Read Chapter 18: The Deserter's Return

The wound in Étienne’s calf burned with every step, a dull fire that licked up his thigh and settled deep in his hip. He had bound it with a strip torn from Gagnon’s sleeve, but the cloth was already dark with seepage. They had crawled into a hollow beneath a fallen pine, the roots of the dead tree forming a natural roof over a shallow trench of moldering needles and cold earth.

Corbeil had taken the first watch. He sat now with his back against the trunk, his musket across his knees, his eyes moving in slow sweeps across the dark treeline. Jean-Baptiste lay in the center of the hollow, shivering despite the summer warmth, his face the color of old tallow. Gagnon had done what he could—stripped the shirt from the dead loyalist, packed the wound in his brother’s side with moss and spiderweb—but the fever was climbing.

Étienne had seen men die of less.

“You need to rest that leg,” Gagnon said, low. The sergeant had not slept. He had not even sat. He stood at the edge of the hollow, arms crossed, watching the same dark treeline with a stillness that spoke of long years in the service.

“I’ll rest when it’s done,” Étienne said.

“It won’t be done if you can’t walk.”

Étienne did not answer. He was watching his brother’s face, the way it twitched beneath the fever, the way his lips moved around words that never quite came. He had heard Jean-Baptiste’s story—the surrender to Hart, the long game of betrayal from within—and he wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe that his brother had not simply broken under the Englishman’s hand and found a story that would save his skin.

But want had never been the same as truth.

“We left three men in that fort,” he said.

Gagnon’s jaw tightened. “We left three men *dead* in that fort. The English will count the bodies and thank God for the math.”

“You don’t know that they’re dead.”

“I know that Hart doesn’t take prisoners he doesn’t need.” Gagnon’s voice was flat. “He had what he needed tonight. He’ll hang them at dawn and send the news to Montreal with his morning dispatch.”

The words hung in the damp air. Étienne forced himself to breathe. The letter in his pocket felt heavier than lead, Roche’s careful treason sealed in wax and pressed against his ribs. He had destroyed the original. He had burned it in the fort’s own brazier after reading it twice, memorizing every clause, so that no paper would ever give the English their legal pretext. But the *knowledge* of it remained, and he carried that weight now.

“We need to move,” he said. “Before dawn.”

“We can’t move,” Corbeil said from the treeline, not turning his head. “Your brother won’t survive a mile, your leg won’t survive two, and the English will fan out come light. We’re better here, let them think we scattered.”

“And when they don’t find us?”

“Then they’ll look harder.”

Étienne closed his eyes. The forest around them was the same forest he had tracked through a hundred times—the same cedars, the same black water seeping between granite shoulders—but it felt different now. Smaller. The walls of the fort had fallen, and with them, the last of his certainties. He had crossed between worlds his whole life, French and Indian, family and duty, and every time he had landed on his feet. Now he lay in a hole beneath a dead tree, bleeding through a cloth, brother dying beside him, no fort in his keeping, no command behind him.

_No path ahead._

Then the twig snapped.

Étienne’s hand went to his knife before his eyes opened. Corbeil was already rising, musket coming up off his knee, the motion smooth and silent as water over stone. The sound had come from the east—a single sharp crack, the kind made by a careless foot, or a deliberate signal.

A voice came out of the dark. Low, in French.

“Étienne? It’s Badeaux. I’m alone. I’ve brought help.”

Étienne’s heart stopped, then slammed forward. *The deserter.* The man who had disappeared on the eve of their assault, the one who had warned the English—whether by malice or through capture, they had never learned. He had been certain the man was dead, or at least gone for good.

“Stop there,” Corbeil said. His voice was iron. “Slow and easy or I put a ball through your gut and ask questions of your corpse.”

“Easy, easy.” The shadow detached itself from the treeline—a lean man in a sodden coat, hands raised, empty. Badeaux. He had been with the fort’s loyalists from the beginning, a former coureur des bois who had joined the defense out of anger at the English seizure of his trading post. He had seemed solid. He had seemed *true.*

“You ran,” Étienne said. He did not rise from where he lay. “You ran the night before we moved.”

Badeaux’s jaw worked. “I ran to find help.” He gestured over his shoulder with his chin. “There are nine men in the woods behind me. French rangers from the mission at Saint-Pierre-du-Bois. They heard of the fort’s fall three days ago and have been moving south to aid the garrison. I found them at the old portage and brought them back.”

“Nine men,” Gagnon repeated. “French rangers.”

“On my life.”

“You don’t have a life left to swear on,” Corbeil said. “Not after what you did.”

Badeaux’s face tightened. “I did what I did because you were walking into a wall. I tried to tell you—the English knew about the sewers. They had men positioned at every exit. If I hadn’t run when I did, I’d be dead with the rest. I ran to find someone who could actually help.”

Étienne pushed himself up onto one elbow. The wound in his calf screamed, but he forced his voice steady. “You could have warned us. You could have said the word *before* we walked in.”

“I barely made it out myself,” Badeaux said. “The English patrol was on the north ridge when I slipped past the picket line. I didn’t have time to write you a letter.”

The silence stretched. Corbeil’s musket did not lower. Étienne watched the deserter’s face—the shadowed hollows beneath his eyes, the way his hands trembled just slightly at his sides. Fear, or cold, or a combination of both. Badeaux was some years older than Étienne, his hair shot through with grey, his shoulders dense with the work of a long life on the rivers. He did not look like a liar.

But then, neither had Roche.

“Bring them in,” Étienne said.

Corbeil turned his head sharply. “Étienne—“

“Bring them in,” Étienne repeated. “We don’t have the men to be choosers.”

Corbeil’s jaw worked, but he said nothing. He lowered the musket, just slightly, and Badeaux let out a long breath. He turned and made a low bird call—three notes, then two—and the forest answered with rustling movement.

They came out of the dark in ones and twos, sleek men in grey coats and round hats, muskets slung over oilcloth-wrapped shoulders. Rangers. Étienne knew the look—men who lived on the edge of the wilderness, who answered to no officer but their own survival. They fanned out around the hollow, a quiet arc of hard faces.

The man who approached him wore a lieutenant’s gorget over a plain deerskin coat, his face scarred along the jaw and his hair bound back with a leather thong. He knelt beside Étienne and looked at the wound without pretending politeness.

“That needs to be cleaned,” he said. “Properly. And your brother needs shelter and warmth or he’ll be dead by morning.”

Étienne did not ask his name. “There’s a sally fort at the second bend of the river, east of here. An old trading post with a reinforced cellar. I know it.”

“That’s two hours’ hard walk,” the lieutenant said. He looked at Étienne’s leg. “You won’t make it.”

“I’ll make it.”

“You’ll slow us down.”

“Then carry me.”

The lieutenant’s mouth twitched. He looked at Badeaux, who gave a short nod, then back at Étienne. For a long moment, he did not speak. Then he rose and gave a short whistle. Two rangers came forward and lifted Jean-Baptiste between them, his arms draped over their shoulders.

“The sally fort, then,” the lieutenant said. “We move now, and we move quiet. Dawn is two hours off, and the English won’t wait for the sun to start their hunt.”

They moved.

Étienne hobbled on Gagnon’s arm, each step a spike of white-hot pain through his calf, but he kept his face still. Beside him, Corbeil walked with the musket cradled in his elbow, his eyes never leaving Badeaux’s back. The deserter led the column, walking with an easy, rolling stride that spoke of long days on the trail.

It was all wrong.

They reached the sally fort as the first grey light of dawn seeped through the canopy. The rangers swept through the structure—a single cabin with a palisade of rough-hewn logs, abandoned for decades but still standing against the river wind—and pronounced it clear. They laid Jean-Baptiste on a bed of pine boughs in the cellar and built a fire from dry wood they carried in their packs.

Étienne sank down beside his brother and checked his forehead. Still burning.

“Where did you find these men, Badeaux?” he asked, not looking up.

“Mission at Saint-Pierre-du-Bois. They were already moving south. They’d heard about the fort’s fall.”

“Who told them?”

“A runner from Montreal. A clerk named Duval, from the governor’s office.”

Étienne’s hand stopped above his brother’s face. *Duval.* The name on the seals that Gagnon had seen. The name of the man who had dispatched Roche’s orders.

He turned slowly and looked at Badeaux. The deserter met his gaze with a flat, even stare.

“A clerk named Duval,” Étienne repeated.

“That’s right.”

“And how,” Étienne said, very quietly, “did a clerk from the governor’s office know to send word to you—a deserter fleeing a fallen fort—at the mission of Saint-Pierre-du-Bois?”

It was the wrong question to ask, and he knew it as soon as the words left his mouth. The rangers had stiffened. The lieutenant’s hand had settled casual on his pistol grip. Corbeil was already moving, his musket swinging up—

But Badeaux moved faster.

He leaped toward the shelf where Étienne had laid the medal—the last gift from his father, the medal he had carried for a decade and tucked away for safekeeping, hanging from a peg near the door. Badeaux’s fingers closed around it and he was running, scrambling for the door, even as Étienne lunged with a shout tearing from his throat.

Badeaux spun at the threshold, the medal clutched to his chest. For a moment, his face was bare—the mask stripped away to reveal something hungry and desperate beneath.

“Duval sends his regards,” Badeaux said, and then he was gone, crashing through the undergrowth, pursued by two of the rangers who had burst after him in sudden, shouting pursuit.

Étienne stood at the door, gripping the frame, his breath tearing in his chest. The medal. His father’s medal.

Gone.