November 4, 1918
“Oww!” said Augustin. “Thomas! Will you stop fussing with it. It’s fine!”
“There’s blood running down your sleeve,” Thomas replied. “I just want to tighten the bandage up a little.”
Augustin tried to remove his arm from Thomas’s reach, but this was difficult as they were both sitting on the same horse.
“Leave it, Thomas,” said George, lifting up in his saddle to look over the ridge ahead. “Won’t be more than an hour or so before we reach camp. We’ll have a medic check it, soon as we get there.”
With the front pushed up north for the first time since the war began, this should have been an easy run for them. They rode through the night, south from Rethel to Reims carrying a report on the dismal state of the railway line.
It wasn’t the Germans that caused the trouble for Augustin this time, just a stray coil of barbed wire in the dark. Down went Augustin’s horse. A shattered fetlock joint kept the beautiful mare from ever getting to her feet again. An exposed corkscrew picket sliced through Augustin’s overcoat into his arm. Before he’d let Thomas look at the wound, Augustin put his hand over the horse’s eyes, whispering to the animal for a moment. He put her down with a single shot.
No time to waste, they continued on their way, riding double, alternating hourly.
• • •
Two and a half years had passed.
Soldiering was not what George had envisioned when he finally managed to sign up (under the name Thomas Augustin).
How he managed, in the first few weeks, to avoid being court-marshaled and shot for insubordination was anybody’s guess. Following orders was not something that came naturally to him. And to be honest, George simply had no idea how helpless he was in the real world. Without servants. Without Thomas.
But with perseverance, and a certain amount of ridicule from his fellows, he learned to keep his head down and stay out of trouble.
Training camp at Etaples was truly dreadful. But the barracks, the bad food, the early hours, were so odd to George that he managed to view them rather like roughing it on some sort of nightmarish camping trip.
That whimsical notion ended as soon as his company began the long slog north to Verdun, to be thrown into “the furnace,” as the endless battle had come to be called. There, in a muddy trench that no amount of rumors prepared him for, the reality came crashing down on his head.
It was a miracle that he survived long enough to be spotted by a sergeant who’d been a groundskeeper at the royal estate. It took a week for word to get to Thomas and Augustin, several more for them to track him down.
Neither of them had laid eyes on George for the better part of a year.
They found him on the morning after the French lost the hills of Le Mort-Homme in the battle of Verdun. He was alive, but you would be forgiven for mistaking him for one of the 30,000-odd soldiers who were now scattered like so much gray and khaki on the barbed wire coiled across the once verdant landscape of northern France.
They sat beside him on a pew in the shell of a chapel serving as a makeshift hospital. George stared at them through the remaining lens of his glasses, as if he wasn’t sure who they were. Shaking his head, he laughed to himself a little, before he buried his head against Augustin’s chest and wept like a child.
It took them until dinner time (not that there was any dinner) to convince him to leave the trenches. He argued that the other men were counting on him. After attempting to reason with him, they resorted to blackmail; if he didn’t stop this nonsense and come away with them, they would tell his fellow infantry mates who he really was.
That didn’t work either, so they were forced to resort to the truth, which was clear to anyone not in shock—he had no mates left, almost everyone in his unit had been wiped out the day and night before.
• • •
By the end of 1914, there was nothing left of the telephone and telegraph lines, the railroad tracks, or the roads. They’d all been destroyed by the shelling. The only way for information to travel was by courier: on foot, bicycle, motorcycle, and horseback.
In the trenches, George had experienced this firsthand—insufficient information leading to disaster, thousands of soldiers killed by their own artillery, due to communication breakdowns.
So George proposed a compromise that day. He would drop his disguise as an infantryman, on the condition that he would continue serving as a courier on horseback—a position that he claimed was safer, and that, as a superb horseman, he was better suited for.
Thomas had grown concerned of late about the duchess’s behavior. He argued that George’s presence was needed in Alorainn. But George refused to return. He didn’t care if he was the heir. He was not going to stand by and watch while others fought and died.
Augustin contended that the occupation of courier was only marginally less dangerous than what George had been doing. But recognizing that they weren’t going to be able to talk him out of it, he and Thomas finally relented.
They had a condition of their own, however; this crazy plan could go forward only as long as George didn’t go it alone.
“I’m a better rider than you’re ever going to be,” said Augustin. “Hell, Thomas is a better rider.”
Once the deal had been struck, they picked up his pack and took him away to recover from his wounds, as much as could be. In a little hotel outside Nancy they waited. Uncle Andre had lunch with General Foch, and called in a few favors. Before a month passed, they had horses and kits sent up from home. No one ever said being royalty didn’t have its advantages.
The only remaining hurdle was the constitution of Alorainn.
Fortunately the duchess was surprisingly cooperative. It kept George away from home, which was entirely to her liking.
• • •
As Augustin had predicted, the occupation of messenger was, in its way, as dangerous as the trenches. After two and a half years in the saddle, they’d had more close calls than they cared to remember. It was a miracle that all three of them were still alive.
Augustin was an excellent horseman but that didn’t keep him from having his horse shot from beneath him on their second day out. It was only George that kept him from packing up and leaving when he had to put the horse down in the middle of a muddy field.
Being a cousin to George, Augustin had known him since they were both eight. But the first time he had paid him any mind was several years later, at the party to announce George’s father’s betrothal to Johanna. Augustin and George spent the afternoon smashing all the windows out of an old house on an adjacent property. They were severely punished, and had been partners in crime ever since.
Augustin was, as many men are, in possession of a multitude of acquaintances. But he had few real friends. He could afford to take most things for granted—his family had more money than God. But, though he’d never been exactly sure why George liked him, he never took George’s friendship for granted.
If anyone could claim to have known George longer than Augustin, it was Thomas. They’d been together since they were in diapers.
Thomas’s mother had been lady in waiting for George’s mother, until the duchess’s death. It was only natural, when George came of age and Thomas returned from school at the abbey, that Thomas officially become valet to the heir. Naturally, since Thomas had been taking care of George, in one way or another, pretty much his whole life.
As treacherous as that task was in the midst of a war, in some ways it was easier to protect George from enemy soldiers, hunger, and trench foot than from himself. The balancing act between being his friend and being his valet had gotten to be nearly impossible in the few years before the war. More and more of Thomas’s day had been spent worrying about whether George had wrapped an automobile around a tree or managed to drink himself to death.
So, in some ways, as horrible as everything was (and the war was horrendous beyond words, the sights they saw, the hardship they experienced) and though they complained endlessly about the mud, the food, the heat, the cold, and the fleas, and talked ceaselessly of the war being over and done, and returning to their previous lives . . . truth be told, though no one ever said it out loud, the three of them wouldn’t have missed it.
• • •
One might have thought that the subject of the beautiful brown-skinned girl who had appeared in Alorainn for a few brief moments, nearly four and a half years earlier, would be long spent. Augustin had hardly laid eyes on the young woman.
But, much as it was in the trenches, a day in the life of a courier swung between heart-stopping terror and utter incessant boredom. Though constantly on their guard—trouble could arise in a heartbeat—most of the time they sat in their saddles and watched the landscape pass. And they talked. And of all the topics that arose, the one that appeared with the most regularity was Adi.
• • •
For Augustin, it was largely about the riddles. It would have been hard to devise a better, longer-lasting entertainment for whiling away the hours. They had managed to get another one of them figured out, after Belfort and Ypres. But the last riddle was killing them.
Of course, what really made it so intriguing was the mystery that came along with the young woman herself. It didn’t take much time for Augustin to become as invested as his friends.
Thomas would agree, but for him there was more to it than that, more than just a game and a puzzlement. First of all, Thomas felt he’d lost Adi. If he had been paying more attention, doing his job, she wouldn’t have disappeared. And because of that carelessness, this woman, whom he considered, in many ways, responsible for the positive changes in George, was lost to them.
There was another reason. Though Thomas had a pretty strong sense by this time in his life that women probably weren’t to his taste, the too brief time he’d spent with the girl was the closest he’d ever come to questioning this preference. He’d really liked her, and it was the rare day since she’d gone that he didn’t miss her.
For George, it was even more complicated. Nobody’s fault, perhaps, but his life was altered the day he met her. He was pretty certain the irresponsibility and the boozed-out oblivion of those years would never return. But neither would the simplicity or the careless joy. In a way that was now impossible to separate, her appearance was forever entangled with a war and the collapse of the world as he knew it.
There was that.
And there were her beautiful hands curled around her face as she slept that first day in the car seat. The light that shone in her eyes when she was excited. The way her lips trembled when she kissed him that night in the orchard.
He knew Thomas felt guilty, that he held himself responsible for her disappearance. But to George’s thinking, it was all his fault. His fault for not kissing her again. His fault for acting like a witless schoolboy the next day.
For leaving her there.
For a while, that was how he had looked at it. Bemoaning the loss, blaming himself, certain that Adi, if she thought of him at all, probably thought herself well favored to be away from a charming drunkard.
But now, and more and more—especially when he would wake in those early morning hours, when the desolation would roll in—it would come to him: she hadn’t become bored with waiting, or gotten fed up with him and left. Something had happened to her. Something to do with the mystery that twisted tight around her.
This was why, for all these reasons, though any fool would understand that the girl was surely gone and never to be seen again . . . this was why they still pondered that fourth riddle and that point on the map that might tell them where her fabled lost brothers were. And that last riddle, that might, just maybe, lead them to something more.