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let’s give ‘em a surprise.”
    “Ben, don’t place too much faith in your wild inventions. Five is still a lot of men. If they’ve guns—”
    “I want to know what they’re after. We’ll just run around that corner and turn on our aegises, then clobber ‘em.”
    “Ben…”
    “Come!” he shouted, and broke into a trot, glancing back as he did so. There they were, five men in nondescript clothing. One of them shouted, and they, too, began to run.
    “Ah, shit!” Robert groaned.

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    And from the corner in front of them stepped a sixth man, pistol cocked and raised.
    2.
    Brigands
    Outside, smoke clung to the earth like a bitter fog, mingling fumes of gunpowder, flaming thatch, and charred flesh.
    “Yes, keep you quiet, little one,” Adrienne whispered, holding her son more tightly to her bosom.
    “It is a strange child who does not cry at gunfire,” the man nearest her hissed.
    Le Loup was the only name she knew him by, a graying fellow with tangled hair, face as cratered as the moon by pockmarks.
    “He came into the world to the sound of muskets,” Adrienne told him. “He cries when he does not hear them.” She peered wearily out the narrow door of the cottage, caught a flash of cobalt through the haze, as if a bluebird were winging through the bleak morning. From quite near, a gun roared.
    “It is good,” Le Loup said. “I have been known to smother children when they raised the alarm for my enemies.”
    Adrienne met his gaze. She needed no words to make Le Loup uncomfortably return his attention outside.
    Adrienne kissed her toddler on the forehead, wondering what thing it was in a child that could demand life of its mother. As a girl, she had not much A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    considered motherhood, and it had never pleased her to be around children of less than seven or so years of age, and not often then. Her own son was really no different from any she had met save that he belonged to her. He was greedy: He gnawed at her breast, even when she had no milk to give, when her own ribs were visible through her starving flesh. He was stupid: stupider than any cow, goat, or dog, which by the age of one and a half would be capable of foraging for its own food and have the sense to remove itself from its own excrement. Not so her darling child. It seemed impossible that he might one day read, speak in sentences, dress himself.
    And yet this creature, this child, was the only reason she still lived. It was as if everything in her that yet wanted to survive had congealed itself into him so that she could see it, be reminded by it, demand that she continue the motions of life, though her soul felt dead.
    She kissed her son again. “Sleep, Nico,” she said, and lay the fatigued child on a bit of straw.
    Almost as tenderly, she lifted up the carbine next to her and primed the pan.
    Stretching out on the stinking dirt floor of the cabin, she propped the short weapon on a hearthstone, sighted the door, and waited. Outside, the nameless little village continued to smolder.
    “Hsst! Awake!” Crecy’s voice came in her ear. Adrienne blinked and realized that she had nodded off—for one moment or many she did not know, since the scene outside had scarcely changed. Adrienne glanced up at Crecy. The redhead’s chiseled features were lovely in the faint light, but there was no other outward sign that Crecy was female. Her rangy frame and narrow chest were easily disguised by her stained waistcoat and heavy gray justaucorps.
    Perhaps Le Loup and his bandits suspected her true sex, but if they did, they assented to the fiction, for they had all had ample demonstration of her speed, strength, and skill.
    “They’ve passed. We must go before they return.”
    “They left no sentries?”
    “Tonio has already disposed of him.”

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    Adrienne eased up, searching for her things. She looped the dirty sling that Nicolas rode in about her shoulder and lifted him into it. He was awake,