Read Chapter 5: A Debt of Blood

The wound was worse than it looked. Not the entry—that was clean enough, a shallow furrow where the ball had clipped the shoulder’s meat—but the bleeding had soaked through the binding twice, and Moreau’s skin had gone the color of old tallow. Étienne pressed a handful of moss against the gash and held it there, watching the man’s face for signs of fever that had not yet come.

“You’ve done this before,” Moreau said through clenched teeth. He sat propped against a fallen birch, his coat stripped to the shoulder, the cloth stiff with blood. The squad had drawn a rough perimeter around them, carbines canted toward the dark spaces between the pines.

“Yes.” Étienne did not look up. He worked the moss around the wound’s edge, feeling for damage beneath. The ball had passed through, and that was luck. A lodged ball would have meant cutting, and cutting here, with no fire and no light worth trusting, would have meant a dead lieutenant who had never been a lieutenant at all.

He did not say that aloud.

“The horses,” one of the men muttered, a voyageur name of Bouchard. “They ran south. The English will have them by now.”

“Then we walk,” Étienne said.

“Walk where?” Bouchard’s voice was sharp. “We got no orders, no food beyond the packs we carry, and the man who knows the way has a hole in his shoulder.”

Étienne finished the binding and sat back on his heels. The wound would need a fire to seal it properly, and a fire would bring the English down on them like wolves. They were half a day from the Huron camp, maybe less if the river ran true, but Moreau could not move fast, and the wilderness was not kind to speed.

He wiped his hands on his thighs and stood. The blood had dried black beneath his nails. It was then, in the settling of his breathing, that he saw the blade.

It was wedged in the birch beside where Moreau had fallen—a throwing knife, buried to the quillons in the pale wood, its hilt wrapped in worn leather the color of tobacco. One of the English had thrown it from cover, either in the chaos or in contempt, and in the retreat they had not paused to reclaim it.

Étienne stepped closer. He pulled the knife free. The blade was broad, single-edged, with a notch in the spine near the hilt—a notch no smith had made. It had been filed there, deliberately, like a signature.

His chest went cold.

He turned the knife over. The leather was stitched with sinew in a pattern he remembered. He had seen that pattern only once before, in lamplight, when a tracker had leaned over his father’s body and wiped a blade clean with the corner of his coat. Étienne had been a boy, held back by his mother’s hand, but he had not forgotten the leather of the hilt or the notch, like a smile missing a tooth.

He knew the name. He had carried it in his mouth like a stone for fifteen years.

“Étienne.” Moreau’s voice came from behind him, weak but watchful. “What have you found?”

Étienne turned the knife in his hand, feeling its balance. It was a good knife. A killer’s knife, well kept. The trapper who carried it was not a soldier. He was a hunter of men, and he had been paid to do that work on both sides of this war.

“You know the man who shot you?” Étienne asked.

“I didn’t see him. He came up from the chute with the others. One of them was big, bearded, moved like a woodsman. The rest of them were soldiers, raw to the bush.” Moreau’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

Étienne slid the knife into his belt. “Because he left a tool behind. A man who walks the border keeps his tools close. He’ll want this back.”

“And you mean to give it to him?”

“I mean to find him first.”

Bouchard stepped forward, his carbine across his chest. “That’s the guide talking, not the mission. The mission is gone. The packet went south on horseback with the English. We have nothing left to deliver.”

“We have Fort Carillon,” Étienne said. “And whatever the English intend for it. The orders were burned or lost—it does not matter. The fort still stands. The English still move. You want to give them time to take it while you argue about whose fault this was?”

Bouchard’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing.

Moreau tried to push himself upright, grunting with the effort. “The guide is right. We go on. We reach the fort. We tell the commander what we carried, from memory if we must. The orders were clear in my head. I can repeat them.”

“Can you repeat them with a bullet wound in your shoulder and an English patrol behind you?” Bouchard asked.

“I can repeat them until I die,” Moreau said. “And if I die, the guide will finish the march. He knows the way.”

Étienne looked at him. The servant—the false lieutenant—held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. There was something in his face that Étienne had not seen before. Not trust, exactly. But a kind of resignation, a settling of accounts.

“We move at dawn,” Étienne said. “I’ll find the Huron camp. They’ll take us in, tend the wound properly. From there we take the river route north. It’ll add a day, but it keeps us off the English’s line of travel.”

“And if the Huron are not friendly?” Bouchard asked.

Étienne met his eyes. “They’re friendlier than the man who left this knife.”

He touched the hilt at his belt. The leather was smooth with years of use. He thought of his father’s face in the firelight, the way he had looked at Étienne before the end, and he thought of the notch in the blade, filed away like a mark of ownership.

The man who killed his father was out there, moving ahead of them or behind, walking the same trail. He knew Étienne was here—the ambush had been too precise to be luck. The tracking party had known where they would cross the chute. They had been led there.

Someone had sold them.

And the only man who could have known their path was the man whose boots Étienne had been following since the river bend. His brother. Jean-Baptiste.

He pushed the thought away and set to work on Moreau’s shoulder, binding the wound with clean cloth from his own pack. The night would be cold, and the wounded man would need warmth. They would have to move before daylight was full, blood trail or no blood trail, and when they reached the Huron camp, Étienne would ask questions of his own.

The knife at his belt felt like an answer waiting to be claimed.

He did not tell Moreau whose knife it was. At dawn, when they lifted the wounded servant between them and began the slow, miserable march through the mist, Étienne walked with his eyes on the ground ahead, looking for a print he had seen once in childhood and never forgotten.

Jean-Baptiste’s trail ran north. The English tracker’s trail ran north. And the brother Étienne had lost to war, to the deep woods, to a whole other life shaped like patience—that brother had left a medal hanging from a tree where only Étienne would find it.

One hunt at a time, he told himself. First the fort. Then the debts.

But the blade was warm against his hip, and the name at the back of his throat had worn no softer in fifteen years.

Perrault.

He would find the man called Perrault. And when he did, the knife would not be the instrument. Nothing so merciful.

He kept walking.