Read Chapter 10: The Traitor's Badge

The fire had burned low by the time Étienne turned to Baptiste's pack. The others slept—La Rue curled against a fallen log, Moreau propped against a birch with his shoulder wrapped in blood-dark linen. The marsh around them breathed fog, soft and patient, swallowing sound.

Étienne worked the leather ties loose with cold fingers. He had avoided this. The servant had carried little—a spare shirt, a whetstone, a twist of dried meat wrapped in oilcloth. But under the shirt, wrapped in a square of wool, his hand closed on something hard. Metal.

He drew it out. A French officer's badge, cast in brass, the fleur-de-lis worn smooth at the edges. The pin on the back was bent but intact. He turned it over and his blood went cold.

There was a scratch on the face of it—a long diagonal gouge, as though a blade had skipped across the metal. Étienne knew that scratch. He had put it there.

He was twelve. His father lay dying in the snow, his chest opened by an English ball, and the French captain—the one who had led them into the ambush, the one who had sworn the pass was clear—had bent over him and said words Étienne barely remembered through the screaming in his head. But he remembered the badge. It had caught the pale winter light as the captain turned away. Étienne had been clutching his father's knife, and he had thrown it. Not at the captain. At the ground, in rage. The blade had sparked off the badge, leaving its mark.

He had not seen that badge again in twenty years.

Now it sat in his palm, warm from the marsh air, a weight far heavier than brass. He ran his thumb over the gouge. Scratched there by a boy who had just watched his father die under the command of a man who had walked them into English guns.

Étienne looked across the dying fire at Moreau. The officer's face was slack in sleep, his breathing shallow. Étienne thought of the other badge—the one he had found tucked inside Moreau's own pack on the first night of the march. He had assumed it was a spare, or a keepsake. He had not looked closely. He had not thought to look.

He stood slowly, the badge in his fist, and crossed to Moreau's pack where it lay near his feet. Moreau did not stir. Étienne knelt, working the flap open with the silence of a man who had spent his life moving through country where noise was death.

The second badge was where he had left it, in the lining pocket. He drew it out and held both in the firelight.

Identical. Same brass. Same fleur-de-lis. Same wear at the edges.

But he did not need to check for the scratch to know which was which. He had felt the weight of the first one as a child, smelled the smoke and snow of that day, heard his father's last breath rattle out. The badge from Baptiste's pack bore the scar his own hand had made.

Two badges. Two brothers. One of them had guided his father into death.

Étienne set both badges on his palm. The question was not whether Moreau was the man from his memory—Moreau was too young, too green in his command, his hands smooth and unweathered. But the badge in Moreau's pack had come from somewhere. A brother, a father, a comrade. Someone whose bloodline had placed it in the officer's keeping.

He should ask. He should pin Moreau to the ground and demand the name of the man who had worn this badge in the winter of his twelfth year.

But Moreau was wounded. Moreau held the mission—the fort, the river bend, the orders that might matter beyond any one man's vengeance. And Moreau was the only one who knew the full truth of what waited at their destination.

Étienne closed his fist around both badges. The metal was cold. It would not warm, no matter how long he held it.

"I wondered when you would find them."

The voice came soft from the shadows. Étienne's hand went to his knife before he recognized the shape leaning against the log—La Rue, not asleep at all, watching him with dark eyes that caught the firelight like water.

"You should have said something," La Rue said. "Instead of pawing through a dead man's things."

"Baptiste was with us for two weeks." Étienne kept his voice low. "He never once mentioned an officer's badge in his kit. A servant carrying a captain's brass—"

"A servant carrying what he was told to carry." La Rue shifted, wincing as his ribs pulled. "You think he knew what it was? Or what it meant?"

Étienne looked at the badges again. Both of them. The one from Baptiste's pack, scarred by his own boyhood blade. The one from Moreau's lining, smooth and unmarked.

"Baptiste was Moreau's man," Étienne said slowly. "Assigned to him before the march. If Moreau wanted a badge kept safe, kept hidden, he could have used his own servant. But he didn't. And Baptiste died with it in his pack."

"Or Baptiste was carrying it for someone else."

La Rue's voice was careful. Too careful. Étienne looked up sharply.

"What do you know."

La Rue met his eyes, then looked away. The fire popped. Somewhere in the marsh, a bird called once and was silent.

"I served at the fort," La Rue said. "The one off the maps. I told you I fled when it fell to betrayal from within. But I did not tell you all of it."

Étienne waited. The marsh held its breath with him.

"There was a captain," La Rue said slowly. "Came in with dispatches from Montreal three months back. He wore a badge like the one in your hand—I saw it when he passed through the gate. Distinguished, well-spoken, knew the country better than most French officers. The garrison commander trusted him. Gave him the run of the fort."

La Rue's mouth tightened.

"Three weeks later, the English appeared at the bend. They came up the river in the night, quiet as snakes. No scout raised a warning. The gates were thrown open before any man on the wall had a chance to fire. And the captain who had come with dispatches was the first man through the breach, wearing an English coat."

Étienne's chest was very still. "He turned."

"He turned. Or he had always been turned." La Rue's gaze dropped to the badge in Étienne's hand. "I never saw his face. I was on the far wall when the gates fell. But the men who fought closest to him said he wore French brass under the English wool. A trophy, or a lie he couldn't quite shed."

The weight of the badge in Étienne's palm seemed to grow. He thought of his father, bleeding into the snow. He thought of the captain who had walked them into the ambush, whose face he had never been able to fully see, only the badge glinting as he turned away.

"Two brothers," Étienne said quietly. "Two badges. One wore this one into betrayal, and the other—" He looked at Moreau's sleeping form. "The other carries its twin in his pack. Knowing exactly what it is."

La Rue said nothing.

"You knew Moreau was tied to this." Étienne's voice was barely a whisper now, rough as bark. "You could have told me."

"I did not know he carried that badge," La Rue said. "I told you the truth—I never saw the traitor's face. But when you told me Moreau was leading us to the river bend fort, and I recognized the name in his dispatches…" He shook his head. "I needed to see what he did. Who he trusted. What he carried. A traitor, I thought, travels light. But a man carrying his brother's memory travels with weight he can't put down."

Étienne looked down at both badges. One scarred, one smooth. Brother to brother. One had betrayed his father, and the other had been leading him—for days, through ambush and marsh and death—toward the same fort where the first brother had opened the gates to the enemy.

He slid both badges into his own inner pocket, against his shirt, where he could feel them with every heartbeat.

"Moreau doesn't know about the badge in Baptiste's pack," he said.

"No."

"He thinks his own is still hidden."

"Yes."

Étienne stared into the fire. The flames had burned low, but the embers still glowed, red and patient. Waiting for fuel.

"Then we let him keep thinking that," he said. "We get to the river bend. We see what waits there. And when we find the man who wears English wool over his brother's ghost, I will be holding both badges—and he will know who carries them."

La Rue nodded slowly. "And Moreau?"

Étienne looked at the sleeping officer. The man who had hired him. The man who had used the death of his father to choose his guide. The man whose bloodline had sent him into ruin once before.

"He gets us to the fort," Étienne said. "After that—whatever his brother did to mine, he will answer for it. One way or another."

The fire crackled. The fog closed in. Somewhere beyond the marsh, the river ran dark toward the bend, and the fort waited at its curve like a promise not yet kept.