Page 3 of The Captive

Sleep wasn’t something I took for granted these days, but at least my body was relaxed enough now to allow my mind to quiet…

I didn’t sleep through the night—I rarely did these days—and I was awake before dawn, when the camp began to stir. I laid silently, listening to the soft calls of the men as they built the fire back up from embers, the gentle sounds from the horses, and Semyon grunt orders.

When the orders turned to yells and Juno released a terrified whinny, accompanied by the sounds of hoofbeats and a gunshot, I sat up straight on my mattress.

Across the tent, Hobbs’ terrified gaze met mine. “Stay quiet,” I snapped, as I reached for my robe.

“My lady!” she gasped, but I ignored her. This wasn’t the first time my traveling party had met with adventure, but I hadn’t been with these men long enough to know how they would react.

So after yanking my robe closed, I dug into my valise past A Harlot’s Guide, my fingers closing around cold metal. The pistol lived in my traveling case, primed, because a sensible woman does not sleep unarmed a hundred miles past the last magistrate.

“Your Grace, no—” Hobbs had her blanket clutched to her chin, eyes white-rimmed in the gloom. “Please, they’ll kill you⁠—”

“Stay in the tent.”

Juno screamed again.

Any horsewoman knows that sound. Not her spook-at-grouse whinny, not her indignation at a late feed—terror, high and raw, the noise a horse makes when the world is ending and she is calling for a trusted friend to save her. That sound pulled me through the tent flap barefoot, robe unbelted, plait swinging, into the grey hour before dawn.

Into chaos.

Riders poured through my camp. A dozen at least, weaving through the wagons and the guy-ropes at a canter, and my first thought—before fear, before sense—was that I had never seen riding like it in my life.

They sat their horses as though they’d grown there. Reins slack on the neck, both hands free, turning tight around a wagon tongue with nothing I could see but a shift of weight. One man hung half off his mount’s shoulder at speed to snatch a saddlebag from the ground and came upright again laughing. The horses themselves were nothing—shaggy, short-coupled, big ugly heads, the same rough little beasts my guards rode—and they threaded the wreck of my camp like swallows.

I had paid riding masters in three countries. Not one of them could have sat the worst horse here.

My guards knelt in a row by the supply wagon, disarmed, one of them bleeding from his nose. Semyon stood apart with his hands held wide, talking low and steady in Russian, in the voice a wise man uses on a green colt. And Pyotr Ilyich lay unconscious by the rekindled fire, blood in his hair, his spectacles winking in the trampled grass a yard from his open hand.

At the picket line, two riders were already cutting my horses loose.

“Stop!” The word came out of me with the whole force of my rank behind it, and it did nothing at all. Hector was rearing against his rope. Juno had backed to the end of hers, ears flat, hindquarters bunched.

“Get away from them!” I screamed, stumbling toward my precious animals.

That was when the leader turned.

He sat a dark, compact horse at the center of the camp, still as a post while his men flowed around him, and he found me across the wreckage—a woman in her nightclothes with a pistol in her fist—and even at twenty paces I watched his interest kindle.

I looked back; I confess it freely.

He was bareheaded, dark hair rough from the ride, a short beard along a jaw that owed nothing to any valet or ballroom affectation. A scar came down out of that beard, one clean pale line from jawbone toward his collar, vanishing under the coat. Broad through the shoulder, easy in the saddle as a man in his favorite chair, and younger than I expected—perhaps a few years younger than myself. Young enough to have been my son’s tutor, though nothing else about him suggested the schoolroom.

He was, and I say this as a woman of six-and-thirty who has seen the masculine treasures of four capitals, magnificent.

You wanted an adventure.

Fear was in me somewhere, cold in my stomach, real. It simply…wasn’t the loudest thing.

His gaze traveled from my bare feet up over the robe, unhurried, and arrived at my face wearing frank appreciation, a faint approving smile—and then he looked away, at Juno fighting her rope, and his whole expression sharpened. He called something in Russian to the men at the picket line, two short words, and jerked his chin at my horses.

I did not need a translator for that.

I raised the pistol and leveled it at his chest. “Do not touch Juno and Hector!”

Really, I was quite proud of how level my voice sounded, and it worked.

One of the leader’s fists rose. The riders stopped—all of them, everywhere, mid-motion, as though I’d shouted a spell instead of my babies’ names. In the sudden quiet I could hear Juno’s snorting and my own blood in my temples.