Read Chapter 36: The Last Order

The smoke had begun to clear by the time Moreau finished counting the coins. He sat on the overturned cart, his back against a splintered wheel, the gold laid out in neat stacks across a dead officer's cloak. His fingers left red smears on every coin he touched.

Bastien stood guard a few paces off, his musket trained on nothing in particular. The road behind them was a river of exhausted men, some still carrying their packs, most carrying nothing at all. The Imperial Guard had passed through an hour ago, marching north with the measured tread of men who had stopped believing the drum.

"Sixteen thousand, roughly," Moreau said. His voice came out hoarse. "Maybe more in the strongboxes. The cart's axle won't survive another mile."

Bastien spat into the mud. "Then we find another cart."

"No." Moreau pressed a hand to his side, where the bandage had soaked through again. Dark fabric clung wet against his ribs. "We're done moving this."

He looked at the men gathered at the edge of the farmyard—forty, maybe fifty of them. Survivors of the regiment, what was left of it. They had followed him through the mud and the blood and the fire, and now they stood in ragged rows, watching him count out their futures like a merchant at market.

Moreau pushed himself upright. The world tilted, caught itself, steadied.

"Form up," he called. "All of you. I've got something to say, and I'll only say it once."

The men shuffled into loose ranks. Corporal Renard helped a private with a shattered arm to his feet and stood him in the line. Even the wounded came.

Moreau's eye traveled over them. Men he'd fed, paid, argued with, buried. He knew their names. All of them. After everything—the accusations, the chase, the fire at Plancenoit—it was the one thing he'd done right.

"The war is over," he said. No murmurs. They already knew. "We lost. I won't tell you it was a glorious defeat, because nothing about today was glorious. But you're alive, and that counts for something."

He reached into the pile of coins and held one up. It caught the last of the dying light.

"This is the army's gold. The Emperor's gold." He turned it between his fingers. "Except the Emperor's run off to Paris, and the army's in pieces across the road. So I'm calling it yours."

A private in the front rank—the boy from Artois, the one who'd wept during the first cannonade—stepped forward. "Sir? You're giving it to us?"

"I'm dividing it among you." Moreau tossed the coin to him. The boy caught it, stared at it like it might turn to ash in his hand. "Each of you gets a share. Enough to buy passage home, or land if you want it. Enough to start again somewhere they won't ask what you did at Waterloo."

The men looked at each other. No one moved.

Renard cleared his throat. "Captain—"

"I'm not your captain anymore," Moreau said. "The regiment doesn't exist. There's no one left to promote me, and no one left to follow orders." He gestured at the gold. "Take it. That's an order."

It broke something. The men surged forward, not in a frenzy but with a strange, reverent speed, each of them stepping up to receive his share from Moreau's own hand. He counted out the coins one by one, calling each man by name, pressing the metal into their palms.

The boy from Artois held his share and wept openly. Moreau pretended not to see.

When the last man had stepped away, clutching his portion, a small heap remained. Moreau split it in half.

"Renard," he said. "Take this. It's for the wounded who can't walk. Find them surgeons, food, shelter. Whatever it costs."

The corporal's jaw worked. "And you, sir? You're not coming with us?"

Moreau shook his head. "There's work here. Men dying on the field who need someone to find them. They're not soldiers anymore. They're just hurt." He looked down at his own stained side. "I'll stay as long as I can."

Bastien hadn't moved from his post. When the last man wandered off toward the road, he stepped close.

"You're a fool," Bastien said quietly.

"I've been called worse."

"The gold—" Bastien lowered his voice. "All that talk about the church, about caches and decoys. You told me you lied to the Prussian. That the treasury was the mill, and the mill's gone."

Moreau said nothing.

"So that makes this money stolen," Bastien went on. "Not from the army. From whoever you took it from. From a story you told a dying Prussian so you could buy time."

Moreau met his eyes. "It's just gold."

"It came from somewhere."

"It came from a dead man's cart." Moreau bent slowly, favoring his wound, and picked up a single coin. It was worn thin at the edges, the stamp of some long-dead king barely visible. "The major is dead. Napoleon is gone. The regiment is scattered." He turned the coin over. "Where it came from doesn't matter. What matters is what I do with it now."

Bastien held his gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded once, reached out, and took the coin.

"I'll see it reaches the men who need it," Bastien said. "And I'll see you don't bleed out on this road."

"Where will you go?"

"Somewhere the war hasn't been." Bastien pocketed the coin. "I hear Switzerland's neutral. I'll find a village, grow grapes, get fat." A ghost of a smile crossed his face. "You're welcome to come."

Moreau shook his head. "Not yet."

They stood together as the last light bled out of the sky. In the distance, the wounded were calling out—low moans carried on the wind, the sound of men who had stopped waiting for help years ago but had not yet stopped hoping.

A figure emerged from the treeline. Moreau squinted. It was Desmoulins, walking stiffly, his coat blackened with smoke. He carried a folded paper in his hand.

"Captain," Desmoulins said, stopping a respectful distance away. "I found the altar. The map the major wanted destroyed—it was still there, half-burned." He held it out.

Moreau took it. The edges were curled, charred, but the ink was legible enough. Names. Routes. The assassination plot that had died with its author.

"Burn it," Moreau said.

Desmoulins blinked. "It's evidence. Proof of your innocence—"

"Everyone who needed to know the truth is dead or gone. No one will court-martial a regiment that doesn't exist." Moreau pressed the map back into Desmoulins' hand. "Burn it. And then find your way out of Belgium. You have your escape papers."

Desmoulins stared at him. "What will you do?"

"Stay." Moreau looked out across the field, where lanterns were beginning to flicker among the wounded. "Someone has to."

That night, Moreau found a barn that still had a roof and laid the dying in rows by the light of a single candle. He tore strips from his own shirt to bind wounds. He held hands while men breathed their last. He wrote letters to mothers and wives, lying gently about how their sons had died—painlessly, bravely, in service of a cause that would be remembered kindly.

Sometime before dawn, he walked to the edge of the barn and looked out across the field. The gold was gone, carried away in the pockets of forty men who would scatter across Europe like seed. Bastien had left an hour ago, taking the strongboxes to bury in the woods where no one would find them. Desmoulins was already a distant shadow moving south.

Moreau pressed his hand to his side. The bleeding had stopped, which he decided to take as a good sign.

He thought of the church at Plancenoit, and the gold that had never been there. He thought of the mill, and the legend he'd built around it, a story so convincing that even he had almost believed it for a moment. He had told the Prussian major the gold was hidden in a dozen different places, all of them lies, and in the end the only true hiding place had been his own refusal to let it mean anything.

Empires rose and fell on gold. There would be another Napoleon someday, another army marching to another field. There would always be men with maps and men with coins and men with reasons to spend them.

But there would only ever be this field, these boys, this moment in the smoke where he had chosen.

Moreau stood in the doorway of the barn as the sky turned gray above Waterloo, and waited for first light to show him what work remained.