkered at the water’s edge. He had on a blue shirt and short-legged pants that revealed the trunks of his hairy legs that stuck out of black boots.

He whistled to himself, dipping a waterskin into the river, then he turned back to the shore where the other waterskins were amassed in a pile. He had glasses on, his upper lip cleft with a triangular space.

Quietly, she watched and listened. She could not remember which one of them had taken the horses. He was turned from her, raising and lowering at the water’s edge like some human-shaped waterwheel. He stepped back and moved to one of the horses, fiddling with its saddle bag where the lantern hung. The horse let out a little grunt of disapproval. The man patted it kindly, then turned back to the water.

Far behind her, someone cried out. A voice answered indistinctly. The man crouched again at the river, his back to her.

She could surrender still. She could turn herself over–ask forgiveness. But that was no real choice. They had beaten her father, and he, that devil of a man, had threatened her own life, too. If she went back, what better chance did she have than if she ran? As the man had said, there was nothing to stop them from burying her in the woods. And now that she had run? Their anger could be limitless.

She lowered her foot, placing it on the pebbly shore. Rocks rolled beneath her feet, but still the man whistled at the river’s edge.

On the bank, one of the horses looked up at her.

Just beyond the lantern light, Rochelle froze. Her heart drummed, dull and heavy in her chest, and she looked for mercy in the horse’s eyes. For understanding.

Its tail flicked frustratedly, and it let go of a tired grunt before it returned to drinking.

In the man’s hands, a canteen bubbled in the dark water, and she steeled herself.

She stepped out from the trees. Pebbles scraped on the shore at her feet.

The man’s whistling stopped. He turned. He looked down the shore one way. He looked down the shore the other way.

Her hands trembled, but, only steps from him, he still had not seen her. She positioned her foot closer–so close now that she could smell the stink of his body.

She bent, gathering her skirt, then she leapt forward, charging him with a meek cry. He tried to stand, but he had barely risen from his crouch when they collided.

He tumbled back into the river, grunting as he hit the water and his hands splashed wildly.

Her breaths became panicked. She stopped, watching him as he fumbled in the water. Her mind couldn’t understand what she’d done, and then all at once her sense caught up to her. She scampered towards the tree that overhung the river, where the reins of the nearest horse hung lazily.

Next to the pile of waterskins and canteens, she saw the man’s sheathed sword and belt, and she grabbed it, jamming it into the saddlebag, her roughness jostling the creaking lantern that hung there.

More loud cries came from the abbey.

She flung herself into the saddle. The horse let out a dissatisfied snort, but she kicked her heels in with a cry, and it reacted at once, jumping from the shore.

In the moonlit grass, men swarmed like peeking rodents, and with a hard pull on the reins, she turned the horse parallel to the river and away from them.

From across the field, one of their voices boomed like summer thunder. “Don’t make me chase you, girl!”

On foot they were too slow to keep up with her, and she galloped out around them in a wide circle, then dashed past the far side of the ruined manor, back to the dry grey road. The whole time they howled behind her, her skin prickling with every shout until their voices faded quieter than crickets. She was laughing as she looked over her shoulder to see if they followed, and crying when she realized they weren’t.

Hard she rode the horse, and she headed back the way they’d come. If she could only reach her father and Monsieur Batton, then together they might be able to make it to the safety of Dijon under the cover of night.

The road bent and turned in ways she didn’t remember, and she rode through abyssal woods with no sense of time or place. Stars twinkled above and the moon shone down on those trees that watched her now with disapproving stares, the lantern light her shameful shroud. How could she have risked the woods at night? How could she have risked her father’s life by forcing them to ride on to Dijon? How could she have been so reckless?

The questions swirled in her mind, and again and again the hard face of her captor–of Alexandre–filled her thoughts. She shuddered to think what he might do if he caught her now, and her cheeks only burned angrier as she thought again of him striking her father.

In all her life, she had never met someone like him. Someone so uncivilized. To rob them was a form of cowardice on its own, but to kidnap her? To force her father to serve a man who must, by his very actions, live contrary to basic goodness? That was something worse.

She gripped the reins even tighter as she rode.

Yet the more she thought of how much she hated him, the more she remembered their ride in the dark. The taste of his perfumes in her throat. The soft breath in her ear. His arms pressed against her, controlling her every movement as gracefully as he steered his horse. He was the most evil man she had ever known, but a tingle spread over her shoulders at the thought of him once more sharing a saddle with her–and that made her hate him even more.

The minutes stretched out like winters, on and on until there was not even hope left for subsistence. Her horse’s hoof falls slowed, but no charge of horses came behind her in the dark.

Her anger had cooled, and the horse had long since slowed to a walk. A cake of dust matted her skirt, and the sleeve on her left arm had torn just below the shoulder. That her father had spent more money on it than had been to his comfort made her feel only worse.

The road turned to follow the path of a wide river that caught the moonlight like glass, and as it did, she patted the horse on the neck.

“What’s your name?” she said. “I bet they call you something stupid, like Caesar or Mercury.”

She stroked the horse’s mane, and he grunted.

When she had been young, her brothers and her father had always named their horses in a way she thought ridiculous. Tomas, her eldest brother, chose names that were strong like him. When her father had given him his own horse, he had called it Mars.

She had only ever ridden him once, and when she had, Mars had taken only a handful of steps, then snorted and laid down. Her father had been cross, insisting how dangerous it was, that she could have been hurt, but she’d found it funny. That was who that horse was–stubborn and defiant to the bitter end–but he was not particularly big or strong.

Her brother Edouard was more like her father. They both had a love of naming their horses for their look. In her lifetime, her father had ridden a Tonnerre, and Edouard had named his all-white mount simply Blanco.

But the way they named their horses paid no regard to their nature. Her father’s Tonnerre had been as big and dark and fearsome as any storm, but that was not what he was at his heart. In Strasbourg, each time she had gone into the stables, Tonnerre would come to his gate and wait to see her, and in those moments he was the gentlest thing on God’s green earth. Her fondest memories in that small stable were feeding him crab apples and seeing the happiness swell inside of him. Even as his eyes had blued and his coat discoloured with age, he had remained eternally gentle and sweet. No, Tonnerre did not fit so well at all. He was more like the smell after the storm than the storm itself.

Birds tweeted. She snaked off the path and steered the horse to a small clearing at the river’s edge. There, she dismounted and took the reins in her hands, again patting the horse on his neck.

The dull rush of the water drowned out the sounds of the surrounding wood, and as she took a deep breath, she felt at peace as a hint of dawn crept towards her.

Dry grass crinkled beneath her feet. She stepped down onto the exposed rib of riverbed and brought the horse down to the water with her. The river was quite wide, but it had contracted in the drought enough to stand on the soft dark sand beside it.

“What about… Joli?” Rochelle asked as the horse dipped his neck down to drink. The lantern light reflected in the horse’s eye. On the far side, the trees packed together as if to keep the lightening sky and unseen sun at bay.

“You are pretty, but more than that, I think.”

The horse nickered.

“Yes, I thought so.” She bent down next to the river, its brown belly turned up to her. She cupped her hand, mud churning in a cloud as she swiped her hand through the water, and she took a long drink.

The weight of the night hung over her. Drowsiness stole into her muscles. Her eyelids were heavy, and she yawned as she became more aware of her own exhaustion.

She stepped back from the edge of the water. She was lucky to have escaped. Things could have gone so much worse for her. Truly, she was blessed to be out of their grasp.

“Ah, yes. I have it.” She patted the horse again. “Benoît.”

The horse sighed. His nostrils flared. His head nodded, and he made a vociferous, dramatic denouncement of her decision with his flicking tail.

“You don’t like it?” She clucked her tongue. “Well, I must call you something.”

She stroked his mane, letting him drink, then she led him back up to the dry grass.

“You know, Benoît, it could be much worse. You could–”

A sharp whistle cut through the clearing.

Rochelle froze. A panic pressed on her neck. Benoît raised his head up, ears searching for the noise. She searched the woods around her for some sign of the whistler, but there were only stumps and trees.

Another whistle cut through them, and Benoît dutifully began to trudge away. She grabbed his reins and held him there behind her in the clearing. From the saddlebag, she grabbed the sword and dropped into a crouch. In the middle of the clearing, in her dirty dress, she held the sword at her side in its scabbard with Benoît behind her.

But still there were only green shadows around her, and the woods betrayed not even the fluttering of a bird.

“Do you know the penalty for horse theft in these lands?” a voice asked with familiar dark timbre.

Her throat fluttered. She drew the blade, casting the scabbard to the ground. The sword gleamed in the rising light, and she swallowed her fear as she best she could. “Is it worse than kidnapping?”

Alexandre’s dark figure emerged. He approached like a predator, easy and sure of the kill. His dark blue cloak drooped on his back, and it looked as tired as him.

Her sword tip rested in the dry, grey dirt. “Stay back,” she warned, trembling as he disobeyed and stepped nearer. She brought the sword up, pointing it towards him.

The blade wobbled in the air, and seeing it, he paused. His blue eyes jolted back and forth between it and her, searching for meaning in her actions.

In one motion, his hand crossed his body, and he drew his own sword with ease.

She cried out, but then steadied herself.

“I won’t warn you again,” he said, and when she hesitated, he took a deep breath. “I could have stopped you at any point these last few hours, but I didn’t want a chase then, and I don’t want a fight now.”

“Then go away!” She jerked the sword in front of her.

He gained a long step towards her. “Lower it.”

She swung wildly, but he was unstirred by her flailing, and the blow fell well short.

He footed a nearer bit of dirt, growing before her as grim as the dawn. “You are like a stone in the boot, aren’t you? A little agony too small to even be a nuisance.”

“Stay away!” She slashed again.

“Don’t make me win you, little stone.” He twirled his blade, sidestepping her at an off angle. The hard features of his face ruffled with stern disapproval. In the night, the dark stubble of his chin had filled out even more and now his eyes had dark circles around them. The longer she looked upon him, the more deranged he seemed, like some demon come to torment her now and forever.

“If I win you,” he said, “then I will have you. Here. On this ground.”

She yelped and lost a step. “Go away! Please!” Her hands shook, but still he stared her down.

“So be it. If you must learn, then let your rough schooling begin.”

He stepped forward, and again she swung.

He raised his sword, meeting her blow with his own. Vibrations moved through her arm and shocked her senses. She groaned, trying to pull the sword back, but the blade resisted, fixed to his own sword.

He yanked hard, and the sword flew out of her hands. It dropped to the brittle grass near his feet, and she gasped.

“The blades bind when they meet on an edge.” He tucked his foot under the sword, then kicked it back towards her with an amused smile. “Consider that your first lesson.”

She stood frozen, unsure what to do. His muscles bulged even under his coat, and his body was well-honed. In all likelihood, he had been fancifully twirling swords for his whole life. What could she do against a man like that?

“Come, at least pretend you’re not so eager to be won.”

Resentfully, she bent down and retrieved the sword. She couldn’t outrun him in her dress. She looked back to Benoît. By the time she had mounted him, he would have already been on her. The only thing she could do was fight.

He lowered his sword and turned his back to her. “Here. Have at me, little stone. I’ll even–”

Before he could even finish his taunt, she swung with a cry. He sidestepped the blow with ease, then struck the top of the sword, throwing her off balance. The cloak fluttered at his back as if reinvigorated, and he laughed, pointing at her with his gloved finger.

“You don’t fight fair. I like that in a woman.”

She shouted, lashing out at him again. Lazily, he raised the sword over his head and blocked her blow.

“What is it you think you’re doing, girl?” He laughed and stepped in a wide arc around her. She matched his steps, and they circled one another until he came to stand in front of Benoît. He reached behind him, patting the horse on his neck.

“Silly girl,” he told her. “Throw it down.”

She scrunched up her face. She would not give in to him. An overeagerness surged within her.

Again, she raised her blade, but he only laughed.

She took a few awkward steps towards him and brought the blade down over his head. He blocked with no less difficulty, but then she pulled back and struck again at his right side. His blade knocked hers off its target, and it struck the lantern attached to Benoît’s saddlebag.

The lantern clanked and fell, and all at once, a fire erupted in the dry grass.

Rochelle gasped. Even before she understood what was happening, orange flames spread out around them, snaking their way into the dry kindling that had gone weeks without rain.

Horror overcame her. She dropped the sword. It thudded to the ground, and her mouth opened. She tried to cry for help, but no words came. The terrible memory of a burning stable filled her mind. The smell of fire. The smell of death.

She began to shake.

Hands wrapped around her. He lifted her into his arms as if she weighed nothing. Sheltering her, he thundered forwards, through the flames. She coughed, choking from the smoke, but he held her and did not break stride as he rushed into the river. Water kicked up around them, and he slogged deeper in.

On the shore, the flames spread out like a wave, consuming everything in their path. Benoît screeched somewhere behind them and galloped off into the woods.

The cool wetness of the water cupped her back through her dress, her hand clenching at his dark coat as he moved behind her to support her.

Her eyes went to the shore, and shivering, she could not look away.

“Holy God,” he muttered. The flames burned on, chewing through the wooded clearing as branches cracked and crashed and the flames roared on. Smoke shrouded the sky, and Alexandre laid back in the water, sliding under her. His arms wrapped her up, and he helped her float.

“Lay on me. I will keep you safe.”

The fire ripped up the side of a tall tree. Black, pungent smoke stacked high into the sky, up to where a ghostly moon lurked.

“I have you.” His voice was a reassuring growl. “Float now, and I will do the rest.”

********

CHAPTER 3

********

The fever of fire consumed everything. A heavy branch snapped, crashing to the forest floor as they floated languidly from it. Rochelle laid in his arms, his hands across her chest, her head against him.

Even after the fire was a distant thing, the smoke still filled her nostrils like a too-strong perfume.

She coughed, tilting her head to the side.

“Just breathe,” he said. “We’ll give it some distance before we make for the shore.”

The fear began to subside, and a new panic rose up to take its place. She grabbed more tightly to the hands that were around her.

“Oh–oh, I can’t swim!” Her arms flailed, legs kicking in the water.

“You’re well,” he cooed. “You’re safe. Just float.”

And the more he talked, rumbling in her ear, the more she believed him. Her arms quieted. Her legs settled. They turned at a bend in the river and the fire disappeared, though the black smoke still rose into the canopy behind them.

As they floated on, she looked up into his eyes. Deep blue stared back at her as if it were the sky itself questioning her. The hate, the anger he’d shown the night before, had disappeared. In its place, there was only an implacable sadness that reminded her of her mother’s eyes. She had not been a melancholy woman, her mother, but there had always been something sad about the way she’d looked.

Or maybe it was only the despair of all those missed years that so darkly tinged that memory. These days, when Rochelle thought of her mother, she thought of her most often as disapproving. Unmarried, with no prospects for the future, how could her mother feel anything but sadness for her daughter’s life? Her mother’s happy, loving smile, and the gentle caress of her hand in Rochelle’s hair were like toys–things she’d put away when she’d become a woman. Those merry memories had become replaced by the figment of a much sterner woman whom, she realized, she had never known.

Tears welled in her eyes. Why did she not remember her mother as she was? They had taken many walks along the Rhine and sleigh rides in the winter. Why did she not remember sitting with her mother and hearing her speak softly of wheat fields? Why is it that the sweetest memories of love still rot on the vine?

Alexandre guided them out of the deepest part of the river, at last standing in the shallows at the shore.

He offered his hand. She took it, and he pulled her to her feet. The water was to her thighs and the skirt of her dress bloomed out around her as the water sluiced off her dress in a dozen silk canals. Her updo hung dripping in a ghastly, sagging ball at the back of her head, and she had no choice but to let it down.

Past her, he waded closer to the shore, where he took off his cloak and threw it on the bank. He turned back to her. “Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. Her fingers went to her hair, playing with it, squeezing the strands as the water rushed off her. “Do you know where we are?”

“There’s a village not far. A few leagues, perhaps.” His voice had lost all of its bravado. He undid his coat. Groaning, he slipped his arms out of it and threw it next to his cloak on the bank. On the outside of his arm, his shirt had singed, his skin turning into a rug of red.

“You’re hurt!” She pulled back a loose strand of hair and moved closer, grimacing at the burn.

He shrugged her off with a scowl.

And then, as if the spell had been broken, her face flattened. Only moments earlier, he had threatened her. He deserved a burn, and much worse than that.

He turned his arm over, examining it and sucking air through his teeth. Then he lowered his arm and picked up his cloak, wringing it out with his hands.

“We will make for the village. From there, it is not far to the marquis’s manor.”

He stopped wringing for a moment and brought a finger and thumb to his mouth. He whistled.

Rochelle looked around. “I don’t see Benoît.”

“Who?” He looked around more carefully. “The horse?”

“I thought Benoît would sound better than whatever insipid name you gave him.” She took off her shoes. Water drained from them like a waterfall. Though hidden beneath her white stockings, her feet felt pruny as she squeezed them, and she wiggled her toes in relief now that they were free.

He threw the wrung cloak to the bank and rolled the sleeves of his wet, white dress shirt to his elbows. The muscles in his forearms bulged, and all those beneath the shirt were pronounced, the shirt sucking against him.

“That is Gosse’s horse, Argent.”

She mumbled to herself. “A lazy name.”

He smiled at her with an unexpected levity. It was such a gentle smile, the corner of his mouth creasing in such delight that it caught her so unaware he should possess any such charm. Here was this handsome, gentle, cruel, hobgoblin of a man–what was she to make of that? Oh, how he must have thought himself so righteous, so God-blessed, the way he moved without regard, when in truth he was no more than a low robber, and only the lackey of a man who wanted dominion over her father.

A quiet fury built within her as he picked up his long waistcoat and began to wring it too. He worked up and down its sleeves, his hands tightening around it, squeezing with deliberate strength to draw the water out. His forearms tensed and relaxed like the throbbing vein in her neck, and with each squeeze, his full lips parted as if he were on the verge of grunting.

It was a moment before she realized she was biting her lip. She crushed her mouth into a line and chose to pretend instead that she hadn’t been biting anything.

He threw the waistcoat to the bank with a final, deep sigh. He began to unbutton his dress shirt. Rochelle’s hands slowed as she wrung out the bottom of her own dress.

The white linen untucked from his waist, the rolled sleeves slipping loose to hang around his hands. He undid the sword sheathed on his belt and tossed it to the ground.

A lump formed in her throat.

His shirt opened, revealing more of his thick chest, and her knees squeezed together as she took him in.

His big hands tugged free the last of the buttons, and he turned his back to her. The shirt slipped off his broad shoulders, and he let out a guttural noise as he pulled his burned arm through the sleeve. On his back, knotted muscles twitched and rolled, and she had never seen something so sinful–so deliciously human.

She took pains to remind herself who he was. It had been he who had brought her here. He who had kidnapped her, who had threatened her, who had nearly killed her.

He turned back to face her, and she averted her eyes.

“Do you know your way home?” he asked.

She shook her head like a guilty little girl. She was unable to even look at him, lest he should see those most shameless parts of her.

“Good.” He wrung his shirt. “Then you had best stay with me if you want to see your father again.”

She scoffed. “I’ll go nowhere with you.”

His knuckles whitened, hands shaking around the dress shirt as his grip tightened. Then it relaxed. “You’ll continue to run, will you? Even to your death?”

She said nothing.

“I make my word a bond, girl. I promised your father I would keep you safe, and I meant it.”

She let out a poisoned laugh. “With kidnapping and threats?”

He put his fingers back in his mouth and whistled again.

“Take your chances if you wish. As I said last night, your father will obey me so long as he assumes you are well. When you die unnoticed in these woods, he will still do as he’s told for some time.”

He whistled a third time.

Heavy hoof falls neared. Alexandre’s buckskin snorted, shaking her head as it came close. The horse brushed up next to Alexandre, ears twitching as Alexandre patted her neck and laid the dress shirt over the horse’s hindquarters.

“My father cares not,” she said as dispassionately as she could. “Keeping me hostage won’t make him more likely to listen to you.”

He chuckled and picked up his waistcoat, laying it atop the dress shirt. “If your father will not obey me, then I will have no use for him. Like you, his breath is drawn at my pleasure, and if my life should become too displeasurable, I will take it from him as easily as I took you.”

More threats. That’s all he was. Words. The pastel of a man.

“How are you this way?” she asked.

“The world is lie stacked on lie,” he muttered. “I am what I am, but I make no excuses for it.” He picked up the sheathed sword and began fastening the belt around his waist. “Your father would go to no lesser ends were he in my position, whether he would admit it or not.”

“He would never!”

He laughed. “Oh, to wade through the puddle of your mind.”

“How can you say such things to me? How can you say it when you know less than even my name?”

“Names are for things worth remembering,” he sneered, “and there’s nothing worth remembering about you.”

She jumped to her feet, pushing closer. Her finger came out. “When this is done, all I’ll remember of you is the snap of the rope as you hang.”

He turned on her. His eyes took on an inhuman intensity and flicked between her pupils. “Oh, then I must make these last days truly debauched.” His face seethed. His naked chest glistened, marble-hard and damp within her reach. He stepped forward and his presence pushed her back.

“You won’t cow me.” She repressed the tremble in her voice. “Not now that I see you how you are.”

“And tell me, how is that?” He stepped again, and she fell back still.

“You’re a little boy. A little boy who howls and calls himself wolf. You may be rough with your words, but I have known rough boys all my life, and you are nothing but bark.”

“Then let me show you bite.” He stepped and stepped and stepped again towards her, driving her back until she was against the river’s edge.

She fought back the tide of fear that swirled inside of her, her eyes locked hatefully on him even as he stared back with equal disdain.

Finally, his jaw flexed, and he backed away.

The breath hissed out of her, and she felt just how warm her cheeks had become. Her vision blurred with angry tears, and she turned, wiping her eyes before he could see.

After a moment, he cleared his throat. “You will ride first. To the village, at least.”

Rochelle bent and picked up her shoes. She was too tired to run anymore, and who knew what fate could befall her even if she made it to the nearest village? Barefoot, she took the horse in sidesaddle, Alexandre watching beneath her. His torso was still bare as he took the reins in his hands, and he walked them back to the road.

The sun had risen, and the light poked through in jagged slants.

A part of her was guilty as they clopped forward–guilty as if she had been the one who had overstepped. It seemed laughable that she should feel guilty in the least after having been kidnapped and chased all night. Yet it persisted. He was a cruel man of vexing discontent, brandishing a sword one moment, then consoling her gently. She had known men in her life who were immoral and savage, but they had always been much easier to disregard.

Her eldest brother, Tomas, was one such man. He had a love of drink and women and vulgarities, and the day he’d last mounted his horse at her father’s house, he had seen no tears from her. She loved him, of course, as one must a brother.

Not because he deserved it, but because he understood their shared histories. All those summers they had played together, the pears he had stolen from the market to eat with her, the angels they had made in the dirty Strasbourg snow. Tomas had always had a temper and a propensity for violence, but a childhood together had meant she knew him to be more than only that, too.

But Alexandre had no memories with her, no history. He was, by all she’d seen, a villain who possessed not even a spark of decent goodness.

So why could she not find it in herself to hate him as fully as he deserved? It was fear, she decided. It was a healthy impulse that told her to be afraid, to keep guard around mercurial men. Yes, it was fear alone that prevented her from hating him as he deserved.

Alexandre guided the horse onwards, the road meandering with a slack propensity through the tangled wood. His hair hung wet and loose past his ears, the curls she’d seen the night before washed away by the river. She stared at him as he led and noticed for the first time an uneven pink and white scar that cut across his back and shoulders. The inclination to ask how it had happened came over her, but she swallowed it. Her father would be the first to tell her that it was unseemly to ask people about their scars.

She hoped he was well, her father, and that he had made it to Dijon. Perhaps he was already using his new position to rally the marshalcy to come and save her. She couldn’t help but smile at that. Wouldn’t that be a sight? Her father riding in on some noble steed, rescuing her from the clutches of a madman. It was the sort of thing one might hear in a children’s story, and it became comforting.

Her father had never seemed a gallant man. He was smarter than most, but he was disposed to talk before action, and if there were rescuing to be done, it seemed he would rather have someone do it for him.

Did that make him a coward? Because what was a man, if not his deeds, and what were her father’s deeds if not deferred?

Alexandre was not a coward. She swallowed, looking at him as he sauntered on. He was a ruthless bastard, lacking in even the most decent of morals, but there was no doubting his daring. Of course, if his deeds defined him, then he made for a dark spot on mankind–and so maybe it was better if her father were a coward, that he should be unlike her captor in any way.

He looked back at her. The shade had kept her cool, but with one look, her skin turned hot.

Was she a coward?

It was not something she had considered in her life. When she was younger, her brothers would often pretend they were errant knights, and she a damsel. They were brave, striking sticks together as she watched. They had never called her craven, but brave was not a word they had ever called her either. She was like some small jewel to them, a thing to be fought for. And jewels could be many things–admirable and beautiful and valuable–but they were not brave.

But she was the one who had stolen the horse, the one who had ridden all night. She was the one who had raised up against the man who sought to possess her as if she were still that admirable, beautiful, valuable jewel. From the time she was a child, she had lived inside the lie that brave men would protect her, but where were they now?

Rochelle rubbed the top of the horse’s head and stared at Alexandre. “What will happen to me?”

“That will depend on how you behave.”

“And when will I be allowed to go home?”

“That will depend on how your father behaves.”

She scoffed. “Why are you doing this? This is all so… I don’t know what.”

He looked back at her with a half-cocked smile that she might have otherwise liked to slap off his face.

“You’ve kidnapped me, and what for?” She shrugged. “My father is a provost marshal and not even set to be the most powerful man in Dijon. It’s not as if he has the riches for ransom.”

“Your father is responsible for presiding over the trials of many criminals. Criminals which my men are wont to be.”

“What sort of criminals?”

“Murderers. Thieves. The hanged sort. Or worse, the sort that they march to Toulon on the Chain, that they might serve as slaves on the galleys.”

Rochelle paused. “You don’t think they deserve justice?”

“Is the law always just?”

“Are you?”

He shook his head but trudged on.

“So then, what? You’ll keep me hostage until he frees your companions?”

“Just one companion.” He looked over his big, round shoulder. “But, yes.”

She groaned. Her eyes rolled back into her head. The days ahead would see her stuck with him, or at least around him. What a miserable experience that would be, forced to endure his hapless threats on and on. It was already exhausting and tiresome, and a few days more of it seemed utterly loathsome.

She groaned again, even more loudly, and turned up her hand. “If I must be your prisoner, then I demand you stop threatening me. I am bored by it. We both know you haven’t it in you to hurt me, or my father.”

He slowed, mulling over her words. He brought the reins in tighter to his chest and bade the horse to stop. Moving towards her, he surrounded her hanging legs with his body a wicked glint flashed in his eyes. “How do you think your father’s position came to be vacant?”

“What?”

“Your father.” He moved his hands up the saddle, grabbing the cantle with one hand and the horn with the other, trapping her within his grasp. “He is not the first man to hold his position. How do you think his predecessor ended his term?”

Rochelle sucked in her breath.

His cold, hard eyes stared back, and he nodded. “Consider, for a moment, that the world is a perilous place. Your father–though a man of some import–would hardly be the first to be butchered in his bed.” He backed away like a storm receding. “And consider that perhaps my reservations about harming you are not a limit of my character, but a matter of timing.”

Her stomach turned on itself, but before she could reply, he clucked his tongue and led on.

********

CHAPTER 4

********

Alexandre de Beaumont looked ahead to the Manoir de Maule rising out of the woods on a hill like some ancient bastion, where long ago it had transfixed the earth and was welded there now with blood and stone. Once, perhaps, Romans or Visigoths had sheltered on its slopes–perhaps even the house lords of Charlemagne–but gone were those days of their ancestral histories, when noble dynasties gripped the land and held it tight. Now were the dawning days of nations, and armies came no more from the banners sworn to provincial lords, but the regiments of common men. It was troubling then that the marquis behaved as if he lived still in that time immemorial–as if Dijon were his demesne and he paid no homage to foreign lords.

Over the manor, the clear coral sky faded to black, and in the distance a poise of stars hung at the blue handle of the earth, where Sagittarius, the just centaur, hung brightest among them all. In the woods, the grief-stricken chattering of bats had begun, and Alexandre felt in himself the onfall of that selfsame misery.

He did not consider himself someone who lived in the history of better days, but he did miss those, when he was far from this hill, still asea in the warm blue waters of the Caribbean. In France, the summers were warm, and one could as surely wear light cotton as much as nothing at all, only here the heat didn’t sizzle but smoulder, and it came with no leeward breeze to dull its point–and, lately, it had been very pointed.

The scowls the girl had worn all day had weathered as she rode, and as the sun had gone out of the sky, so had the fight gone out of her.

Now, at last, the day had groaned to its penult, and he was glad for it. His boots had stopped sloshing by the noon hour, but he had walked the better part of the day in them, still damp, longing to dry his feet. Had he any faith she would not have tried to flee with Lundi as soon as he loosened his grip on the reins, he might have stopped to rest.

He scratched at his naked shoulder as they wound towards the manor. The skin was warm, but at least he had not burned in the sun. His arm that had burned in the fire had taken to aching and throbbing, but it did not seem in need of intervention.

The girl’s eyes were half-closed as he led her on, her head lolling back, then snapping to when she realized what was happening. She had let out gentle moans and deep sighs of displeasure the whole day, muttering often how tired she was of the road.

He had kept quiet to let her sleep, but she had complained endlessly instead. As much as it might have annoyed him to hear her voice squeak out beside him, he tried to be considerate of her discomforts. She hadn’t eaten since he’d taken possession of her and hadn’t slept in that same time either. He might otherwise have found himself disinclined to her endless complaining, but he couldn’t deny her discomforts.

Through the last bristle of woods he led Lundi on, and the manor appeared behind the bars of their ornate limestone gate. At the gatehouse, two of the marquis’s house guard greeted them with upheld pikes and a noble salute. He requested a horse to ride the last leagues himself and they obliged.

From the gatehouse to the sprawling dooryard, the last steps seemed longer than the rest of the entire journey. They passed slanted green hedges and a fountain where some angelic figure’s mouth had dried in a white crust, the water long since emptied from the fountain’s base. At last, he paused before the foyer door and dismounted.

The girl seemed delirious, wobbling in the saddle as he reached up and took her hand. “Come down,” he said, helping her into the stirrup.

“I’m exhausted.” She let out a long breath. Her foot touched the ground, and as it did, she buckled under her own weight.

Alexandre caught her in his arms and scooped her up against his bare chest.

Her face nuzzled against him, arms folding in around her belly, and in her repose she almost seemed a bearable woman. She had a saintly face, but a jaw that was thin and sharp and wolfish.

An attendant came out, greeted him, and at Alexandre’s command, led the horses away.

He carried her to the door, where another attendant closed it behind them. Candled sconces burned on the walls and in the chandelier above, and their patterns reflected wildly on the marble floor. He took her up the wide stairs to a chamber reserved for guests. There, the bed was made, and he laid her on it before taking a wool blanket from a dresser drawer and laying it over her. Past the point of exhaustion, she babbled something, but he had no more energy left in him to care. Tomorrow he would hear all manner of inane things from her once more, but tonight he was through.

He tiptoed from the room and shut the door, rubbing at his tired face. It had been a long two days and nothing had gone to plan. They had ridden out to ambush the provost’s carriage in the morning, but had been caught flat-footed to find it still on the road in the dark. Things had gone well there, at least. No one had been killed, and even though the old man had needed to be handled, things were kept well-balanced. But now he was exhausted and just as in need of sleep as the doltish girl he’d laid to bed.

The others had ridden out in all directions, and he didn’t know if they had yet returned, or if they were still searching. In the morning, he would find out, but for now, he was simply glad he had been the one to find her. The others were as angry as he had been to give chase, and anger could make a man do terrible things.

His belly growled, but it was something to tend to later. For now, the order was to sleep, and he would be glad to have it.

At his chambers, the tall, slim figure of Joseph approached, hands behind his back. With a twitch in his wispy black moustache, the marquis’s footman nodded to Alexandre at the meeting of their paths.

“Your father wishes to speak to you,” Joseph said, his voice as thin as ever. He took careful stock of Alexandre, nose crinkling as he sniffed the air between them. “You reek of the road.”

“Tell the marquis I will speak with him in the morning. For now–”

“It must be now. He was adamant, monsieur.”

“Then he must go disappointed tonight.”

“Your mother also wishes to see you,” Joseph added with a razor-edged smile.

Alexandre swallowed his frustration. He excused himself, redressing with a linen shirt that felt cool and itchy after a long day under the sun. He returned to Joseph, extended his hand, and invited the footman to take him onwards to the marquis.

In the great hall, the marquis waited behind the long table at the far end of the room. He sat alone, Alexandre’s mother nowhere to be seen. Joseph said nothing, but kept his hands folded behind his back, waiting at the hall’s wide main doors as Alexandre stepped deeper in.

Two long tables ran perpendicular to the marquis’s table, their surfaces bare of dishes and guests. On the walls, shadows flailed from the flickering sconces, the moonlight beaming in through the hall’s tall windows, while the marquis sat idly at his table, hands flat across it.

“So comes my son,” the marquis said. He picked up the silver goblet before him and waved his other hand towards Alexandre. Under the long black of his overcoat, the marquis’s dark red waistcoat shimmered in the candlelight, and a blue cravat was tied tightly at his throat. The years weighed on the man, his hair thinning and short, his curls more limp and flecked with grey, the whiskers around his mouth streaked with white, but the strong shape of his face was still the same as Alexandre’s, and despite hope, there was no denying that he and the marquis were made of the same coarse cloth.

“I see my mother is absent,” Alexandre said.

“Do not blame Joseph. I told him to bring you however he must.” The marquis nodded to his footman.

Alexandre leaned atop the table nearest the window, looking out over the blue woods.

“Tell me then,” the marquis said.

“Tell you what?”

“How did you fare?”

“The girl is here, as you wished. Her father is alive, as you wished.”

The marquis’s smile stretched out in an ugly line. “Well done,” he said, though Alexandre’s face gained no expression. “Most often I measure you by what you lack, but sometimes I do forget you are not without appeal.”

“I have not slept in some time. Is there something needed?”

The marquis rose from behind the table. “The plan has changed. We will no longer be holding the girl until your man’s trial is resolved.”

Alexandre sighed. “If you kill this provost, they will only send another.”

“No, we will keep her beyond the trial.”

“What?”

“She is valuable,” the marquis said. “It is senseless to give up an advantage when unpressed.”

Alexandre rubbed his stubbly chin and looked down at the floor. The provost had hardly been ambivalent about his daughter’s kidnapping. Though he had been no match for them, her father did not strike Alexandre as a man who would sit idly by while his daughter was kept prisoner.

“This is a father,” Alexandre offered. “If you continue to threaten the girl, who’s to say what his reaction will be? A gentle man might give in to you, but what if he is something else? And even if he is gentle, there is an oft found fury in gentle men.”

The marquis cynically examined the features of his son, then stepped out from behind the table. He brought a hand to his own chin, then waved whatever thought he had away. “No. I am not concerned.”

“A threat to a loved one is a constant pressure, and a constant pressure soon becomes unbearable,” Alexandre said. “The best plan is to be generous–to see how this new provost adjudicates your realm. After all, what are his politics? None of us yet knows. Perhaps, with a bribe, he might even be favourable to your aims.”

The marquis laughed, and the sound rumbled in the hall. “I can hardly convince my own son, my heir”–he said the word with all the spite of a grieving father–“yet it is a provost’s sympathies I will have?”

“Manage the enemies you have,” Alexandre counselled. “Do not make more from nothing.”

“A man does not acquire such an appointment without already being favourable to the crown.” The marquis stepped closer. “And as you rob these highways in my realm, you will need the protection that a man like the provost provides.”

“And the arrangements are what, then? You think you can keep this girl trapped in a room for months? Years? My God, what a fresh hell that would be for us all.”

“She is unruly?”

Alexandre stood at the window, shaking his head. “Holy God, what an agony.”

“Even so, she makes a fine hostage.”

He looked out over the moon-swept woods, to where the long line of storm clouds gathered on the horizon, filtering out the moonlight like God’s own hand. Killing the last provost had been a mistake, and to kidnap this one’s daughter had been an extreme risk, but to hold on to her? The marquis’s actions worried him of late.

“You overvalue the man. When the verdict is read, he will have his daughter back and our business will again be our own.”

“Do you not listen?” the marquis sneered. “This is a man who can be motivated long into the future.”

“We do not need him.”

“We do.” The marquis approached. “Thus, when your man goes free and terror again reigns on these highways, no more of your men will find themselves so threatened.”

He put a hand on the back of Alexandre’s neck, gripping it lightly, but Alexandre pulled away.

“My son recoils,” the marquis announced to Joseph, then he turned back to Alexandre. “Have you ever seen such disregard for a father’s love?”

“I have never seen any of my father’s love.”

“That is because you disregard it.”

Alexandre shook his head. “It is a mistake to keep her without justification.”

“That is why you’ll marry her.”

Alexandre jerked back. Slowly, his face twisted into a smile. He let out a strange laugh. “Marry her?”

The marquis’s face stayed unamused.

The smile slipped off Alexandre like a pane of ice slipping from a warm winter window. “That was not–”

“Yes.” The marquis pushed his lip out, nodding. “Tomorrow you will marry. That will keep the provost on our side, and as your wife, we will have good justification to keep her here, and her father loyal.”

“No,” Alexandre said, aghast. “I will not.”

“You will.”

“You would cast our house to ruin for this? To win favour with a provost?”

The marquis stared him down. “I would inure you to what small success is within your reach.”

“I will take no wife.”

“It is not a discussion.”

“I refuse.”

“It is beyond your wishes.”

“You cannot–”

“And what else have you left for me?!” the marquis shouted. He smashed his goblet to the stone. “I have nothing. My heir is dead. My fortune lost. All I have is you. A disgrace.” He thumped his fist on Alexandre’s chest, knocking him half-a-step back. “This house that lives here, in your blood, it has come to ruin because of you. Because of your fell deeds. In all those years I had you fostered in Calais, what did you learn? Robbery? Murder? Contempt for me? That is all I have now–a robber and a murderer and a contemptuous son. Those alone are the tools God has given me to rebuild our storied house, so those are the tools I will use.”

Alexandre looked away.

“Yes,” the marquis hissed. “I’ll hear no more of this moralizing, then–not from you, the root of my sins.” He turned his back on Alexandre. “You will marry this girl. She will give you an heir. Her father will give you the highways. And you will give me the value of all that gold you so foolishly dropped into the sea.”

The marquis headed for Joseph and the tall doors.

“And when she refuses?” Alexandre called. The marquis stopped on his heel.

“She is lowborn. She should be so lucky to marry a man of your station, even if that man is only you.”

The marquis stepped from the room, and at once he and Joseph were gone.

Alexandre kicked the bench at the nearest table.

There were many terrible things he deserved, but marriage was not one of them. There was no woman on the face of the Earth he was capable of marrying, let alone loving, and a woman as bitter and argumentative as her made it all the worse still.

To force him now to wed a lowborn woman whom hated him was only another form of cruel punishment the marquis had devised, whether he knew it or not. Even if her marriage kept the provost at bay, it could only end poorly for them. Either they would push the provost to action by small degrees, or else he would be replaced with another of the king’s appointees more willing to dispense the king’s justice.

He thought of that girl, only just laid to bed, and he shook his head in disbelief. She was… exhausting–disposed to disagreement and contrarian behaviour as if she were the devil sent to torment him now and forever–and an anxiety filled his mind at the thought of never being free of her.

Alexandre folded his arms behind his back and left the great hall. The moonlight came in sharp slats and squares across the corridors, the clouds creeping closer still. In the foyer, he stopped atop the wide stairs. From the chandelier, a dull candlelight gleamed on the dark marble floors.

He had no pretense of being a romantic, but as he watched the candles burn low, he could not help but wonder about the emptiness of his heart. He had no love in him to give, and long ago he had promised himself he would not marry–that he would not reduce himself to that miserable state of being. But a pang of sadness overcame him, standing there in that comfortable space. As infuriating a woman as she was, he felt also for her that she should she be tethered to him. He was uncompanionable and difficult, and even an improper rash of a girl like her deserved better than that.

What was there to be done, though?

He could flee–run all the way back to Calais, to that bruised Atlantean sea, where he could board a ship and sail away. He could return to the sultry Caribbean and find himself a fresh white patch of sand where, like him, the trees might bend and furl in any direction but France.

A part of him had always hoped he would return there one day. It was the place he had been most happy, even if its balmy days had also brought no small misery.

But then, that was no real choice.

Were the marquis the last of his relatives, he would have done it, but his sister, Adele, and his mother were still dependents of his father. To flee and leave the marquis’s debts uncontested was to expose them to danger and destitution as much as it was the marquis.

And the girl. Holy God. It annoyed him to think it, but she would be worse too if he left. The marquis would not give her up when she had such value to his schemes, and his own leaving would only forestall her marriage to another. She was a nuisance, but she had done nothing wrong. She deserved better than to marry a man like any in his company.

He sighed as a patter of raindrops fell across the window of the foyer. In truth, everyone benefited from him staying. Everyone except for him.

********

CHAPTER 5

********

Pink clouds slid through the heavens on angel strings, their bottoms so flat that Rochelle began to believe her whole world might be bound in a bottle of bitter earth and candied sky. Then came the phage of little minutes, the rolling of thought into thought until the bottle broke, and all the earth’s clouds wandered free.

These were the admissible thoughts–the raindrops of little feeling that, one-by-one, fell, then disappeared. Much of her afternoon had been spent at the windowsill, where a dense wood was splayed in the distance, and each time her mind wandered back to those other thoughts–those alarming, inadmissible thoughts of fear and doubt–she focused once more on the woods.

There, the trees were tall and wide, but they remained indistinguishable as she tried to count them. Beneath her window, a field of grass stretched all the way back to the woods, swaying with every wild breeze like a dying man, rolling over in the desert, begging for water. The night before, a heavy rain had fallen, but even that was not enough to slake the world of thirst.

Food had come twice, though she’d refused the second offering. It was squishy red bowls with some crumbled cheese on top, and it had been unseemly. When she had asked the girl for some indication of where she was, or what was expected of her, the girl had only demurred.

“I will find out,” she had promised, but then the door had shut, leaving Rochelle in silence at the window. Twice she had pulled on the door, but both times a distant noise had caught her unaware, and she’d retreated. She was glad for it, frankly. To escape was a delightful notion in a comfortable bedchamber, but to achieve it had, so far, been something much worse. The last thing she wanted was to find herself once more in a river, floating from fire–or worse, in another bumping carriage.

There was little to occupy her mind in the room. The mattress was feathered and nice to lie on, but it and the empty wardrobe offered little entertainment. She took to sighing and scowling, as she had in those early days of her journey, but with no one to appeal to, her complaints had begun to annoy even herself.

At last, the doorknob spun, and she gathered herself at the window.

Alexandre strode forth, as full of pomp as any man could be. The distance between them might have been measured in leagues still, but when she said nothing, he came closer.

“Come.” He held out his hand, just as he had that first night they’d met. Even now, in the comfort of daylight, he seemed a darkling and impatient man. The heavy bags around his eyes had not softened with the night, though his hair had curled once more, and he was again shaved.

A tension rifled her nerve. Where they stood on the issue of her imprisonment was not so clear. At times, he had seemed almost human, and at others he was violent and impertinent. He varied so much that the space between the moments of his kindness might have been filled as likely with rage as good humour. Yet, as she hesitated, he made no aggressive move.

With a painful grimace, he extended his hand nearer. “If you please.”

Rochelle lifted her chin, put her hand in his, and allowed him to lead her from the room.

The manor was ornate. Statues, paintings, and hunting trophies lined its walls and gathered in its crowded spaces like their own kind of huddled prisoners. The generations’ worth of minutiae adorned the house with the dripping, self-satisfied pride that came with every man who held some little well of power. It was the glee of domination and control that manifested as much in titles and names as it did in the little remembrances of having wielded it. Here were a people who had fermented suffering for so long, and so well, that they draped themselves in it for all the world to see. They did not care about the ugliness of that bedecked history. They only cared what it served. And like all things in a nobleman’s house, it served him. It was a behaviour no doubt endemic to Alexandre and to each of his vile ancestors.

He led her by the hand to a grand door where a servant stood in a vibrant mix of blue and red. With a kind word, the servant opened the door, then stood aside to let Alexandre and her through.

The chamber within was immense. A chandelier sparkled above, a grand fireplace laying dormant on the far side of the room, and high-backed chairs and long duchesse brisées were scattered along the walls. There were no windows, but tall sets of doors on each of the room’s four sides. Her eyes went to the ceiling. Long lines of golden filigree arced across a mural where swords clashed and rearing horses overlapped in an endless struggle–no doubt some scene from all their painful history.

Alexandre guided her to the fireplace, then released her hand. Expectantly, she stared at him, but he offered nothing in return. His eyes fixed on the dead, black hearth as if he were some small boy who would rather have been anywhere else. Had he a heart, she would have pitied him, but instead she only felt the surging of her annoyance. Annoyance at his manners. Annoyance at her circumstances. Annoyance at the gaudy opulence of all this horror.

Was there something she owed him? Something she was supposed to say? She had never been in any chamber so grand and, beneath the chandelier and the painted ceiling, speaking in a too-loud voice seemed profane.

She cleared her throat, but then a door on the far side of the room opened. From a courtyard of light brown stone beyond, a well-dressed older man entered with an entourage at his back. In a black waistcoat, with a cravat of red around his neck and thin silver chains hanging from his various pockets, his presence struck her as charming. If he had been twenty years younger, she might have even considered him handsome, but age had been no friend for him.

Alexandre took notice. His posture straightened. His hands went behind his back. With a tip of his head in deference to the man, Alexandre swung out his arm. “May I present… the Marquis de Maule.”

Rochelle curtsied.

With a grunt, the marquis looked her up and down. “She is not so unfavourable for a lowborn girl.”

Her mouth twitched open, but she held her tongue. Her body was her own, and she had never been anymore ashamed of it than the humility demanded before God… but then, she had always thought of herself as more than not unfavourable.

“What is the problem, then?” The marquis turned to Alexandre. “Where is the suffragan to marry you?”

Rochelle blurted out an unintelligible noise.

The marquis flashed a wicked smile. “Oh, you didn’t tell her?”

Alexandre’s teeth gritted together. “Explain for yourself.”

“Watch your tone.” The marquis slipped into a twisted expression, bringing a finger to Alexandre’s face. Each man held the other’s gaze for a long moment. Then, at last, the marquis’s face eased. He smiled weakly and turned to Rochelle with a chuckle of insincere paternal wisdom.

“This is a provincial matter. An issue of my scutage.” The marquis held out his hand for her. Without confidence, she took it, and he led her back towards the door and the courtyard whence he’d come. “I am sorry that you and your father have been caught between the king and I, but the matter will soon be resolved. When it is, you will be returned to your father”–he held a finger up to Alexandre who walked behind them–“unharmed, Alexandre.”

“As the marquis requires,” Alexandre answered.

“Until such a time as that is, however, you will marry my son.”

Rochelle eeped.

The marquis chuckled again. “Yes, it is not what you might expect. When this matter is presently resolved, though, I will see to it myself that the suffragan has your marriage annulled, yes?”

He led her through the doors until they stood in the courtyard. A thin oak tree stood in its centre, surrounded by tall, brownish walls and small, dying shrubs. The marquis let go of her hand, then wiped his own hand on his black waistcoat.

“I don’t–”

“Good.” The marquis’s smile turned sickly sweet. “My son will be kind to you from now on. You have my guarantee. And, until this is over, I will accommodate you as I would any lady of your… luxury.”

Alexandre set his teeth, staring from behind the marquis. She did not know what to do. Neither offered a hint of understanding or compassion, and finally the marquis’s smile washed away. He turned to Alexandre.

“Send for the suffragan. Have him here today. We’ll have the ceremony tonight.”

“Yes,” Alexandre said.

“And this time, you best do it.” The marquis turned his back on them and stepped back into the grand chamber, where a servant inside shut the doors, leaving only Alexandre and Rochelle in the cramped courtyard.

“Marry you?” Was there anything less desirable than that? “I will not.” She shrugged. “No–I will not.” He seemed no more moved than the tree that cast its shade down upon them. “I will not marry you, no matter how much you wish it, you… you ogre.”

“Curb yourself,” he warned. “I have no more want of you than fire does water, but you will be my bride.”

“Because your father commands it? Are you such a pitiful child?”

He stepped closer, the terrible shadow of the oak tree crossing his face. “Because the marquis commands it,” he said. “And you will obey.”

“No.” She shrugged off his insistence, then stuck a finger out towards him. “No, I–”

He seized her by the hair, his teeth bared, and she yelped. He drove her back until she was against the wall.

“You will.” His breath brushed the exposed skin of her neck, and his voice turned to a menacing whisper as she grabbed for the hand that held her. “You will obey it because its substitute is ruin. Ruin for you. Ruin for your father.” His breath revealed gooseflesh along her neck as his lip touched her ear. “Ruin for us all.”

Her mouth widened in pain, but she forced her eyes open. “Is this the kindness your father promised?”

He tightened his grip and snarled. “Tell me I will have your obedience.”

She grimaced and held her tongue. Tighter, he gripped her, pulling her onto her toes, and she yelped again. “Yes–yes!” She grabbed for his hand, and when nothing came of it, she surrendered. “You have it.”

“Good.” A smile crossed his face and his hold relented, though he did not fully release her. “You need not adore me, but you will play your part in our little comedy of love’s profession.” His finger traced the skin of her bare arm, his lips brushing against her ear, and she shuddered. “You will play it as if more than only your life depended upon it.”

At last, his hand freed her. She could only just bring her eyes to meet his, and he was still every bit as terrible as she remembered.

Nose twitching, he took a deep breath and a look of disgust crossed his face. “I will see you cared for.” He turned and waved. Across the courtyard, through an open door, the same plump servant girl who had brought Rochelle food that morning swarmed towards them.

“Come, mademoiselle,” the girl assured. She put her hand around Rochelle’s shoulders, leading her from Alexandre.

“That is no lady,” Alexandre huffed, and he marched away.

She stopped and watched him go, touching her aching scalp. What a bastard.

The girl began to fuss at the rip of Rochelle’s dress, folding it and unfolding it to assess the damage while Rochelle paused. She clucked her tongue. “Pay no attention to him. But yes–come. We have had rain, and so I have seen a bath drawn for you.”

The girl began mumbling to herself and led Rochelle to a private chamber. A dark privacy screen stood inside the door, and behind it a wide wooden tub had been filled with still-steaming water. Shelves surrounded the tub, some with glass vials, and others with towels and linens.

At the water, Rochelle dipped her fingers in, and the warmth raced through her body.

The servant took a vial of oil and emptied it as little splashes of oil eked into the water. She put her hand into the tub, agitating the bath, then shook her hand dry and smiled at Rochelle.

“There you are, mademoiselle.”

Before Rochelle could thank her, the servant disappeared.

A bawdy concern came over her. Even standing next to the tub, the heat of the water was soothing, and the private room was smaller and more comfortable than the bedroom she’d been afforded–yet a feeling lingered, as if just beyond that door Alexandre waited, conspiring to catch her exposed. That was not how he seemed, though, and as she dipped her hand in the tub again, she found the water too tempting.

With great effort, she pulled off her dress, then looped her thumbs around the strings at the back of her corset and pulled them free.

Why was he so rough with her? Her face turned red as she thought again of him grabbing her hair, and she could still feel the ache in her scalp. The temerity he had to demand obedience, as if she were something to be punished.

She shook her shoulders, her hair bouncing and tickling the skin of her back. Then her corset fell loose, and a shiver with it.

Worse than the pull of her hair was the embarrassment that came with the gentle touch of his finger on her arm–with his breath on her neck. A warm, tingling sensation mounted inside of her. How did a bastard evoke such a thing? She was not chaste, but she had never felt anything so rousing as when his lips had pressed against her earlobe. It was wrong. She knew that. He was a wicked man. Yet the shape of his wickedness that should have been repulsive and ugly was instead the pleasing shape of hard deviltry, and she could feel the tingle in her thighs at the thought of his lips once more against her skin.

Yes, there was some small attraction. He was annoyingly blessed with qualities, like the strength of his body and the shape of his jaw. He was a brute, though, a fiend–and how then did the curl of his hair or the blue of his eye matter when he could, at any moment, clutch her by the hair and make her submit to his every whim?

She shivered again.

He evoked within her an ambivalence that was equal parts hate and desire, but even knowing what it was, she could not deny that it was intoxicating. He was domineering, capable of doing terrible things to her without regret, and yet somehow that too had an appeal.

Breathing in, she smelled lilacs and flowers as she finished undressing and dipped into the tub with a flexed toe.

The water rushed around her, up to her shoulders, and she let out a delicate moan of delight.

“Ah, that is the sound of love, isn’t it?” a strange, feminine voice said behind her.

Rochelle nearly jumped out of the water, a wave splashing over the side of the tub. A tall woman with dark skin stood at the door in an exotic yellow dress. A bright white scarf covered her hair and wrapped around her neck and shoulders.

Gently, she touched the centre of her chest. “I am Sayyida Zahra.” With a mischief in her eyes, the woman strode forwards. “Though I have yet to hear your name.”

Rochelle swallowed, wrapping her arms around herself. “Rochelle.”

“Rochelle,” Sayyida Zahra repeated, playing with the word on her tongue. She smiled. “It is lovely that we should meet–but, of course, I wish we were not meeting, that you should be anywhere else.”

Rochelle curled into a ball in the tub.

“I should like to sit with you while you bathe, if you will allow me the privilege of your company?”

It had been a long day trapped alone, yet to be naked before a stranger was deeply embarrassing.

Sensing her hesitation, Sayyida Zahra pointed to the privacy screen. “I will, of course, give you what you need.” She put a hand once more to her chest. “I am not so cruel.”

Rochelle nodded. “Then I should like some company.”

The sayyida stepped behind the screen. “Where are you from, Rochelle?”

“Strasbourg.”

“Strasbourg,” Sayyida Zahra repeated slowly. “I have not been there–that is perhaps rarer than you think. But tell me, what is it like in Strasbourg?”

Rochelle took a breath, uncurling slightly from the ball she’d made of herself. The boats would be rowing up the Rhine this late in the afternoon. They could be going anywhere, even as far back as the sea, their small sails bending and waving in the wind. The markets would be flush with bushels and wagons full of fruit, red, delicious berries and sweet apples. All along the city’s little docks there would be tall stacks of grey fish whose scales would glint in the afternoon light like diamonds, or the fading light of morning stars. When they had lived there, they had lived near a market, and she realized now that she missed it. There had always been the hum of noise during the day, and it had become like the soothing sound of rushing water to her. Here, everything was too quiet–too still.

She drew her knees back to her chest and laid her chin on them. “I miss it.”

At first, no answer came from beyond the screen, then Sayyida Zahra made a small noise of despair. “Yes, of course. I understand. I would miss it, too. But then, we do carry it with us always, don’t we? I am from Fes–do you know it?”

“No,” Rochelle said.

“It is beautiful,” the sayyida said. “But when I was young, my father moved from there to Agadir–do you know that one?”

Rochelle shrugged and shook her head, then, realizing Sayyida Zahra could not see her, she said, “No.”

Sayyida Zahra said something in Portuguese. “But it was my father who told me before I left Fes to gather a vial of dirt from our garden, and to tear a page from my favourite book. I kept them with me for many years, and everywhere I went, I thought I carried a piece of that place with me. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized everything important about my old home I carried in my heart already.”

Rochelle flexed her toes against the bottom of the tub. Her father was the most important thing to her, and she worried her heart was not big enough to carry him. “What made you realize it was more than dirt?”

“Sailing,” the sayyida said. “When I was so far from any shore, I realized all the places–and all the people–that I once loved, I still loved, even though I could see none of them.” She paused. “I have been to many places. I have seen many things. The ports of the Mediterranean. The Americas. India.”

“India?” Rochelle’s eyes lit up. “I have never even been this far from Strasbourg before.”

“Ah,” Sayyida Zahra said, the smile audible in her words. “But the world is so big and wide, it does us no good that we should be trapped in only such a small part of it. And with Alexandre’s crew, I have been fortunate to see very much of it indeed.”

“His crew?”

“Yes, he is a sailor–well, they all are, I suppose. Privateers at one time, though now reduced to these… other forms of pillage, which I loathe.”

Rochelle’s head tilted to the side, and she ran her fingers over the top of the water. “We are still far from the ocean, are we not?”

“Yes, but he is still a sailor–in his heart, at least.”

For a moment she soaked in silence, then she reached to a nearby shelf for a sponge and began to scrub at her body. “That explains his incivility.”

Her skin turned red, but she only scrubbed harder. It felt as if it had been eons since she’d last had a bath, and the heat suited her well. Bubbles churned as she worked, putting her thoughts on anything other than Alexandre.

After a long moment, Sayyida Zahra cleared her throat. “He is a good man, your father?”

Rochelle stopped and looked at the privacy screen. “Yes. He is thoroughly decent.”

“But would he not do anything to save you?”

Rochelle’s mouth opened, but then only hung there. He was not a bad man in the least and, despite Alexandre’s accusation that her father could ever behave at all like him, there was nothing he had ever done to believe that to be true. Yet, guiltily, she wished that he was capable, that he might do anything to rescue her.

“Alexandre is a man,” Sayyida Zahra said, “and men err. And I will not defend him in what he has done. Your kidnapping is not one of his finer moments in any category worth keeping–but then, as someone who has been there among his finest moments, I will not wholly condemn him either.”

Rochelle turned an eye to the privacy screen. “How could you not condemn him?”

“His intentions are well-meaning.”

“Well-meaning? He took me, and now he is set to marry me to further terrorize my father. How is there anything well-meaning in that?” She scrubbed even harder. “I am only glad the marquis is here, that he has agreed to annul the marriage once he has what he wants. If it were up to Alexandre… who knows what it would take to be free?”

“Ah, the Marquis de Maule…” A heaviness laid in the sayyida’s words. “Now there is a man with no well-meaning intentions.”

Rochelle’s scrubbing slowed. “What do you mean?”

“In the course of his selfish enterprises, the marquis has attracted many creditors to his name. After the death of Alexandre’s brother–”

“He has a brother?”

“He did, yes.” Sayyida Zahra paused for a moment. “The marquis blames Alexandre for Aldrich’s death and insists he pay the marquis’s debts as his penance. The marquis, of course, does not care about penance. He cares about gold and silver and jewels that he may extend his debts only farther.”

The Sayyida emerged from behind the screen, and Rochelle dropped the sponge, once more wrapping herself with her arms.

Sayyida Zahra approached. “What is most important to know about the Marquis de Maule, Rochelle, is that he has no intention of releasing you.”

Rochelle blinked up at her.

“Your presence here keeps your father loyal, and that makes you too valuable to surrender.” The sayyida lowered herself to her knees at the tub’s edge and laid her arms across its lip. “But I have something revelatory to tell you.”

“What?” Rochelle asked meekly.

“I have all the riches Alexandre could ever need to free his family from his father’s debts.”

Rochelle shrunk deeper into the tub.

“Alexandre means a great deal to me. He is too…” Sayyida Zahra smiled slyly as she dragged her hand through the water. “Frankish, let us say, when I prefer Egyptian, but I do care for him, as one might a brother. Yet still he is a man, foolish in his pride, and he would do anything else if it meant he would not need my help.”

When Rochelle gave no answer, Sayyida Zahra took another deep breath.

“Rochelle, I have come here today as a friend. More than that, though, I am a commiserator.” She paused, gathering her thoughts, then nodded. “You must have no love for Alexandre or his father, and I can understand that. Helping them must seem unimaginable, and I understand that, too. Yet, if you could convince him to take my help, it would be an opportunity to help yourself as well.”

“How?” Rochelle asked, arms still across her body.

“Alexandre will not listen to me. I have tried to convince him to let me pay these debts, but he will not allow it. If you, however, could convince him to accept my help, then the marquis will have no need of a hostage.”

Rochelle let out a biting laugh. “In what world would he ever listen to me?”

“If you became his lover–”

“If I what?”

“Yes.” Sayyida Zahra frowned. “It is distasteful. But it is the surest path for you to be freed.”

“No.” Rochelle shook her head. “No, the marquis said–”

“The marquis says much,” Sayyida Zahra assured her, “but he means less. You are a pawn to them, my dear. They see you not as flesh and feeling, but as chattel and clay. You are a lowborn woman and they would buy and sell you as surely as if you were some spit of land that might amuse them.”

Sayyida Zahra’s scarf slipped. On her neck were black lines that made up a shape of letters and other symbols that Rochelle did not know.

“There is a secret about the world that governs all thigs,” Sayyida Zahra continued. “Power is not given, only taken.” She dragged her hand once more through the water. “You are powerless here. If you wait for the marquis to empower you, it will be too late. Not even a man of title or good provenance can give you that kind of power, for how is it power if he can take it from you whenever he pleases?”

Rochelle tightened her arms around her, looking into the waving water. As her gaze rose, Sayyida Zahra watched her closely.

“You say your father is a good man, yes?” the sayyida asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you must do this for him. He deserves better than all of this.”

“But… to seduce Alexandre?”

Sayyida Zahra opened her mouth, but then paused, crushing her lips together. Her hand came out towards Rochelle, palm up as she pointed at her. “You stole a horse.”

A grin spread out on Rochelle’s face.

“I heard Alexandre say that you were a good rider–that you evaded them for some time.”

Her smile faded, and she shook her head. “It was foolish. I could have been hurt.”

“It wasn’t foolish at all. You acted. It is noble to act. It is a thing to be proud of.”

She tried to further suppress her grin, but it only grew more unconstrained.

“Consider what I am saying in the same spirit. You did something many would not have even dreamed of doing–yet you did it. Why? Because you had to. The means are different, but what I am asking of you is not.” The sayyida reached in, once more tickling the water with her fingertips. She flicked her fingers, splashing a few small beads away from her. “Rochelle, the only way you will leave this place is when the marquis has no more use for you.”

Rochelle raised her hands to her head. She kept her elbows and knees covering her body as she squeezed her hair, drawing a flow of water from it. She thought of the feeling of standing there in ankle-deep water, her wet hair running down the back of her dress. If she tried to run and made her way back to her father, perhaps they could escape to Strasbourg. And if not that, then perhaps they could rally the marshalcy to arrest Alexandre and his father. But what if she fled and Alexandre did not chase? What if he went to her father instead and, knowing he had no more leverage, killed him?

With a deep breath, she looked up at Sayyida Zahra. “Did Alexandre kill the last provost?”

The sayyida rose, a dark emotion looming over her. “Yes. And he will kill your father, too. If he must.” She adjusted her scarf, covering the black lines on her neck. She glided to the door and threw a look back over her shoulder. “Power is not given, only taken. So be brave, Rochelle–and take it.”

Then she was gone.

In privacy, Rochelle’s body relaxed. The water had cooled. The heat she had felt in her hands and feet had dissipated. There was that heaviness she sometimes felt before making a big mistake. She had felt it throughout her life, especially when she was young and her brother Tomas urged her towards something she knew to be wrong.

In Strasbourg she had known a Julianna, and she was beautiful. Though a peasant girl, even in the cheapest, most unflattering of garb, she drew attention to herself. She had joked once that it was a curse, though it had not seemed so when Julianna had said it with a smile and a wave of her hand. She had attracted the eye of a man of some small nobility, and soon they had fallen in love. Or at least as much the appearance of love that a nobleman can feel for someone beneath himself. In private, the noble told Julianna of his love and his undying devotion, yet in the streets of Strasbourg, he would not have even held a door for her.

Julianna took it in her stride. To her, he was not a leering predator, but a rescuer, as if there was some need to be rescued from being the daughter of a man who had made his own great wealth from hard work.

Their affair had started in the summer, and by winter she was with child. Her father offered the nobleman anything to take the hand of his daughter in marriage, but the man refused all offers. Had the Rhine been his, Julianna’s father would have given it all to see her cared for. Her nobleman, though, had not wanted a dowry. He had only wanted to water his lusts with the pleasure and satisfaction of a young, beautiful woman. To him, she was much a trophy as all the bloodiest bits of history that the marquis used to line his halls.

And when Julianna became too plump to satisfy him any longer, her noble was through.

She had been a sweet girl, whose only crime was being born on the wrong side of history–because somewhere in the waters of all those silvery ancestries, Julianna had no doubt had some relative who was themselves noble by blood or deed. But she had been the daughter of a daughter of a daughter, and any noble blood she had once had was now as unclean as the blood of any beast that cheweths not the cud.

Julianna was ignoble, but she was not undeserving of love. And yet the man had seen her as nothing more than a plaything for tedious nights.

That was how the marquis–how Alexandre–saw her now, she realized. She was a thing of some value because the light of the moment was kind to her, but eventually they would discard her, and where she fell would be of no consequence to them. Then she would become, to them, like any other peasant, good for only working rainless fields.

It was a choice to be obedient, to wait while the infinite pieces of the world arrayed around her. She had clung all day to the fleeting thought that her father could come to rescue her, but that was nothing more than the childish fantasy of a girl. The ambitions of her father, as much as his passive nature, would not allow him to mount any kind of rescue without first doing much talking. It would be foolish, then, to wait for such relief. And waiting for the marquis to annul her impending marriage seemed no less foolish.

Sayyida Zahra was right. The choice was hers, and she could not wait for the cage of her life to swing shut before deciding to act.

She looked down into the water, the ripples distorting the shape of her body in the unsettled bath. Could Alexandre even be convinced to want her, though? The marquis’s appraisal hung with her. Surely she was more than not unfavourable?

In those years she’d lived in Strasbourg, proposals had been made. She had refused them all, but there had been some flattering offers.

But there was more to marriage than only flattery, and none of the men who had stood before her and asked for her hand had stirred anything inside of her with desirable urgency. Her heart was no stranger to fluttering, or her cheeks to reddening, but her courters offered little more than that, too. They were just pressing beasts, desperate to know her heat, and though some of them she might have even loved, none of their intentions were more than the same games Julianna had played with her noble lover.