Page 79

Rodrick was already moving. The register office stood at the yard's eastern end, lit by a lantern.

Two grooms were arguing over a tally sheet.

"—I tell you we were issued six sacks, not four."

"You had your share yesterday."

"Yesterday's oats do not feed a horse today, you fool."

Rodrick shook his head as he stepped between them. "Are you still arguing over this?"

They turned, mid-retort, irritation ready—then stalled just enough for him to take the slate from their hands.

"Ha, here it is. One delivery," Rodrick said, drawing a line through the scrawled numbers. "Entered twice. You've counted the same six sacks for both squadrons."

"That's not—"

"It is," Rodrick cut in, already adjusting the figures. "Twenty-four mounts here, eighteen there. Four measures per horse, not five. You'll have enough if you stop inventing extra animals. You—take the fodder and see it issued properly. No one eats until the horses do."

He turned the other by the shoulder and pointed toward the yard.

"Go and count your mounts again. This time with your eyes open."

The man opened his mouth, thought better of it, and went.

Really, if only normal people realized how powerful a drug authority was. Now blessedly alone, Rodrick brought the sheet to the lamp. The horses were listed by squadron.

Montmorency. Where are you?

He had been asking this question for fifteen years. He had asked it in London and Paris and Lisbon and Madrid. He had asked it in rooms where asking cost him things he did not have to spare. He had asked it of Talleyrand, who had smiled and given him fragments—a country, a regiment, an approximation—and kept the rest as currency.

He shifted to the officers' register pinned beside it, scanning for rank, billet, and attachment. Montmorency used to name his horses after grand heroes from France's chivalric age… Roland. Olivier. Bayard. Renaud Montauban. But instead of knights, there were only lofty names like Honneur. Fidélité. Justice. Prudence.

Vengeance.

Don't we all want it? Pity it was always served so cold.

He almost smiled. Royalist gentlemen. So predictable. Abstract virtues for abstract men who had spent twenty years in exile telling themselves their cause was sufficient reason to return.

He had reached the bottom of the page when his eye caught something different.

Pamplemousse.

He stopped, unable to breathe, as if a ghostly hand had reached up from the grave to clamp his neck.

You didn't do this, Antoine. Tell me you did not name your horse after—Fuck.

"Where is this one stabled?" he asked a passing groom.

The scrawny boy pointed toward the inner stalls reserved for officers' mounts.

The noise fell away as Rodrick walked the length of the stable, replaced by the quieter sounds of animals at rest. Breathing. The shift of weight. The occasional stamp of a hoof on packed earth. Lantern light gave way to the dimmer glow of widely spaced hanging lamps.

He found number twelve at the end.

The horse lifted its head when he entered—a bay, darker than the remount he'd steadied in the yard. Its ears came forward. It regarded him with the calm of an animal well handled.

He checked the tackle on the peg outside the stall.