Read Chapter 27: The River Trap

The river ran fast and gray beneath the first pale light, and Étienne read the mud at the water's edge like a page of writing. Lemieux's boot prints were there, clear as ink, pressed deep where he'd stopped to drink. He was alone. He was wounded—the drag of his left heel told that much—and he was heading north along the bank, toward the rapids where the water would drown the sound of his passage.

Bouchard crouched beside him, eyes narrow. "He's not running blind. He knows this ground."

"Better than we do," Étienne admitted. "He was born on this river."

Behind them, the rangers spread in a loose skirmish line. Eight men. Marguerite had wanted to come; he'd left her at the fort with Jean-Baptiste, who burned with fever and whispered names in his sleep. That was the only reason Étienne's brother walked beside him now instead of lying on a cot. Nathaniel had healed enough to carry a musket, though his shoulder still moved stiff and his face had the gray cast of a man who had not eaten well for weeks.

"You should have stayed," Étienne said, not for the first time.

Nathaniel's jaw tightened. "I should have been there when he killed our father. This is the least I owe."

There was no arguing with that. Étienne didn't try.

They followed the trail along a bend where the river cut deep into the bank, carving a shelf of rock and scraggled pine. The prints angled up toward a notch in the treeline—a game trail, old and little used. Étienne stopped, reading the signs. Something was wrong.

"He's not favoring the open ground."

"Maybe he's found a horse," Nathaniel said.

"No." Étienne knelt, touching a broken twig at waist height. The bark was still wet, the sap bleeding. "He stepped off the trail here. Deliberately. He walked into the brush to double back."

Bouchard moved up beside them, rifle cradled. "Ambush?"

"Maybe. Or maybe he's just careful." Étienne scanned the treeline, the way a man does when he knows he's being watched. The morning birds had gone quiet.

Too quiet.

"Pull the men back," Étienne said, low. "Now."

The first shot came before the words were fully out. It cracked from the high ground across the river, muffled by the water but unmistakable. Bouchard grunted and dropped, his hand going to his thigh where blood bloomed dark against his buckskin. A second shot followed, then a third, and suddenly the treeline ahead of them came alive with movement—brown coats, green coats, the flash of English regulars and Stockbridge rangers moving through the brush in a loose arc that was already closing around them.

"Ambush!" Nathaniel shouted, leveling his musket and firing into the trees.

Étienne grabbed Bouchard by the collar and hauled him back toward the riverbank, bullets whining past his ears and thudding into the mud where he'd been standing a moment before. The rangers scattered, taking cover behind boulders and fallen logs, returning fire in ragged volleys. Across the water, more English regulars emerged from the treeline, dropping to one knee to fire in disciplined ranks.

There were too many. Thirty, maybe more. And they had the high ground.

"Roche planned this," Bouchard gritted out through his teeth, pressing his hand against his leg. "He knew Lemieux would run this way. He wasn't chasing us. He was herding us."

Étienne saw it now. The burned forest to the west had never been about flushing them. It had been about driving them toward the river corridor, where Roche's main force could cut them off from the fort. Lemieux was the bait.

"Get the men to the water," Étienne ordered. "We'll make for the rapids."

"The rapids will kill you," Bouchard said.

"Roche will kill us faster."

They ran. There was no other word for it. They ran bent double along the bank, firing blind over their shoulders, while the English pressed forward from the trees. The rangers took casualties. One man—a young métis named Fournier who had joined them only two days before—went down with a ball through his chest and did not rise. Another, old Lacroix, fell and dragged himself behind a boulder and kept firing until his musket was empty, buying them time with his life.

Étienne did not look back. He did not have the luxury.

The river narrowed ahead, funneling between two shoulders of granite where the current quickened and the water turned white with foam. The rapids. Even the Indians avoided them in spring melt, when the water ran high and hungry. But there was no other way.

"We can make the far bank!" Nathaniel shouted over the roar, already wading into the shallows.

"No!" Étienne grabbed his brother's arm, hauled him back. "You'll be swept under. We'll follow the shore—there's a ledge on the west side, we can crawl along—"

"He's here." Bouchard's voice cut through the noise, raw with pain. He had pulled himself up against a boulder at the water's edge, his rifle trained back the way they'd come. And there, emerging from the trees on the high bank, was Lemieux.

The captain stood with his coat open, his arm bound in a dirty sling, watching them with the calm patience of a man who had set the trap and was savoring the moment. He raised his good hand, and the English regulars around him held their fire.

"You have nowhere to go, Étienne Rousseau." Lemieux's voice came across the water, thin but clear. "Your father died like this too, you know. Cornered against the water with nowhere to run. He asked me once if I would spare his son. He begged, actually. It was unseemly."

Étienne felt the world narrow to a point. The water. The rocks. The man who had killed his father standing thirty yards away with blood on his hands and a smile on his mouth.

"You should have died at the fort," Étienne said.

"I've heard that before." Lemieux turned to the regulars beside him and nodded. "Kill the rest. Take the two brothers alive. I want them to watch each other die."

The regulars raised their muskets.

Bouchard moved. Étienne saw it happen in pieces, the way a man sees disaster in the moments before he can stop it. Bouchard shoved Nathaniel hard toward the river's edge, sending him stumbling into the current, and then he was running—not away from the enemy but toward them, firing his rifle from the hip and dropping the weapon to draw his knife.

"No!" Étienne shouted. "Bouchard!"

The older ranger did not look back. He charged into the fusillade of lead like a man who had already made his peace, and the English fire shifted toward him, away from the brothers. Bouchard took a ball in the shoulder and kept moving. Another in the chest, and he stumbled. A third, and he fell.

But he had bought them seconds. Precious, ragged seconds.

"Move!" Nathaniel grabbed Étienne's arm, dragged him toward the water. "He gave us this—move!"

The river took them. The current was savage, cold enough to steal breath, and instantly Étienne was under, tumbling over rocks, his pack torn from his back, his rifle wrenched from his grip. He clawed for the surface, broke through gasping, saw the granite wall of the gorge sliding past in a blur of gray and green. Beside him, Nathaniel surfaced, bleeding from a gash on his brow, and together they reached for the ledge Étienne remembered from boyhood—a narrow shelf of rock where the river bent away from the gorge.

They pulled themselves onto it, sodden and shaking, and lay there while the English fire cracked overhead, harmless now, the angle too steep for their marksmen.

Étienne pressed his forehead against the cold stone. Behind them, drifting downstream, he could see the bodies of the rangers who had fallen. Bouchard's flintlock lay at the water's edge, abandoned, the river lapping over it like an apology.

"He did what he had to," Nathaniel said, his voice ragged. "They all did."

Étienne did not answer. He watched the far bank, where Lemieux stood with his English regulars, gesturing downstream—ordering men to cut them off below the gorge. The captain was limping now, favoring the leg Étienne had shot, but he was still alive. Still free. Still laughing, probably, at the ruin he had left behind.

"We have nothing," Étienne said. "No weapons. No food. No men."

"We have each other." Nathaniel's voice was quiet. "And we have the trail."

"The trail leads to an army."

"Then we go around it."

Étienne looked at his brother. There was something in Nathaniel's face he had not seen before—something hard and resolved, older than his years. You should have stayed at the fort. The words died before he could say them.

Another shot cracked from downstream. Close now.

Lemieux was not finished.

"Go," Étienne said, pushing himself to his feet. "And stay behind me. The English will think I'm the one worth hunting."

Nathaniel said nothing. But the look he gave Étienne was strange, full of some secret weight, and Étienne filed it away for another time—a time when they were not bleeding and cold and hunted.

They moved along the ledge, away from the river, away from the dead, toward the timberline and the dark trees beyond.