Brienne-le-Château, May 1780
It was Bourrienne's idea, which surprised nobody, and Bourrienne's fault, which he freely admitted from the very first sentence.
"There's a fair in town," he said, dropping onto the bench beside Napoleone with the particular breathless urgency of a boy who has just heard news too good to sit on. "Traveling players, a man who eats fire, and apparently a girl who dances with ribbons tied to her wrists that catch the torchlight so you can't look away from her. Souvré's older brother came through on the delivery cart and told half the kitchen about it before Brother Anselme chased him off."
"That's very interesting information to have acquired secondhand from a delivery cart."
"It's very interesting information regardless of where I acquired it. We should go."
Napoleone didn't look up from the page in front of him. "The gates close at dusk. We're not permitted beyond the walls after evening prayers without a signed leave."
"I'm aware of the rule. I'm asking whether you intend to let a rule stop you, which, given the last year, seems like an uncharacteristic amount of respect for authority on your part."
That, at least, earned Bourrienne a proper look. "There's a difference between a rule I break because breaking it serves a purpose, and a rule I break because I'm bored and there's a girl with ribbons."
"There's also a girl with ribbons," Bourrienne said, entirely unbothered, "which I happen to think is purpose enough. But if it helps you feel better about it, we can call it reconnaissance. A soldier should know the town he's garrisoned in. That's practically a military principle."
He isn't wrong, you know, Marcus offered, unbidden, and there was something distinctly amused in the old voice tonight, lighter than Napoleone had heard it in weeks. I once had a legion nearly mutiny in Pannonia because I kept them so occupied with drills and philosophy that not a single man got a proper evening in a proper town for the better part of a year. Even Rome's most disciplined men eventually need somewhere that isn't a barracks.
You're encouraging him.
I'm agreeing with him, which is a different thing, though I concede the distinction may not comfort you much at this exact moment. Something almost like a chuckle passed through him, warm and entirely unphilosophical. Go to the fair, Napoleone. I spent the better part of two decades governing an empire and never once, not a single time, snuck out anywhere at all. I would rather like to live vicariously through the one part of your life where getting caught costs you a scolding and not a war.
Napoleone found himself, despite every sensible objection lined up in his head, smiling faintly at that.
"Fine," he said. "But we go quietly, we return before the second watch checks the dormitory, and if anyone asks, we were never gone."
Bourrienne's grin could have lit the room without a single torch. "Now that's the Napoleone I actually like."
They went out through the old gap in the eastern wall, a stretch where the stone had crumbled just enough for a boy to squeeze through if he didn't mind scraping his coat, a route Napoleone had noted months ago and filed away without ever expecting to need it for something as frivolous as a girl with ribbons. Davout declined to come, on the grounds that he saw no particular value in a fire-eater he could just as easily hear about secondhand without risking a week's confinement for the privilege. Rocher wanted to come badly enough that Napoleone finally had to remind him, gently, that four boys sneaking out together were considerably easier to notice missing than two.
The town of Brienne at night was nothing like Ajaccio, no salt in the air, no restless dark water at the edge of everything, but it had its own particular pulse to it, torchlight and woodsmoke and the sound of a fiddle tuning somewhere near the square, and Napoleone felt something in his chest loosen that he hadn't fully realized had been tight.
The fair itself was small by any honest measure, a handful of stalls, a juggler who dropped more than he caught, the promised fire-eater who drew gasps mostly from children young enough to still find fire itself astonishing. But the girl with the ribbons was, Napoleone had to admit, worth the risk his friend had taken to see her. She moved through a slow, deliberate dance while two long ribbons trailed from her wrists, catching the torchlight exactly as promised, and Bourrienne stood transfixed through the whole performance with an expression Napoleone had genuinely never seen on him before.
"Her name's Adèle," Bourrienne said afterward, flushed with something that had nothing to do with the evening's chill. "I asked one of the stallholders. She travels with her father's troupe. They'll be gone by Sunday."
"Then I'd suggest you enjoy tonight, since it appears to be the whole of your acquaintance with her."
"You're supposed to be encouraging, not accurate."
"I find the two aren't always compatible."
They wandered the fair a while longer, spent Bourrienne's few coins on roasted chestnuts that were, if anything, worse than the coffee-black bitterness Napoleone remembered from Autun's better meals, and it was well past the hour they'd agreed to turn back before either of them noticed the torches along the square thinning, the crowd dispersing, the night growing genuinely late.
"We should go," Napoleone said. "Now. Not in a moment."
They ran most of the way back, breath ragged, coats flapping, and arrived at the gap in the wall to find, with the particular sinking clarity of a plan meeting reality at the worst possible instant, Brother Léotade standing in the shadow of the wall itself, arms folded, waiting.
"I confess," Léotade said, mild as a held breath, "I did not expect to find you two, of all the boys in this school, attempting to climb back in through a hole in my wall at this hour."
Bourrienne opened his mouth. Napoleone caught his arm before a single word could escape.
"Brother," Napoleone said, stepping forward, keeping his voice steady despite the pounding in his chest that had nothing to do with the run back. "I owe you an honest account, and I intend to give you one, though I doubt it will improve your opinion of the evening."
"Go on, then."
"We left without leave, through this gap, to see the traveling fair in town. That much is entirely true and I won't pretend otherwise." Napoleone kept his eyes level, his tone even, the same careful architecture he'd built for Léotade once before, in a different corridor, over a different crisis. "What I will say in our defense is only this: neither of us went to drink, or to gamble, or to do anything that would shame this school if it were shouted from the chapel roof tomorrow morning. We watched a juggler drop things and a man eat fire he clearly regretted eating, and we came back the moment we realized how late it had grown, faster than either of us has run all year, precisely because we knew exactly how much trouble we'd be in if we didn't."
"That is not, strictly speaking, a defense, Buonaparte. It's simply a confession dressed up with better posture."
"I know, Brother. I don't intend it as a defense. I intend it as the truth, offered before you had to drag it out of either of us, because I'd rather you judge me on an honest account of a foolish evening than a dishonest one of an innocent walk."
Léotade studied him for a long moment in the near-dark, and Napoleone had the distinct, uncomfortable sensation of being weighed again, the way he had been in the corridor over the watch, the way he suspected he would be weighed by this particular man for as long as they both remained under the same roof.
"And you," Léotade said, turning finally to Bourrienne. "Was the fair worth three days' confinement, do you imagine, now that the bill's arrived?"
Bourrienne, to his credit, didn't flinch. "Yes, Brother. Honestly, yes. I'd pay it again for the ribbons alone."
A sound escaped Léotade that might, in a man less committed to his own severity, have been mistaken for a laugh, quickly smothered. "Extraordinary. At least one of you has the decency to be honest about his priorities." He unfolded his arms, and something in his posture eased, fractionally, though his voice remained stern. "Two days, both of you, not three. I find I haven't the heart to punish a boy as harshly for chasing ribbons as I did the last one for planting evidence in a friend's boot. Go. Straight to your beds, and if I hear so much as a whisper of tonight from anyone else in this dormitory, the next sentence will be considerably less generous."
They went, quick and quiet, and it wasn't until they were safely back on their own cots, breathing hard from more than just the run, that Bourrienne finally let out a long, shaking exhale that was half laughter.
"Two days," he whispered. "For that. I'd have paid ten."
"Go to sleep, Bourrienne."
"You're smiling. I can hear it in your voice even in the dark."
"I am not."
You absolutely are, Marcus put in, warm and unmistakably fond, the closest thing to delight Napoleone had heard from him in months. And you should be. That's the first evening in a year I've watched you spend entirely without calculating anything. I'd nearly forgotten you were capable of it.
I calculated our way out of Léotade's wall not five minutes ago.
You did. Beautifully, as always. Something wry, almost teasing, threaded through the old voice now. But before that, for one whole hour, watching a girl with ribbons and a man regretting his own fire, you weren't calculating anything at all. You were simply a boy at a fair. I'd like you to have more evenings like that, Napoleone. Truly. An empire, when you finally have one, will take every single evening like this one away from you if you let it, and I would rather you'd banked a few more of them first.
Napoleone lay in the dark, the fair's torchlight and fiddle music still humming faintly somewhere behind his eyes, and didn't have a ready argument for that at all.
"Goodnight, Marcus," he murmured, so quietly even Bourrienne, three feet away, didn't catch it.
Goodnight, Napoleone, the old voice answered, warmer than it had any right to be, eight centuries removed from anything resembling a fair, and entirely, unmistakably glad to have finally seen one anyway.