Read Chapter 6: The Deserter's Tale

The Huron camp sat on a gravel spit where the river bent west, a scatter of birch-bark lodges that smelled of smoke and drying fish. Étienne had been here twice before, once with his father, once alone. The headman, an old man named Atironta, had looked at Moreau's wound without surprise and set two women to work on it with hot water and crushed willow bark.

The rest of the squad—seven men now, down from twelve—had collapsed in a loose circle around the central fire. They were soldiers of the Béarn regiment, or what remained of it, and they looked it: torn uniforms, hollow cheeks, eyes that kept drifting to the tree line.

Étienne sat apart from them, at the base of a pine, turning the throwing knife over in his hands. The blade was worn thin at the tip, the handle wrapped in leather that had been shaped to a particular grip. He had watched a man die with that grip once. Had stood behind a bush as a boy and watched his father fall, and the man who threw the knife had bent to retrieve it from his father's chest, and wiped it clean on his sleeve, and vanished into the green.

That was nineteen years gone.

The man would be older now. Harder to kill.

The knife's leather creaked under his thumb.

"Étienne."

He looked up. Moreau stood over him, one arm in a sling, his face pale but his eyes clear. The willow bark might have taken the edge off the pain, or he was simply good at hiding it.

"The headman says the English haven't been seen this far north in a month," Moreau said. "We can rest here a day, maybe two."

"Three."

Moreau shook his head. "The orders—"

"Soon." Étienne stood, pocketing the knife. "If we push him too fast, he'll die, and then what do your orders matter?"

Moreau studied him. Whatever he saw in Étienne's face, he didn't like it, but he nodded. They were learning to hate each other more politely than before.

The shouting came from the northern edge of camp. A Huron sentry yelled something in his own tongue, and then a figure burst through the brush—a white man in a filthy French uniform, staggering, half-mad with exhaustion. He hit the ground at the edge of the firelight and stayed there, gasping, while the soldiers scrambled for their muskets.

Atironta's young men ringed camp, but no one followed.

The deserter—and he was a deserter, Étienne knew the look—was a whip-thin man in his thirties with a week's beard and a face burned raw by sun and wind. His uniform tunic was torn at the shoulder and had been used to bind a gash on his left arm, blood dried to a black crust. He crawled forward, hand outstretched.

"French," he rasped. "Thank God. Thank God—"

One of the soldiers—a corporal whose name Étienne had never bothered to learn—grabbed the man by his collar and hauled him up. "Who are you? What unit?"

The deserter's eyes rolled until they found the man's stripes, then the faces around the fire. A laugh bubbled out of him, thin and slightly broken. "Lost. Been lost for eleven days. Thought I was dead."

"Answer the question."

"Guichen." The man's voice cracked. "First Battalion, Guichen regiment. Name's La Rue. I was stationed at the outpost at Lake of the Two Mountains."

Moreau stepped forward. "There's no outpost at Lake of the Two Mountains. There's a trading post, and that's been abandoned since the spring."

La Rue's laugh broke again. "That's what the maps say. That's what everyone says." He pushed himself up onto his knees, swaying. "They built a fort. Not on any map. A fort of logs, on a bend of the river, halfway between here and the great falls. We were thirty men. Thirty."

He let the rest hang.

"English?" Moreau asked.

La Rue shook his head. "Our own. Our own command signed the orders. We were supposed to hold it through the winter, keep it quiet. But—" He swallowed. "The commander, he had a commission from the Governor. A secret fort, a hidden garrison, the keys to the whole river. And then the English got word of it somehow, and they sent a patrol. Not regulars. Hunters. Woodsmen. Professionals." His voice dropped. "We knew what that meant. When the first assault came, the commander took five men and the payroll and the best horses and went south overland. Left the rest of us to die."

The fire popped, sending sparks up into the dark. The soldiers had drawn closer now, a ring of weather-scarred faces watching the deserter with the uneasy suspicion of men who had heard too many tales to trust any of them.

"You ran," Moreau said flatly.

"I ran," La Rue agreed. "After the third assault. After half the garrison was dead and the rest of us were boarding windows with our own dead." His voice caught. "You weren't there. You don't have the right to judge."

"No one's judging," Étienne said. His voice was even, low. La Rue's eyes found him, noted his skin, his coloring, his dress—settled on the knife at his belt.

"A métis," the deserter said. "The English captain had one. A métis tracker. Walked like a wolf, killed our sentry without a sound." He spat. "Left his knife in the man's throat."

Étienne went very still.

Over the fire, Moreau watched him.

"A knife," Étienne said. "What did this knife look like?"

La Rue frowned, the question seeming to pull him from the depths of his fatigue. "I don't know. I never saw it. Pascal was the one who found the body—he said there was a knife left behind, with a wolf's head carved on the handle. They left it as a sign, like a signature."

Étienne's blood went cold, then hot. The knife in his pocket suddenly felt heavier. He kept his face blank, letting none of it show.

"He killed four of us on the first night alone," La Rue went on. "Not through the gates. He climbed the wall. We found the sentry thrown down the well." He shivered. "That's when we knew we couldn't hold. That's when I ran."

Moreau was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had a new edge in it—something like calculation, something cold. "Where is this fort?"

"On the river." La Rue's eyes went to the water, dark and broad beyond the camp. "A day's march north-northeast, maybe less. If you know where to look. The river bends like a snake there, makes a long crescent. This fort sits on the inside of the crescent, maybe fifty yards back from the water. Wooden walls, a palisade, one gate to the south. Sixty feet square, if that."

"You're certain of the direction?"

"I walked it. Walked it eleven days, eating roots and grubs, following the river through the bush, trying to find—" His voice broke and stopped.

The squad leader, a sergeant named Roux, stepped toward Moreau. "Sir. This man's a deserter. His word's worth nothing. He could be a spy sent to lure us somewhere."

"He could be," Moreau said. "But he's not."

Roux blinked. "How do you know?"

Étienne followed Moreau's gaze to the deserter. La Rue had begun to shiver, though the night wasn't cold. The shivering was in his hands, which he'd folded in his lap. They were torn, callused hands, wrapped in scraps of cloth that had been cut from the hem of his own uniform.

Moreau pointed at the scraps.

Étienne looked closer.

The cloth scraps weren't plain. They bore faded regimental stripe patterns—green and blue, on a background of grey wool.

The stripes of the Vaudreuil regiment.

The regiment Jean-Baptiste had been assigned to five years ago.

Moreau read the recognition on his face. He said nothing, but something passed between them, an understanding that coiled around them both like wire.

Moreau turned to La Rue. "You said this fort holds a garrison. How many are left of the original thirty?"

La Rue laughed again—that broken, hopeless sound. "Maybe ten. Maybe fewer. The English have killed them off one by one. But they haven't taken it yet—that's what they want, isn't it? To take it intact. To hold it."

"Why?" Étienne asked.

La Rue looked at him. For the first time, the man's eyes held something other than fear or fatigue. Something like wonder.

"Because they say," he said slowly, "that from that fort, you can command the passage of every canoe, every boat, every load of furs and ammunition that moves between Montreal and the great lakes." He paused. "And they say the Governor has a map that shows the English intend to take it by winter, and that the man they sent to lead the assault is a professional hunter who has never lost a chase."

Étienne said nothing.

Moreau looked at him. "That fort—if it exists—would put us a day off course."

"It exists," Étienne said.

Moreau raised an eyebrow.

Étienne reached into his pocket and drew out the throwing knife, laid it flat on his palm where the firelight caught the worn handle and the weathered blade.

La Rue's eyes went wide. "That's—that's the English captain's knife. Wolf's head. I told you—Pascal described it—where did you get that?"

"I pulled it out of a tree," Étienne said, "where the English tracker left it, in the ambush that shot you."

Silence fell over the camp like snow.

Moreau looked at the knife. Then he looked at Étienne. And then he looked north, at the dark river bending west.

The secret fort was on the river. The man who killed Étienne's father was leading the assault against it. Jean-Baptiste's trail led north, and the regimental stripes on La Rue's bandages blazed like a lantern lit in his mind.

Everything was connected. Everything was pulling him toward a single point of convergence, a place that existed on no map.

Moreau's voice came low, nearly swallowed by the fire's crackle. "If the fort exists, and if we can reach it before the English take it—we might not need the orders at all."

Étienne turned the knife over in his hand.

His brother was somewhere north. And if Jean-Baptiste was with the English—if his brother had sold his loyalty to the tracker who wore a wolf's head—

He was going to find out.