Sword And Blood (Vampire Musketeer Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  But Aramis held up a hand. He stepped very close to Athos. So close that the smell of the blood beneath the laceration of his hair shirt was torment. “Athos,” he said. “Tell me only one thing. Do the crosses on the wall bother you?”

  Athos looked up, first at one crucifix and then at the other. He shook his head, because his throat felt too dry to speak. He thought distantly that Charlotte had drank her fill and that he must be nearly drained again. Not that his strength had ever been that which a common vampire should have. And here he stopped, pondering common vampire and would have laughed could he have remembered how.

  Aramis’ gaze was still upon him, and Athos thought he’d marked how Athos stared at each of the crosses in turn. Aramis let out a long, drawn out breath, almost like a sigh. “I was afraid . . . ” he said. “I feared . . . ”

  Athos nodded. “I drank,” he said, his voice coming out harsh and raspy. And to the look of alarm in Aramis’ eyes. “Armagnac. Not . . . ” He shrugged. “I drank because I feared meeting her without. And then . . . ” He shrugged and opened his hands as if to explain that the madness of the night had not been his fault, and those whose fault it had been he would have been unable to explain if pressed.

  Aramis did not press. Instead, he got up and went through the back door into the depths of his lodgings. And if I’m really lucky Athos thought, savagely. He will return with a stake and end my miserable existence forever.

  But Aramis came back with a bowl of something foul smelling resting on a cracked saucer. He handed bowl and saucer to Athos and said, “Drink. It is warm but not hot, and I believe you need warmth right now. Not that I understand precisely how this operates in vamp– in someone like you, but I think you are in shock, and I suspect why. But I need you to speak, and you cannot speak till you’ve recovered. Drink. Bazin has made more.”

  Not sure whether he should be grateful for Aramis’ attention or mortified at having to drink more of the foul-tasting liquid, Athos forced himself to drink.

  The horrible taste woke him, and the feeling of liquid flowing into him helped. He drank a cup, then two, then another. Porthos and Madame sat in silence. Porthos looked embarrassed and Madame mulish. Athos wondered what each of them had seen and how they felt about what they’d seen.

  He, himself, was not sure how he felt about what he’d seen, much less what he’d done. Another bowl of broth was pushed on him, and then another. He drank them obediently, wondering if they’d serve as expiation for his sins, and then reminding himself that vampires were already outside forgiveness . . . but remembering Aramis had said perhaps not.

  And then, halfway through his fifth cup, he drew his breath and it into a sob. Aramis fetched the chair that stood behind his desk, and moved it in front of Athos. He folded his hands upon his lap and leaned forward. “You drank to have the courage to see her, but Athos, why must you see her at all?”

  “I thought,” Athos said. “That she would tell me where d’Artagnan was.”

  “And did she?”

  Athos shook his head. “She told me that I must pay forfeit.”

  Aramis clucked his tongue on the roof of his mouth, the sound echoing too loudly in Athos’ ears. “Fool. If the boy hadn’t told us you’d gone out and if we hadn’t followed you close enough, we’d never have known where you’d gone or what had happened. As it was, we stumbled upon you coming out of the tavern, and from there we followed. It was a matter of minutes to gather enough musketeers to rescue you.”

  “Minutes,” Athos echoed. “How many?”

  “Fifteen,” Madame Bonacieux said dryly. “Did you think you’d survive her glamour longer?”

  “Glamour?” Athos turned his puzzled gaze to the lady.

  She made a sound that indicated derision and opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Aramis did. “You were under her glamour, Athos. You’ve felt this before and withstood it, from the vampires we duel.”

  Athos sighed. He could see he would have to explain, lest Aramis wondered what had possessed him, more or less literally. “It is not the same,” he said, softly. “None of those other vampires were my wife.”

  “Your wife?” Aramis said, at the same time Porthos said, triumphantly, “I told you.”

  “Please be still Porthos. You told me Athos had married a vampire, which is neither sanctioned nor plausible.”

  “Plausible or not,” Athos said. “It is nonetheless true.”

  “You married a vampire?” Aramis said, at the same time Porthos said, “I meant he is married to a vampire. His wife was changed.”

  Athos made a gesture with his hand, meant to convey denial. “No. My wife was a vampire when she married me. She says so at any rate,” he frowned. “And I believe she is telling the truth. She . . . I didn’t know she was a vampire. She looked like . . . she pretended to be the sister of our priest. Three months into our marriage, we went for a ride and she . . . she’s a splendid rider . . . she rode ahead of me, until she ran into the branch of a tree, which rendered her unconscious. I rushed to aid her and when I cut her dress, to help her breathe, I saw the branded mark of the fleur-de-lis upon her shoulder. Faded, mind you, and covered in cosmetic, so I’d never perceived it by candlelight. But in the light of the morning sun it was unmistakable.”

  “A hidden Judas goat!” Porthos said.

  “Very acute, dear Porthos,” Athos said, regretting his voice came out hollow and bitter. “Indeed, a hidden Judas goat. In that moment, filled with revulsion at what I loved so well, I performed what the law would have executed upon her for hiding what she was. Because she was a Judas goat and she had not informed me of this, and was therefore a branded criminal, possibly planning against the unturned, certainly breaking the king’s law, I hanged her from a nearby tree.”

  He saw the flinch in Madame Bonacieux’ features, and Porthos said, “But—”

  “But there might have been a mistake?” Athos said. “At the moment I did not even consider it. I felt . . . betrayed.” He looked at Aramis. “I believe I don’t need to confess to the sin of pride. The vampires had been besieging my domains for a decade, slowly cutting off those on whose labor our prosperity depended. And now, I thought, a Judas goat had insinuated herself into my house.” He looked up, but met no condemnation in Aramis’ dark eyes. “The doubts came later, in the days, in the weeks that followed. The doubts sent me running from my house, unable to bear the memories of our days together in my beloved home. I told people I felt called to fight the vampires, but it was no such thing. I needed to fight the vampires, to kill . . . to kill my own damned pride most of all.”

  “These doubts are foolish,” Aramis said. “Were there a mistake or a doubt, she would have told you before you discovered it. She would have let you judge of the justness of it. That she hid it and lied to you . . . ”

  Athos inclined his head. He did not want to think either of his rashness in killing—as he thought—the woman he loved, or of the doubts and guilt that had pursued him for years over her—she who had turned out. after all, to be a vampire. “She told me she’d been a vampire, all along. When I was turned. She was the one who turned me.” His hand went up to his neck to touch the first bite mark she’d given him, which hurt still like a fresh firebrand.

  “But you said you were riding,” Porthos said. “In the sunshine I mean.”

  “Yes,” Athos said, then understood what he had said and how odd it seemed. “But . . . ” He shook his head. “She was in the sunlight, and yet she tells me she was a vampire then.”

  “Are you sure she is a vampire?” Porthos asked. “What I mean is—”

  “She turned me.”

  “She had him under glamour tonight,” Madame Bonacieux said, her voice crisp. “But the question is, was she a vampire then?”

  Athos turned to her. His vision blurred. He saw her shape but not the details and not her expression. He spoke to her shape, “I hung her from a branch. She didn’t struggle, because she was unconscious. But I waited . . . ” He shook his head.
Though he couldn’t see whether she showed disbelief, he spoke as if she did. “I beg you to believe I’m remembering correctly. The scene has haunted my nightmares for years. She could not have survived it unless . . . .”

  “Yes,” Aramis said, sounding cool and collected and calling Athos’ gaze to his imperturbable countenance. “There is no doubt at all she is a vampire. And there is no doubt, I presume, she can withstand the sunlight. It is unheard of, and it must be explained, but it is not in doubt. And Athos . . . did she ever tell you where they took d’Artagnan?”

  Athos shook his head. “No, she never . . . ”

  He stopped, because before he could say there was never time or opportunity, he recognized he knew—knew with certainty as though she’d told him—d’Artagnan was alive and where they were taking him, had an inkling of why they’d captured the young Gascon and perhaps even a hint of why his wife could walk in the sunlight of the living when even Athos, not a full vampire by a vampire’s own account, could not.

  “She didn’t tell me,” he said, softly. “But I know.”

  Remnants

  D’ARTAGNAN didn’t know how long he struggled, his feet weary and sore and bleeding. He walked in the dark night with no way of measuring time or judging how close dawn might be. It seemed like an eternity of walking, measured on his torn feet, on his aching legs.

  At first he thought only of going away, of getting away from the road and those searching for him. It was some time before his mind noted the disarray of the desolate fields, and that there were no signs of life anywhere. No farmer tilled these fields. No livestock huddled in the early spring morning chill, not even an old woman collected wood.

  Which brought him to other less happy thoughts—what had happened to those peasants? There had been vampires on the road. Local vampires. Rough peasants, who didn’t recognize the rule of the cardinal.

  He imagined peasants crowded into their hovels, through daylight and hunting at night, draining any man and livestock within reach. They want us and the horses, echoed in his mind with an ominous tone and he shivered. Every shadow and every bush seemed to him a menace and he walked warily.

  Most warily of all, he approached a largish house set in the middle of a cottage garden gone to rambling wildness. Though it was early spring, and the winter had killed most of the plant growth except for the pine trees, it was easy to see where the beans had grown to encompass most of the yard, in what was now a mass of dried leaves.

  The house seemed to be long-abandoned and, looking closer, d’Artagnan felt it must be. The chicken coup in the back was quite deserted, the door open. There were no pigs in the sty. And from the house itself there came no smell of cooking or of fire and no sound of living. Which didn’t mean, d’Artagnan thought, even as he eyed the pink tendrils of sunrise starting to color the ink-blue sky in the east, that the house was deserted. Vampires didn’t cook and, that he knew, didn’t keep fires burning. They gathered in the dark and ambushed humans, and needed neither market gardens nor chickens and pigs.

  And yet he had to brave the quiet interior of the cottage. He had to look for water and, if possible, for any stores of food the home might still hold. For a while now he had been aware of his hunger and thirst; now his throat felt parched and his tongue as though it were glued to the roof of his mouth.

  He entered the house cautiously, breaking several spider webs with his face and some relief. No matter if vampires didn’t need pigs or chicken, or other food, they would need to move now and then and they would, perforce, break the webs with their movement.

  Feeling a little bolder, he walked in, the webs like ghostly fingers on his face. The bottom floor consisted of a kitchen and a large room that had probably been parlor and hall and gathering place. Judging by the state of the fireplace, the last ashes wet and dried again and then wet again, no fires had been kindled in a year, maybe more.

  Up the uncertain staircase, parts of the steps eaten out by mold and mildew. Up all the way to a half upper floor where a partition divided two rough chambers, both of them with rotting straw mattresses. He felt wholly relieved when he saw there were no clothes anywhere and also no sign of human bones. He released his breath in a great sigh of relief. He’d picture the family here as having gotten away from of the vampires in the countryside. And perhaps it was so, or perhaps they’d been turned. Or perhaps they’d been caught in their flight. But in d’Artagnan’s imagination he would have them escape and be living somewhere away from danger and vampires, in some well-secured village in the countryside where the bloodsuckers had not managed to penetrate.

  He descended the staircase again, carefully. The floor gave out under his feet twice, and he stepped away just in time. But the floor at the bottom was steady.

  D’Artagnan needed food. He went back to the shuttered kitchen. The sky was now frankly pink and fingers of light crawled in through the open windows, seeming solid as they fell on spirals of dust raised by his passage. It was a simple kitchen, and not far different from his mother’s own kitchen in Gascony. Noblewoman she might have been, but the lady of a domain so small it could have fit in the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris, and barely wealthy enough to compete with the better-off farmers. And the most fortunate farmers in Gascony were no better than the poor farmers elsewhere in the country. At least until the fields stopped growing rocks, which heaven knew the good Lord owed Gascons for the help they’d lent France in all its wars and for saving France from itself over and over again.

  He remembered his father, after a session of sword practice, telling him that the vampires would be around until God sent the Gascons to defeat them.

  As it dawned on d’Artagnan that he had been smiling at the reminiscences of home, the smile vanished from his face. He looked around the kitchen again. There was a cupboard built atop a storage container. That would be flour for the daily baking, he thought. He didn’t want to guess how spoiled the flour would be. Judging by the mattresses upstairs, it would be rotted. But opening the bin disclosed there was no flour, save for a dusting of something at the bottom that might well be sawdust. Of course, the grain supply had failed long ago in villages that had not kept the vampires out. Sowing and harvesting required many men and long hours of work together. Hard to do after your neighbors became vampires.

  He felt suddenly very tired, or rather he felt as if the tiredness he’d been keeping at bay had dropped on him like a heavy blanket. He almost swayed under the weight of it, but he felt hunger warring for his attention and forced himself to totter to the other corner, where a wooden trunk stood. He didn’t have any great expectations. In most households, such trunks contained a quantity of salt preserving some pork. The salt, by now, had gotten damp and the pork would be spoiled.

  But when he opened the box, he was greeted with the smell of apples. There were perhaps a dozen, wrinkled and shrunken, dried within their skins, but their heady fragrance giving witness to their unspoiled nature. Next to them, wrapped in a slightly dusty linen towel, which hid another, cleaner linen towel, was an unopened wheel of cheese.

  D’Artagnan found an overturned table in a corner of the kitchen where, fortunately, the roof overhead seemed to be sound. No rain had rotted the wooden table. He set it on its legs and wiped frantically at the dusty top with his sleeve. He found a stool nearby which, though it shook when d’Artagnan set upon it, neither cracked nor gave the impression it would give out under him.

  A quick search of the shelves in the corner brought to light a set of ceramic cups, from which he chose the one that looked least encrusted with dust. To eat the cheese he needed water. And he meant to eat the cheese. He limped out the back door, holding his cup.

  The hoped-for well was to the left of the kitchen door, its mouth bordered by stones that had miraculously not fallen. It was capped too, with a still-intact oak cover. Even more surprising, the rope on the pulley above—though black with age—proved sturdy to his pull. Once the cover was removed and d’Artagnan pulled the rope up. The bucket that ha
d been suspended halfway between the top of the well and the water proved reasonably clean and sound, the wood dry and only a little dusty.

  Like a man possessed, d’Artagnan worked the pulley getting the bucket down, then up again, the weight of water pulling at his arm muscles and making him feel every sore place and every injury. Up and up and up until he held a bucket of cool, clear water. He’d have drunk it, he thought, even if it had come up green and slimy and bearing a croaking frog.

  He used the first bucket to wash himself and his cup, then filled the cup from it, and tottered back into the kitchen.

  By the time he’d eaten two apples and managed to find the stump of a knife with which to cut a few slices of cheese, the sun was full up, warm on his back as he ate. Birds sang outside and the air brought a heady scent which he thought were roses but must have been some other flower. It was too early for roses.

  The vampires wouldn’t come searching him in full daylight, he thought. He could get a good long distance from them.

  But he wondered how far he was from Paris? How long had the carriage rumbled along the road, before he had woken. How long would it take him to get to Paris and to a place where he could claim the protection of the musketeers, the protection of his friends?

  On his way to Paris he’d ridden his horse and stopped only at hostelries surrounded by healthy fields, heralding an area not blighted by too many vampires. Could he find one of those on foot and tired? Could he find them before night and vampires overtook him?

  There would be no denying he was tired. Tired enough to drop where he stood, he thought. How would he fight against vampires—either the ones from which he escaped or wild ones who had once been peasants and who might now overtake him?

  Blinking in the light of day, the languor resulting from a full stomach overtook him. His feet hurt, sore and cut from his escape. His legs ached with fatigue. His shoulders and neck remained painful from being bound in an unnatural position. He had to rest.