"Well?" Crecy snapped.
"I did," Adrienne answered faintly. The scent of charred flesh was strong, and she remembered the heaps of dead on the barge.
"You did," Crecy affirmed. She reached down and cupped Adrienne"s face in both palms. "Hold this tight in your heart, Adrienne. They would have killed you. That was their intention. Instead you killed them-you. Not some army, not some executioner, not some bodyguard."
Adrienne watched the man"s feeble movements. "Can we help him?"
"Yes. Do you want to watch?"
"I can"t."
"Turn around then." Crecy leaned down and kissed her on the forehead, then turned
her gently away from the dying man. An instant later, the labored breathing ceased.
"Now come on. We still have several miles to go."
Adrienne proved incapable of managing either of the spirited mounts that survived the
fight and so again clung to Crecy on a galloping horse. This time, however, she did not
resist holding tightly; she needed the feel of a human body against her own. She wished Crecy were Nicolas. Crecy"s body was lean and hard, much as she had imagined Nicolas" might be. Holding Crecy now felt like salvation, like hope, though she knew she should be frightened of the woman and her strange powers. She felt Crecy"s heartbeat, and she felt life there.
Nevertheless, she would rather it was Nicolas, his life, his heart. His last words to her thudded in her pulse and hissed in with each breath. She had never loved before. She could not, could not love Nicolas. Not now. It made no sense.
"How did you do that, Crecy?" she called through the wind, hoping in conversation to escape the thoughts and images rattling around in the coffin of her skull.
"Do what?" Crecy asked.
"Best a musketeer at swordplay."
"It is something I have learned, that is all."
"But how? Where? And your strength-"
"It is more than natural, yes," Crecy replied, half turning. "Does this surprise you?" She laughed, deep in her throat. "Men are always surprised, too, when I turn my edge on them."
"But how came you-"
"I have always possessed it, always nurtured it. It is another of my gifts."
"You seem to have a great many gifts," Adrienne muttered.
"They are not without their price," Crecy replied. There was something final in the way
she said it.
Adrienne reluctantly took the hint "Can you tell me where we are going?" she asked.
"One of the duke"s houses," Crecy answered. "There we have an entourage to
accompany you back to Versailles. They will all swear that you have been in the country."
"What is this, Crecy? What schemes am I involved in?"
"I"m not altogether certain," Crecy replied. "I will tell you what I can."
"Do you know who tried to kill the king?"
"No." But did she hesitate a bare instant? How would Adrienne know if Crecy lied?
They broke from the forest and entered a region of hilly fields. The sky had clouded, and spa.r.s.e dapples of sunlight seemed like the footprints of an angel on the waving green wheat.
She wondered if Nicolas were still alive. Surely he would have caught up with them by
now.
"You could have gotten Fatio to say what he said without me," Adrienne said. "Why did you need me?"
"You were the only one who could interpret what he said, ask the right second question. Also-" Crecy paused."-you must know that I never suspected mat this outing of ours would put you in such grave danger. If I had known that, I would not have even suggested it. I thought..."
"What?""I thought you might actually enjoy it. I thought you needed some diversion.""Why do you care what I need?"Crecy was silent for so long that Adrienne believed that she had ignored the question.
Finally, however, she slowed the horse to a walk-its coat was foamy-and began
speaking once more."For you," Crecy said, "it has only been a short time since we met. For me, I have seen you many times, Mademoiselle, in dreams and visions. I have known us as friends, in the future. I feel what I shall feel. Does that make sense?"
"This is real, then, this "sight" of yours? And what you see always comes true?"
"To be frank, I cannot say that what I see is always true. But it is certainly very often true.""If you are less than certain, why do you insist that I marry the king?""The truth is-" But then Crecy stopped again. "I"m sorry, Adrienne, but I cannot tell you that. I have sworn an oath."
That sounded final, but Adrienne was unwilling to stop talking without learning
something. "Then tell me this," she appealed. "You spoke of a great catastrophe coming. What do you see?""The apocalypse: storms of flame, walls of water, flood, famine, plague.""And in the sky? Do you see anything in the sky?""Yes. A comet, another omen of disaster.""This comet: did it rest in the sky or move?""It moved swiftly."Adrienne sighed. "Then you have known the answer all along, Mademoiselle."
"No. Seeing and knowing are different things. Can you explain my vision?"
"When I came to work with Fatio, he had already completed a calculation of two trajectories, but he was searching for a way of attracting the two bodies to each other so that their trajectories would intersect. For one of the bodies he had a very precise harmonic equation; for the other he had none. To attract two bodies, you must know their harmonic natures and then you must build a sort of bridge between them. We call this mediation."
"But if you do not know the nature of both bodies you cannot create a mediator," Crecy interjected.
"Precisely, and that was the problem for Fatio. However, during that time, I intercepted a strange communication from someone calling himself Ja.n.u.s who had been eavesdropping on our aetherschreiber conversations."
"I didn"t think that was possible."
"It wasn"t, and for the same reason; the mediation between the two chimes of matched aetherschreibers is so specific mat it only bridges between them. But this Ja.n.u.s had solved that problem, thus enabling us to see the way clear to solve Fatio"s problem of attracting bodies."
"This equation from Ja.n.u.s, then-it allowed you to read the nature of the second body?"
"Not at all, though I think that may be what Ja.n.u.s thought But what his equation really does is to allow us to quickly and exhaustively create the whole range of possible mediators between the two bodies. When the correct one is applied, it should immediately become obvious through counter resonance."
"I see that. What I don"t quite see is how this creates a weapon, though it raises some interesting possibilities."
"Last night, Fatio mentioned "Lead" and "Tin" eating their children. He was using alchemical parlance. Lead is the planet Saturn, and Tin is Jupiter. By their children he means comets."
"Comets?"
"Planets have elliptical orbits tending toward circular. Comets have very narrow elliptical orbits. They approach the sun very nearly and then retreat to the nothingness out beyond Saturn. It has been guessed that the great attraction of the large planets likely pulls some comets into them-they thus "eat their children," as Saturn did in Roman myth."
"So one of these bodies in the equation is a comet?"
"Yes. Or something like a comet. He also babbled of the "dogs of Iron." By Iron I suppose him to mean the planet Mars."
"Mars? War dogs, then?"
Adrienne shrugged. "The language of alchemy is more poetic than exact. But there has been some suggestion that there are dark comets between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. If the gravity of Mars perturbed one of these comets, it might be "sent baying in" toward the sun and thus Earth. In any event, it is clear that one of the objects in the equation is a celestial body, like a planet but smaller. The body was of unknown affinity."
"Why unknown?"
"Because no one knows what comets are composed of. We can make guesses, but that is all."
"Then the known body? The other moving object?" "Why, Earth, of course," Adrienne replied. "And more specifically, London."
The Royal Society
Maclaurin gave him a moment for that to sink in by signaling the server to pour them more coffee. Ben surveyed the others for some confirmation of the Scotsman"s bizarre a.s.sertion.
"You think I have not a capful of wit?" Ben finally asked. "Why tell me such a thing-to
see how gullible I might be?"
"There"s too much salt in this boy," Heath muttered acidly. "He might be most useful to us as bacon."
But Voltaire and Vasilisa both grinned at his impertinence, and he knew he had won
headway in that quarter.Maclaurin stared at him, a perplexed scowl on his face. "Now why in th" h.e.l.l would I do that?"
"Do you mean to say you are in earnest? What has become of the Royal Society?" Ben asked.
"It"s not the least thing that Parliament has dissolved it," Vasilisa said.
"Replaced it, rather," Maclaurin clarified. "Our charter has been revoked."
"Why?"
Maclaurin sighed and scratched his chin. "The reasons given are many and complicated, but when the broth is boiled down, what"s left is three things. First, the king and Parliament want killin" magics, and Sir Isaac won"t give them any more.
Second, Sir Isaac ha" made a number of enemies of late of a purely personal nature- but nothing stays purely personal in politics. Third... well, as I intimated earlier, Sir Isaac ha" not been entirely well."
"Not well?"
"And that is all you will hear on this subject for the moment, sir," Maclaurin said firmly. "So just leave it at that."Ben nodded thoughtfully. "You said something about the society being replaced..."To Ben"s surprise Heath answered his unspoken question."The London Philosophical Society," he said, "received our charter. Many of our number defected to them."
"Muttering, chanting Rosicrucians," Voltaire opined with a sort of languid