Read Chapter 1: The Midnight Despatch

The barn door came off its hinges with a sound like a cannon shot, and René Delacroix was already moving before the first ember landed in the straw.

He hit the frozen ground shoulder-first, rolled, and came up running with the charred scent of his own burning luck in his nostrils. Behind him, the farmhouse groaned and collapsed into a tower of orange sparks that licked the low Lorraine sky. A mare screamed somewhere inside—not his problem. His problem was the letter, pressed flat against his ribs beneath a leather doublet that had seen three wars and a dozen lies.

The letter was thin. That was the joke of it. A single sheet of good paper, folded thrice and sealed with Cardinal Richelieu's own ring, and it had already cost four men their lives tonight. René intended to make it five if he had to—though he'd rather it be someone else's.

"Delacroix!" The shout came from his left, ragged with wine and road dust. "Delacroix, you whore's son, stand fast!"

He didn't turn. He knew that voice—Sergeant-Major Vautrin, once of the Cardinal's own guard, now of nothing at all because he'd chosen the wrong side of a Cologne alley knife fight and owed his continued breathing to the man who'd saved him. The same man who'd just sold René's route to the Imperials for the promise of a purse and a pardon.

Vautrin was the betrayer, then. René filed that fact in the ledger he kept behind his ribs and let it settle next to the others. It did not surprise him. The last thing to surprise him had been his mother's death, and that had been eighteen years and a lifetime of duplicity ago.

He vaulted the low stone wall at the paddock's edge and landed badly, his left ankle screaming a protest he chose to ignore. His horse—a sturdy, ugly bay he'd called Treason for reasons he no longer remembered—was tethered to the post where he'd left him, already dancing with panic at the smell of fire and blood.

"Easy, easy," René muttered, cutting the tether with one clean stroke of his belt knife and swinging up bareback in the same motion. Treason needed no urging; he was off like a bolt from a crossbow, hooves throwing clods of black mud at the night.

Behind him, Vautrin's voice rose again, this time joined by others. Deeper voices, harder accents. German. Low German, some Swabian, a smattering of Bavarian. Imperial cavalry, and not the rabble that followed whoever paid last. These were Ossa's men, and Ossa ran with the Wolf's own precision.

René cursed—in French, in Italian, in the gutter Spanish he'd learned from a Toledo whore who'd taught him other things too—and leaned low over Treason's neck. The bay stretched into a gallup, and the cold air of an early October night tore at René's ears until they ached. Behind him, the burning farmhouse painted the world in lurid orange, and in that light he saw shadows move. Many shadows. Fifteen, twenty riders at least, fanned out in a wide crescent that meant they knew their business.

Someone had told them exactly how he'd come.

So Vautrin hadn't just sold the route. He'd sold the timing, the approach, the very shape of the moon. The letter was worth that much. It had to be. Richelieu didn't write letters that cost four lives without them being worth four hundred.

René drove Treason toward the treeline, where the oaks swallowed the light and the undergrowth would break the cavalry's charge into single file. He knew this ground—knew it the way a fox knows it, not from maps or study, but from the necessity of survival. Two leagues west lay the village of Domrémy, and beyond that a ford across the Meuse that might buy him an hour if the water ran low. Two leagues past that, the road to Paris, and safety in crowds and numbers and the blessed anonymity of a man who was no one.

But the treeline was still a quarter league away, and the ground between was open pasture, and Treason was already blowing hard from the day's killing pace.

"They'll have pistols," René told the horse, as if the animal could answer. "And they're not afraid to use them on a man with a letter he'll never show."

A pistol cracked behind him—answered the observation with rude finality—and the ball whined past his ear like an angry hornet. Close. Closer than he'd like. The Imperials had trained marksmen, then, or lucky ones, and he couldn't tell which frightened him more.

He twisted in his saddle, risked a look back, and saw a rider breaking from the crescent—a big man on a black horse, his breastplate catching the firelight, a wheel-lock pistol still smoking in his gauntleted hand. The man raised the pistol in salute, made no move to reload, and instead drew a long, narrow sword.

Hunting sword. Duelling sword. The weapon of a man who wanted his quarry alive.

That changed things. If they wanted him alive, they'd hold their fire at close range. That meant they knew who he was—knew his face, his name, his habits. That meant someone who knew him very well had told them. Vautrin knew him, but Vautrin was a petty thief with a drinking problem; he didn't know enough to bring out Ossa's iron riders.

Something else was in play. Something that made the letter feel heavier against his ribs.

The treeline rose toward him, dark and forgiving, and René allowed himself one breath of hope before the world turned to breaking glass.

Treason screamed—a sound that would live in René's nightmares until he died—and the horse's forelegs buckled as the ground gave way beneath them. A ditch. A rain-swollen drainage cut, hidden by the tall grass, yawning like a dead man's mouth in the darkness.

René kicked free of the stirrups a moment before impact, throwing himself forward and to the side in a graceless arc that ended with his shoulder striking the creaking roots of an ancient oak. Pain exploded down his arm, bright and white, and he tasted blood where his teeth had caught the inside of his cheek.

Behind him, Treason's scream cut off in a wet crunch.

René didn't look. He couldn't look. The horse was dead, the letter was still pressed against his ribs, and he could hear the thundering of hooves growing closer. He pushed himself up, ignoring the screaming protest of his shoulder, and ran.

The forest swallowed him, and the darkness became his only ally.

He moved like a man who had learned to move through shadows—skirting the pools of moonlight, stepping where the fallen leaves were damp and quiet, breathing through his mouth to keep the rasp of his lungs from carrying. Behind him, the sounds of pursuit changed. Riders dismounted. Voices called orders in German. Someone laughed, and the laugh was not kind.

They knew the forest. They knew the ground. They knew, René suspected with growing dread, exactly where he was going.

The ravine came upon him without warning.

One moment he was moving through a thinning stand of elder, the next the ground simply ended, falling away into a black mouth of air and shadow. He heard the water below—a stream, deep enough to break a man's fall, shallow enough to break his legs—and measured the distance in a heartbeat. Eight feet. Perhaps ten. A gap a man could leap on a good day with a running start and no bullet holes in his self-regard.

Today was not a good day.

He turned instead, pressing his back against a moss-slicked boulder at the ravine's edge, and drew the one weapon he'd carried beyond his belt knife—a long, narrow blade of Solingen steel, taken from a dead captain at Breitenfeld who no longer had any use for it. It was a cavalry man's sword, too long for close work, but René wasn't planning on close work.

He was planning on one man. The one who wanted him alive.

The big rider came through the elder stand alone, his black horse picking its way with the arrogant confidence of an animal that had never known a fall. He reined in twenty feet away, studied René with pale eyes that caught what little light bled through the canopy, and smiled.

"You have the letter," the man said. His French was perfect, unaccented, the French of the Sorbonne and the court. "Give it to me, and I'll let you walk away."

"From you?" René laughed, and the sound was raw and broken. "You just watched my horse die in a ditch. You expect me to trust your word?"

"I expect you to be reasonable." The man's hand rested on the pommel of his sword, but he made no move to draw it. "You're a courier. Your life has value only insofar as it serves your master. But your life has no value at all if your master is dead."

René went still. The cold that settled in his chest had nothing to do with the October air.

"My master is the Cardinal," he said, testing the waters.

"Your master was the Cardinal." The man's smile widened, showing teeth that were too white and too even. "He died three hours ago in Rueil. The news travels slower than the letter, I'm afraid. It so often does."

Richelieu dead. René's mind raced, seizing on the impossibility of it, the wrongness. Richelieu had been ill for months—everyone in Paris knew it—but the man was a survivor, a cockroach in a red robe who had outlived a hundred plots and a dozen assassination attempts. To die now, three hours after dispatching a secret letter that could—

A lie. It had to be a lie.

But the doubt was already there, a splinter under the skin.

"Even if that were true," René said carefully, "the letter would matter even more. The Cardinal's enemies would want it."

"Oh, yes." The man's eyes glittered. "They would want it very much indeed. Which is why you'll give it to me now." He drew his sword with a whisper of steel that sang in the darkness. "Before I take it from your corpse."

René had been in enough fights to know when talking was over. He raised his Solingen blade, settled into a guard he'd learned from a Neapolitan fencing master who'd died screaming of the pox, and invited the big man to come and take it.

The man came.

He was fast—faster than his size suggested—and his blade came in a high line that René blocked a heartbeat too late, the shock of impact vibrating up his already-wounded shoulder. He gave ground, felt the edge of the ravine at his heels, and used it. The man pressed forward, his blade flickering in and out of the darkness like a snake's tongue, forcing René into a rhythm that didn't suit him.

René was not a duellist. He was a brawler with pretensions, and he knew it. He let the man push him back, back toward the edge, until the big man's confidence betrayed him—a half-step too far, a blade too extended.

René's sword came up in a wild parry that would have been laughable in a salle, but it caught the man's blade and twisted it wide, and in that moment of opening, René's free hand went to his belt and came away with a fistful of mud and leaf-rot.

He threw it in the big man's eyes.

The man howled—a sound of pure animal fury—and clawed at his face, and René did not hesitate. He stepped inside the man's guard and drove his blade into the gap between breastplate and gorget, where the mortality of every man lives regardless of his rank or his armour.

The big man made a wet sound and folded. René pulled his blade free, stepped back, and watched the rider topple sideways into the ravine, his body making a sound like a sack of wet stones as it hit the stream below.

The black horse shied and bolted into the darkness.

René stood at the ravine's edge, breathing hard, the letter burning against his ribs. Behind him, the sounds of pursuit were growing closer—voices calling in German, searching the trees.

He turned to look at the gap. It was wider than a man should reasonably leap, and the other side was steep, a crumbling bank of clay and roots that would not forgive a short landing.

Behind him, a voice shouted in Swabian German. A crossbow bolt hissed past his ear and embedded itself in a tree trunk.

René Delacroix, who had been ten men in ten countries and betrayed all of them to varying degrees, looked at the chasm, at the darkness beyond it, and then down at the letter pressing against his heart. Richelieu was dead—or would be in a few hours, if the rider had spoken true. Which meant the letter was an orphan now, a child without a parent, its purpose unclear.

But it was his letter. His burden.

He took three steps and leaped into the darkness.

The landing was not clean. René hit the far bank with his wounded shoulder, felt something tear deep in the muscle, and rolled up against a root that drove into his side like a fist. His sword was gone, dropped somewhere in the void, but he didn't need it. He had the letter. He had breath in his lungs. He had a story to tell whoever might listen.

He pushed himself to his feet, swaying, and began to climb the bank, leaving the ravine behind him and the body of the man who'd known too much in the cold water below.

The night was not done with him yet.