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approached close enough to hear.
    Lamotte pulled up his horse and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword, though he didn’t draw it out of its scabbard.   The villagers were unarmed – unless one could count wicked-looking scythes and pitchforks as weapons – and he was no coward to draw his sword on unarmed men.   “What do you want?”
    The leader held his pitchfork braced on the ground with the sharpened points turned out towards him in a threatening manner.   “Don’t come any closer.   Turn your horse around and go back the way you’ve come.   You may not pass.”
    “Why not?   I have done no wrong.”
    A babble of angry voices came back to him.
    “We have no sickness in our village.”
    “We don’t like strangers around here.”
    “Get back to the pit of Hell you’ve come from.”
    “Get off with ye – we won’t have no truck with you, ye plague-ridden devil.”
    He would not turn his horse around and lose a day’s riding because of the ill-founded fears of a mob of peasants.   Even now, his own sweet Sophie may be dying for want of his medicine.   “I come from Paris.   There is no plague there.   I do not have the sickness.”
    “Then go back to where you’ve come from and leave us be.”
    A general murmur of assent greeted these words.
    “I cannot go back.   My betrothed wife is ill and I must bring her the medicines that will save her.   I must go on.”
    The crowd shuffled its feet uneasily, not knowing what to make of his claim.   Then a man from the back spoke up.   “There ain’t no medicines made by man that can save one who has the plague.   It’s a curse sent from God to punish the wicked.”
    “His wife deserves to die.”
    “And he along with her.”
    He did not like the turn the mutterings were taking, or the angry looks that were being directed his way.   He set his spurs to his horse, intending to break his way through the crowd by sheer force.
    His horse was too weary from the days of traveling to respond quickly.   Before the pair of them could get through the mob, the villagers were upon him.
    He saw the pitchfork being swung in his direction, but he could not escape it.   A sensation of fire burst into his side as the outermost tine tore through his flesh.   His horse screamed in pain, his powerful hooves lashing out at their attackers.
    Many hands reached out to pull him out of his saddle.   He hit the ground with a thud on his newly injured side.   The world in front of him faded to gray and then went black, and he knew nothing more.
     
    Six months later:
    Sophie Delamanse rode slowly through the busy streets, taking in each new wonder with the wide open eyes of a stranger to the city.   The street vendors calling their wares, the swaggering young bullies parading their strength, the merchants going about their business, all the hurly-burly of the most important city in all of France – she marveled at the cacophony of sights and sounds and smells that was Paris.
    The crowds at once disturbed and elated her.   She had lived alone in the deserted manor house in the Camargue all winter until she had become accustomed to the fearsome silence of solitude.   In Paris, she need never be alone again.
    A woman of the street called out to her from a dirty alley.   She blushed and turned her head away before suddenly thinking better of her shyness and returning the woman’s saucy greeting with a polite tip of her plumed hat.   She was a man now – the reincarnation of her brother, Gerard, who lay still in his shallow grave in the marshy swamps of the Camargue.   She must remember her new self in all her dealings and bring honor to her brother’s name and to all her family.   She would remember her love for her brother and her hatred for all those who had wronged them both, and they would make her strong.
    During the long, cold months of winter she had brooded constantly on her brother’s death.   Her guilt and despair had nigh destroyed her until