On My Lady's Honor (All for one, and one for all) by Kate Silver Page B

I’ll puke.”
    The blonde Musketeer growled.   “Trust a dirty little gutter rat not to know the meaning of morality or respectability or human decency.   You may as well stay a man and be done with it.   You act just like men do.”
    The thief turned around to glare back at her.   “Street rats can’t afford morals.   You can take your morality and shove it up your arse for all I care.”
    Sophie spoke up quickly, trying to distract their attention away from their quarrel.   She wanted them to be sisters and work together, not to snarl and spit at each other like fighting cocks.   “How did you guess our sex?”
    The thief was still not mollified.   She looked pointedly at the blonde Musketeer as she spoke.   “A life on the street teaches to look beyond how people seem on the outside.   If you don’t learn that lesson quickly, you’re dead.”
    Surely she could have seen through them on the instant.   No one else had so much as suspected her disguise for weeks.   “When did you realize that we were women?”
    “As soon as you burst into the storeroom and rudely disturbed my booty-gathering,” the thief said, her back turned to them again.   “You could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw the pair of you evidently with the same idea as I had – to become a Musketeer.   I thought I was the only woman daft enough to try it, not to mention smart enough to carry it off.”
    Sophie knew just what that felt like.   She could hardly conceive that there were three of them in the same boat.   She had to wonder if there were any more of them hidden away in different regiments – women passing themselves off as men, just like the three of them.
    “It’s the only reason I stuck with you both,” the thief continued, her head deep in a cupboard.   “If you’d been men, I would’ve ditched you three times over and left you to be taken up in irons by the guard without a qualm.   As it was, I figured you two could do with a helping hand.  
    “Ah ha, success.”   She turned around again, a fresh bottle of wine in her hand.   “Come gentleman, shall we make our introductions again?” she said, as she poured them all another generous measure.   “Let me start.   May I introduce myself not as JeanPaul Metin but as Miriame Dardagny, born and raised in the back alleys of Paris, lately a pickpocket, recently turned Musketeer in the hopes of making my fortune with rather less risk to my neck.”
    The blonde Musketeer stretched out her legs in front of her.   “Courtney Ruthgard at your service.   I have a cousin named William of around my age.”   She wrinkled her nose.   “He is a sweet-natured simpleton who grows tulips in Holland and hasn’t a martial bone in his body – he is one of the few men in the world who is worth the food he eats.   I borrowed his name to become a Musketeer and avenge the wrong that one of them did to me and my family.   God willing, he will sleep with the worms before too much longer and I shall sleep easy in my bed again.”
    “Sophie Delamanse.   My twin brother, Gerard, was a Musketeer before he died of the plague – the plague that I brought into the house.   I loved him dearly and would have given my life for his, but I was the cause of his death.   I decided to take his place, and win in his name the honor that should have been his.”
    The three of them sat in silence for a while, drinking their wine and looking at each other in bemusement.   Sophie did not know what to say to the other two.   She had trained herself for so long to act and think like a man that she did not know how to be a woman again.
    Finally she dared to do what she had been longing to do for hours.   She reached under her shirt and pulled free the wrappings that bound her chest, sighing with pleasure as her breasts swung free.   “Ah, that feels so good.   I never dreamed how uncomfortable men’s clothes could be until I had to wear them myself.”
    At her cue,