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She took it from the hook. Then dark breeches and a black overcoat. A helmet rested on the table beside the wardrobe. Also brass. White Bourbon plumes atop it. The crest fell in a long sweep of black horsehair.

She picked it up. Set it under her arm with the coat.

A field glass lay on the desk, half-hidden beneath a glove. She took it and slipped it into her pocket without breaking stride.

The saber hung on the wall beside the wardrobe, the leather of the scabbard worn smooth where a hand had found it again and again. She paused there a fraction longer, then took that too.

In her room, she stripped off the borrowed dress and pulled on the uniform. The coat went over it. She tied the strap of the field glass across her chest, then reached for the helmet. The brass was dulled by use, the surface marked with faint scratches.

She lowered it slowly over her head. The rim pressed above her brow, and the leather settled against her temples, close, enclosing.

The sounds of cannon and horses galloping outside muted. She gasped at the figure reflected in the mirror. The helmet made her taller, twenty feet tall. A soldier who could break a column, a raven knight. She seemed larger than life, powerful.

Good that she appeared like this on the outside, when inside, she felt so small. The woman who had been held by a loving spy all night. The spy who would hunt her father.

The street outside number 43 had changed. Last night it had been the Brussels of the ball—a gay city pretending the war was a backdrop. The carriages that had departed in flight were returning, the horses lathered, the occupants pale and silent or speaking in fragmented voices. Aides-de-camp cut through the foot traffic at a gallop, their horses scattering pedestrians without apology, dispatch bags at their sides.

Nobody looked at her as she passed through the traffic of returning coaches, through knots of officers comparing intelligence on street corners, through a column of wounded.

She followed the cannons' call south. At the corner of the rue de Namur, a gray horse was tied to a post of what had been a tavern and was now a makeshift aid station.

She spoke to it quietly, the way Rodrick had taught her to. The horse's ears swiveled toward her. It shifted its weight, assessing, and then settled.

She checked the girth. Tightened it two holes, then put her foot in the stirrup and mounted. She looked north, once, toward number 43 and its closed door.

Kill Napoleon Bonaparte.

Then she turned the horse south, put her heels to its flanks, and galloped toward the cannon.

***

She rode until the houses thinned and the road broke into churned earth, until the sound of the guns no longer rolled but struck, each report hitting her chest like a blow. Every time an Allied picket questioned her, she yelled, "Blücher, important message to Blücher," and they let her pass.

Past the Anglo-Dutch line, she reached up and pulled the white plumes from the helmet.

The horse's breath came hard beneath her, quivering under her knees.

She crested the rise and the world opened. Below her lay the valley of Waterloo. Two miles. Half a mile across. Broken regiments lined the two ridges like ragged fringes on a torn coat, and between them, heaped and strewn across every yard, the dead and the dying lay in numbers she had no frame for.

And still the two sides faced each other. Uxbridge had been wrong. Smoke and constant cannon fire made it hard to see, but the French line was still there.

Suddenly the guns fell silent, and an eerie stillness filled the field. A gust of wind lifted the gray cloud of smoke from the guns.

The French bands sounded the pas de charge. Tu dum Tu dum. Tu dum. All the hairs on her spine rose. A black mass detached itself from the French line and marched uphill, moving like a weather front.

Louise took her field glass. It was the Imperial Guard, their black bearskins reaching toward the heavens, muskets shouldered and bayonets fixed. A deafening cheer rose from the French ranks as they advanced toward the Anglo-Dutch army, then a deafening quiet fell over the field. Napoleon had kept France's unbeaten giants through everything and was spending them now at the end of everything.

She had cheered them in Charleroi. She watched them now through the glass and her hand shook.

The British battery opened fire, tearing through the lines with grapeshot and shells, and the Guard kept going, the bearskins rolling forward in a black tide.

"Close ranks!" the French officers screamed again and again.

The columns reformed like water closing around a stone and kept moving. Up they went. Pride swept over her.

The Guard hit the British infantry at the ridge's crest. The crash traveled across the valley.

If they broke through there, the line might still fold. The army could rally around the Guard, the road to Brussels open, the day turn yet again. Louise held her breath and watched the ridge.