Read Chapter 3: The Baptismal Medal

The stream ran quick and cold, snowmelt from the high hills, and its bed was a tumble of slick stones that would put a man on his back if he didn't watch his step. Étienne read it the way he read all moving water—where the current braided, where the gravel piled, where a misstep would cost more than dignity. He chose a crossing where the stream widened and shallowed, fanning out over a gravel bar, and he signaled for the squad to follow.

Moreau moved behind him, his borrowed officer’s coat cinched tight against the chill. The men came after in a loose file, muskets held high, powder kept dry. Étienne kept his eyes on the far bank, but something caught at the rim of his vision—a glint, low and off to the left, where the stream bent around a stand of birch.

He did not stop. He did not turn his head. He knew that glint.

The bireh tree leaned half over the water, its roots clawing at the bank. From a low branch hung something that caught the afternoon light in a way no leaf or drop of water could manage. Silver. Small. He had not seen it in over eight years, and yet he knew its shape, its weight, the feel of its edge worn smooth against his thumb before he had pressed it into another hand.

He waded on, boots filling with cold water, face a mask of trail-craft and patience.

“Good crossing,” Moreau said, stepping onto the gravel bar beside him. “Shallow.”

Étienne grunted. He did not look at the tree. He looked past it, at the ridge rising on the far side, and he said, “We’ll rest at the top. Give the horses their wind.”

The squad slogged out of the water and up the rise. Étienne waited until the last man had passed him, then fell in at the rear. No one looked back. No one saw him peel away.

He returned to the stream at a crouch, moving from stone to stone, keeping low behind the reeds. The birch stood where it had stood, patient. The medal turned slowly on its leather cord, twisting in a breeze he could not feel.

Étienne reached up and closed his fingers around it. The silver was warm from the sun, warmer than the air, warmer than anything in this country had a right to be. He turned it over. On one side, the Virgin, arms spread, crowned with stars. On the other, a name scratched in a hand he knew as well as his own: *Jean-Baptiste.*

His brother’s baptismal medal. The one their mother had brought from the mission at Michilimackinac. The one she had hung around Étienne’s neck when he was a child, and that Étienne had hung around Jean-Baptiste’s when their father died, telling the boy it would keep him on the good path.

Jean-Baptiste had laughed at that. *The good path is the one that feeds you, brother.*

Étienne had not seen him in eight years. He had heard rumors—a trapper up the Ottawa, a runner in the pays d’en haut, a man who had gone over to the English traders because they paid in silver instead of promises. Étienne had never believed the last one. But he had never had proof otherwise.

Now he had this. A medal on a branch above a stream in the middle of nowhere, where no one would pass unless they were being paid to pass it. It was not lost. It was not dropped. It was placed.

He looked at the ground beneath the tree. Soft mud, a boot print, fresh. He knelt, careful, and studied it. Heel worn, toe scuffed, a crack across the sole that would come from walking long on dry ground. Not a patrol boot. Not a soldier’s boot. A hunter’s boot, or a runner’s.

Jean-Baptiste had always worn his boots loose at the ankle. Said it gave him more feel for the ground. Étienne had laughed at him for that.

The print was pointed north. North and east. Toward the ridge the squad was climbing. Toward Carillon.

Étienne slid the medal into the inner pocket of his coat, over his heart, and tucked the leather cord in after it. He stood, brushed the mud from his knees, and walked back to the climb at a pace that suggested he had merely stopped to drain his boots.

The squad had spread out along the ridge, sitting on fallen logs, passing a skin of water. Moreau stood apart, studying a small map, his lips moving silently. He looked up as Étienne approached.

“Anything?”

Étienne kept his face still. “Nothing. Trail’s quiet from here to the ridge. The English patrol we saw yesterday was heading west. They’re not coming back this way.”

Moreau’s eyes did not quite believe him. He folded the map. “You were gone longer than that.”

“I was reading the stream. Current’s changed since the thaw. There’s a channel to the west that will take a canoe deeper than a man thinks. If the English know it, they could swing around us without touching the main trail.”

That was true enough—the channel existed. It was also true that he had not spent any time studying it.

Moreau watched him a moment longer. Then he nodded and turned away, and Étienne felt the weight of the medal against his chest like a second heart.

They moved on. The country rose, forest thinning to scrub and rock, showing bare ribs of granite where the soil had sloughed away in the spring floods. Étienne led them by feel, by landmarks that had no names, by the set of the sun and the tilt of the moss on the north side of the trees.

By late afternoon, they came to a shallow valley, still holding the last of the day’s heat, where a stream ran clear and slow between banks of red willow. Étienne called a halt. The men dropped their packs, unslung their muskets, sat heavily. They were good men, most of them—young, leather-tough, quiet in the way of men who knew that noise carried more than words.

Moreau walked to the water’s edge and knelt, cupping water in his hands. Then he stopped. He was looking at something in the bank.

Étienne came up beside him. In the soft mud, pressed half a day old, was a print. Moccasin, small, with a distinctive cross-hatch pattern across the heel. Not the kind of moccasin a soldier wore. The kind a runner wore, a man who had learned to walk on snowshoes before he learned to wear boots.

Moreau looked up at him. “Someone passed this way this morning.”

Étienne said nothing.

“You said the trail was quiet.”

“I said the trail was quiet from here to the ridge. This is not the ridge.”

Moreau stood. His hand drifted to the pistol at his belt, a nervous habit he had not yet broken. “Who makes a moccasin like that?”

“Anyone who’s spent a season with the nations.”

“Indian?”

“Could be.” Étienne kept his voice level. “Could be a coureur. Could be a man who learned from the same people I did.”

Moreau stared at him. In the low light, the servant’s face was a study in suspicion—the eyes narrow, the jaw set. He knew Étienne was holding something back. He could feel it the way a man feels a pebble in his boot.

“You would tell me,” he said slowly, “if there was anything I needed to know.”

It was not a question. It was a demand dressed in the clothes of a request.

Étienne looked at him for a long moment. The medal burned against his chest. He thought of his brother, of the good path and the one that fed you, of a boot print pointing north toward the English and a secret fort and orders to burn.

“I would tell you what I know,” Étienne said, and he was careful to make the words true. “What I suspect is another thing.”

Moreau’s jaw tightened. He turned away, and Étienne knew the man did not trust him any more now than he had at the outset. Perhaps less. The servant was learning the shape of the wilderness, and the shape of the man who led him through it.

That night, Étienne did not sleep. He sat with his back to a pine, the medal in his palm, his thumb tracing the worn letters of his brother’s name. The fire had burned low. The men were rolled in their blankets, and the sentry was a young soldier from the Richelieu who kept turning his head at every owl call.

Jean-Baptiste was out there. Somewhere to the north, moving toward the same objective. Not with the English—Étienne could not believe that, would not believe it—but ahead of them, or beside them, leaving signs for his brother to find because he knew Étienne would be coming. The medal was not a warning. It was a message.

*I am here. Follow me.*

But follow him where? To the English? To a fort he might have been paid to find? Or to something else, something that only a man who had walked both sides of this long war could see coming?

Étienne turned the medal over once more, catching the faint glow of the coals on the Virgin’s face.

He made his choice. The orders were sealed. The fort was a secret. But his brother was his brother, and blood moved faster than paper.

He tucked the medal away and stood. Moreau lay on the far side of the fire, facing the dark, and Étienne saw the man’s eyes gleam in the dying light. The servant was awake. The servant had been watching him watch the medal.

Étienne met those eyes across the embers, and said nothing. What was there to say? The trail was already set. The river bend waited, and whatever waited there, he would find it with his brother’s name against his heart.