Read Chapter 4: The Ambush at the Rapids

The water came at them out of the gorge like a living thing, white and roaring, throwing spray high enough to wet their faces a hundred yards off. Étienne raised a hand without looking back, and the squad halted on the bank, horses stamping and blowing.

“The crossing is upstream,” he said. “Half a mile. We’ll lose the morning.”

Moreau—still wearing the dead lieutenant’s coat, still carrying the dead lieutenant’s name—pushed his horse forward, jaw tight. The bandage on his forearm from the earlier scrape had soaked through with sweat and trail grime. “You said this was the fastest route.”

“It is. The water drops to the knee at the shallows, but we have to climb around the falls.” Étienne pointed northeast, where the river bent hard against a wall of limestone. “There’s a game trail. Steep, but passable.”

“Then we take it.” Moreau’s voice cracked on the last word. He had been pushing hard since the medal, since Étienne’s silence, since the moment it became clear they were trailing something that didn’t want to be trailed.

Étienne had not told him about the medal. Had not told him about Jean-Baptiste’s deliberate sign, the scrap of ribbon that had to have been tied within the last two days. His brother was ahead of them. His brother was leaving a trail that Étienne alone could read.

He had made his choice. He would follow it where it led.

The portage was misery. The horses balked at the scree, and Corporal Dufresne slipped twice, skinning his knee against the rock. The two privates—boys, both of them, from farms outside Quebec City—grumbled in low Breton accents that Étienne understood better than they knew. Only the scout, a wiry Huron called Tsonnontouan who had joined them at the last village, moved without sound or complaint. He met Étienne’s eye once at the top of the ridge, and something passed between them. Tracker to tracker.

They were coming down the far slope toward the river’s quiet upper reach when the first shot cracked.

The ball took the lead private—Girard, the younger one—in the throat. He made a noise like a broken bell and toppled sideways off his horse, dead before he hit the gravel bar.

Étienne was already moving. He dragged Girard’s horse around by the bit, shouting in French and then in Huron for Tsonnontouan to get the others behind the granite shoulder at the river’s bend. Two more shots came, both high, one slapping into Dufresne’s saddle roll.

“Off the trail! Off the trail, now!”

Moreau was frozen, gripping his reins with white knuckles, eyes wide on the boy’s body sprawled in the wet stones. Étienne reached him in two strides, slapped the horse’s flank hard, and drove them both behind the rock wall as a third volley tore through the leaves where they had been standing.

“You.” Étienne grabbed Moreau’s coat. “Who taught you to lead men?”

Moreau’s mouth worked but nothing came out. His eyes were still on the corpse.

“He was supposed to look alive.” Moreau’s voice came low and broken. “I said the English were days behind us. He asked if we would catch them at the fort, and I said yes. I promised.”

“He’s dead. Mourn him when we’re not.” Étienne pressed his back to the rock, feeling the ridge of it through his shirt, scanning the treeline in quick, methodical passes. The shots had come from a shallow bluff a hundred and fifty yards off, where the pine canopy thickened and the light died early.

Tsonnontouan slid in beside him, silent as a shadow. “Four, maybe five,” he said. “They have shifted. Two hold the high ground. At least one is moving south, to cut us from the river.”

“English?”

Tsonnontouan shrugged. “They shoot like farmers. But they move like they know this ground.”

Étienne closed his eyes. It was not just a patrol. Patrols did not take flanking positions. Patrols did not leave the high ground to circle through difficult terrain, pinning a larger force with steady fire and no sign of recklessness.

But the better question was not who they were. It was who they were tracking.

“They’re following us,” he said quietly. “Not hunting game. Hunting men. And they’ve been on our back-trail since the ravine.”

Moreau pressed his hand to the rock face, breath fast. “Then how do we break contact?”

Étienne looked at the rifle in Moreau’s trembling hand, at the lieutenant’s coat that hung a size too large on the servant’s frame, and understood what he was carrying. Not the fort’s orders. Not the sealed letter that smelled of wax and desperation. He was carrying a fiction, and the fiction was about to collapse if they couldn’t stay alive long enough to reach the fort.

“We don’t,” Étienne said. “We go through them.”

He drew Jean-Baptiste’s medal from inside his shirt, touched the worn face of St. Anne, and tucked it back. It had been his mother’s medal before it was his brother’s. He had watched Jean-Baptiste receive it at their father’s funeral, when Étienne had been too young to understand why the priest had to hold the coffin steady.

The memory was gone in a blink. He turned to Tsonnontouan. “Take the left flank. Give them one shot at the bluff, then break east. Don’t let them see you double back.”

Tsonnontouan nodded once and slipped away.

Étienne moved to Dufresne, the only soldier left with any grit, and laid out the plan in three sentences. The corporal’s jaw tightened, but he did not argue.

“You two.” Étienne pointed to the remaining private, a trembling boy named Hervé. “You stay behind the rock. You keep the horses. If you hear the signal—two quick shots—you ride for the fort road and you do not look back. You understand me?”

Hervé nodded, terrified.

Étienne turned to Moreau. “And you stay with—“

The shot came from the river.

It took Moreau in the shoulder, spinning him halfway around. He cried out, a sharp animal sound of surprise, and went down hard on his injured arm. The rifle clattered onto the moss.

Étienne saw the muzzle smoke rise from behind a boulder at the waterline, where a second shooter had crept up unseen while they watched the bluff.

He fired without thinking, his ball chipping the boulder’s edge and sending the Englishman ducking back. Then he was at Moreau’s side, dragging him behind the largest of the stones, hands already pressing against the wound.

Blood pumped hot and fast between his fingers. Not an artery. Close, but not one. The ball had passed through the meat of his shoulder, leaving an exit wound the size of Étienne’s thumb.

Moreau’s face was white. He tried to speak, failed, tried again. “Did… did they know?”

“Know what?”

“That I’m not him. That I’m just the servant. That I never even fired a musket before last month.”

Etienne tore a strip from his own shirt, wadded it, and pressed it hard into the wound. Moreau gasped.

“They didn’t shoot the lieutenant,” Étienne said. “They shot whoever was standing beside him.”

Tsonnontouan’s rifle cracked twice from the treeline—the signal. The horses were already gone, Hervé drumming south along the river road with Dufresne close behind.

Étienne pulled Moreau’s good arm over his shoulder, hauling him upright. The man weighed less than the pack he’d been carrying. “Can you walk?”

“I can try.” Moreau’s teeth chattered despite the heat. “But the packet… the orders… it’s in my saddlebag. The horse is gone.”

Étienne felt the cold sink into his chest. The sealed orders, the single piece of paper that would decide whether the fort burned or surrendered, was on a horse now fleeing south under the guard of other men’s loyalty.

And the English patrol was moving through the trees around them.

He looked at the river, fast and green and full of memory. Upstream, half a day hard, the current bent around the limestone cliffs where he had once trapped beaver with his brother and where he had buried his father on a cold October morning after the English came through the village.

“We follow the river,” he said. “Upstream. There’s a Huron camp at the bend. They’ll shelter us from the English.”

Moreau blinked. “You know the Huron here?”

“I know this whole country,” Étienne said. “And the men who hunt through it.”

He hefted the wounded servant higher, and they began to move, crashing into the brush parallel to the water while the English regrouped behind them. Étienne’s eyes stayed on the treeline, reading sign in every bent stem and broken twig, and what he saw made his blood run slower and quieter than it had before.

The English tracker who had set this ambush was not a soldier. He was a woodsman who knew exactly how to kill a party of men on open ground, how to pin the strong and wound the weak, how to make the survivors carry their own dead uphill.

Etienne knew this way of war.

It was the same way his father had died.