Free Death in Gascony by Sarah d'Almeida Page A

this might very well have seemed paltry, but it was clear that the man already had, in his mind, an idea of how dangerous musketeers could be, because he only sighed again and nodded. “Very well then.”
    He called out and a dark-haired urchin emerged from the shadows and, upon instruction, led them up the stairs to a room, which took up most of the space over what—from the sounds and the smells emerging from it—must be busy kitchens.
    D’Artagnan, taking in the broad, clean-looking room, with oak flooring, fresh rushes on the floor and the sort of beds that were little more than pallets—only four mattresses set upon the barest of frames—sent up mental thanks for the separate beds. In some of the hostelries in which they’d stayed they’d had to share the beds two and two and, in one of them, all four. Getting elbowed by Porthos’s giant arms in the night probably had a lot to do with how mauled he felt.
    But here—he thought, turning back to the beds to discover surprisingly clean sheets and blankets, smelling of sun and wind—here he would sleep well. And tomorrow he would be well enough to go on with the travel. He must be. His mother needed him. Of this he was sure.
    He heard, as if a long way off, disconnected sounds—his friends splashing water—doubtless in the lone washstand in the room—then banging dishes about, and Porthos’s surprised exclamation, “The paste is made from the livers of what? And what do they do with the rest of the goose?”
    He didn’t remember either the water being delivered or the food being brought in. Somehow, he’d lain down on one of the beds, and he felt as if the whole world were receding before this present comfort of being off his feet and not being bounced about by a horse.
    “D’Artagnan,” Athos said, as if from very far away. “Are you sure you will have no food?”
    “Oh, let the boy be,” Porthos said. “He’s been looking like curdled milk all day. Perhaps he ate something that didn’t agree with him.”
    “I don’t think so,” Aramis’s voice said, calculatingly. “I don’t think so. I think it’s his wound paining him.”
    “But didn’t he use the Gascon balm?” Porthos asked.
    “The jar was broken. He should have rested instead of pressing on.”
    “He feels a duty to his house and family,” Athos said.
    Aramis made a sound that wasn’t quite a sigh and wasn’t quite a tone of exasperation. “You and your duty, Athos. What you don’t understand is that such a sense of duty is really the sin of pride. You hold yourself to such a duty as if you were immortal and not cut of mortal cloth. When our Lord came to the world—”
    D’Artagnan could see in his mind’s eye as Aramis lectured Athos on the path of holiness, and he wished he was awake enough to laugh. But he wasn’t, and therefore he let himself sink, deeper and deeper into the well of sleep, till he could hear no more.

Where Waking Is the Best Part of Valor;
The Very Odd Habits of Gascon Cutthroats;
The Finer Points of Treason

    D ’ARTAGNAN woke up with the sound of a knife sliding on its sheath and a voice whispering in the Gascon language, “Which of them?”
    Another voice answered, in a whisper, also in Gascon, “The dark-haired one.”
    “But there’s two dark-haired ones.”
    Through D’Artagnan’s still-foggy mind, the thought went that his friends had learned to speak Gascon very fast. But neither of the voices sounded like his friends’ voices, and then there was that knife, the sound of it. Truth, they used knives to eat with, but there were no sounds of eating.
    He opened his eyes. There were two men—
    He had no time to see beyond that. Two men. Two men he didn’t know, and they were standing by the table. At the table, D’Artagnan’s friends sat and for a moment—for a cold, heart-stopping moment—the youth thought they were dead. But their heads were down on the table, and in front of them the remains of what seemed like a cyclopic repast.