He jerks a knife out of his belt, but suddenly, in a feat of unexpected heroics straight out of an adventure novel, Percy grabs his fiddle case from the ground and swings it like a brickbat. It connects with the skull of the leader and he topples to the ground. Felicity seems to take her cue from this, for she snatches up one of her petticoats from the soil, flings it in the face of the man with his gun on her, then slams her elbow between his legs, so he’s down for the count. I scramble to my feet and start to stagger away, not certain where I’m going other than getting the holy hell away from here, but one of the highwaymen grabs a handful of my coat and jerks me backward. I choke as my collar cinches around my neck. My first instinct is to faint with fear, but everyone else is being brave, and that makes me feel courageous too, so instead I whip around and throw my first-ever punch straight at his chin.
And it bloody well hurts. No one warns you that knocking a man across the jaw probably hurts you as much as it does whoever’s getting your fist to their face. He and I both cuss at the same time, and I double over, just as a gun fires and a bullet goes flying over my head. I feel the whistle against the back of my neck. So perhaps throwing an incredibly inept punch saved my life.
“Run!” I hear Lockwood shout, and Percy grabs me by the wrist and drags me off the road and into the trees, Felicity on our heels. She’s got a fistful of her skirt hoisted nearly to her waist, and I get a view of a good deal more of my sister’s legs than I ever wished to see. There’s the crack of another gunshot, and something knocks me hard in the back of the head. I think for a minute I’ve been shot, but then I realize it was Percy swinging his violin case around to use like a shield.
Behind us, I hear the horses scream, then the clatter of the coach wheels. I don’t dare look to see if Lockwood and our company are making their escape as well—I’m too afraid of catching my foot on something and falling, and I can hear the bandits chasing us. The underbrush is crashing and there’s another gunshot, but we keep running. I don’t know how long we can go for. I am somehow feeling both as though I could sprint all the way to Marseilles fed only by fear, and as though my pounding heart is getting in the way of my lungs, making it hard to breathe deep enough. My throat is starting to feel raw.
“Here, here, here!” Felicity cries, and pulls me over a ridge slick with leaves. I lose my footing and sit down hard, tripping Percy so that we both tumble down the slope like demented mountain goats, simultaneously trying to regain our footing and keep moving forward.
“Over here,” Felicity hisses, and we clamber after her, behind a great rock jutting from the roots of a massive ash tree, and press ourselves up against its back side. I hear the highwaymen crash by us. Their shouts waft behind them, fading to echoes like birdcalls flitting between the trees.
We sit for a long time, all of us gasping and trying to make no noise beyond that. We’re breathing so hard it seems a miracle that that alone doesn’t give us away. I can feel Felicity shaking next to me and I realize suddenly that she’s clutching my hand. I can’t remember the last time I held hands with my sister.
We hear the highwaymen retreat, then come back in our direction, but never close enough to be a threat. Eventually, the noise of them fades into silence, and the forest is nothing but the crackle of the trees.
The rush is starting to fade and a swell of pain goes through my palm. I peel my fingers from between Felicity’s and shake my hand out a few times, wincing. “I think I broke my hand.”
“You’ve not broken your hand,” Felicity says.
“I should know, it’s my hand.”
“Let me see it.”
I pull it up against my stomach. “No.”
“Let me see.” Felicity grabs me around the wrist, then mashes her fingers into my palm. I yelp.
“It’s not broken,” she says.
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s hardly swollen, and I can feel that the bones are all still intact.”
I don’t know how Felicity knows what bones are meant to feel like.
“But don’t tuck your thumb into your fist next time you punch someone,” she adds.
I’m also not clear how Felicity knows the best way to throw a punch.
I look over at Percy. He’s got his violin case pressed to his stomach, two fingers stuck into the pair of bullet holes now etched into the edges, as though he’s plugging a leak. “What do we do now?” he asks.
“Go back to the carriage,” I say. It seems so obvious.
Felicity’s brow puckers. “Do you think we could find it again? We’ll get lost. Or ambushed.”
“They’re highwaymen,” I say. “They want money and then they run. They’ll be long gone by now.”
“I don’t think those were highwaymen. They were looking for something. Something they thought we had, and they seemed rather determined to murder us for its possession.”
“Is that what they were saying? I was sort of . . . panicking.”
“Do we have it?” Percy asks.
“Have what?” I say. “We don’t know what they’re after.”
Felicity flicks a leaf off the hem of her dress, then says, “If any of us is smuggling, now would be the time to come forward.”
And then they both look to me.
“What?” I protest.
“Well, out of all of us you seem the most likely to have picked up something,” she replies. “Did anyone drop something in your pocket while she had her tongue down your throat?”
I am about to complain, but, rake that I am, that tasteful phrasing on Felicity’s part pricks a sudden vein of memory. One hand strays to my pocket, tented around the outline of the trinket box I took from the Duke of Bourbon. I had forgotten entirely that it was there. “Oh no.”
Percy looks sideways at me. “Oh no what?”
I swallow. “I’d first like it to be noted that I am most certainly not a smuggler.”
“Monty . . . ,” he says, my name sopping with dread.
“And,” I continue overtop him, “I’d like you to both remember just how much you adore me and how dull your lives would be without me in them.”
“What did you do?”
I pull the box from my pocket and hold it flat on my palm for them to see. “Stole this.”
“From where?”
“Ah . . . Versailles.”
Felicity snatches the box from my palm, dials clacking together like teeth when her fingers close around them. “Henry Montague, I’m going to murder you in your sleep!”
“This can’t be what they were looking for. It’s puny—it’s just a trinket box!”
“This”—Felicity waggles it before my face—“is not an ordinary trinket box.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s some sort of puzzle, right?” Percy says, taking the box from Felicity. “When you put the letters in the correct alignment, it opens. There’s a word or cipher you have to spell.” He spins the dials a few times, then makes a trial of the latch, like his first guess might be right. Nothing happens. “Obviously it’s meant to hide something or keep it safe.”
“And so Monty thought that might be the best thing to take—something clearly valuable,” Felicity says.
“It wasn’t clearly valuable,” I protest. “It looked plain in comparison to everything else there.”
“It was in the palace! Why were you stealing from the king at all?”
“It wasn’t the king’s! We were in someone else’s apartments.”
“You stole from someone important.”
“Yes, but why would highwaymen be after something belonging to a duke?”