Read Chapter 17: The Price of Freedom

The sewer mouth breathed its cold stone stench up at them as Étienne crouched at the lip, Gagnon at his shoulder. The moon had gone behind a bank of cloud, and the fort wall rose black and silent above. Too silent. He’d expected shouts, a patrol’s tramp, the garrison’s night noise. Instead the fort sat like a held breath.

“They know,” Corbeil whispered from behind him. The deserter’s voice was a dry rasp. “Hart’s no fool. He’s folded his men inward.”

Étienne shook his head. “We go. Gagnon, the postern—how many between the yard and the cellar stairs?”

“Two sentries at the magazine, one at the well. The rest bivouac in the east barracks.” Gagnon’s face was a pale scar in the dark. “If they’ve moved, I don’t know it.”

It was the best they had. Étienne lowered himself into the channel, the water fouling his knees, and the others followed—Corbeil, then Gagnon, then the seven loyalists who had chosen to come. Men with rusted muskets and starved faces, men who had hidden in the woods for a week while the English ate their rations and warmed their fires. Étienne felt their hunger at his back like a physical weight.

They crawled a hundred yards through the dark, the stone walls pressing close, and emerged in the angle of the north courtyard where the midden pile had grown high enough to hide a man. Étienne raised his hand. Three fingers. Two. One.

He broke for the postern gate, low and fast, and the first musket shot came not from the wall but from the barracks roof. The ball clipped the stone beside his head and screamed off into the night.

Then the night tore open.

From every window, every parapet, a sheet of flame answered. The loyalists behind him went down in the first volley—two men crumpled without a sound, a third screamed and thrashed in the mud, his leg ruined above the knee. Gagnon grabbed Étienne’s arm and hauled him back toward the sewer mouth.

“The gate!” Gagnon shouted. “They’ve sealed it—the postern’s blocked!”

Étienne looked. The postern gate had been filled with rubble and timber, packed so tight a rat couldn’t pass. Hart had known. Somehow Hart had known.

“Fall back! Fall back to the channel!” Corbeil’s voice cut through the crackle of musket fire, and the survivors broke, scrambling for the stone mouth. Étienne counted as they dove into the dark—Gagnon, Corbeil, four men. Of the seven loyalists who had come, three were dead or dying in the yard, and the English were taking their time, firing deliberately at the bodies to deny any rescue.

Then a shot came from the cellar stairs, and Étienne saw his brother.

Jean-Baptiste had somehow gotten free of his chains and fought his way up into the yard—but he was a broken thing now, staggering, one arm hanging useless, his face a mask of dried blood. He was shouting something, but the words were lost in the din. A redcoat stepped out of the magazine shadow and leveled a musket at his back.

Étienne was already running.

He didn’t remember crossing the yard. He only remembered the impact, his shoulder driving into his brother’s ribs, sending them both sprawling into the muck as the musket ball passed through the space where Jean-Baptiste’s heart had been a heartbeat before. His brother’s breath came in short, ragged gasps, and when Étienne rolled him over, he saw the dark stain spreading across his brother’s tunic.

“You came back,” Jean-Baptiste managed, a cracked laugh dying in his throat. “You stupid, loyal fool. You always come back.”

“Don’t speak.” Étienne hauled him up, fire singing past his ear. “Save your strength for running.”

“No strength left to save.” Jean-Baptiste’s hand closed on Étienne’s wrist, and for a moment his eyes were clear—the old Jean-Baptiste, the boy who had taught Étienne to set snares and curse in three languages. “Roche isn’t the only one who sold pieces of this fort. There’s a name. The letter—” He coughed, blood flecking his lips. “The letter wasn’t forged by Roche alone. It came from Montreal. It came from someone high. Someone who wants the river open to the English.”

“Who?” Étienne pulled him toward the sewer mouth, the world reduced to the narrowing corridor of fire and shadow.

Jean-Baptiste tried to answer, but his head lolled, and his boots dragged.

The sewer mouth was ten yards away. Corbeil was there, rifle up, covering them with deliberate, single shots that dropped a redcoat each time. Gagnon had one arm around a wounded loyalist, dragging him into the dark.

Étienne made the threshold and shoved his brother through. Corbeil grabbed Jean-Baptiste by the collar and pulled, and Étienne turned to follow—

A ball took him in the calf.

It was not a clean wound. It tore through the meat of his leg and sent a shock of white pain up his spine, and he went down on one knee in the muck. The English were pouring out of the barracks now, a dozen or more, forming a loose line.

“Go!” he roared. “Take him and go!”

Corbeil did not hesitate. He hooked his arm under Jean-Baptiste’s and dragged him into the dark channel, and Gagnon followed with the wounded man, and Étienne was alone in the mouth of the sewer with his leg on fire and the English closing.

He fired his pistol at the nearest redcoat and did not see him fall. He had one shot left and no way to run. He thought of Moreau, dying in La Rue’s care. He thought of the name Jean-Baptiste had tried to speak, the betrayal that ran all the way to Montreal.

Then a hand closed on his collar and hauled him backward into the dark as a volley tore apart the spot where he’d knelt. Corbeil, who had come back.

They ran blind through the channel, boots slipping on slime, Jean-Baptiste’s weight shared between them. Behind them the English did not follow into the dark—they were soldiers of the King, not sewer rats—but they lined the bank and fired into the opening, wasteful, furious shots that rang against the stones.

By the time they emerged on the river side of the fort, the east sky was gray with false dawn, and Étienne’s leg had gone from fire to a cold, dull throb that told him worse things were coming. He counted heads in the half-light.

Gagnon. Corbeil. Jean-Baptiste, unconscious and bleeding slow. One loyalist, a boy of maybe seventeen, shaking so hard he could barely hold his musket. Three others had been left in the yard or in the channel, and Étienne knew some of their names. He had eaten with them three nights ago.

They staggered up the slope into the treeline, and when Étienne looked back once, the fort stood against the lightening sky, solid and whole, the Union Jack snapping in the morning breeze above its walls.

It had been a slaughter. It had been a trap from the first shot, and he had walked his men into it like a man walking into his own grave.

They made camp in a hollow a mile from the river, hidden under a deadfall of spruce. Corbeil tore strips from his own shirt to bind Étienne’s leg, and the boy—Rolande, he said his name was, when he could speak—built a fire small enough to hide. Jean-Baptiste lay with his head on a folded coat, his breathing shallow and wet.

Étienne crawled to his brother’s side and pressed his palm to Jean-Baptiste’s forehead. It was hot as a stovetop.

“The name,” he said quietly. “You started to give me a name.”

Jean-Baptiste’s eyes flickered open. For a moment they focused on Étienne’s face, and a terrible, knowing smile touched his cracked lips.

“You’ll hate it,” he whispered. “You’ll hate it more than you’ve ever hated anything. But you need it to understand the shape of the thing.” He swallowed, wincing. “Ask Gagnon who carried the orders from Montreal to Roche. Ask him the name of the intendant’s clerk who sealed the dispatches.”

He closed his eyes, and his hand fell slack.

Étienne sat back on his heels. He looked at Gagnon, who had gone very still, his face as pale as a man who has just heard his own death sentence read.

Gagnon would not meet his eyes.