Read Chapter 3: The Iron Cross

The iron cross was still warm from the dead man’s skin when René slipped it over his own neck. It clinked against his chest, lighter than it looked, and he tucked it beneath the grimy Bavarian tunic before buttoning the collar. He tested the weight of the deserter’s saber at his hip, adjusted the pitchfork-scarred boots on his feet, and spat on the corpse one last time for good measure.

“God forgive us both,” he murmured. The corpse offered no reply, only stared at the low clouds from its resting place in the brambles. René dragged a fallen branch across the shallow scrape where he’d hidden the man, scattering dead leaves until the earth looked no more disturbed than a badger’s rooting. Good enough. In an hour, the wolves would finish what he’d started.

He walked until dusk along the deer tracks that ran parallel to the Imperial road, keeping the treeline between himself and the occasional clatter of hooves. Twice he heard voices carried on the wind—German, gruff, laughing about whores in Heidelberg—and each time he pressed himself into the undergrowth until they passed. The Bavarian tunic itched at his neck. The iron cross tapped against his breastbone like a second heartbeat.

The barn found him before he found it, a crooked timber skeleton slumped at the edge of a fallow field. Smoke rose from a farmhouse a quarter mile off, but no lanterns burned in the barn itself, and the hay within was dry enough to sleep in if one ignored the rat droppings. René barred the door from the inside, sat with his back to a support beam, and pulled the letter from its hiding place in his boot.

He’d carried it for nine days without reading it. That had been the Cardinal’s instruction, of course—*deliver, do not read, the seal is the message*—but the Cardinal was dead, or dying, or something between, and René had killed a man on the strength of that wax seal. The hangman’s rope had already taken two boys who’d worn his clothes. He felt entitled to know what he was dying for.

The seal was red and unbroken, the wax impressed with the fleur-de-lis and the Cardinal’s personal cipher. René worked a thumbnail beneath it and cracked the wax along its seam. The parchment inside was stiff, the ink black and sharp, written in a hand he recognized from a dozen other dispatches: Richelieu’s secretary, the one who dotted his *i*’s with a small flourish.

He held the page to the last sliver of gray light and read.

*To His Most Catholic Majesty, Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, from the hand of Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duke of Richelieu, First Minister of France.*

*As discussed through intermediaries of mutual trust, we hereby confirm the terms of our accord. France shall make no overt move against the Imperial forces in the Palatinate for the duration of the campaigning season. In exchange, His Imperial Majesty shall refrain from supporting the Spanish tercios in their advance upon the Rhine. Our armies shall appear to contest every bridge and ford, burning what must be burned, hanging what must be hanged, that the world may see our enmity is true.*

René read the passage twice. Then a third time. The light had faded enough that he had to squint, but the words burned themselves into his mind regardless.

*For it is understood between us that the true enemy of both crowns is not each other, but the house of Habsburg in Madrid, whose gold drains the coffers of Paris and Vienna alike. Let our soldiers bleed in seeming earnest. Let the peasants burn and the towns pay ransom. Each month this war continues in good conscience of performance, France and the Empire grow stronger in hidden alliance while Spain grows weaker in visible war. When the Spanish lion is bled dry, we shall make peace as brothers and divide the spoils of the house of Austria between us.*

*Signed and sealed, this twelfth day of October, in the year of Our Lord 1634.*

René lowered the letter. His hands were steady, which surprised him. He’d expected something ugly—a betrayal, a secret pact, the usual filth that passed for statecraft. But this was different. This was the entire war made into a stage play, with himself and every other poor bastard with a musket as the actors. The burning farmhouse in Lorraine. The two boys swinging from the crossroads gibbet. The officer he’d killed with his own hands on a moonless road. All of it—*all of it*—was theater.

He laughed. It came out as a dry, broken sound, swallowed by the hay and the darkness. He laughed again, louder, until his throat ached, then folded the letter along its original creases and pressed the broken seal back into place as best he could. If the Emperor’s men stopped him and the seal was cracked, he would be dead before he could explain. But the wax held roughly together, passable at a glance in poor light.

*Well, Renny,* he thought, *you finally know what you carry. Now decide what you do with it.*

The letter was a pass of a different kind. The Bavarian tunic and the iron cross got him through the first checkpoint at dawn—a trio of Imperial dragoons huddled around a cookfire who waved him through with a grunt when he answered their challenge in bad German and gestured at his empty hands. The second checkpoint was harder: a sergeant with a scarred face and the lazy eye of a man who had seen too many deserters, who made René stand at attention while he circled him like a butcher appraising a carcass.

“You’re a long way from Munich,” the sergeant said in thick-accented German.

René forced his mouth into the dull, slack-jawed expression of a man who understood every third word. He shrugged. “The fighting moves. I move with it.”

The sergeant’s eye narrowed. “You carry no weapon but the saber. No pack, no rations. Deserters travel light.”

“I bring a message to the quartermaster at Mainz.” René tapped his chest. “They told me travel light, travel fast.”

The sergeant reached out, quick as a snake, and grabbed the iron cross where it hung beneath René’s tunic. He turned it over in his scarred fingers, examining the worn figure of Saint-Michel and the crude engraving on the reverse. René felt his heart stop. The dead man had worn this cross for years, had sweated into it on battlefields from Bohemia to the Rhine. If it meant something to the Imperials, René had no idea what. He simply held his breath and prayed to a saint he didn’t believe in.

The sergeant grunted. He released the cross and stepped back.

“House of Schellenberg’s mark,” he said, jerking his chin at the engraving. “That’s a pass, if you’re one of theirs. You look too ragged for a Schellenberg man.”

“I’ve been in the field,” René said. “The field makes us all ragged.”

The sergeant’s mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but something close. He waved René through. “Get to Mainz before the Swedes do. They’re crossing the river everywhere now, like rats.”

René nodded and walked. He did not run. Running would have drawn the sergeant’s eye. He walked at a steady, purposeful pace down the rutted road toward the river, the iron cross bouncing against his chest with each step, until the checkpoint shrank to a speck behind him.

Only then did he allow himself to breathe.

He found a hollow at the base of an oak tree, screened by ferns, and sank down with his back to the bark. The letter was a weight in his boot, the cross a weight on his breast, and between the two of them he felt like a man being pulled in opposite directions. If he delivered the letter, he prolonged a lie that would burn ten thousand more homes and hang a hundred more boys. If he destroyed it, he threw away his payment, his pardon, the only chance at the redemption the Cardinal had promised him—and for what? To shorten a war? To save peasants who would never know his name?

He thought of the priest from the village road, the one who’d told him about the hanged boys with eyes that held no forgiveness. He thought of Vautrin, wherever he was, no doubt counting coin already paid in betrayal. He thought of the officer he’d killed, the man who’d said Richelieu was dead. Dead or dying, the Cardinal’s authority was crumbling. If René delivered this letter now, he delivered it into a world where the man who’d signed it might not even exist anymore.

The ferry landing was a day ahead, at the bend of the Rhine where the river narrowed into a churning channel. Somewhere on the far bank, the Swedish patrols prowled. And somewhere behind him, the Imperial checkpoints were learning about a dead deserter in a bramble thicket, and a Frenchman wearing his clothes.

René reached beneath his tunic and pulled out the iron cross. The engraving on the reverse was thin, worn, hard to read in the dappled light—but he made out the letters now, a name and a date, and above them a single word in German.

*PASSIERSCHEIN.*

The sergeant had known what it was. Vautrin had known what it was. And the dead deserter, the Bavarian whose name René had stolen along with his clothes, had known what it was worth.

René turned the cross over in his fingers, feeling its warmth, its weight, the strange comfort of an object that had once belonged to a man who was now wolf-meat. He looked at the river, at the dark ribbon of water visible through the trees.

“All right,” he said aloud, to no one. “All right.”

He stood, brushed the leaves from his tunic, and set his face toward the ferry. The letter could be decided later. The cross would get him across the river. And across that river was the Cardinal’s enemy camp, and the man who might know whether the Cardinal still lived, and whether the letter in René’s boot was a weapon or a confession.

One thing at a time. The ferry first. Then the answer.

Then the choice.