Read Chapter 29: The Search Widens

The gorge wall rose black against the paling sky, and Étienne stood at its base with his brother, both of them feeling the weight of the empty space where their rifles should have been. Nathaniel had torn a strip from his own shirt and was binding it around Étienne's shoulder wound, pulling it tight enough to make him hiss.

"That's the last of the cloth," Nathaniel said. "After this, we've got nothing to spare."

Étienne looked north along the river's edge, where the gorge began to open into marshland. Seventy miles to the outpost. On foot. Unarmed. He had walked worse distances with less reason, but not with an English force combing the woods behind him and a traitor riding hard ahead.

"He'll take the canoe route," Étienne said. "Lemieux knows the river. He'll paddle north while the current helps him, then portage at the falls and come down on the outpost from the west."

Nathaniel squinted at the water. "You're certain?"

"I tracked him for three days before the fort. The man avoids open ground. He'll stay to the water where he can see approach from both banks." Étienne pressed his hand against the binding at his shoulder and tested the movement. The pain was manageable. The weakness was not. "There's a cutoff on the east bank, above the first rapid. A trapper's path that rises into the high country and comes down again at the lake. If I take that, I can reach the outpost's back door before he arrives by river."

Nathaniel shook his head. "That path is thirty miles of steep ground. You're bleeding through that wrap already."

"I'll bind it again when I stop."

"And you'll have nothing to eat, nothing to defend yourself with if Roche's men cut across your trail."

"I've been hunted before." Étienne met his brother's eyes. "The question is what you'll do."

Nathaniel looked away, toward the southern treeline where the bodies of Bouchard and the others still lay unburied. The guilt sat heavy on him, visible in the set of his jaw and the way his hands kept opening and closing at his sides.

"I'll take the river," Nathaniel said. "Follow him close. If he stops to rest, I'll be on him before he wakes."

"You've got no weapon either."

"I've got my hands and I've got the dark." Nathaniel turned back, and for a moment Étienne saw something of the old Nathaniel, the one who had raced him through these woods as boys. "And I've got something to make right."

Étienne studied his brother. The confession at the gorge had cracked something open between them, but trust was not the same as forgiveness, and Étienne could still feel the distance of Nathaniel's lie like a cold stone in his gut.

"You let him go once," Étienne said. "If you catch him on the river, alone in the dark, and you hesitate—"

"I won't."

"You said that before."

Nathaniel's face went tight. He held Étienne's gaze without flinching. "I didn't know what he was then. What he'd done to our father. What he'd do to those men." He nodded toward the treeline where the rangers had fallen. "I know now. And I won't hesitate again."

Étienne wanted to believe him. He had no choice but to believe him. They had split the distance between them, and there was no one else left to carry the weight.

"The outpost is called Fort de la Roche," Étienne said. "Small garrison. Maybe twenty men. Governor's name is Marchand—he's a supply officer, not a soldier. If Lemieux delivers those forged orders claiming they come from Montcalm's headquarters, Marchand won't question them. He'll move the garrison exactly where Lemieux wants them, and the supply line will be wide open."

"Then I'll reach him before he delivers."

"You'll reach the river landing. If you miss him, you go straight to the fort and you tell Marchand everything. Tell him about the false orders, tell him about Roche's force moving north. Make him believe you."

"And if he doesn't believe me?"

Étienne thought about that. A métis guide and a known deserter's brother, arriving at a frontier outpost with no weapons and a wild story about a traitor captain with forged orders. Marchand would have them in irons before they finished the first sentence.

"Show him your father's name," Étienne said. "Roussel guided for his father before the war. There are men at that outpost who'll remember the name. It's the only credit we have left."

Nathaniel nodded slowly. He extended his hand, and Étienne took it, gripping hard enough to feel the bones of his brother's knuckles against his palm.

"Don't die out there," Nathaniel said.

"Keep your own advice." Étienne released his hand and turned toward the east bank, where the treeline rose steep and dark. "If you reach the fort before I do, don't wait for me. Stop Lemieux any way you can."

"And if you reach it first?"

"Then I'll have a rifle again, and the captain will learn what it means to kill a Roussel."

Nathaniel held his gaze a moment longer, something unspoken passing between them—an apology, perhaps, or a promise. Then he turned and began picking his way along the river's edge, moving north with the current.

Étienne watched him go until the trees swallowed his shape. Then he faced the east bank and started climbing.

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The trapper's path was barely a deer track. It switchbacked up the gorge wall through dense spruce, the ground soft with decades of fallen needles that muffled his footsteps. Every time he put weight on his left arm to pull himself up a ledge, fire shot through his shoulder and down into his chest. By the time he reached the high country, the morning sun was fully up and the binding was dark with fresh blood.

He found a stream and drank until his stomach ached, then tore another strip from his shirt—leaving himself with barely enough cloth to cover his chest—and rewrapped the wound as tight as he could stand. He had no fire, no flint, no knife. Just his hands, his legs, and the memory of the country laid out before him.

The high country opened into a barrens of stunted birch and rock outcrops, where a man could see a long way. He scanned the western horizon, looking for the smoke he had spotted the day before. It was still there, a thin smudge against the sky, but it was closer now. Or larger. It was hard to tell at this distance.

Roche's main force, or Lemieux's campfire, or something else entirely.

He kept moving.

The sun crossed its peak and began its descent. His shoulder throbbed with every step, but the pain had settled into something manageable—a dull pulse he could push past. He ate nothing. There was nothing to eat. He drank at every stream and kept his eyes moving across the country ahead, searching for sign.

He found it in the late afternoon.

A track, cutting across the barrens from the southwest, heading northwest toward the lake. Hoofprints. Four horses, moving fast, spaced like a traveling party. He knelt and studied the marks. The horses were shod with military shoes—English pattern, not French. And in the soft mud beside the track, he found what he was looking for: the print of a man who had dismounted and walked ahead of his horse for a stretch.

A man with a slight drag in his left step, as if favoring an old wound.

Lemieux.

Étienne's heart hammered. The captain had left Roche's main force behind and was traveling light, four riders pressing hard toward the lake. Toward the portage. Toward the fort.

He was ahead of schedule. Far ahead.

Étienne looked at the sun, then back at the track. If he pushed hard through the night, he could reach the lake by dawn. But the lake's eastern shore was a maze of inlets and bogs—easy to get turned around in the dark, easy to lose a day wandering into a dead end.

And his brother was still on the river, probably a full day behind Lemieux's party.

The plan was already failing.

He stood, staring at the hoofprints, and made a choice. He would follow the track. Not to the lake—that was too far. But Lemieux's party would have to stop eventually. Horses needed rest, and even the captain could not push them forever.

He moved into the wind, following the trail north, and the smoke on the horizon grew steadily darker as the afternoon wore on.