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The canvas flapped in the wind, and somewhere outside, a horse stamped. The camp settled into sleep.

Sighing, he pulled the blanket over them and tucked it around her shoulder. With his thumb, he found her pulse, the blessed steady beat beneath the skin. Several hours of incontrovertible evidence had not persuaded some primitive part of him that Louise Bonnechoix remained among the living. His thumb stayed where it was.

Louise's hand moved over his ribs. Slowly at first, almost idly, then across his shoulder, down his arm, back again. Her fingertips found the scrape along his knuckles from the battery and paused.

Rodrick looked down at the top of her head. "I assure you, I remain structurally sound."

Something warm struck the hollow above his collarbone, followed by another drop. He did not lift her face. He would not make her submit those tears for inspection when she had already spent the day giving the world more of herself than it deserved.

Her mouth trembled against his throat. "Your recipe didn't work."

Rodrick swallowed. "Which part?"

"The part where this was supposed to make it stop."

Rodrick kept his finger on her pulse. "Then I have another recipe for you. Never risk your life like that again."

"Not even for a good cause?" came the whisper against his neck.

Rodrick closed his eyes. "No country, no father, no empire is worth what you did today, Lou."

Another tear slipped warm against his skin.

"You are wrong."

Rodrick pulled her nearer because pushing her away had ceased to be something his body knew how to do. Not while his thumb had to keep counting the beats of her heart.

Of course she believed that. Louise would empty herself for something she loved and call the expenditure meaning. She would ride at muskets, stand beneath cannon, offer blood to France and loyalty to a father she had scarcely known, and regard the transaction as perfectly sound.

Rodrick hated it. He hated that loyalty in her.

Because you want it.

The intrusive thought arrived in his mind in his own bloody voice.

That was precisely the sort of appetite a man starved before it learned to feed itself.

"Sleep, Lou. Tomorrow we will arrive at Charleroi, and you can place all this loyalty at your father's feet."

Louise went quiet against him. Rodrick stared into the darkness beyond her hair.

Rodrick hoped Napoleon understood the value of what he would be given.

Charleroi smelled of horses, powder, cook fires, sweat, and too many men occupying too little town. Louise followed Lieutenant Gérard through a street that had apparently ceased to belong to civilians sometime that morning. Infantry sat along walls with their shakos between their knees. Muskets stood stacked outside doorways.

Gérard threaded through it all with the satisfaction of a man showing a visitor around his ancestral château.

"De Brissac is in the lower town," he said.

"Any idea why he wants to see me?" Louise asked, wondering why she had been summoned less than two hours after they arrived in the city. She had tried to find Rodrick, but he had vanished with the senior officers.

"None. This way," Gérard said.

They turned into a broader street and nearly walked into an artillery train.

The guns' bronze barrels gleamed beneath the march's grime, each mounted on its carriage and drawn by teams of heavy horses. Behind them rolled ammunition caissons, wheels grinding over the stones.

Gérard pointed toward the largest pieces. "Twelve-pounders. The Emperor's favorites. He calls them his most beautiful daughters."