Read Chapter 2: The Trail North

The wet pine boughs slapped Étienne’s shoulders as he moved, and he breathed the cold, needle-scented air the way other men breathed prayer. Dawn had not yet broken, but he did not need light to read the forest. He read the bent ferns, the scuffed moss, the way the dew had been knocked from the low hazel branches. He read the story of men who did not know how to move silently through a country that was not theirs.

He stopped. Held up a closed fist.

Behind him, the twelve French soldiers halted in a ragged, grateful line. They were city men, most of them—warehouse clerks and tavern boys pressed into blue coats, their boots ruinous for this kind of work. Jacques Moreau, still wearing the dead lieutenant's uniform, came up beside him, breathing through his mouth like a winded dog.

"What is it?" Moreau whispered.

Étienne knelt and touched the ground. A heel print, deep, with the distinctive pattern of an English brogan. He moved his fingers over the torn moss, found a second print, a third. He traced the line of them with his eyes, reading the direction.

"Someone passed this way," he said. "Not more than half a day ahead of us. A small party. Maybe five, six men."

Moreau's face, pale beneath the blue hat, tightened. "Trappers?"

"No." Étienne stood and brushed his hand on his breeches. "Trappers move like they own the forest. These men move like they're afraid of it." He pointed at a broken branch, chest high, where the bark had been scraped away. "That was a man walking too fast, carrying something heavy, not caring who saw. A patrol in a hurry, or a messenger."

"English?"

"Who else would be this far north, this deep, at this time of year?"

The soldiers behind them shifted. One man sneezed. Another cursed him in a whisper. Étienne watched Moreau's face work through several thoughts at once, none of them good. The servant had the dead officer's uniform, the dead officer's papers, and now the dead officer's mission, and none of that training had prepared him for a forest that talked back.

"You think they're heading for Carillon?" Moreau asked.

"I think they're heading for whatever your general wants you to tell him first." Étienne let the words hang. "And that means they'll be waiting when we arrive."

He turned and walked back along the line of soldiers, moving past them with quick, quiet strides. He knelt at the edge of their camp—if it could be called that—and checked the single pack he carried. Powder, shot, a hatchet, dried meat, a length of rope. Nothing that would weigh him down.

The truth of it sat in his gut like a stone. He had known, the moment the story had cracked open last night, that he was no longer leading a routine patrol to a fort. He was leading a pack of fools through hostile country with a liar at their head, chasing the shadow of an English patrol that might already have reached its destination.

He should turn back. He should tell them the truth and let the army sort out its own lies.

But he'd given his word.

The sky lightened. East, above the treeline, a pale grey spread like a stain on linen. Étienne walked back to Moreau and the squad, and he did not ask permission. He simply spoke.

"We move now. We move fast. You will not speak above a whisper. You will not fire a weapon unless I give the word—an English patrol hears a musket shot a league away, and this forest carries sound like water carries a canoe." He looked at each of them in turn, twelve tired faces, most of them younger than his own thirty years. "You will step where I step. You will stop when I stop. And if you cannot keep up, you will be left."

One of the soldiers, a red-faced man with a sergeant's stripes on his sleeve, stepped forward. "And who died and made you captain, half-breed?"

Étienne looked at him. Calm. Empty.

"The man who hired me to keep you alive," he said.

The sergeant's mouth opened, but Moreau cut him off. "He speaks for me." The servant's voice cracked on the words, but he held himself straight. "You will obey him as you would obey me. That is an order."

The sergeant looked from Moreau to Étienne, and Étienne saw the calculation in his eyes. The uniform. The commission. The fact that disobedience meant a court-martial in Quebec, assuming they survived the forest to see one. The sergeant stepped back.

Étienne turned and moved into the trees.

They made good time for the first hour. The ground rose gently, the spruce and fir giving way to maple and birch, the undergrowth thinning enough to let them walk two abreast in places. Étienne kept the pace hard but not brutal, pushing the soldiers enough to keep them awake, not enough to break them. He stopped at intervals to check the trail ahead, reading the signs with a tracker's patience.

The English patrol was still there. Always there. Fresh scuff marks on a log. A fleck of cloth on a bramble. The cold ash of a fire that had been carefully buried but not carefully enough.

They were a day ahead. Maybe less now.

And then Étienne found something that made him stop cold.

He was crossing a rocky ridge, the kind of place where the forest floor gave way to broken stone and roots twisted like knotted rope, when he saw it. A mark on a birch tree, cut deep into the pale bark. A cross with a circle around it.

His mark. The one he'd taught his brother to make, years ago, when they were boys learning to find their way home through these same woods.

Étienne touched the mark with his fingertips. The bark was still wet around the edges. Fresh. A day old, at most.

His brother.

The thought hit him like a blow to the chest. Jean-Baptiste. Eleven years now since the English had taken him, during the raid on the settlement, when Étienne had been off hunting and returned to find the cabin burned and his mother dead and his little brother gone. Eleven years of hoping, of asking every trader and trapper who passed through, of searching faces in every camp, every fort, every trading post.

Jean-Baptiste had been a boy. Nine years old. He would be a man now. A man who might not know his own brother.

And his mark was here, on a trail that led toward the English patrol.

Étienne heard footsteps behind him. He turned, his face already smoothing into the neutral mask he wore for the soldiers, and found Moreau climbing the ridge toward him, red-faced and sweating.

"What are you looking at?" Moreau asked.

"Nothing." Étienne stepped away from the tree, putting his body between the servant and the mark. "Just checking our bearing."

Moreau looked at him. For a moment, something sharp moved behind the servant's eyes—a man who had spent years reading the moods of officers, learning to tell when they were lying, when they were hiding something. He would have made a good servant. Possibly a good soldier. But he was neither, and he was trying to be both, and the weight of that was beginning to show in the lines around his mouth.

"You're lying," Moreau said quietly.

Étienne held his gaze. "I'm keeping us on course."

"Those men ahead. You know something about them."

"I know they're English and they're moving fast."

"Is that all?"

Étienne considered the question. He could lie. He was good at lying. It was a skill he'd learned early, in a world where the French called him English and the English called him French and everyone called him something that wasn't quite a name. But there was something in Moreau's face—the desperate, hunted look of a man who was also wearing a lie for armor—that made him answer honestly.

"Their path crosses ground I know," he said. "Personal ground."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning I need to know who's leading them." Étienne picked up his pack and slung it over his shoulder. "And you need me to get you to Carillon. Those two things might pull in the same direction. Or they might not."

He started down the ridge, leaving Moreau standing alone among the trees. Behind him, he heard the servant exhale, a long slow breath that carried the weight of all the lies he was trying to hold together.

Then Moreau called after him. A snap, not a plea.

"Étienne."

He stopped. Turned.

Moreau's face was pale, but his jaw was set. "There's something you need to know. About the letter."

"What about it?"

"It's not a letter." Moreau reached inside his coat and pulled out the small, sealed packet, the one Étienne had noticed the night before. He held it out, and Étienne saw the wax seal glint in the pale morning light. "It's orders. From the general himself. Sealed orders for the commander of the fort." Moreau's voice dropped. "And they say that if the English reach the river bend before we do, we are to burn the fort and every man in it rather than let it fall into their hands."

Étienne stared at him. The forest seemed to have gone very quiet.

"Burn the fort," he repeated.

"They know it will fall if we don't get there first. They'd rather have ash and bones than an English flag flying over that river." Moreau's hands were shaking around the packet. "You understand what that means. If those Englishmen ahead of us are heading to the fort, we're not racing them to deliver orders. We're racing them to decide whether or not a hundred soldiers die."

The mark on the birch tree burned at Étienne's back like a brand.

And ahead, in the forest, his brother's trail led toward the men who would doom the fort.

Étienne turned and walked north, into the trees, without saying another word.