The Musketeer's Seamstress - By Sarah D'Almeida Page 0,19
hand went to his sword. “Sir,” he said. “I can’t believe you know what you are saying. I only hope that, wandering in your mind in some distress, you have confused my friend with someone else.”
“Aramis!” Bagot sneered. His hand, clasped on his own sword hilt, was so tightly clenched that the knuckles appeared white. “Aramis indeed. It is he, whatever his true name is, who killed the Duchess de Dreux not a day ago, in the palace, after having wormed himself into her bed with who knows what threats and cunning.”
“Are you certain I’m not misreading your meaning?” Athos asked. “You do indeed mean to insult Aramis, my friend? Aramis who has served as my second in countless duels and, likewise, asked me to be his second in countless more?”
“Dueling is against all the edicts,” Bagot said, his face now so red that it shaded to purple in places. “And you’re confessing to it so calmly.”
“Indeed,” Athos said.
“Then I’ll have no choice but arrest you.”
Athos threw his head back, a gesture that made his long, blue black hair—tied back with a simple ribbon—flick upon his faded musketeer’s uniform. He removed his hat and bowed slightly.
D’Artagnan didn’t need to see his friend’s face to know the mad rictus of a smile that distorted Athos’s features and made mockery of its own frozen politeness. In this mood, Athos scared even his friends.
Bagot, though he didn’t know Athos, must have been able to read expressions, because his eyes widened and for a moment shock replaced anger in his expression, as he took a step backwards.
“My dear sir,” Athos said, still bowing, his voice icily polite and echoing with accents such that had, doubtlessly, been learned at the knee of the sort of tutor that only ancient and cultured nobility would think to hire. “You leave me no choice but to charge.”
Athos rammed the hat back on his head, and, in a movement so fast that the eye could not perceive it, pulled his sword out of its sheath. In that small landing, atop a very narrow staircase, there shouldn’t have been space for such antics. But Athos had the well-trained grace of the dancer, the agility of a born athlete. And Bagot had, at the very least, healthy self-preservation instincts. As did his cohorts.
Athos’s sword had no more than gleamed in the dim light, the dusty air, than there was a scurry and scuffle, and the noise of several men scrambling, prudently, down the stairs.
This gave Dlancey and Fasset the chance to take a step back, and Bagot the chance to stand, solidly facing Athos, even if from a lower rung on the stairs. To his credit, Bagot looked not scared but annoyed, as though he were an accountant whose sums refused to come quite right. “Ventre saint gris,” he said. “You are a madman. You—”
Athos pounced forward. D’Artagnan had often seen him in this state. He knew that the urbane, learned man whom he called a friend was the outward manifestation of something else—something repressed and dark, deep and brutish—that peeked out of Athos’s eyes only on two occasions: when the musketeer was deeply drunk, and when he felt the bloodlust of a duel.
Bagot pounced backwards and put up his sword.
Bagot was a better fighter than D’Artagnan expected. Perhaps not as good as Athos, but good enough to defend himself from Athos’s blind fury. For a moment, the two advanced and retreated in the narrow distance of the first three rungs of staircase and the tiny landing. Back and forth, in a scuffle of boots, an echo of grunts and wordless exclamations, a flash of swords hitting each other and sliding, metallic, along each other’s length.
For just a breath, Bagot pressed Athos backwards, onto the door of Aramis’s lodgings, forcing Porthos to retreat, and D’Artagnan to glue himself to the wall to allow the combatants room.
But Athos recovered. A low growl making its way through his throat, he charged forward, forcing Bagot to retreat. With remarkable cunning and even more remarkable agility, Bagot stepped back and back and back, halfway down the stairs, keeping Athos at bay but managing to retreat, without ever turning his back to escape. Halfway down the staircase, he jumped over the railing and to the hall downstairs. But there he turned to face Athos, as if to show he wasn’t running, just seeking more space for his sword arm.
Athos yelled something that was no word, just formless fury, and jumped after the man.