There was absolutely no reason to argue with Porthos, and D’Artagnan was concerned with far weightier worries. The note from Constance worried him, after what might have been the deliberate entrapment of Mousqueton. If they were right and if the Cardinal were so desperate to get leverage against Anne of Austria and to make Anne of Austria confess to some plot that he would stoop to entrapping Mousqueton, would he not prefer to entrap one of them?

He’d looked at her letter, and it did look like her handwriting, but would not the Cardinal, in all but name and honor the King of France, be able to command someone to imitate the hand of a woman who lived at court and who had, doubtless, written notes to various people living there?

He felt a shiver down his spine, even as he gave his password to Monsieur de la Porte and got admitted into the palace-or at least into the dark gardens adjoining the palace. Because his eyes were sharpened by his awareness of danger, his mind prying the edges of every dark corner, every lengthening shadow, he was alert and ready, and dropped his hand to his hip at the sight of a man walking towards them.

The words, “Who goes-” were on his lips-the training of years as a guard in the long watches of the night. But he got no further than that because his eyes had recognized the tall, slim figure, the glimmering blond hair, the fashionable attire of his friend Aramis.

“Aramis,” he said, at the same time that Aramis’s voice echoed back, “D’Artagnan.”

The two stood in the winter garden, surrounded by bare trees, looking at each other. D’Artagnan was surprised to see something very much like hostility in his friend’s eyes.

It was only when Aramis said, “He made you come after me, did he not?” that he understood the mute resentment in the green eyes.

“Athos?” he said, and, to Aramis’s nodding, “No. I convinced Athos that you-and I too-must be allowed to investigate this by… having freedom of movement. I am here because I got a letter.” He felt himself blush. “From Madame Bonacieux,” he added, with reluctance that came not only from laying open his affairs to his friend, but also from his consciousness that Aramis’s lovers were of a much higher level in society.

But Aramis didn’t seem to catch the implication, nor to be inclined to deride D’Artagnan’s choice of society. Instead he leaned in close to his friend and said, worriedly, “Madame Bonacieux? She has sent you a note? What did she say?”

“Nothing, except for asking me to meet her.”

Aramis gave him a curious look. “Is this normal, then?” he asked. “For her to send you a note ordering you to come to her at the royal palace?”

D’Artagnan shook his head. “No,” he said, and blushed a little. “Normally she comes to see me. She has the keys to my lodging, and she will come in any time of day or night that she can get away. I assumed…” He cleared his throat. “I assumed she did so today, coming into my lodging and leaving me her note, since I was not there and neither was Planchet. Unless, of course, she sent the note earlier, while Planchet was still there. Why are you looking at me with such an expression of reproach, Aramis?”

Aramis’s expression of reproach did not abate, but he frowned harder at D’Artagnan. “My friend, sometimes I am reminded of how young you are and that you are, in fact, far younger than I, myself, am or remember being. How can you, at such a time as this, come to a summons written on a note, without any warranty that it is from someone who means you well? Did you at least take the precaution of not coming in the way she told you to? Or the way she expected you to come?”

D’Artagnan frowned. “I came the way she asked me to, and gave word to Monsieur de la Porte.”

Porthos said, “Surely you can’t think that Monsieur de la Porte is betraying us? He has always been on the side of the Queen. His-”

“Porthos,” Aramis said. “We are now in such territory that I’m not absolutely sure the Queen means us well. And I know the Cardinal means us ill.”

“What do you mean you don’t think the Queen means us well? We have always been her devoted servants, and in fact, we have allowed her to remain on the throne and we-”

Aramis’s finger darted out, and stopped D’Artagnan’s lips. “Shh,” he said. “Shhh. Do not be foolish. Doesn’t even the Bible exhort you not to put your faith in princes?”

“But-”

“No,” Aramis said. “The devil. I’m starting to suspect, with Athos, that this whole thing is deeper than we thought. Where is Athos, speaking of him? What is he doing?”

D’Artagnan shook his head. “I presume he is back at his lodgings, with the servants. He did not tell me he intended to do anything else. At least…”

“At least?”

“At least since I disabused him of the notion that he could pass for a peasant looking for work,” D’Artagnan said.

Aramis’s chuckle echoed like a clap of thunder, all the more surprising because until it sounded, his features had been so grave and tense and full of foreboding. Now he grinned at D’Artagnan. “Surely even our friend could not-”

And at that same moment, Porthos lunged past D’Artagnan’s shoulder, sword out, so quickly that D’Artagnan was forced to dart out of the way or be trampled. And in darting out of the way, he noticed a motion. Something dark moving past his line of sight towards Aramis. At the same time, Aramis had his sword out, and his cloak wrapped around his arm, and was defending himself from two adversaries at once.

D’Artagnan in turn found himself fighting two men, attired all in black and wearing what looked uncommonly like monkish cowls. They had sword and dagger out, each of them, and there were at least six. They fought fiercely, with quiet intensity, their only noise being grunts of surprise when their attacks were parried, or sudden exclamations of pain, when first Porthos and then Aramis put his sword through one of the adversaries.

Faced with two of them, D’Artagnan, for the first time in his life, found himself sweating to hold his own in a duel. He’d fought two guards of the Cardinal before, and wounded them both. He’d fought more than two of them, sometimes, truth be told. But this-this was something quite different. These men fought with unerring ability, as though each of them had been as well trained as D’Artagnan himself had been by his battle-veteran father. It was all he could do to meet each of their thrusts and push them away.

In his mind, his late father’s voice echoed, in quiet reproach, never be happy that you are parrying each of an enemy’s thrusts, my son. The truth is that if you’re only parrying you have already lost, for you’re never attacking. You have to be lucky every time they attack, and they only have to be lucky enough to let the sword go through once.

But though his father had trained him on how to respond to sudden attack, and given him intensive practice on dueling two experienced swordsmen-often recruiting his friend, Monsieur de Bhil for the occasion-he had never trained him in fighting two people who were intent only on murdering him.

“Holla there, what goes here?” a voice called, out of the shadows.

On that sound, one of the adversaries lunged, and his sword blade thrust towards D’Artagnan. D’Artagnan had only the time to interpose his arm to push the blade away from his chest. And then his opponent was gone; vanished, as though he’d come out of the night, and left via the night itself.

And D’Artagnan realized, only then, that he’d been wounded and his arm was bleeding profusely. He watched the blood drip from the cut which had pierced both the velvet of his doublet and his flesh and, from the pain of it, had grazed the bone of his forearm.

“I see, musketeers with their swords out,” the voice that had spoken out of the shadows said again. “Dueling, were you?”

Into the relative light of their position-in the middle of the garden where neither shadow of tree nor of wall fell on them-strode Jussac, one of the Cardinal’s favorite guards. “Porthos, Aramis, D’Artagnan. Tell me, who was dueling whom? Not that it matters, as you have undoubtedly been dueling, and therefore you are all arrested and you’d best hope that the new edicts weren’t signed tonight, else you shall all be beheaded by first dawn.”