TW02 The Timekeeper Conspiracy NEW Read Online Free PDF Page A

said Lucas.
    "We don't know for certain, Captain. Our agent died before he could complete his message. But we're assuming that Cardinal Richelieu will be involved, either directly or indirectly. He was without a doubt the most influential man in France at the time and he's a pivotal character in history. However, our research department has brought out yet another factor which we find extremely significant.
    "The month of April in 1625 was when a young man named D'Artagnan arrived in Paris."
    The last time she had been in France had been almost five hundred years earlier. Her name had not been Andre de la Croix then. It was not her real name, but her real name no longer mattered to her. That had been another time, another life.
    She had not belonged in 12th-century England any more than she belonged in 17th-century France.
    She had been born in the western Pyrenees, Basque country, but she often felt that she did not belong in any time or place at all. The feeling of being different, of not fitting in, went back almost as far as she could remember.
    It had started when her parents died, leaving her to take care of her little brother. She had been just a child herself. It had not taken her very long at all to find out just how vulnerable a young girl could be, so she had learned to act the part of a young boy. That deception had constituted the first major change in her young life.
    She had continued the masquerade into adulthood, having learned that being a man offered far greater opportunities than being a woman. Her breasts were small and easily, if uncomfortably, concealed and the hard life she had led as a "young boy" had given her a body that was lean and strong. After years spent as itinerant thieves and beggars, she and her brother had been taken in as squires by an aging knight-errant whose brain had been befuddled by one too many injuries. The old knight had never learned her secret and he had trained her in the martial arts of chivalry. That had been the second major change in her life.
    She had known that living free in a time when freedom was a commodity in scarce supply meant becoming strong and self-reliant. She worked hard, developing her body into an efficient fighting machine. She was taller than most women of her time, broad-shouldered, and long of limb. Her drive and physical characteristics combined to give her a body and a degree of fitness that would be unknown to women for several hundred years. She became the physical equal of most men in strength and the superior of most in endurance and reflexes. After the death of her mentor, she took her own brother as her squire and became a mercenary knight, a "free companion" with the fictitious name of Andre de la Croix. She chose for her device a fleury cross of white on red. Guarding her secret with her life, for that was what exposure as a woman would have cost her, she entered into the service of Prince John of Anjou. Shortly thereafter, she met a man she took to be a sorcerer and he had brought her to the third and greatest change in her young life.
    His name was Reese Hunter and he, too, did not fit into his own time. On the day she met him, his time would not yet come for another fourteen hundred years. He was a deserter from the Temporal Corps and he possessed a device he called a chronoplate, a machine for traveling through time.
    He had told her that he was not a sorcerer, yet what he called "science" seemed nothing less than magic. Though he had learned her secret, he was the only man she had ever met who did not treat women as inferiors, as possessions. He had told her that there would come a time when she would not have to resort to her deception to live life on her terms. That time would not come for many hundreds of years, but he could take her there. He had told her of the life he led, the times and places he had been to, and she had been both awed and frightened. She would not have believed him, would have thought him mad, had he not