Read Chapter 16: The Plan to Retake

The cellar air was cold and rank with the smell of old blood and damp stone. Étienne had his brother’s arm over his shoulder, half-carrying him toward the far wall where Corbeil crouched in the dark, knife out, listening at the bottom of the stair.

Boots thudded above. Three men, maybe four, moving fast.

Jean-Baptiste’s weight sagged. His breath came in ragged gasps, and his fingers were slick with blood where the chains had bitten through the wrists. Étienne could feel the heat of fever through his brother’s shirt. He had minutes, if that, before the man collapsed outright.

“There’s a drain,” Corbeil whispered, jerking his chin toward the corner. “Old privy shaft, runs under the west wall. Sergeant Gagnon said the English never found it. They sealed the main postern, but the shaft’s still there.”

“You checked it?”

“Gagnon did. Before they took him up for questioning. He’s the one who told me where the keys to the cellar were.”

The boots stopped directly above them. A voice, low and English-accented, said something Étienne didn’t catch. Then the sound of a key turning in a lock.

Étienne moved. He dragged Jean-Baptiste across the uneven stone floor, past the empty iron rings where other prisoners had hung, to a narrow opening at the base of the wall barely wide enough for a man’s shoulders. A crusted iron grate covered it, rusted nearly solid. Corbeil jammed his knife tip into the seam and leaned on it. The grate groaned, then gave with a shriek of corroded metal.

Above, the footsteps stopped. A shout.

“Go,” Étienne hissed. “You first, take him.”

Corbeil didn’t argue. He ducked into the shaft, reaching back to pull Jean-Baptiste through. Étienne’s brother fought him for a moment, dazed, then let himself be dragged into the dark. Étienne followed, pulling the grate partially back into place behind him. It hung crooked, but it would hold for a few seconds.

The shaft sloped downward, slick with centuries of runoff. They slid more than crawled, boots scraping against stone, hands finding handholds in the moss-crusted walls. Water soaked through Étienne’s trousers, cold enough to cramp his legs. Behind him, he heard the cellar door crash open and a voice roaring in French—one of the English, shouting for the Corporal of the Guard.

Then the shaft turned, and the sound faded.

They emerged in a ditch choked with cattails and dead reeds, fifty paces beyond the fort’s west wall. The moon was up, thin and high, casting enough light to show the dark mass of the fort behind them and the dark line of the forest ahead. Étienne hauled himself out of the muck, then dragged Jean-Baptiste up after him. His brother was barely conscious now, head lolling.

“We have to move,” Corbeil said. “They’ll find the grate.”

They moved. Into the trees, branches whipping their faces, Corbeil leading, Étienne carrying most of his brother’s weight. They broke through into a shallow ravine and followed it north, away from the fort, until Corbeil finally stopped at the base of a fallen pine and dropped to his knees.

Étienne lowered Jean-Baptiste to the ground. His brother’s eyes were open, but glassy. He reached up and gripped Étienne’s wrist with surprising force.

“You came,” he whispered. “I thought—I thought they’d take you too. The letter, the trap.”

“I know about the letter,” Étienne said. “I know about Roche. And I know you surrendered to Hart.” He paused. “Tell me why I shouldn’t leave you here.”

Jean-Baptiste’s laugh was a dry rasp. “Because you want to know what Roche planned. And because you know Hart will level this fort before the month is out, and that river bend will be English ground from here to the sea. You want to stop it. You just don’t know how yet.”

Étienne said nothing.

Gagnon found them an hour later. The sergeant moved like a ghost through the undergrowth, rifle slung across his back, face grimed with dirt and dried blood from the questioning he’d taken. He looked at Jean-Baptiste, then at Étienne, and nodded once.

“There’s a trapper’s lean-to a mile north. Used to belong to a friend of mine who died last winter. We can hold there.” He eyed Jean-Baptiste. “Is he going to make it?”

“He’ll make it,” Étienne said, hoping it was true.

---

They made the lean-to by dawn. Gagnon built a small fire—risky, but necessary. Jean-Baptiste was shaking violently now, his teeth chattering even as he pressed himself against the fire’s warmth. Étienne cut strips from his own shirt and bound the wounds on his brother’s wrists, then checked the other marks. There was a stab wound on his side, shallow but festering, and a set of broken fingers on his left hand.

“They wanted names,” Jean-Baptiste said as Étienne worked. “Loyalists in the settlements. The people who would resist Hemlock’s rule when the fort fell. Roche gave them names before he left. I wouldn’t.”

“Roche left?”

“The same night Hart arrived. Took a canoe upriver with his pay and his whore. He’s gone. They don’t plan to hold the fort, Étienne. They don’t have to. They only have to hold it until the main garrison arrives—a week, maybe less—and then use it as a staging ground to cut the river in both directions. Every boat that tries to run the bend will be a target.”

Gagnon spat into the fire. “Then we take it before they come.”

“Take it with what?” Corbeil said. He was standing at the edge of the lean-to, watching the treeline. “There’s four of us, one of them half dead.”

“Seven,” Gagnon said. “There are three other men I know are still in the woods, hiding since the march north. They’ll fight if they know there’s a chance.”

Étienne sat back on his heels. His mind turned over the layout of the fort as he’d seen it from the ridge before the infiltration. Log palisade, bastions at the four corners, a gate facing the river, two gates on the landward sides. The outer yard was mostly clear ground, broken by the barracks and the magazine. The cellar where his brother had been kept was almost empty—they held no prisoners now, which meant the garrison was thin.

“The garrison,” he said. “How many?”

“Twenty, maybe twenty-five,” Jean-Baptiste said. “Mostly men Hart brought down from Hemlock’s army. Not regulars. Volunteers, trappers, a few Ojibwe scouts who hire out to whoever pays. They’re not disciplined.”

“And the walls?”

“Log, but not reinforced. The French built her in a hurry three years ago and never finished the outer earthworks. The postern on the west wall is sealed, but Gagnon says there’s a sewer drain runs under the southeast bastion that empties into the river.”

Gagnon nodded. “It’s big enough to crawl through. I had it scouted when I was still part of the garrison, before Roche sold us out. The grating’s rusted; one man with a bar could tear it loose. It comes up inside the magazine.”

“The magazine,” Étienne repeated.

“If we put men in there at dark, we could open the main gate from within. Take the garrison in their sleep.”

Étienne looked at the map Gagnon had scratched in the dirt with a stick. The plan was simple, and simple plans were the ones that worked if you had surprise. His eyes swept over the rough lines.

“We don’t have twenty-five men,” he said. “We have seven. And we won’t have them if we don’t do this tonight. The longer we wait, the closer the English garrison gets, and the more time Hart has to send word of an escaped prisoner.”

“Tonight,” Jean-Baptiste rasped. He was watching the fire, his face pale, his eyes bright. “I can walk.”

“You can barely stand.”

“I can walk. And I know where the sentry posts are, and the patterns. Hart’s a coward. He’s kept the same watch rotation since the day he took the fort, because he doesn’t think anyone’s going to challenge him.” He looked up at Étienne. “We can use that.”

Étienne weighed it. His brother could be lying. Could be bait, set out by Hart, and Étienne fall for it all over again. But the alternative was leaving the fort in English hands and marching back to Moreau with a wound and a story about a trap. If Roche had sold the fort before Étienne had even been hired—

“We’ll do it,” he said. “But we do it my way. We split into two groups. Gagnon leads the loyalists through the sewer to take the magazine. Corbeil, Jean-Baptiste, and I approach the main gate as prisoners.”

“Prisoners?” Corbeil’s hand hovered near his knife.

“You’re a deserter. I’m a guide they suspect. My brother’s an escaped prisoner. If we stumble out of the woods at dusk, the sentries will expect to bring us back to Hart for questioning. They’ll open the gate.”

“And then?”

Étienne looked at the map, then up through the trees toward the fort. “And then we take it back.”

---

They spent the day planning, sleeping in shifts, eating a squirrel Gagnon shot with a single ball from his rifle. As the sun began its slide toward the treeline, Étienne went looking for the deserter.

Corbeil wasn’t there.

Gagnon stood over the lean-to’s collapsed frame, looking north. “He was gone when I came back from scouting the approach. Didn’t take a rifle, didn’t take the spare powder.”

Étienne felt the cold pit open in his stomach. “He deserted once,” he said quietly. “He could do it again.”

“Or he went to warn them,” Jean-Baptiste said. “Get Roche’s pardon.”

Étienne looked at the fort through the gap in the trees. The angle of the late sun threw the long shadow of the flagpole across the clearing. The English flag hung limp in the still air.

He had two choices. Go now, before Corbeil could reach the fort and break the alarm—or fall back and lose the only chance he had.

“We go tonight,” he said. “We go now. And we don’t wait for him.”