the musketeer's seamstress Read Online Free

embroidered velvet. The ones he held out to Aramis were over-breeches, slashed, to allow the embroidery to shine through.

    Count on Porthos to wear twice as many clothes as needed. However, the plain dark breeches, when on Aramis, were loose enough not to display the slashes.

    Athos nodded his approval, and nothing remained but to fish in his sleeve for his own, silken handkerchief and use it to clean Aramis’s face of blood enough to pass in the gloom.

    The whole had taken very little time, but the voices of Aramis’s pursuers sounded near now. Without speaking, with hasty gestures, Athos directed the rest of them to sit or kneel on the ground. He, himself, pushed on Aramis’s shoulders, forcing the younger musketeer to kneel down in the boneless manner of a man in shock. He adjusted the fold of the cloak he’d loaned Aramis over Aramis’s bare feet.

    At the last moment, noticing the ivory dagger in Aramis’s hand, Athos took it and slipped it into his own belt, in a place where the folds of the hem of his old-fashioned, Spanish style doublet hid it.

    Athos ran back to roughly where Aramis’s footsteps left off, took his own shoes off and then ran past them to a place near the road. He put his boots back on, and scuffed the sand, kicking and running around a bit, like a mad man. Then he jumped well away from the scuffled area, and ran back to them.

    His friends were looking at him as if afraid he might have gone mad. All except Aramis who looked down at the ground as if it contained the grave of all his hopes.

    What was Aramis doing, running around with a bloodied dagger? Whose dagger was it? Athos did not remember ever seeing his friend with an ivory dagger. What had Aramis done with it? Why were servants and dogs pursuing him?

    But the questions would have to wait, because the pursuers were on them. Just before they reached them, D’Artagnan somehow flourished the dice cup and threw the dice, a distinctive and non-frantic noise. The noise of friends relaxing together.

    Athos managed a smile at the young man, before the pursuers arrived.

    Then he turned, away from the men seemingly engaged in a game of dice, and faced the pursuers’ sword in hand. They were, as he expected, the sort of rabble that can be roused in the middle of the night and sent on any pursuit at all for the sake of being able to scare another human being, evildoer or not.

    There were five men, one of them almost as tall as Athos, all of them unkempt and clad in what appeared to be servant uniforms much the worse for the wear. Two of them held dogs straining at the leash, sniffing around disconsolately.

    They wouldn’t be used to tracking humans, Athos thought. They were primarily hunting dogs, who followed various animals through fields and meadows.

    Chasing Aramis must have been easy. There was just the scent of a human, a bloodied human, at that. But here, they would be confused by new smells. Aramis was wearing borrowed clothing with their smells upon it.

    Before the men handling the dogs could give a command, Athos said, “Who goes there?”

    The taller of the men, holding a large brown and black dog on the leash examined Athos from head to toe with a look Athos was not used to receiving from anyone, much less a peasant. “What business is it of yours?” he asked.

    “I guard the entrance to the King’s palace,” Athos said, straightening himself, and only managing to hold his temper in check because it wouldn’t do to call their closer attention to them or to Aramis.

    “A fine job you’ve done,” one of the pursuers said. “Considering that murder was done within.”

    “Murder?” Athos said. “Within the palace? Then why hasn’t the alarm been given?” He gave the servant a glare that implied that the man was a bit worse for the drink.

    The man stopped at that. Clearly, he’d never thought to give the alarm to the palace at large and was now wondering why he hadn’t.

    A small person pushed from the back