Athos knew any onlooker would have said he and the arrived courier rode at a brisk pace on their return trip to Pinon. But logically knowing this to be the case did nothing to convince him. In his mind, he trudged away from that backward inn, dragging his feet with every step away from his master's hovel, the widowed Anne's chamber, the fireside table at which they had shared meals so many times. Trudged like a man in mud so deep it threatened to suck off his very boots.

It was worse, perhaps, that it was a journey he could not even make alone—the courier sent from La Fere having been told he'd not be paid until he returned with Athos, and Athos' own coin grown too scant to make up that difference and dismiss him after he had paid for Anne's lodging, and his master's promised wage.


He had still been in the grip of Catherine's pleading letter when Madame Concierge had come and found him at a table in the public room, where he was seated, drinking alone.

"Man for you, My Sir," she said. "Come from Pinon." She had come to tell him directly, rather than just pointing the man this way, Athos knew, because she hoped (at his expense) he would bid her feed and water the man arrived from a journey of such length.

He did not.

When the man approached his table, he held out a letter. Athos did not extend his hand to take it. "What news?" he asked, without true interest, knowing such a courier would have some, if not all, the information the letter held.

"My lord is wanted at La Fere," for the courier well-knew Athos' rightful title.

"I am aware of this." Athos' replies revealed no heat in temperament, no seeming investment in the answers he received. He was benign, placid, his tone mild and removed.

"I am told your return is urgently called for."

"Of this, also, I am aware."

"Will you come, my lord?"

"What concern is it of yours?"

"My payment is contingent upon returning you, and with the dispatch in which it is done."

Still, the letter hung in the air.

"There is sickness in Pinon?" Athos asked.

"Grievously so, I am told."

"You are not aware first-hand?"

"I am employed out of Parne, Monsieur le Vicomte," he referenced Pinon's closest urban neighbor.

Athos tired of the letter, there, extended between them. He reached for it with intent to toss it into the fire beside which he had positioned himself.

It was a mistake. By taking it into his grip, he recognized the script upon it as though like a snake, it had bitten him. Thomas' hand. Gritting his teeth, he tore it open.

"Athos, You must come straightaway. I beg you, Thomas"

It was an exceptionally short letter, and would be an expensive one to have sent by this hired rider from Parne. He saw in the handwriting that Thomas was not quite himself; there appeared over-much effort in the swirls and curls of his brother's usually confident script, several spots where the pen had lost ink and stuttered. He tried not to imagine it having been written on a lap desk whilst his brother struggled to pen it from what was understood to be his sickbed.

This was Catherine's doing, he thought (only the second uncharitable thought he had ever had about her), this flourish, putting his sick brother to work to call him home. 'I beg you' Thomas had written. He exhaled a sigh. It was untenable.

And as for his father? As for Le Comte? Very well, Athos would return, as so ruthlessly beckoned. But once everyone's recuperation had been affected, Le Comte would have to renegotiate his eldest son's liberty again. He, Athos, was owed more time. He had been promised six weeks. And he meant to see that promise honored.

"We leave within the hour," he told the courier. "You may wait for me here," he pushed his cup toward the other man, and indicated the bottle from which he had been drinking. "I will see to our departure."


Athos increased Hyperion's gait. The next inn on the Pinon road, where they would water and very briefly rest their horses, was within a quarter-hour's ride.


She found no rest in the public coach that had left the inn, and (thankfully) left Madame Concierge—with whom she had bartered to pay for her ticket, as she would be leaving the room Athos for which Athos had left payment. A ticket that would take the gentlewoman widow Anne only so far, before she would need to purchase another to travel on, and need a new identity to match it as well.

It would not do for Sarazin to find Anne. Should they meet again (when she had managed to recover from her realization of utterly impractical attachment to the dusty swordsman), it would be best it were she who approached Sarazin—not he who found her out. Controlling such a narrative, arriving as a conquering hero rather than a runaway associate, was imperative to success and survival in Sarazin's world.

She had told herself she'd have hours to craft a new story, settle on a new name before she would need to make use of these new trappings of identity. Plenty of time to scheme and plan. And yet she was frittering it away, her mind still chewing over the startling ease with which Athos had managed to extricate himself from her, and seemingly without the smallest shred of regret.

So consumed was she in poring over the last twenty-four hours with him, the times she had been in his company—she had missed entirely when, at the coach's second stop, a respectably-dressed man of some means (nothing too flashy) had raised his eyebrows upon marking the charming young woman across from whom he was about to sit on his coming journey. Had she been more herself, more attentive to such things, she would have granted him an unforgettable introduction ten minutes gone.

As things stood, he had fallen into sleep, his mouth half-gaped, snoring sonorously, annoying the rest of those aboard the coach. Even at this, she marked him not.


The courier reckoned aloud that, allowing for their mounts to rest, they were yet three hours off from Pinon, La Fere twenty minutes beyond that.

"Ye shall sleep in your own good bed tonight, my lord," he had reminded Athos.

Athos had strongly wondered if he would ever sleep again amongst the rooms of La Fere's chateau, which spoke to him only of restraint and imprisonment in a bleak, disinteresting future.

"Perhaps," the passing thought came to him from seemingly out of nowhere, "it is the feeling of such oppression men attempt to flee by choosing, instead, their mistress' bed."

But mistress, if he had—or desired—any, for him would be, only, the sword. And the sword cared not where its master slept. As he walked away from the unwanted company of the courier, his mind begged the question of him: what did a Musketeers' bed rack, then, look like? Single, to a room? Or many lining the walls of a great, long hall? And when sent on business for the King, where, then, did a Musketeer, these men of the sword, lay his head?

He had been heading off back toward the stable—Hyperion's company about all that he could stand, when the clatter of a rider coming at great pace into the foreyard of the inn stirred up dust and clamor enough to distract even him.

He cast his gaze toward the cloud obscuring the rider—and his arrival.

"My Lord! My Lord!" came the call of the courier. "'Tis for you, this rider! News! News!"

Athos stood his ground, feeling no compunction to travel more closely. The two men, then, were left with nothing but to approach him. The new arrival, he found he knew. Mathieu, a groomsman at La Fere. He could not ride a horse elegantly, but had always been able to ride them fast.

"My lord, Athos," Mathieu greeted him, and with the impatience born of many years of having to live through hollow pleasantries and meaningless honorifics, Athos cut him short before his speech became any more florid.

"Speak," impatience echoed in the demand.

"I come bearing—"

"Speak," said Athos. Why someone should ride hell-for-leather to locate him and then prattle at length upon their arrival, he could not abide. "Don't babble."

"You father, Le Comte, is dead," Mathieu said, as instructed, to the point. He withdrew a packet from a thong about his neck, pulled something out of it, and perhaps, knowing Athos, (that he would not reach for the thing himself) reached for and secured Athos' hand, into which he dropped a small, gold ring. "You are Le Comte, now, my lord."

Athos felt the weight of it on his finger, without looking at it: his father's signet. Sign and seal that represented Le Comte de la Fere. The noble symbol of identity. What he should have felt about his father's death, he could not say. Perhaps would never be able to say. A Comte departed this world, a new one was baptized into it. He had spent his life being educated on what this moment would mean, what this vast, inherited responsibility would entail.

But what he had not realized—what no one had ever told him, suggested or even intimated—was that, until this moment he had been a falcon, blindfolded and on a tether, master of no one's fate, allowed free only at the beck of his master. And then, with a soul winging (he assumed) to Heaven, departing this world, and a ringlet now upon his finger, his Fate had changed forever. Changed, because now, now it was in his hands alone. He was subject only to the King himself.

"Thomas?" he asked, not needing to be more explicit. Was his brother also soon to die?

"Master Thomas improves more with every hour," Mathieu reported. "'Twas himself it was bid me bring you the signet. He'd strength enough to stand by your father's bed at the end."

At that, Athos felt that falcon's tether fall away. Blindfolding hood gone, he saw more clearly than he had ever done before.

"This man needs payment," he told Mathieu, of the courier. "You may tell my brother I shall arrive at La Fere in three days' time." In truth, he cared not if Mathieu performed either duty.

"You will not come with me, my lord—for the sake of your dead father?"

"No," he said, and there was no need to color it with any tincture of annoyance or impatience. Simply, 'no.' "I have business elsewhere."

Mathieu and the courier—equally taken aback by his reply-were still standing, shocked, as moments later he rode Hyperion out of the stables, back in the very direction he had just come.

...tbc...