Read Chapter 25: The Fuse is Cut

The powder trail led from the captain’s dropped lantern across the flagstones of the magazine ante-room, a thin black serpent of fuse snaking toward the stacked barrels. Étienne did not think. He threw himself down, palm slapping flat over the burning cord, felt the sizzle bite into his flesh, and rolled. The fuse came with him, pinched between thumb and forefinger, and he wrenched it free of the last length still anchored in the powder keg’s bung-hole.

For a heartbeat the world held still. Then his hand began to throb, and he let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

The captain had cut it close. Inches, perhaps. A few seconds more and the entire fort would have gone up with the French relief column still forming outside the walls. Étienne dropped the dead fuse into a bucket of sand and stood, wiping his palm on his coat. The smell of burnt powder clung to his sleeve.

Boots pounded on the stairs behind him. Gagnon appeared in the doorway, musket low, eyes wild in the lamplight. “Étienne! We heard firing. Where is he?”

“Gone.” Étienne’s voice came out flat. “Through the postern, or over the wall. He lit it and ran.”

Gagnon stared at the magazine barrels, then at Étienne’s hand. “You cut it.”

“I stopped it.”

The older man holstered his knife and looked around the cramped stone room. “Then the fort is ours,” he said slowly. “And the coward’s lost his prize.”

Étienne shook his head. “He’s lost the magazine, but he’s still alive. And he knows every escape route this fort has. He’ll be in the forest by now, running for the English lines.”

Gagnon’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing. They climbed back up the stairs to the parade ground, where the noise of battle had slackened to scattered shots and distant war cries. Through the open main gate, torchlight moved in ragged clusters—the French relief column gathering prisoners, counting their dead. The English assault had folded as quickly as it had begun, their garrison caught between the walls and the approaching column. Those who hadn’t surrendered had melted into the dark treeline.

Lieutenant-Colonel Deschênes rode through the gate on a lathered bay, his coat torn at the shoulder, a gash across his cheek drying black in the lamplight. He reined in and looked down at the fort’s interior—the crates, the stacked muskets, the tricolour already being raised by a pair of grenadiers over the gatehouse.

“Monsieur Roussel,” he said, and there was real respect in the address. “I was told I would find you here.”

Étienne inclined his head. “Colonel. The fort is yours.”

Deschênes swung down heavily. “So I see. And its commander?”

“Escaped.” Étienne glanced toward the dark line of trees beyond the western palisade. “A man named Roche. But the captain who spoke for your side—the one who killed my father—he’s gone too. He ran when the powder failed.”

Deschênes studied him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “The traitor. I have a name for him, though it cost us dearly to learn it. Captain Arnaud Lemieux.” He tested the name as if it were bitter. “He was posted to the supply office in Montreal for two years. It seems he sold every convoy schedule we had.”

Étienne felt the name settle into him like a stone. Lemieux. The man who had stood over his father with a pistol. The man who had sealed the sally port and walked the survivors into a trap. And he was out there now, somewhere in the dark, carrying everything he knew about the French positions along the river.

“He’ll rally the English,” Étienne said. “Whatever’s left of them. He’ll tell them what he knows about this fort. About the river. About us.”

Deschênes nodded. “Which is why we will not be lingering. The regiment has orders to push on to the head of the lake by week’s end. But I’ll leave you a garrison of fifty men. Enough to hold these walls until spring, if you can keep them fed.”

“Not me,” Étienne said. “I’m going after him.”

The silence that followed held its own weight. Gagnon shifted beside him, and from the corner of his eye Étienne saw Bouchard and two of the rangers standing at the edge of the torchlight, listening.

Deschênes’s gaze moved from Étienne’s face to the scarred hand he had not yet thought to wrap, and back. “The war will not be won by chasing one man through the woods, Monsieur Roussel.”

“No,” Étienne agreed. “But it could be lost by letting him go.”

The colonel was quiet for a long moment, then let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Your father would have said the same. I served with him at Carillon, before the English took him. He was never one to let an enemy walk into the trees.” He extended his hand, and Étienne took it. “Take your rangers. Take whatever you need from the store. And when you find Lemieux, you tell him the fort he betrayed is still standing in French hands. That will wound him more than any bullet.”

Étienne released his hand and turned away before the colonel could see the thing that flickered in his chest. Praise had never sat easy on him. He walked toward the fire the men had built at the edge of the parade ground, where Bouchard and the others were already crouched around the flames, passing a flask.

The ranger looked up as he approached. “So,” Bouchard said, his voice roughened by smoke and shouting. “We’ve taken a fort, scared off the English, and lost the man we came for. What now, guide?”

Étienne crouched down and held his burnt palm out to the warmth of the fire. “Now we find him. Track him, run him down, and put an end to him.”

“Alone?”

“No.” Étienne looked at Bouchard, then at Gagnon, who had come up silently behind him. “I’ll take whoever wants to come. A small party. Fast. We won’t be dragging wagons and cannon through the brush. Just good men who know how to move quiet through the woods.”

Bouchard glanced at the two rangers beside him. One of them—a lean métis named Peltier who had not spoken a word since they’d entered the fort—nodded once. The other, a broad-shouldered farmer-turned-soldier named Leclerc, took a long pull from the flask and shrugged. “I didn’t come this far to sit on a wall and wait for spring.”

Gagnon knelt beside them and spread his hands over the fire. “I’m with you. But there’s the matter of your brother.”

Étienne’s chest tightened. Jean-Baptiste was still in the lean-to they’d made in the trees beyond the fort, burning with fever. He’d sent word through one of the loyalists that the fort had fallen, but that had been an hour ago. There had been no reply since.

He stood, brushing off his knees. “I’ll see him first.”

He made his way to the postern gate—the one the English had never known existed, now guarded by a pair of deschênes’s grenadiers—and slipped through, following the worn path into the treeline where the wounded had been carried. The lean-to was a low shelter of canvas and fir boughs, and a small fire burned outside it. The métisse woman named Marguerite, who had come north with the loyalists, knelt beside the entrance, watching the trees.

“He’s asking for you,” she said without turning.

Étienne ducked inside. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and pitch. Jean-Baptiste lay on a bed of pine boughs, his face grey beneath the lantern light, his breathing ragged and shallow. But his eyes were open, and they found Étienne as he entered.

“The fort,” Jean-Baptiste said, his voice a dry croak. “Tell me.”

“Ours,” Étienne said, kneeling beside him. “Deschênes’s column arrived early. The English rode out to meet them and left their powder unguarded. We’ve raised the tricolour over the gate.”

Jean-Baptiste gave a weak laugh that caught in his chest. “And the captain?”

“Gone. Fled north into the trees. But I’m going after him.”

Jean-Baptiste’s hand, bony and hot, reached out and caught Étienne’s wrist. “You’re going to leave.”

“I have to. You knew that.”

“I know.” The older man coughed, and Marguerite leaned in with a cup of water. He drank, then sank back, but he did not release Étienne’s wrist. “When you find him—when you put an end to him—do it for all of us. For Father. For the men he burned in the marsh. For the trust he broke.”

Étienne closed his fingers around his brother’s hand. “I will.”

Jean-Baptiste held his gaze for a long moment, then his eyes drifted shut. His grip slackened, but his chest still rose and fell, slow and steady beneath the blanket.

Étienne stood and stepped back out into the cold night air. The fire had burned low, and Marguerite rose to meet him.

“He’s strong,” she said. “The fever will break in a few days. He’ll live.”

Étienne nodded. He had heard those words before, said over dying men. But he did not push the thought. Instead he looked back toward the fort, where torchlight flickered against the stone, and heard the distant sound of men singing—some old French marching song, carried on the wind.

For the first time in months, the river bend belonged to the French again. But the war had not ended. It had simply found a new shape, and in that shape, a man was running north through the dark. A man who knew Étienne’s name, and his father’s, and the wounds that bound them.

Étienne walked back through the postern gate to the fire where Gagnon and Bouchard were waiting, and squatted down among them.

“We leave at first light,” he said. “Track north along the river, then cut west into the high country. He’ll head for the English post on Lake Champlain, but he won’t take the easy road. He’ll know we’ll come.”

“And when we find him?” Bouchard asked.

Étienne looked into the fire and saw his father’s face, and the captain’s thin smile, and the dead serpent of fuse lying in a bucket of sand.

“We finish it,” he said.