One for All, page 22
“How I wish I knew what you were thinking,” he said.
“Monsieur, I’m quite sure my uncomplicated musings would be of no interest to a gentleman of your education and standing.” The mocking words tangled on my tongue as his hazel eyes bored into mine.
“Tania,” he said gently, “we’ve been over this: it’s Étienne.” There was no witty retort on my lips, no coy flirtation at the ready. He was right; he was Étienne. Unlike the other men we were trained to manipulate and seduce, he made it clear that he cared what I had to say. Cared how I felt. Wanted to help me when I was ill. He wasn’t anything like my mother had made me believe young men were. How could his father produce such a son? “Are you enjoying your excursion to the university?” he continued.
“I suppose,” I demurred. “Now that you’re here, though, I’m enjoying it much more.”
There; there it was. It was in the stretch of his fingers, in the way he held his jaw, and it didn’t matter that it was a reaction to a false version of myself, because the way he looked at me, it was as if he saw through all the artifice and still liked what he found.
Étienne’s hand grazed my forearm. His fingertips pressed against the fabric, so very light. But it wasn’t until his hand traced over my concealed dueling wound, accompanied by a blister flash of pain, that I stepped back with a wheeze.
“Is everything all right?” A dozen things flashed through my head, questions and emotions all jumbled, all overwhelmed by a sudden surge of panic. My muscles eased when he withdrew. “I apologize. That was forward of me.” A slight, frustrated frown crossed his lips. “I seem to say those words to you a lot lately.”
“Apology accepted,” I said, even through the conflicting twinges of irritation and yearning for things to be different, to step forward, to feel that whisper of a touch. Even if it meant that bit of pain, too.
His intense expression lightened as he glanced at the nearby clocktower. “I want to speak with you further, but I’m afraid I must leave.”
“So soon?”
“My mother requested my presence.” At my raised eyebrows, Étienne laughed. “She thinks I’ve spent too much time away from home. Neglecting familial duties, as it were.”
“And what duties might those be?” I wanted to ask him how she was—I knew that she was unwell; Madame de Treville had told me. But he didn’t know I knew that. He didn’t know that I could tell, despite the casualness of his tone, that he worried about his mother.
He looked at me curiously. “Attending to matters of the estate. I’m the eldest. But I’m sure you already knew that.” The last bit was offhand, his focus drifting to the students.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Only that everyone is acutely aware I’m my father’s only son and due to inherit his titles and burdens. Strange, how my parents paid for my education to have me use it ‘being a gentleman.’”
“I don’t know what you mean to imply, but—” I started.
“I intended no slight. I was complaining; I’m acting like a child, I know—”
“I don’t think it’s childish at all,” I broke in. Now was my chance. “It’s like you told me: You want to make a name for yourself, to do good on your own terms. That’s not the problem. The problem is that I still know next to nothing about you other than what you don’t want to be. I don’t exist for your amusement. I am not a toy. If you don’t want to be thought childish, prove it. Tell me who you are, Étienne. Who you are and what you want.”
The air had gone very cold. The response had sounded right in my head, as a way to force his hand, but when I laid it all out, flesh side up, bare to the elements, it rang with emotion I hadn’t expected. Oh Dieu, what had I done?
But then his expression opened, warmer than I’d ever seen. I wanted to reach for his hand but stopped as I remembered Madame de Treville’s instructions. He had to chase me.
“Tania,” he whispered my name like it belonged on his lips, like it had always belonged there. I closed my eyes briefly against his, against the sharp light and sounds of the university square, the thick pain of betrayal rolling in my stomach.
A shadow fell over us. Nearly time for Aria to return from her feigned meeting, surely … but even she wasn’t tall enough to douse us in darkness. For the first time since Étienne approached, I felt the cold rush of wind, air on the cusp of winter.
“Father?”
Not now. Please, not now. This was a trick, a joke, a prank. It wasn’t possible to summon a person by thinking about them. If it were, Papa would be by my side. “I told Mother I’d return today—isn’t sending you to fetch me a bit excessive?” he said.
Steeling myself, I spun to face the man who might have murdered my father.
I’d pictured his face often in the past weeks; it came to me in my nightmares, the ones that left me drenched in tears and my throat sore from screaming. There was so much of Étienne in him. The sharp jaw, the dark hair … thankfully his eyes were icy green, held no resemblance to Étienne’s hazel ones.
“Not that you have any reason to be privy to such information, but I’m here on business—I figured you’d return to your old haunts. Besides, must I have a reason to see my only son?” His words were cool. “Now, then, aren’t you going to introduce me to your lovely acquaintance?”
It would take less than five seconds. Less than five seconds to retrieve my sword and dagger from under my skirts and flay him from navel to nose. My fingers itched for my saber. I grasped a ruffle of my skirt instead. This wasn’t me—I wasn’t eager to hurt others. There was something scary in how the eagerness stemmed in me, the unfamiliarity of it. But then, this could be Papa’s killer. This wasn’t an innocent civilian, wasn’t even a man on the docks with his sword pointed at me.
“Father, I present to you Mademoiselle Tania.”
His gaze roved over me, clinical. “Just Tania?”
Did he recognize me? Did he see my father’s face in mine like I saw Étienne’s face in his? “Mademoiselle Tania,” I emphasized, a bit too much bite in my response.
He studied me for what felt like an eternity. Murderer ringing in my ears, my pulse. Finally, he returned to his son. “Interesting. Étienne, bid adieu to your companion. You’re clearly prone to distraction, and I won’t risk you forgetting your promise to your mother.”
The sentence echoed in my mind; Maman had said something eerily similar before. She always had me making promises she knew I couldn’t keep.
Étienne tried to speak. “Father, I—”
Verdon hardened. “I shouldn’t have to remind you of your duty, Étienne. To your family. To me. I’m feeling generous, so I’ll give you a moment to gather yourself, but you will be in that carriage in five minutes. Understood?”
Flames licked at the corners of my vision as Verdon retreated to the street corner a few hundred feet away. His steps were quick, meticulous. He couldn’t have been older than Papa—but while Papa’s movements had shown the creaks and cracks of a body worked to the bone, Verdon’s motions were unencumbered from vestiges of injuries. It would’ve been easy for him to quietly sneak up on Papa in the paling twilight, to hide under the sound of Beau’s hooves, to silently dispatch my father. That is, if he’d deigned to do the bloody work himself. After conversing with a groomsman, he disappeared into a waiting carriage with a lion emblazoned on its side, reminiscent of the seal on Étienne’s letter.
“I’m sorry,” Étienne whispered close to my ear. I shivered and tightened the hood of Maman’s embroidered cloak. “I know how my father comes off—I’m sure he does, too, but he doesn’t care. I meant it when I said we didn’t see eye to eye. I’m working on that, though. I’ll do whatever it takes to make him understand that other people matter. That we matter.” My face warmed under his concern. “We will speak more when I return, of what you talked about. I promise, no interruptions.”
Once he was out of my vicinity I could breathe again. When he was next to me he took up all the air until there was so little left that I had to take searching, gasping breaths, hoping to catch a wisp of air to pull myself out of the haze.
I felt the presence of my sisters in arms before I looked up—Aria and Théa at my shoulder. “Did you get what we needed?” I asked.
Théa nodded, gleeful, and pointed to her frilled skirts. “I strapped the books to my legs, Tania—to my legs! Have you ever heard of anything so scandalous?”
Aria tugged at my arm before we set off. “I didn’t mean to spring him on you. But I didn’t see any other option. Did you get new information?”
The heat of Étienne’s hand on my arm lingered even after we parted. The ice of his father’s gaze burned in my mind. “Yes. Yes, I think I did.”
* * *
“Familial duties? Really?” said Portia after we returned. We were clustered in the parlor, chairs pulled close to the fireplace for warmth. “Why else would his father suddenly appear in Paris? He’s obviously taking him home to resume plotting the King’s murder.”
I responded before Portia finished. “You didn’t hear him: He hates his father. And the feeling is mutual. On the slightest chance Étienne’s involved, he’s being coerced.”
“What does it matter if he can give us the information we need?” Portia asked. “And why are you so set on defending him?”
“Because I’ve spent time with him, Portia! He’s thoughtful, not selfish. His father, on the other hand—”
“Girls,” Madame de Treville warned. We ceased bickering. Aria’s eyes remained on mine a moment before she returned to leafing through one of the books Théa had acquired.
“We don’t have time for this,” Madame de Treville continued. Her ever-constant refrain. With December around the corner, every interaction with her was fraught, sharp. “Tania, get Verdon to open up more when he returns. Procuring the shipment information from him was brilliant; who knows what else he has to offer? Maybe we can even get him to confide in you about his father’s plans.”
“I can try, but—”
“You did well laying out your cards when you told him you weren’t to be trifled with. Now is the time to force his hand. We’ll assign you a different target for the first party after he returns.”
Unfamiliar emotions swirled through my chest. “And what exactly will that accomplish?” I asked.
“Isn’t it obvious? You’re going to make him mad with jealousy. He’ll see you flirting and he’ll have no choice but to spill his heart to you,” Portia answered before Madame de Treville could.
Aria stood at the mention of flirting, before Portia was even finished speaking. “I’m going to bed,” Aria said.
“As you all should,” our mentor announced. “Get some sleep. We’re almost at the end, girls. I can feel it. We’re going to accomplish what even les Mousquetaires du Roi couldn’t. What all those men couldn’t. We’re going to be the ones to save the King.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
IT TOOK HOURS for me to reach the brink of sleep, to latch onto that numbing haze, and then: the sound of a foot placed carefully, but not carefully enough. A clench of floorboard against floorboard. The wheeze of wood panels creaking under pressure.
The noise spurred a series of images: Papa dead and alone in the dark. The man bleeding on the docks. The men who’d gutted Papa’s office and left us to pick up the pieces. The men who planned to kill me if they had the chance.
I rose from my bed. Did my best not to rush, did my best to wait until I became accustomed to the pitch and fall of the world. It was probably Théa, searching for her chamber pot. Or Portia, pacing in her room, as she did when she was unraveling a particularly obscure problem.
None of these reassurances kept me from arming myself with my dagger before stepping into the hallway.
Empty. There was nothing. All of it, imagined. Théa’s snores thundered under the crack of her door, only partially muffled by the carpet.
But then my stomach plummeted, fine hairs vertical on my arms when something shifted in the dark. No, someone. “Halt!” I said. “Arrétez-vous!” I wanted to cry the words, but I was too surprised, too unsteady on my trembling legs to raise my voice louder than it would be when speaking in the parlor.
A masked figure, covered head to toe in black, paused, boots inaudible on the carpet as he rotated to face me. “Bonsoir, Mademoiselle la Mousquetaire.” Words gruff, he spiraled his hand and draped himself into a parody of a bow.
My blood went cold as I scrambled for my dagger. “What did you call me?”
“You believe no one has discovered your secret?” The way he spoke, the forced harshness—he was altering his voice.
I fought to maintain my grip on the sweat-lined dagger handle. “Well, you know who I am. Why don’t you tell me who you are, and we’ll call it even?”
“I don’t think that wise, but I applaud the effort.”
I caught a glimpse of a sheaf of papers. “If you give those back, I won’t alert the guards.”
“Ah, but that is a lie. Look how you tremble in fear.”
“Even if I were afraid, I’m braver than you could ever be,” I ground out.
“Continue to tell yourself this, ma chère. I bid you adieu.”
“Wait!” I stormed forward to find an object held right under my nose, his arm outstretched. Coughing, I waved away the sudden pungent fumes. But then I lurched. Grabbed onto a dresser as the floor pitched, tumbled, transformed into a roiling, angry sea. This wasn’t the dizziness I knew; this was something else, something foreign and monstrous. Something that flared across my vision in large swaths of onyx.
After a long, painful stretch of time, my vision cleared. The hallway was empty. Everything as it had been, aside from the smell scorched into my nostrils. The thief had vanished.
Heart pounding, I knelt, not heeding the warning that spotted across my vision. Just clenched my toes as I felt along the carpet for anything that could’ve produced my symptoms, anything he might’ve left behind. But I only found flecks of dust.
“Tania?” Aria stood in the threshold of her doorway holding a candlestick, delicate light pooling into the hallway. She coughed, cleared her throat, her words gruff at first. “I thought I heard…” She set down the light before padding over, bare feet against carpet. “Did you faint?”
She helped me up as the floor tilted under me. “There was a thief. He knew what I am—what we are,” I said.
She scanned the length of the hall. “Where is he?”
“He had papers. I tried to stop him, but he—I don’t know what he did, but he held an object up to my face—a vial, maybe? And the smell…” Hearing it out loud made it sound ridiculous. “You don’t think me foolish?”
Aria took up the candlestick once more, half her face illuminated in its buttery glow. “Would you lie about this?”
“Of course not,” I said.
She let out a deep breath, her gaze traveling along the creaks and corners of the hallway. “We need to investigate. Did he have a rope? Un rossignol?” I stared at her blankly. “A picklock, Tania. To get inside. Though the house’s locks are reinforced. He could’ve climbed. But then he would’ve entered through a window.” She paced, unaware of my growing shock. “Not impossible. The risk of breaking glass, however. Any thief worth their salt would know better.”
“Aria,” I said eventually, “how?”
“How what?”
“How do you know all of this? Does this have to do with what you told me that day in the carriage? About La Cour des Miracles?” She hesitated, but she didn’t tell me to stop, or cut me off, so I forged on. “I want to understand. How to assess this aftermath, how to think like the intruder. If I understand, I can help you figure out how he got in—maybe even who he is. Please, Aria,” I added to the statue who’d replaced her.
At long last, a crack: a release of her rocky shoulders, an unclench of her sharp jaw. “You remember our conversation?” she asked.
“Of course.” Madame de Treville lecturing Portia, the shadowed alleyway, Aria whispering from across the carriage … “You said you grew up in La Cour. But I don’t understand how that’s possible.”
She drew me into her room and shut the door, resignation flooding her face. “Sit.” She motioned to an armchair and studied me before returning the candlestick to her nightstand. “What I’m going to tell you remains between us. Théa must never know. Or Madame de Treville, for that matter.”
“And Portia?”
Aria’s face smoothed, expression tender. “She knows.”
“Is it that … are you worried Théa or Madame de Treville would treat you differently? Your past is part of you; our past is part of each of us—but that doesn’t mean we’re not ourselves. It doesn’t mean you’re not still Aria.”
Her cool eyes remained unchanged, but her body tensed. “Théa would insist on knowing everything. She doesn’t know which questions not to ask. I can’t deal with that. I will be in control of what I tell and what I don’t. And Madame de Treville would never forgive me. She thinks she is the same as us because she knows struggle. That her rejection by the Musketeers gives her heightened understanding. But she doesn’t comprehend what it’s like to be pushed aside for other reasons than just being a woman. You must promise, Tania. Promise you won’t tell them.” What could I do but nod? She took a deep breath. “I’ll start from the beginning. I have to start from the beginning.
“Until I was ten, it was me and ma mère. We shared a small appartement within La Cour des Miracles with another family. A large family. My mind’s erased most aside from my mother’s voice. Her smile…” Her gaze was distant. “She did what she had to. Made sure I had clothes on my back and food in my stomach, however little.”
A pang went through my chest. Maman, with fury in her face. Maman, with how she let my fingers bite into her arm when I needed to stand. Maman, who wanted me to be safe even though she didn’t—couldn’t—understand that maybe I could be the one doing the saving. “She sounds strong.”
