Chapter 96: THE WINDOW AND THE WOLF

The gate of the depot stood open behind him, and Jean-Luc Marchand walked out of it into the grey light of an Ardennes autumn that had no right to exist in the year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and sixty-seven.

The boy walked at his side.

He was perhaps nine years old, small and thin, with Marchand's own grey eyes and a jaw that would one day harden into something stubborn. He wore a coat of strange cut, neither French nor Dutch nor Spanish, and he carried no weapon, and he held his father's hand as though he had been waiting a very long time to do it. Françoise walked on Marchand's other side, her skirts gathered in one hand, her face pale but steady. Behind them, at the gate, Étienne had not followed. Étienne never left the depot. Étienne could not.

The boots in the trees had not moved.

"Your Majesty's men," Marchand said quietly, "are in the wood."

The boy looked up at him. "I know. They came while you were writing me."

"Did they see you?"

"No." The boy smiled, and it was a terrible smile, because it was too old for his face. "They saw the gate. They saw the light. They did not see the door, because the door did not want to be seen. The door is shy, Papa. It only opens for family."

Françoise drew a breath. "Marchand. If the King's soldiers have seen the light—"

"Then Colbert knows," Marchand said. "And if Colbert knows, then the King knows, and the King has ordered the depot sealed, and there are men with crow's feathers in their caps walking toward a gate that is no longer there." He stopped walking. The trees ahead were thinning into a road, and on the road, half a league distant, there was a carriage and a knot of horsemen and a banner that caught the thin sun like a blade. "We cannot go back to Versailles the way we came."

"We cannot go back at all," Françoise said. "Not with the boy."

The boy let go of Marchand's hand and stood in the middle of the road, and the wind moved his hair, and he said, "You were going to take me to him. You said so. You said we were going to have a conversation with my King."

"He is not your King," Marchand said.

"He is the King of the country where I was born," the boy said. "That makes him mine. You told me that, Papa. In the ledger. You wrote it before I was born, and then you forgot you wrote it, and then you wrote it again. That is how windows work. They remember you even when you forget them."

Marchand looked at the boy for a long moment. Then he took the black ledger from under his arm and opened it, and there, on a page he had not written, in a hand he recognized because it was his own, were the words:

*The window is not a door. A door lets you through. A window lets you see. The King must see, or the King will break the glass.*

Below it, in the same hand, newer and thinner, as though written by fingers that had grown tired of writing:

*He will not like what he sees.*

Marchand closed the ledger. "How did you get here?" he asked. "Through the window. You came through the window. But the window is in the sky, beyond the stars, and you are standing on a road in the Ardennes."

The boy looked up at the grey clouds. "The window is wherever the ledger is," he said simply. "You are the ledger, Papa. That is what the older one told you. The one in the mirror. He wrote the first lines. You wrote the rest. And I am the line that neither of you wrote, because I wrote myself, the way you wrote me, and now the window is open and I am here and I am not going back until you keep your promise."

Françoise knelt in the road and took the boy's hands in hers. "What is your name?" she asked.

The boy looked at her, and for the first time he seemed uncertain. "I do not have one," he said. "Not yet. Papa has not written it."

"Then I will write it," Marchand said, and his voice was rough. "When this is done. When the King has looked through the window and seen what he must see. I will write your name, and you will have it, and no one—not Colbert, not the crow, not the storm—will be able to take it from you."

The horsemen on the road had turned. Marchand saw the flash of a carbine, the lift of a hat, the banner dipping as a rider spurred toward them. He stepped in front of the boy and Françoise and raised one hand, palm open, and called out in the voice he had used on the parade grounds of the Royal Army, the voice that carried without shouting:

"I am Jean-Luc Marchand, commissary of the King's armies, by the King's writ and seal. I carry dispatches for His Majesty from the frontier. You will not fire."

The rider reined in twenty paces away. He was young, and his face was red with cold, and there was a crow's feather pinned to his bandolier. He looked at Marchand, and then at the boy, and then at the black ledger under Marchand's arm, and his eyes widened.

"You are the man from the depot," he said. "The one the Minister seeks."

"I am the man the King sent for," Marchand said. "There is a difference. Take me to him."

The rider hesitated. "And the child?"

"The child is mine," Marchand said. "He goes where I go."

The rider looked at the boy, and the boy looked back at him, and something passed between them that Marchand could not see—some flicker of recognition, some echo of a face the boy would wear when he was grown. The rider's horse shied and would not stand still.

"Very well," the rider said at last, and his voice had lost its certainty. "But the Minister will want to see the ledger."

"The Minister," Marchand said, "may look through the window like everyone else."

He lifted the boy onto the saddle before the rider, and Françoise mounted behind, and Marchand walked at the stirrup with the ledger under his arm and the cross of the dead woman against his chest. The road led south, toward Versailles, toward the King who counted boots and waited for storms, toward the dark gardens of Marly where the earth had swallowed a man whole and spat him out again. The sky above was grey and low, and the wind smelled of rain and ink.

Behind them, in the wood, the gate of the depot stood open for a long moment. Then it closed, softly, like a book being shut, and Étienne's voice whispered after them on the wind, so faint that only the boy heard it:

*The window is open. So is the wolf.*

The boy did not turn. But he put his small hand on the rider's pommel and leaned forward, and his grey eyes—Marchand's eyes—fixed on the road ahead, where the towers of Versailles were beginning to rise out of the mist like the teeth of a beast that had been waiting a very long time to be fed.