Read Chapter 9: Shifting Loyalties

The tent flap ripped open and daylight poured in, blinding after the gloom of Lefebvre’s corpse. Étienne Moreau raised a hand against the glare and found himself staring into the wrong end of a carbine. Behind it stood a provost sergeant he didn’t recognize, jaw set, eyes flat and professional.

“Captain Moreau. By order of the provost marshal, you are placed under arrest for the murder of Sergeant Michel and the theft of regimental funds.”

Moreau’s mouth went dry. He heard Pichegru shift beside him, felt the hussar’s hand move toward his sabre, and shot out an arm to stop him.

“On whose authority?” Moreau’s voice came out steadier than he felt. “I am the quartermaster of this regiment. You cannot simply—”

“I can, sir.” The sergeant produced a folded document, creased and official, and held it up like a talisman. “Signed by the colonel himself this morning. You’ll come quietly, or we’ll carry you.”

Behind the provost, a crowd was gathering. Men from the supply wagons, cooks, farriers, a few infantrymen from the line companies, their faces shifting from curiosity to something uglier as word spread. Moreau saw Corporal Bisset, a young soldier he’d pulled from a frozen ditch outside Vilnius three years ago, push to the front of the throng.

“What’s this about, Captain?” Bisset’s voice cracked. “They saying you took the gold?”

“I didn’t take anything.” Moreau kept his eyes on the provost, but he pitched his voice for the crowd. “I’ve been hunting the man who did—the same man who killed Sergeant Michel and hanged Sergeant Lefebvre in that tent behind me.”

Murmurs rippled outward. A man shouted from the back, something about the quartermaster being the only one who kept the accounts straight, and another answered, angrier, saying the accounts were the problem.

The provost sergeant shifted, uncomfortable. “Captain, I have my orders. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”

“Harder for whom?” Moreau asked.

He saw it then—the mutinous murmur Pichegru had warned about days ago. Not a shout, not a charge, just a low swell of noise that rolled through the assembled men like thunder before rain. Bisset stepped forward, and then another man, and then three more, forming a loose half-circle around the provost party.

“You’ll not take him,” Bisset said. His hand rested on his belt knife, casual but deliberate. “The captain’s been good to us. Fed us when the supply lines broke. Paid us what was owed, even when Paris forgot.”

“He’s owed for what he took, then,” the provost said.

A bottle arced over the crowd and shattered against a wagon wheel. The provost’s horse shied. His sergeant looked at Moreau with something between fury and genuine fear, and Moreau understood that the situation was about to become a slaughter—not of him, but of the men too loyal to let him be taken.

“Stand down,” Moreau barked, loud enough to cut through the noise. “All of you. I’ll not have your blood on my account.”

Bisset’s face twisted. “Captain, they’ll hang you.”

“Not if I’m innocent, Corporal. And I am.” Moreau stepped forward, past the carbine’s muzzle, and put his hands behind his back. “Do your duty, Sergeant. But I want my one request carried to the colonel—he owes me that much.”

The provost looked relieved. He motioned for his men to secure Moreau’s wrists with cord, not iron, which told Moreau something. They didn’t want him dead. Not yet, and not publicly.

They marched him through camp. Men stepped out of their tents to watch, faces unreadable, and Moreau memorized them as he passed—which ones looked away, which ones held his gaze, which ones smiled. The Crow was among them, somewhere. He could feel the weight of that gaze on his neck like a thumb pressed against a bruise.

The tent they shoved him into was a supply tent at the regiment’s edge, canvas patched in three places, the floor still scarred from where a crate of ammunition had sat through the winter. They bound his hands to the center pole and left him alone with a single lantern.

The light was low and yellow. Moreau sat with his back to the pole, working the cord against the rough wood, feeling it fray thread by thread. He had maybe four hours until dawn. The provost had not told him the schedule, but he could guess. They’d want discretion, a quiet court-martial before first light, a noose before breakfast. The colonel would not be eager to explain why his quartermaster had stolen a wagon of gold while his army starved.

Four hours, then. Maybe less.

He heard footsteps outside—two pairs, careful and slow—and then a whisper of canvas as the tent flap lifted. A shadow slipped through and crouched before him, and the lantern caught his face.

Corporal Bisset.

“They posted two guards,” Bisset whispered, producing a knife. “I told them you wanted to see the priest. They believed me because I look the type.” He sawed at the cord around Moreau’s wrists. “You saved my life at Vilnius. I’m not letting you hang for a crime you didn’t commit.”

“You’ll be hanged yourself if they catch you,” Moreau said.

“Then we’d better not get caught.”

The cord snapped. Moreau brought his hands forward, rubbing the raw creases in his wrists, and looked at Bisset for a long moment. The corporal was younger than him by a decade, with the open face of a farm boy who’d learned to shoot early and pray often. He didn’t have to be here. He was choosing to be.

“I need three things,” Moreau said. “A horse. A weapon. And the location of Captain Delacroix’s quarters.”

Bisset blinked. “Delacroix? The artillery captain? He’s the one who fingered you, isn’t he?”

“He’s the one who’s been leaving a trail of dead men behind him,” Moreau said. “I mean to find out why.”

It took Bisset twenty minutes. He returned with a bay mare that had belonged to a dead hussar, a cavalry sabre still slick with its last cleaning oil, and a scrap of paper with a map drawn in charcoal. Delacroix’s quarters were a lone tent at the artillery park’s southern edge, set apart from the other officers, with a clear view of both the east gate and the road beyond.

“He doesn’t sleep in the officers’ row,” Bisset said. “Men say he prefers the quiet. I say he prefers to watch the road.”

Moreau took the paper. His hand was steady now. The fear of the rope had burned off, replaced by something colder and clearer.

“Bisset,” he said. “If I don’t come back, there’s a man named Renard in the provost office. Tell him Pichegru is not what he seems. Tell him to look at the artillery roster for the last two months. Every name that transferred in or out.”

“What will he find?”

“I don’t know. But it’s more than I have now.” Moreau clasped the corporal’s arm. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” Bisset’s jaw worked. “Just find the bastard who did this. For Lefebvre, and Michel, and the men who trusted you.”

Moreau slipped out through the rear wall, cutting the canvas with the sabre’s edge and stepping into the cold night air. The moons were thin slivers behind a bank of cloud. The camp was quiet, too quiet—a few fires burning low, sentries walking their posts with heads bowed, none of them looking his direction.

He found Delacroix’s tent without incident. The flap was tied shut, but a sliver of light bled through the seam. Moreau crouched behind a stack of empty caissons and watched.

Ten minutes passed. A man came out of the tent—not Delacroix, but a soldier he didn’t recognize, wearing the crossed-cannon insignia of the 3rd Artillery. The soldier carried a lantern and walked toward the east gate, moving with the easy gait of a man who knew he wouldn’t be stopped.

Moreau waited. The soldier disappeared into the dark. No one else moved.

He approached the tent from the blind side, slit the canvas low, and rolled inside. The interior was sparse—a cot, a field desk, a chest bound in iron. The desk was clean, its top bare, but Moreau had spent a decade as a quartermaster learning that men hid things where they thought no one would look.

He checked the chest first. Empty except for a folded map of the Waterloo countryside, marked with troop positions in two different colors of ink. He checked under the cot, between the canvas layers, and in the lining of Delacroix’s greatcoat. Nothing.

Then he noticed the desk’s side drawer was an inch shallower than the others. He pulled it out, felt along the bottom, and his fingers found a seam.

A false panel. Beneath it, a leather satchel.

Moreau opened it. Inside was a notebook, bound in dark leather, pages covered in a small, precise hand that wasn’t Delacroix’s. He’d seen the captain’s writing on requisition forms—looping and careless—so this belonged to someone else.

He skimmed the first page. Names. Dates. Amounts. A ledger, but not for money—for men. Each entry noted when a man had been recruited, what he’d been paid, and how he’d been used. Three names were crossed out at the bottom, annotated with a single word: *gone*.

Moreau’s blood went cold. He knew these names.

Sergeant Lefebvre. Sergeant Michel. And a third—a corporal in the supply office named Gautier, who’d vanished three weeks ago on a foraging detail and never returned.

He turned the page and found a list of destinations. Brussels. Ghent. Charleroi. Each with a date and a note, and beside the last entry, written in the same neat hand, a phrase that made Moreau’s breath catch in his throat.

*The Emperor’s gold is already spent. The Crow flies east.*

Footsteps approached the tent.

Moreau shoved the notebook into his coat, rolled through the slit he’d cut, and flattened himself against the canvas’s shadow as Delacroix’s boots crunched past. The captain was alone, walking with his head down, his hands clasped behind his back. He paused at the tent flap and looked over his shoulder—not at Moreau, but at the east gate, where the gold had gone.

Then he went inside.

Moreau lay still in the dark, listening to the other man breathe. He could leave now—slip away, find the colonel, burn the notebook’s evidence in front of the provost and watch them squirm. But the notebook’s final phrase kept repeating in his head. *The gold is already spent.*

Which meant the theft wasn’t about money. It was about something else entirely. And the man who wrote that notebook was still out there, watching, waiting for Moreau to make the next move.

He rose, silent, and made his way back toward the supply tent—not to return to his bonds, but to find the answers he’d been missing. If the gold was spent, the trail was never about the wagon at all. It was about the men who’d bought and sold it, and the name at the top of every page.

The Crow wasn’t Delacroix. Delacroix was a pawn.

The Crow was the man who kept this notebook. And Moreau was going to find him before dawn.