Read Chapter 34: Aftermath of Blood

The earth was soft here, dark and rich from the spring melt, and it took Étienne nearly an hour to dig the grave. The soldiers from Dubois’s garrison stood watch in a loose circle, their muskets cradled but ready, their eyes drifting between the body on the ground and the treeline where the captain had fired from.

Nathaniel lay where he had fallen, his blood long since soaked into the moss. His face had gone slack in death, the strain and fury of the last hour erased, leaving something younger behind. Étienne remembered other faces on other brothers, men he had guided through these woods for coin and passage and the promise of a place in one world or the other. None of them had looked this peaceful.

He worked with the folding shovel from his pack, each scoop of earth a small surrender. His shoulder screamed with every motion, the old wound tearing fresh beneath the crude bandage he had tied that morning. The knife wound in his side had gone quiet—too quiet, the way a wound went when it planned to kill you later.

“Let one of us take the shovel,” the eldest of the four soldiers said. His name was Gagnon, a corporal with a grey-shot beard and the careful look of a man who had buried too many friends already. “You’ll be no good to the fort if you bleed out before we get there.”

Étienne shook his head and kept digging. The motion was penance. He had hesitated when it mattered most, and his hesitation had cost his brother his life and the captain his fate. All that remained was to settle the accounts, and digging was the only way he knew to begin.

When the hole was deep enough—not a soldier’s grave, but a man’s grave, deep enough that the wolves would not find him—Étienne climbed out and knelt beside Nathaniel. He had no words for the dead. His mother had taught him prayers in her language, his father had taught him the catechism in his, and in the end Étienne had found he belonged to neither. He placed his hand on Nathaniel’s chest, felt the cold that was already creeping into his brother’s flesh, and spoke in a voice low enough that even the soldiers could not hear.

“You were wrong, in the end,” Étienne said. “But you were my blood. I will not let them forget that.”

He dragged Nathaniel’s body into the grave by the shoulders—Gagnon caught his feet and helped lower him down—and then Étienne began to fill the hole, a handful of dirt at a time, letting the earth take its time with what it had been given.

It was full dark by the time he finished. The stars had come out, sharp and cold, and the wind had picked up out of the north, carrying the smell of snow from the heights. Étienne drove two branches into the mound and lashed them crosswise with a strip of leather torn from his own coat. No marker to say who was buried here. No one would ask, and no one would answer.

He stood, swayed, and caught himself on the trunk of a pine.

“You’re needed at the fort,” Gagnon said. It was not a question.

Étienne looked at the four men. Gagnon. A young private named Bisset, barely old enough to grow a beard, who had watched Nathaniel’s confession with his mouth half open and had not shut it since. Two others, brothers from Quebec named Marchand and Marchand, who spoke to each other in gestures when they thought no one was watching.

They had heard everything. Nathaniel’s confession. The captain’s mocking words. The shot that ended both.

“You heard what my brother said,” Étienne said. “What he admitted to. The betrayal is broader than one man. The captain is dead, but the orders went north to the fort already. The garrison is planning for attack from the lakes, and the English are not coming from the lakes. They are coming from—” He stopped. He could not say it. He did not know if he could say it.

“From the south,” Gagnon said. “We heard. The captain told you the fort was a means to draw strength from Quebec. He were crowing about it as he died, weren’t he?”

Étienne nodded slowly. The captain’s last words had come ragged and full of satisfaction, the confession of a man who had nothing left to lose. *You think the fort means something. You think the river bend matters. It was always a lure, guide. A glittering thing to make the English throw their strength at a pile of logs while the true blow falls on the walls of Quebec itself.*

“Then we ride for the fort,” Étienne said. “Tonight. With speed.”

“You cannot ride,” Bisset said, his voice cracking. “You can barely stand.”

“I will stand when I am there.” Étienne gathered his pack from the ground, shrugged it onto his shoulders, and hissed through his teeth as the weight settled onto his wounded side. “Take the captain’s horse. Tie mine between us if I fall.”

Gagnon stepped forward and put a hand on Étienne’s chest, stopping him before he could move.

“We heard what he said,” Gagnon repeated, quieter now, his eyes searching Étienne’s face. “But I want to hear it from you. Are you taking us to the fort to save the garrison? Or are you taking us to a grave like this one?”

Étienne looked past him, to the branch-lashed cross that marked his brother’s resting place, and beyond it to the darkness of the forest that had raised him and chewed him up and turned him out into the world with a foot in two countries and a home in neither.

“The fort is a trap,” he said. “But the trap is not for us. The captain meant to use the fort to drain men from Quebec. He meant for the English to pound its walls to dust while the real advance caught the governor with his breeches down. If I can reach the fort in time, I can turn the garrison around. Send the men back where they belong. Or hold the walls so well that the English break themselves against them and the river never falls.”

“And what of the thirty men marching south?” Marchand asked—the older one, though Étienne could not remember which was which. “We heard that too. They are walking into an ambush. Do we warn them instead?”

Étienne closed his eyes. For a long moment, he felt the weight of every choice he had made and every choice he had failed to make, pressing down on him like snow on a weak branch. His brother was dead, killed defending a betrayal he had committed. The captain was dead, killed before he could testify. Lemieux was still out there, somewhere to the north, ready to expose the supply depot at Lac Fourche. And thirty French soldiers were marching south toward an English killing ground.

“We send a rider south,” Étienne said. “One man, fast and light, with a message to the column. Tell them to wheel east before the river crossing, find the English trail, and strike before they can spring their trap. The trail is fresh enough that a good man can track it.”

“And that man would be riding into battle,” Gagnon said.

“That man would be riding to save thirty lives.”

Gagnon turned to his men. The Marchand brothers exchanged another look. Bisset swallowed and stood a little straighter.

“Bisset,” Gagnon said. “You have the best eyes at night. Take the message.”

“Me?” Bisset’s voice cracked again.

“You are fastest. You are young. And if you ride hard, you might get there before they stop for their evening prayers.” Gagnon looked back at Étienne. “The rest of us take the fort with you.”

Étienne met his gaze and nodded. It was not gratitude he felt—gratitude was a candle against the dark of what had happened tonight—but it was something like trust, and that would have to be enough.

They burned Nathaniel’s marker before they left. A pyre would draw the wolves, but a cross of branches might draw inquiries, and inquiries led to questions, and questions led to the truth. And the truth, for now, was a burden Étienne intended to carry alone.

Bisset mounted the captain’s horse—a fine beast, still saddled, still fresh from carrying its master to murder—and rode south with the message folded inside his coat. He looked back once, at the fire and the men beside it, and then the darkness swallowed him.

Étienne climbed onto his own horse with Gagnon’s help, biting down on a cry as the motion tore at his side. The bandage had gone dark and wet again, and he could feel the warmth spreading down his hip, the slow leak of blood that would not stop until a surgeon put a needle through him.

“We have three horses,” Gagnon said, mounting his own. “Four of us. One must ride double.”

“I will walk,” Étienne said.

“You will not.”

“Then I will ride double and hate every stride for it.”

They rigged a rough harness, binding Étienne’s horse to Gagnon’s saddle with a length of rope, and set off into the north. The moon rose over the treeline, gibbous and yellow, and the forest opened its arms to let them pass.

Étienne did not look back at the fire, or at the fresh grave beneath it, or at the place where his brother had died and the captain had died and the last claim he had to a family in this world had gone into the earth with them.

He set his eyes on the northern sky and rode into the dark.