Read Chapter 24: The Wound's Cost

The convent’s infirmary smelled of beeswax and old linen, a sweetness that sat poorly over the iron tang of blood. Élise worked by candlelight, her fingers steady even as her shoulder throbbed beneath its fresh dressing. Sister Marguerite lay on the narrow cot, her face the color of tallow, a dark stain spreading through the bandages wrapped tight around her ribs.

James stood in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame. His coat hung open, revealing the stained shirt beneath, and the deep furrow of the sword cut along his side had begun to seep through the linen again. He had not sat down since they dragged Marguerite through the convent’s back gate, pursued by shadows that melted into the dawn.

“You should rest,” Élise said without turning.

“So should you.”

“One of us has to keep watch.” She pressed a clean cloth against Marguerite’s wound, feeling the shallow rise and fall of the nun’s breathing. The ball had passed through the lower ribs, missing the lung by a finger’s width. A month ago, Élise would have called that luck. Now she called it mercy, and she was not sure she believed in either.

Marguerite stirred, her eyelids fluttering. Her lips moved, forming a word too faint to hear.

Élise leaned closer. “Sister?”

The nun’s eyes opened, hazy with pain. “The papers… did you get them?”

“You gave James a map,” Élise said gently. “There were no papers in the satchel.”

Marguerite’s face twisted, not with pain but with something deeper—fear, or shame. “I could not carry them. Too many eyes in the convent. I gave them to someone I trust.”

“Who?”

“A banker in Paris.” Marguerite swallowed, wincing. “Rue Saint-Honoré. Maison Aubert. He was my father’s friend. He has kept our secrets for twenty years.”

James stepped into the room, his boots heavy on the stone floor. “And the fortress? Your message mentioned Namur.”

Marguerite’s gaze found him, and something passed between them—a recognition that had nothing to do with the two decades that separated their childhoods. “The Château de Bouillon, south of Namur. It is not a château anymore. It is a prison.” Her voice cracked. “They kept Pierre there. They keep him still, unless they have moved him.”

Élise’s hands stilled on the bandage. Her brother’s name hung in the air like a struck bell, the resonance of it filling the small room. Three years she had searched. Three years of false leads and dead ends, of letters returned unopened, of dreaming of his face in the smoke of a hundred battlefields.

“You are certain?” she asked.

“I saw him.” Marguerite’s eyes filled. “Two winters past, when they brought me to question him. They thought a woman’s presence would loosen his tongue. They did not know we had already—” She stopped, pressing her lips together.

“Already what?” James asked.

Marguerite turned her face to the wall. “Already loved each other. Before the war. Before everything. We were to be married in the spring of ’12. He wrote to me from the front, told me he had permission from his captain to take leave. He never came.” A single tear traced the line of her nose. “I took my vows the following autumn. I told myself God had called me. But it was grief. Only grief.”

Élise sat back on her heels. The room seemed to tilt, the candlelight swimming. Marguerite loved Pierre. Marguerite, who had been hidden away in this convent for years, who held the secret that could tear Europe apart, who had been shot for her trouble—she had loved Pierre. And Pierre had been tortured in a fortress near the Belgian border, not dead. Not dead.

“Why did you not tell me?” Élise’s voice came out raw.

“Because I did not know you.” Marguerite’s eyes met hers, and in them Élise saw an exhaustion that matched her own. “I did not know if you were a spy for Étienne, or for the royalists, or for anyone else who would use Pierre’s suffering for their own purposes. I still do not know what you are.” A ghost of a smile crossed her pale lips. “But you have your mother’s hands. I would know them anywhere.”

Élise looked down at her own fingers, stained with blood that was not her own. “You knew my mother?”

“She died before I came to France. But Pierre spoke of her. Of you.” Marguerite’s smile faded. “He spoke of you often, Élise. He said you were the bravest person he knew. That you would fight a war single-handed to find him.” She closed her eyes. “He was not wrong.”

The silence that followed was heavy, filled with the weight of years and distances. James shifted in the doorway, and Élise felt his gaze on her, steady and unreadable. He had known about his sister’s past—he must have. And yet he had said nothing.

“You knew,” she said, turning to him. “All this time, you knew she was connected to my brother.”

“I suspected.” James’s voice was quiet. “Marguerite and I barely knew each other as children. She was sent to France when I was six, to be raised by our aunt after our mother died. By the time I searched for her, she had already found God.” He paused. “Or rather, she had lost him.”

Marguerite laughed, a brittle sound that turned into a cough. “I found him again, brother. In the dark of that cell, with Pierre’s blood on my hands and my own death waiting in the corner, I found him. He does not speak in cathedrals. He speaks in the spaces between pain.”

Élise had no answer for that. She had stopped believing in God on the battlefield at Quatre Bras, when she had watched a boy of sixteen die with his intestines in his hands, calling for his mother. But she understood the spaces between pain. She had lived in them for three years.

She rose, her knees protesting, and crossed to the small table where the remnants of their supplies lay scattered. Clean linen, a bottle of wine too sour to drink, half a loaf of bread that had gone hard. She tore the bread into pieces and brought one to James.

“Eat,” she said. “You will be no good to anyone if you collapse.”

He took it, his fingers brushing hers. The touch was brief, but it lingered—a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire in the hearth. Élise pulled her hand away.

“We need to decide what we do,” she said, returning to Marguerite’s side. “The papers are in Paris. Pierre is in Namur. We do not have the strength for both.”

“We do not have the strength for either,” James said dryly. “I can barely lift a sword, and you are bleeding through your bandage again.” He gestured at her shoulder, where a fresh bloom of crimson had spread through the linen. “We are in no condition to storm a fortress or rob a banker.”

“Then what do you suggest?” Élise heard the edge in her own voice and did not soften it. “That we wait here until Étienne’s men find us? Until the royalists decide to burn the convent with us inside?”

“I suggest we do what Marguerite intended.” James crossed to the window, looking out at the grey afternoon light. “She gave us the map to the papers, not the papers themselves. The map is useless without the key. The banker holds the key. And the banker is in Paris.”

“And Pierre?”

James turned. For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, slowly, he reached into his coat and pulled out a folded letter, creased and worn at the edges. He held it out to Élise.

“I wrote this months ago, when I first began to suspect Marguerite was alive. I meant to deliver it to you in Brussels, before Waterloo, but—” He shook his head. “There was no time. And then there was no point.”

Élise took the letter. The seal was broken. She looked up at him, questioning.

“Read it,” he said. “Or don’t. But know that I have already made my choice. I am going to Namur. I am going to find your brother, and I am going to bring him out of that place if I have to burn it to the ground.”

“You do not even know him.”

“I know you.” James’s voice was low, rough with something that might have been feeling. “That is enough.”

Élise stood frozen, the letter in her hand. The weight of it seemed immense, heavier than the locket she had worn for so many years, heavier than the secrets they carried between them. She looked down at the unread words, written by a man she had saved from death on a battlefield, a man who had chased her across France, who had bled for her, who now stood before her offering to rescue a brother he had never met.

She did not open the letter.

Instead she folded it, carefully, and tucked it into the pocket of her dress, over her heart.

“We go to Paris first,” she said. “We retrieve the papers, and we deliver them to the English man Marguerite promised them to. And then we go to Namur. Together.”

James opened his mouth to argue, but she cut him off.

“I have spent three years searching for my brother. Another week will not kill me.” She looked at Marguerite, whose eyes were open now, watching them both with a strange expression—grief and hope tangled together. “And I will not let you face that fortress alone. You saved my life. You helped me find my brother. The least I can do is keep you alive long enough to see it done.”

James held her gaze for a long moment. Then, slowly, he nodded. “Paris, then. And then Namur.”

“And then Namur,” Élise agreed.

She turned back to Marguerite, easing the bandage from the nun’s ribs. The wound had stopped bleeding. The flesh around it was pink and angry, but clean. With rest and care, she would heal. They all would, perhaps, in time. The scars would remain—they always did—but the wounds themselves could close.

Marguerite reached up and caught Élise’s hand. Her grip was surprisingly strong.

“When you find him,” she said, her voice barely a whisper, “tell him I waited. Tell him I never stopped waiting. Tell him—” Her voice broke. “Tell him I am sorry I could not wait longer.”

Élise squeezed her hand. “You will tell him yourself. When we return.”

Marguerite shook her head, a sad smile on her lips. “I will be here, Sister. In this convent. It is where I belong now. But you—” She looked from Élise to James and back again. “You belong with each other. Do not let the war take that from you too.”

The words settled over the room like ash, soft and final. Élise did not answer. She did not know how to. She finished dressing Marguerite’s wound, collected the scattered supplies, and went to the window where James stood, looking out at the gathering dusk.

The convent grounds stretched before them, grey and quiet. Beyond them, the road to Paris wound through the countryside, and beyond Paris, the road to Namur, and beyond Namur, a fortress where her brother waited.

She did not know what they would find there. She did not know if the papers would reach England in time, or if Étienne’s agents would catch them first, or if the peace that had been bought with so much blood would hold. She did not know if Pierre was still alive.

But she knew one thing. She was no longer alone.

James’s hand found hers in the dim light, their fingers interlocking. He said nothing, and neither did she. They stood together, watching the darkness fall, two wounded soldiers waiting for the dawn.