Read Chapter 12: The Fort Revealed

The slope climbed hard through spruce and black rock, and Corbeil slowed with every step, his breath coming in wet gusts. Étienne did not wait for him. He moved ahead, keeping to the game trails, reading the ground the way his father had taught him—soft earth, bent stems, the faint scuff of moccasins that had passed days ago and meant nothing now.

The trees thinned. Wind moved through the upper branches, and the smell changed—water, cold and broad, and something else. Woodsmoke. Too much woodsmoke for a trapper's camp. Too regular.

Étienne dropped to a knee at the treeline and pulled Corbeil down beside him.

"Quiet," he said.

Below them the land fell away in a long granite shoulder, then opened into a wide basin cut by the river's great bend. The water came in from the northwest in a grey-green sheet, swung hard around a limestone bluff, and ran south between low cliffs. And there, on the inside of the bend, where the current slowed and the bank rose high enough to command both reaches of the river, stood the fort.

It was bigger than La Rue had described. Log palisades twelve feet high, bastions at each corner, a blockhouse rising above the northwest wall with its roof intact. The parade ground inside was visible through the open gate—packed earth, a well, a row of storehouses. A flag flew from the blockhouse pole.

The flag was not white with the fleur-de-lis. It was the red cross of Saint George.

Corbeil made a sound low in his throat. "They're here."

Étienne watched the fort for a long moment. Men moved along the parapet. A pair of soldiers stood at the gate, their coats a muddy red even at this distance. Smoke rose from three chimneys in thin, confident columns. The English had been here long enough to build fires and settle in. They had not come yesterday. They had not come last week.

"Moreau said this fort would be empty," Étienne said, his voice flat.

"Moreau said a lot of things."

Étienne's eyes tracked the walls, the gate, the river below. A single English longboat sat beached on the gravel shore, and beyond it, pulled up on the bank, a pair of canoes with the marks of the voyageurs—French-built, French-painted. The English had come by water. The men inside had not built this fort. They had taken it.

"They stripped it," Corbeil said, reading the same scene. "Like Saint-Louis. Took what they wanted and left it for the English to hold."

Étienne did not answer. He was thinking of the letter in his pack. The letter sealed with the governor's mark. The letter Moreau had carried so carefully, wrapped in oilcloth, guarded with his life through the ambush in the marsh. Orders. Orders to surrender the fort, Moreau had said when Étienne had finally forced the truth from him. Orders to deliver to the commander so the garrison could withdraw before the English arrived.

But the English had arrived.

Étienne pulled the letter from his pack. The seal was intact. He had never opened it, never read the words inside. He had trusted the mission because a man had paid him to guide it, and because the man had carried a scarred badge that Étienne had put there with his own knife as a boy—a lifetime ago, another world.

He broke the seal.

The paper was stiff, the ink black and even. The hand was a clerk's hand, careful, practiced. It addressed the commander of the fort at the river bend, naming him by name—Captain Roche.

Étienne read the words twice.

The letter was not an order to reinforce. It was not an order to hold. It was a command to open the gates, to stand down the garrison, to deliver the fort and its stores into the hands of the English officers who would arrive under flag of truce. It was signed with the governor's name and sealed with the governor's ring.

It was a surrender.

Not a defense against an enemy. Not a desperate ride to save a stronghold. The fort had been sold. The letter was the bill of sale.

"Roche," Étienne said. The name came out like a splinter.

Corbeil looked at him. "What?"

"Roche commands this fort. The letter is addressed to him. It orders him to surrender it."

Corbeil stared. "Then Roche... he was the one who was supposed to open the gates? At Saint-Louis—"

"Saint-Louis was the betrayal. This is the delivery." Étienne folded the letter carefully, the way a man folds something he intends to use later. "Moreau knew. He carried this from Quebec. He knew his brother was here."

"But Moreau said he was going to kill Roche."

"Men say a great many things."

Étienne looked down at the fort again. The English flag snapped in the wind. The soldiers moved along the walls, unhurried, at ease. They were not expecting an attack. They were not expecting anyone at all. They were waiting for a French officer to arrive with a letter and hand them the keys.

And somewhere inside that fort, behind those walls, was the man who had betrayed Étienne's father. The man who had worn the badge. The man whose brother had walked beside Étienne for two weeks, bleeding, lying, driving him toward this moment.

And Hart. Somewhere down there, or coming toward this place, was the English tracker who had put the shot through his father's chest.

Étienne's hands were steady. His father had taught him that a man who shakes when he is angry is a man who misses. He would not miss.

"He's down there," Corbeil said. "Roche. And the English. If we go down there, we walk into their guns."

"We're not going down there."

"We're not?"

Étienne put the letter back in his pack. He kept it close to his body, against the small of his back, where the oilcloth had worn soft from the walking. He thought of Jean-Baptiste, of the message he had left at the trading post, of the trail that had led him across half of New France to this ridge.

The river bent below him, indifferent. The fort sat in its loop of water like a stone in a sling.

"The letter was delivered," Étienne said. "It doesn't matter who carries it. Roche will open the gates, or he already has. The fort is gone."

"Then what are we doing here?"

Étienne turned and looked at Corbeil. The deserter's face was pale, his hands raw from the marsh, his eyes ringed with exhaustion. He had come this far because he had nowhere else to go. There was a kind of honesty in that.

"We're here because the man who betrayed my father is down there," Étienne said. "And because the man who killed my mother's son is coming. And because my brother has a trail that ends in this place."

He looked back at the fort.

"The letter was never the mission. It was the bait."