Rook(3)

“Fate is our true Goddess, Gerard, and Luck is her handmaiden. Luck has been with the Red Rook tonight and not with you. The next time you allow traitors to walk out of the Tombs, you shall be unlucky indeed. One piece of you for each prisoner that is lost, one inch at a time. Do you believe that I will do this?”

Gerard nodded, his eyes closed, round face beaded with sweat. His hand lay exactly where it had been, bleeding onto the polished wood.

“Then we have an understanding.”

Gerard nodded more vigorously, breath hissing from between his teeth.

“Good. That is good. You will begin at dawn, with the cells that are the closest. One of them will have seen. And if they do not tell me what they have seen, I will make them beg for the blade. They will run up the steps of the scaffold.”

LeBlanc moved smoothly across the room to the door. “You should see to that wound, Gerard, so you do not lose the hand. Heat would be best, I think.” He paused before a gilded mirror, amending a slight deficiency in his neckwear. “And do clean up the desk,” he added.

When LeBlanc shut the door of his office he found Renaud, his secretary, emerging from the far end of the corridor.

“They will be in boats, Renaud,” he said. “Have the gendarmes ready and send a courier to our ships on the coast. He has taken too many this time. They will be difficult to disguise.”

The words had been muted, but Renaud had good ears. He bowed and slid away as LeBlanc tilted his head toward the office door, waiting. When the sizzle of hot metal on wounded flesh finally reached his ears, he smiled. This time Gerard had not held back his scream. And it had been impressive.



Sophia ran the horses down a dirt road through the land the Parisians called The Désolation. The haularound rattled and bumped beneath her, the fading nethermoon a passing glimpse of white through entwining limbs, the north lights twisting like green and purple smoke in the sky. Finally she turned onto a grassy track, loose potatoes rolling from side to side, until the forest opened into a small clearing that was almost perfectly square. It was probably a ruin, this clearing, like most of them, a thick layer of concrete or asphalt close enough to the surface to discourage the trees. The haularound rolled to a stop, and behind the sudden silence ebbed a distant rush and boom. The sea.

Sophia lifted the edge of the holy man’s robes and found the little girl, soft blond hair shorn ragged about the ears, still clinging to her leg. She’d fallen asleep. Sophia disentangled the child’s limbs, ignoring her protests as she slung her over a shoulder and climbed down from the seat.

She hurried to the back of the haularound. A latch clicked, a long board went clattering to the ground, and a jumble of two dozen feet was revealed in the narrow, hidden space beneath. Moans fell from mouths like the potatoes to the ground. She’d had the space made for weapons and supplies, not people.

“Out!” Sophia commanded, voice gruff and in Parisian, one arm full of a child who was done with being still. Marie Bonnard scooted out from the space, wearing a dress possibly held together by its own dirt, tugging out her two older children before stumbling over to snatch up her little girl. When the haularound had emptied there were thirteen faces turned to the holy man, all showing differing levels of desperation, hope, and inquiry. And then, like puppets on the same string, every head jerked to look back down the grassy track. Another rhythm had joined the remote sound of surf, a thunder that resolved into the harsh tattoo of hoofbeats, coming fast and closing in on the clearing.

Panic moved through the group like contagion. Ministre Bonnard’s hollow eyes darted to the woods and back, chest heaving beneath a once-fine vest, then five gendarmes burst from the trees, sword hilts winking in the moonlight. Ministre Bonnard let out a yell like an animal. He went for the holy man’s throat with surprising speed, crying out as an even quicker hand shot from beneath the black robes, catching the man’s wrist and twisting. The ministre gasped, clutching his wrist to his chest.

“Friends,” Sophia whispered. “They are friends.”

Ministre Bonnard gaped incoherently while his wife sank to her knees, trying to bounce and shush their little girl. The gendarmes dismounted and without a word began putting the former prisoners of hole 1139 in the saddles. One of them, tall, blond, and with broad shoulders only just stuffed into the short, tight coat of an officer, tossed his reins around a limb and approached the holy man.

“You’ve left your feather behind you, then?” he asked, Parisian accent thick.

“Of course,” Sophia replied, grinning as the heavy robes came off, showing a slim figure in leather breeches and a vest. A wig of thick, dark hair was thrown with the robes into the bed of the haularound.

“The Red Rook!” they heard one of the thirteen whisper. “Le Corbeau Rouge!” Their murmurs of fear had shifted instantly to excitement. Sophia glanced once in their direction and switched to a softer voice and the language of the Commonwealth.

“Is all well? You got my message?”

The gendarme who was not a gendarme stepped closer, taking his cue for the change in language. “Yes, and it scared the life out of us. Cartier agreed to man the second boat. How did you manage?”

“Waited until the alarm sounded and the gendarmes had gone running, then took them all out Gerard’s office window and left the coffins behind. We were lucky to switch the wagons. The child came out under the robes. The poor holy man developed an abscess in his leg, I’m afraid. A horrible infection. The watchman at the prison said he must have sinned.”