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Hortense met her in the courtyard of the château of Malmaison. Josephine's daughter held her hands together, as though she was trying to keep something inside them from escaping.

"Where is he?" Louise asked.

"The Emperor is in the maze. He has not spoken to anyone today. The National Guard is outside. They say it is for his protection, but—" Hortense's voice faltered, and she glanced toward the bench where her son sat.

Louis-Napoleon looked somber beyond his seven years, as though he understood that something enormous was happening and had decided the safest thing he could do was become very still.

"I don't know what to do," Hortense whispered.

Louise's chest tightened. There was nothing she could give Hortense that would make the soldiers disappear from the gates or put a smile on her son's face.

She reached for Hortense's hands. They were cold despite the summer air. "You've done so much already. You stayed when everyone else found reasons to leave."

Hortense's chin trembled, and Louise wished she had something more useful than gratitude to offer.

"I will speak with the Emperor."

The château of Malmaison was beautiful, but it was in the gardens that the phrase haunted house made sense. Here Josephine had planted her famous flowers. Dinners had been held and games played on these lawns. The Emperor had walked these paths not as a man pressed by armies but as a husband expected at supper. She tried to place it—the sound of laughter instead of guards, the doors opening to guests instead of messengers—but the image would not settle. The air felt too tight for it.

She sped her steps, her boots crunching the gravel. The maze's hedges towered over her, swallowing the late afternoon light.

She was inside before she had finished deciding to enter. The first turn robbed her of the exit. Why did aristocrats design things like this?

She pulled in a sharp breath, but no air came. It was normal, this shortness of breath. It was not like she was suffocating. Just because Rodrick still refused to see her didn't mean she couldn't breathe.

She turned right again, then three lefts. Everyone was counting on her. Caulaincourt, de Brissac, Hortense and her little boy, everyone.

Another wrong turn. Then another. Wrong turns were no strangers to her. She had been making them for months. The mission she had accepted without question. The trust she had withheld when she assumed the worst. Waterloo, the Genappe road, the farewell that was still sitting in her chest like a shard she could not locate to remove.

She turned again.

Time passed too fast. The provisional government's hour ticked down somewhere outside the hedge walls. And Rodrick—Charlotte had told her this morning that he had been writing letters. That he had been making inquiries about Vienna.

She took the left junction and, just like that, the path opened. The gravel gave way to pale stone, and a fountain ran softly.

Napoleon sat on a bench, looking at his palms as if they were a map.

"Sire," she said. "I have just spoken with Caulaincourt. I bring options."

"Eh." He patted the place beside him. "Let's hear them."

She sat by his side and kept her hands folded in her lap, fingers tightening against each other to hold them still.

The provisional government and the Allied commanders wanted Napoleon's surrender. For the moment, however, there was still time to get him out of France. Louise laid out the routes Caulaincourt had given her—Rochefort first, with ships waiting on the Atlantic and contacts in America if they could reach the coast before the Allies closed the road. Then Switzerland, with men in Geneva prepared to arrange his passage. Each plan remained possible. Neither would remain possible for long.

He listened, then his chin dropped to his chest. The fountain continued its steady flow, the sunlight dancing along the rim of the basin. Somewhere beyond the hedges, a bird called and fell quiet again.

How could he be so still?

She forced her legs to stay put against the impulse to stand, to move, to grab his hands and urge him. The guards were outside the house. The Allies were at the gates of Paris.

"Sire, the options depend on acting quickly. Time is against us. If we don't act now, all will be—"

Abruptly, he stood, leaving her staring at his gray coat.

Then he began to pace, moving around the perimeter of the circular court.

Something in the way he held himself had changed. His shoulders leaned forward, as though they carried a weight that drew him down.