Read Chapter 2: The Colors of Treason

The dawn came gray as a dead man’s face, and with it the sound of bells. Not church bells—those had been silent in Lorraine for weeks. These were smaller, sharper. Alarm bells, riding the cold wind from the east where the Imperial camp had been hammering its pickets into the earth since first light.

René lay in the hollow of an oak’s roots, his fingers stiff around the hilt of the dead officer’s sword. He’d stripped the man of everything useful before dumping the body in the ravine—coin, pistol, a signet ring that might buy a meal or a grave. But the blood on his own coat had dried to a brown crust, and the coat itself was cut in a cut that screamed *gentleman*, which in this country was as good as screaming *spy*.

He moved before his body finished shivering. The farmhouse he’d fled was two miles back, already ash. The ravine was at his heels. But the bells were coming closer, and bells meant patrols, and patrols meant questions he couldn’t answer with a French accent and an Imperial officer’s blood under his nails.

He found the peasant at the edge of a fallow field, bent over a broken plow. The man saw him coming and straightened slowly, his face a map of caution. René had killed enough men to know when a man was weighing whether to run. He put the sword away and spread his empty hands.

“My cart threw a wheel,” René said in his best Lorraine patois. “I need clothes. I’ll pay.”

The peasant’s eyes flicked to the fine coat, to the sword, to the pistol at René’s belt. He was not a fool. But he was poor, and poor men learn to traffic with wolves.

“Yours is worth more than mine,” the peasant said.

“That’s why I’ll pay you the difference.”

It took three minutes. René shrugged off the officer’s coat and traded it for a rough smock that smelled of sheep and woodsmoke. The peasant took the fine wool, the boots, the signet ring. René kept the pistol, hidden in the fold of the smock, and the letter—always the letter—pressed against his chest beneath the rough cloth. He rubbed dirt into his hair, into his face, and when he straightened he was no longer René Delacroix, courier of the Cardinal.

He was a man who had lost his cart and his horse and his dignity, and was trying to find his way home before the soldiers came.

---

The priest found him an hour later, trudging west along a road that was more mud than stone. The priest was old, his cassock patched at both elbows, his mule loaded with more hope than supplies. He fell in beside René as if they’d walked together for years.

“You’re going the wrong way,” the priest said.

“I’m going where the road takes me.”

“The road takes everyone to the meat grinder these days. You heard the bells?”

René grunted. Noncommittal. A peasant answering a priest.

“Imperial cavalry swept through Remiremont last night,” the priest went on, unbothered by the lack of conversation. “Looking for a Frenchman. A courier, they say. Carrying dispatches for the Cardinal.”

René kept his eyes on the mud. “Cardinal’s dead.”

The priest glanced at him sharply. Then the old man’s face softened into something like resignation. “That’s what the soldiers are saying too. But they’re not looking for a dead man’s letters, are they? No. They’re looking for the courier himself. Alive, they say. They want to know what’s in his pouch before they put him in the ground with it.”

“Then he’s a fool if he’s still alive.”

“He’s alive. The Imperials don’t ring bells for ghosts.” The priest paused, shuffling his feet. “They hanged two boys at the crossroads this morning. Peasants, no more than sixteen. Said they’d seen a man matching his description near the river. The boys said it wasn’t him, but the provost didn’t believe them.”

René’s jaw tightened. He’d been nineteen when he’d learned that the world kills the innocent to punish the guilty. He’d been twenty when he stopped caring.

“God rest them,” he said.

“God rest them indeed,” the priest said, and then he stopped walking. His voice dropped, losing its pulpit cadence. “But if I were a man carrying a dead Cardinal’s letter, I might think about whether the road I was on was the road I was meant to travel. The Imperials know your route, friend. Every bridge, every ford, every village where a Frenchman might stop to water a horse. Someone told them. Someone who knew.”

René turned. The priest’s eyes were sharp now, too sharp for the patched cassock.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Father.”

“Of course not.” The priest smiled and resumed walking, and for a long moment René thought about putting his hands on the holy man’s throat and squeezing the truth out of him. But the old man was already twenty paces ahead, and his voice drifted back. “The abbey is two miles west. Brother Francis keeps a lantern burning for travelers. A good man, for all his sins.”

The priest was gone, swallowed by the gray morning, and René stood alone in the road with his heart hammering against the letter in his chest.

*Someone told them.*

He’d known it in his bones since the farmhouse, since the moment Vautrin’s knife had come out in the candlelight. But hearing it spoken aloud, by a stranger in a patched cassock who was either a fool or a saint or something far more dangerous, made the truth of it bed in like a splinter.

Vautrin had known his route. Vautrin had known the timing. And someone had paid Vautrin in silver or threats or both.

René started walking again, but his feet had changed direction. Not west, toward the abbey. North, toward the crossroads where the boys had been hanged.

---

He was still a mile from the crossroads when he saw the figure stumbling through the field to his left.

The man wore the patchwork uniform of a Bavaria regiment, but there was nothing soldierly about him now. His boots were gone—swapped, perhaps, for bread. His tunic hung open, and he carried nothing but a wooden cudgel and the wild-eyed look of a man who had abandoned his post and knew it.

A deserter. One of thousands bleeding out of the Imperial camps like pus from a wound.

René stepped off the road, meaning to let the man pass, but the deserter saw him and lurched closer, waving the cudgel.

“You!” the man called. His voice was cracked, raw with thirst. “You, peasant. I know you.”

René kept his face slack. “I don’t know you.”

“Yes. Yes, I know you.” The deserter’s eyes widened, suddenly triumphant, the way a dying man looks when he finally understands his fever. “At the farmhouse. By the river. I saw you. The Frenchman, in the coat with the gold thread.”

René’s body moved before his mind caught up. He closed the distance in three strides, seized the deserter’s wrist before the cudgel could rise, and drove his other hand up under the man’s chin. The snap was clean, merciful almost. The deserter’s eyes went blank and he folded like a scarecrow losing its stuffing.

René knelt over him, breathing hard. He’d killed before. More times than he could count. But this was different. This man hadn’t been a soldier come to take his head. He’d been a broken thing, a fragment of the vast machine that was hunting him, and for a moment René saw himself in those dead eyes.

*When did I stop being a man and start being a target?* He forced the question down. It was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

He stripped the deserter’s tunic. It was badly made—Imperial quartermaster’s work, threadbare at the elbows—but the colors were correct. Bavarian blue. A regiment badge on the shoulder, half-ripped away. René pulled off his peasant smock and dragged on the tunic, wincing at the smell. There was no insignia left, he saw. If this man had ever looked like a soldier, the army had taken it back from him when he ran.

René was about to leave when he noticed the iron cross around the deserter’s neck, half-hidden by grime. A Saint-Michel, crudely cast. He lifted the chain over the dead man’s head and held it up to the gray light.

It was cold against his palm. Heavy for its size.

He tucked it under his tunic, next to the letter, and dragged the body into the hedgerow, covering it with leaves and broken branches. From a distance, in this light, with the mud smeared on his face and the Bavarian blue hanging loose on his shoulders, René Delacroix did not exist.

He was a deserter from the Bavarian line, a broken man stumbling home, the same as a thousand others tramping these roads. He was nobody. He was invisible.

He was walking toward the Imperial camp because it was the last place they’d look for a French spy.

And beneath his shirt, the letter—the dead Cardinal’s letter—burned against his heart.