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watching her with gray eyes clear of human thought—and yet communicating something, a hint of some weird secret, an enigma only mute pupae such as he were privy to. Something like a feather stirred in her chest, quite near where she had once kept her love for another Nicolas. It was a place she could prod as one might prod a sore, but it was no longer painful; what she felt there was only a cold cavity. The gangrene that nearly destroyed her was gone, but the scar of it still clung.
    Le Loup was already outside, encircled by some ten or so of his band. Adrienne and Crecy emerged from the house, and, with as little sound as possible, they all began to move off.
    Half an hour later, the village was a plume of smoke in the sky, then a memory. Le Loup and his brigands had hoped to raid it, but it had already been abandoned by all save corpses when they arrived. While they were searching the ruins for food, clothing, and other valuables, the bluecoats had come, more than they could ever hope to deal with, and so they had hidden and waited. Bandits did that often, as Adrienne had discovered in the past several months.
    Now they wound through muddy, overgrown pasture, weeds and thistles waving higher than their waists. The sky was an iron skin upon the heavens, as it had been since the comet had come at a madman’s call and ruined the world.
    But at least the rains had slackened.
    “We cannot stay with these men much longer,” Crecy confided, as the line stretched out and they were able to achieve relative privacy near the middle of the column.
    “We need them, I think,” Adrienne said.
    “Oh, indeed, but they will soon decide that they do not need us. Or me, at any rate.”
    “Le Loup is jealous,” Adrienne admitted. “He knows you are the better leader, and his men know it, too. But that can be managed.”

    A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    Crecy was silent for a score or so steps. “He hasn’t touched you, has he?”
    “Touched me, yes. More, no. But I fear—”
    “Fear nothing. I will kill him, if it comes to that.”
    Adrienne shook her head. “We need him.”
    “Not that badly.”
    Adrienne frowned. “You still treat me as if I am some delicate flower. You would do it, if it meant the survival of your son, your friend.”
    “And you still treat me as if you think me a whore,” Crecy shot back, “and a stupid one. If you lie with Le Loup, he will have made his conquest. He will then pass you along to his men. Do you want that? Is that a sacrifice worthy of you?”
    “If it keeps us alive.”
    “Listen to yourself. Listen. Is this how you were brought up by the sisters at Saint Cyr?”
    Adrienne snorted. “They brought me up for nothing, nothing at all. What use have they made me to the world or myself? The only thing they prepared me for was to take vows, and if I had done that I would be raped or dead or both now, for the convents are the first place men like Le Loup go; and in these days all men are like him. Yes, all that I learned in Saint Cyr, my skill in mathematics and science, literature, the ways of grace—all useless. What has my fortune always turned upon? In Paris, at Versailles, now? The organ between my thighs. That is the way it is. How dare you confront me so, Crecy?
    You have always known this about the world, and I do not mean by that that you are a whore. Only that you were never a fool.”
    “I never thought you a fool,” Crecy softly replied.
    Adrienne did not meet Crecy’s gaze. She had come to understand when the other woman was exercising her caustic sarcasm and when she was sincere by A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    the set of her strange, pale eyes. Just now, Adrienne did not want to risk seeing sincerity there.
    “Listen,” Crecy said, still softly. “Do not lie with him. It will gain us nothing and lose us much. Le Loup thinks you are my woman. He will not take you by force.”
    “No, but he may kill you in your sleep. What then?”
    Crecy shrugged. “It is simple. I shall not