Chapter 6 #3
Slowly, slowly, the duelist untangled Oste’s right hand, his weaker one, and guided it down towards the sword at his hip. He pressed it just far enough for his fingers to find purchase over the metal surface, then he let go.
He’d never expected to hear the duelist speak, but tonight he earned a single word in a low, melancholic murmur that reminded him of the shooting stars he’d counted with his mother with their backs to the ground. He didn’t know why, or what it meant. Only that he yearned.
“Please.”
The duelist dropped to his knees, his head level with Oste’s groin.
Oste held his breath, then let it go in a surprised rumble when the duelist slid his mask up just enough to expose soft, pink lips that kissed his hilt-mounted hand.
There was just that act, a delicate touch, and his imagination filled in the rest with the visual of a thousand burning celestial bodies.
Oste’s knees nearly buckled, and he foolishly, clumsily, hovered there in stupefied adoration while the duelist rose and ran off with nary a sound.
After a minute had passed, Oste numbly plucked some lavender from a nearby planter and ran it under his nose while he considered what the hell a man was to do when his hero was growing impatient.
Well. At least he knew how to make himself forget about it.
Warm, pastel-colored bricks weren’t meant for the tips of fingers directed towards them from ire and pain.
Dorotèa jabbed them into the side of the house in the Cordeliers district, as though the sun-heated stones could make her feel nothing if she only let her blood seep out of the scrapes they left behind.
Her nails broke when her skin did, but the chips didn’t make her feel any better or calm the quake she felt inside at all.
All she had now were ugly fingertips and the sensation of falling without ever hitting the ground.
She seethed when she backed up and drew her hands away from the wall, then flipped them over to assess them.
She’d scraped a few fingers, to be sure, but she knew full well this dead-end alley had seen more blood than that.
She’d planned an escapade to this forgotten corner even before Oste had set her on fire earlier that day, but Dorotèa hadn’t known that when she’d come at this late hour, still in the duelist’s garb, that she’d burn so much.
Finding out where Marie had been killed was no great trial, not when the bathhouse girls were chatty and quick to point out that it was no place in the thermal quarter they ever wanted to walk by ever again.
Everyone who’d had a bath or bathed someone in the last month knew the place: a dilapidated corridor between shabby buildings where not even lavender grew.
Even the fountain at the end of it, attached to the wall, barely trickled.
That nobody had managed to clean all the blood out from the gaps between the cobblestones was laughable with all the washing establishments around.
The rusty brown had transfixed itself to the pores in the divides.
Dorotèa had told herself she’d take some action, find a clue, incapacitate some wretch.
Something she could tie up with a ribbon and deliver on the doorstep of the viguerie.
And yet, this sad little alley was as empty and forgettable as any, and her sword arm, trustworthy as it always had been, felt crippled.
She’d tried to flex it, to will it to even punch a wall, but every movement had made her feel Oste’s hold on her wrist again, and how it burned and tickled.
Her fingers, tainted as they were, dragged down her face when she forced out the gesture of exasperation. “Focus, damn you,” Dorotèa hissed under her breath, but the very idea then stole her air away, and she gazed upward.
Had Marie been caught unaware out here? Dorotèa scanned the dingy stretch of darkness; it was as much a trap as any.
Any woman might have taken a wrong turn or simply been cornered in this pathway that offered no escape.
Certainly, she thought that no woman would intentionally go down this way.
It invited trouble one couldn’t easily get away from, especially at so late an hour.
Doubtless her movement to the end of it was incidental, unless her attacker was known to her.
Dorotèa shuddered when she looked down the end of the alley.
This had been no sloppy affair, no impulsive end brought upon with a dagger.
Someone had made the choice to take aim with a musket and fire; she couldn’t think of a greater weapon to control someone.
Had Marie been marched down there, then?
Had she been told to give in to her attacker’s inclinations?
Boudiou, but what would it have been otherwise?
And she’d said no, in some sense—they found that evidence under her fingernails—but her rejection had been silenced by a single bullet. That was all it took.
And so Dorotèa clawed at her chest, over the place where her heart pounded, because that poor dead girl had fought even with the odds. A musket wielded by a constable, or a soldier, and yet she’d rejected whatever she’d been told—or was made—to offer.
“Oh, Marie,” breathed Dorotèa, “I’m proud that you didn’t go quietly, but sorry that you went.”
She pressed her back against the wall, then slid down to sitting. Dorotèa bunched her knees up, still held snugly by red hose, and wrapped her arms around them.
She and Oste had always fenced for the game of it, for play, and it was so easy to forget the necessity of the skills behind the sport.
She’d never been so backed into a corner that she’d feared for her life, but boudiou, had she feared for his.
Flassans had taught her what that felt like, damnable man, when Oste had been pinned down, too.
How many arquebusiers had the captain had with him then?
Eight? Ten? Enough that it should have been worse.
He saved us. The thought made her eyes sting. It always had, ever since she thought it for the first time, when he’d gone out and masked the truth of what they’d done that night. And for all that’s good and holy, he doesn’t deserve what his good deed cost.
Dorotèa ran her worn-out fingers over the spot on her opposite arm where he’d touched her.
What had she been doing today? Opening her mouth like she did could have exposed her, and that she’d also kissed his hand made her cheeks heat.
Truly, what had she been thinking? Her actions had been born of a similar feeling as to what she felt now, she knew—all adrenaline, all blooming warmth in new places that drove her to sharp-edged distraction.
Fencing with him wasn’t enough; suddenly she wanted to be close to him, too. How she quaked at once for his company.
Surely, his thumb had grazed over her skin and not her doublet. Surely, because she’d felt the warmth his contact exuded, and it had shocked her with electric pulses. And surely, he did not still think himself weak, because in only his hands she’d felt his quiet strength, stalwart and infallible.
Dorotèa wondered what it might feel like to let those hands hold her, but she quickly tilted her head back and released a tired laugh.
“You’re mad,” she mused out loud, “and probably parched.”
She pushed up to her feet, lamenting how little she could glean from this place and what in God’s name she’d gotten up to with Oste when she took note of, at last, the trickle of water ahead in that old, cracked fountain against the wall.
Dorotèa narrowed her eyes and tilted her head at it, at once seeing more than just the fountain.
It had to connect somewhere, like the others.
As the duelist, she was no stranger to the multitudes of waterways crisscrossing Aix-en-Provence, and had even used some of the tunnels before to discreetly move around the city.
The thermal quarter possessed most of all, and she was certain she’d once found a path down only a block from this place.
Someone might have been able to dart there from this alley quickly.
Or, perhaps, there was another entrance even closer than that one, in one of these old buildings.
People came quickly after hearing a shot, but the murderer got out even quicker than that.
Bastard might have used the waterways, Dorotèa thought to herself, and thus felt a sense of derision towards a fountain in an entirely new experience for her.
But being quick on his feet on the streets is the more likely outcome.
No matter. She’d find a way to suggest it to Oste—if, that was, he continued to welcome her suggestions at all.