Athos, normally so fluent with words and so ready with classical quotations, suddenly felt a great empathy with his friend Porthos, to whose lips words would never come when called.

Having fastened D’Artagnan’s bind, he crossed his arms upon his chest. “What have you been doing? All three of you? For you must give me leave to tell you that it seems like you’ve all gone around like madmen, attempting to get killed.”

OF all of his friends, D’Artagnan retained his greatest admiration, not to say hero worship, for Athos. Oh, it could be said in many ways that the young Gascon revered all his friends. How could it be otherwise? His father had raised him in awe of those servants of the King. He had trained him to use his sword as one of them could be expected to use his. For the longest time-in fact, since he’d first been breeched-D’Artagnan’s entire ambition had been to wear a musketeer’s uniform. In that uniform, he hoped to follow the footsteps of those other sons of Gascony who had made themselves famous, if not rich, in the capital.

Indeed, he viewed Porthos as a new Ajax, and lived in silent admiration of Aramis’s worldly ways, his understanding of court gossip and his easy grasp of the more obscure points of theology-save for the patent meaning of the seventh commandment. Aramis’s influence had greatly improved D’Artagnan’s mode of dress and of wearing his hair, and Porthos’s not-quite-voiced exasperation had taught him to use his sword better and to move his feet with the grace of a dancer, as his giant comrade did.

Still, when all was said and done, Athos was the one of the musketeers who commanded D’Artagnan’s near veneration. If D’Artagnan could have chosen to be any man at all, he would have been Athos. It wasn’t that he was blind to Athos’s defects of character-in their time as friends, he had come to know Athos’s deep grief and the things he used to hide it, from wine to his sudden, blind rages. But he also knew that Athos held himself with an iron-strong will and to principles so high that he would never stoop to doing anything dishonorable. In fact, the more he knew Athos, the more he’d come to admire him, for the faults he did not allow to affect others, as much as for his obvious nobility of character. Still young enough to need guidance, D’Artagnan had chosen Athos as his mentor and the tutor of his mind.

To see Athos this angry at them cut him to the quick. The emotion was increased by his patently weakened state, his having lost enough blood to feel dizzy and vaguely nauseous. To Athos’s words, he could only say, “Oh, pray, don’t be so furious. We didn’t do it to vex you.”

This brought him an intent look from the blue eyes so dark that they might as well be black, and a slight frown that was, strangely, apologetic. “I didn’t suppose you did,” Athos said. “I am fairly sure the three of you were just proceeding in the way you normally do.” He pressed his lips together, as if this were a great crime, then looked up at Aramis. “I told you not to go to the palace.”

“I had to,” Aramis said. “I had to speak to Hermengarde.”

“Alone? Are you perhaps courting Mousqueton’s girl-friend?”

“No,” D’Artagnan said, jumping into the conversation, because he had seen Athos and Aramis fight before, and it was not something he wished to see again. Porthos and Aramis fought all the time, the sort of amiable squabbling that caused one to think of a litter of newborn puppies in a basket, stepping all over each other and nipping at each other’s ears with no malice and no rancor-or memory of injury-held.

But perhaps because they were so highborn and trained to it, as great noblemen were, when Athos and Aramis argued it was all pale, drawn faces, and the sort of look that true enemies gave each other, not friends who merely disagreed on some point. Besides, this one fact was the sort of thing that would make Athos very irate, and an irate Athos could be an unbearable Athos. As the oldest and noblest of all of them, the erstwhile count held himself responsible not just for D’Artagnan, but for all of them. But his wish to protect them often demanded that they obey him, something that Aramis more than the others rebelled against. So he intervened hastily, trying to deviate the conversation. “No, but the armorer’s son wished to.”

“The armorer’s son?” The question came from both Porthos and Athos, at once.

D’Artagnan shrugged. “At least that is what the neighbors thought. That the armorer’s son, the young Langelier, wished to make Hermengarde his wife, while the armorer wished for Mousqueton to marry his daughter.”

“The armorer’s daughter?” Porthos asked, bewildered. “Is that what they told you? I cannot credit it. Mousqueton never told me.”

D’Artagnan was much too kind to explain that, given Porthos’s sometimes ambiguous relationship with the French language, it was quite possible that Mousqueton had indeed told him, but that the whole thing had got twisted in Porthos’s own mind into a conversation about some different subject-as perhaps the price of swords, or maybe even of fish. Instead he said, “I don’t know how seriously Mousqueton would have considered it, but the neighbors-at least the Gascon baker I spoke to-and his family, seemed to take it quite as a given.”

Athos was frowning at D’Artagnan. “I wish you wouldn’t speak,” he said. “You have bled a great deal.”

D’Artagnan, despite dizziness induced by blood loss and not improved by brandy, shook his head. “Oh, it is nothing,” he said. “Planchet, could you give me my shirt?” And then to his friend, “I just got slightly cut. Most of what appears to you to be blood comes from washing the wound and getting the water mixed with blood, so that there seems to be a great deal more of it than there ever was.”

Athos looked at Aramis over D’Artagnan’s head, and because there didn’t seem to be hostility in that look, D’Artagnan didn’t feel obliged to speak up. He had the impression that Aramis had shrugged. “It is bad enough,” he said, in a low voice. “As you saw, the cut is very deep and, in fact, he bled a great deal, in the palace gardens, before we could stop it. You must not be so alarmed though. I stopped most of the bleeding there. The very little he bled here can’t have made his case much worse.”

And Athos, who appeared thunderstruck and at a loss for words, shook his head. He looked at D’Artagnan allowing, for just a moment, a glimmer of humor into his severe countenance. “All of you, my friends, tempt me to say, with Monsieur de Treville, that such noble men shouldn’t risk themselves in such foolish ways.”

Aramis gave a soft chuckle, echoed by D’Artagnan himself, and Porthos snorted in amusement. “He only says that when he is pleased with us, usually because we have risked ourselves in foolish ways. Only let us be taken by the guards of the Cardinal without a fight, or let us do the prudent thing and abandon a scene of trouble, and he will proclaim us the most scurvy and worthless men who ever lived. And he will give us no quarter.”

Athos inclined his head, but the tension in his bearing seemed to have broken. D’Artagnan, who was starting to read his friends very well indeed, suspected that Athos had come in furious at something and that this anger had colored the scene that had greeted him. Ire mingled with worry had made him, for a moment, wish to pick a quarrel with any of them, so that he could either justify his annoyance or stop worrying. And Aramis would have risen to the bait.

But perhaps his own confusion had helped or perhaps Athos’s sense of humor had reasserted itself. He sighed, in exasperation. “Let’s suppose we take this from the beginning and one at a time, then. D’Artagnan, am I to understand that you gathered information from a Gascon family?”