Read Chapter 8: The Missing Brother

The trading post squatted at the edge of a burned clearing like a tick on a wound. Its log walls were blackened with age and smoke, its roof patched with birch bark and hides, and a single painted sign hung crooked over the door: LECLERC & FILS — TRAITE. The name meant nothing to Étienne, but the post did not need a name. It was simply a place where men could trade their secrets for powder and rum, and where news moved faster than any canoe.

Étienne left Moreau and the deserter La Rue in the shade of a birch grove a hundred paces back, hidden from the post's sight. Moreau had objected, of course — his shoulder was a ruin of stained bandages and his face the color of old tallow, but his mouth still worked well enough to argue. Étienne had silenced him with a look and a gesture at the empty tree line.

"If the English tracker is close, he will watch the post. Three men walking wounded draw attention. One man walking alone draws questions."

He had not waited for an answer. He had simply walked.

The post's interior smelled of cured hides, stale grease, and the copper tang of old blood from the traps hanging on the walls. A single window let in a slab of gray light that fell across a plank counter worn smooth by a century of elbows. Behind the counter, a man with the face of a cracked river stone looked up from a ledger, his small eyes moving over Étienne's buckskin, his rifle, the fox-trimmed capot he wore against the autumn chill.

"Étienne Roussel." The trader's voice was flat, unsurprised. "Three seasons since I saw your shadow. Heard you hired out to the French again."

Étienne did not ask how the man knew his name or his business. A trader who did not know the travelers on his route was a trader who did not last. He set a pouch of powder on the counter — enough to buy goodwill if not silence — and leaned in.

"I'm looking for news of my brother."

The trader's eyes flickered. A small tell, but enough.

"Jean-Baptiste." The name hung between them like a blade. "You've missed him. He came through here — two winters past, maybe three. Bought a new knife and a sack of corn. Looked thin. Looked hard." He paused, his tongue wetting his lips. "Looked like a man running from something."

Étienne kept his face still. His brother had been gone four years now, vanished into the northern woods after their father's death, leaving nothing behind but a cold hearth and a guilt that had never thawed. Étienne had searched. He had followed trails that went nowhere, asked questions that received no answers. And then he had stopped searching, because the dead do not come back and the living must find their own way to forgiveness.

But the baptismal medal — Jean-Baptiste's medal, the one their mother had placed around his neck before she died, the one Étienne had last seen shining on his brother's chest as Jean-Baptiste walked away from their father's grave — had been hanging from that tree at the stream crossing. A sign. A message. A question that demanded an answer.

Jean-Baptiste had been ahead of them on the trail. And now this trader was telling him his brother had been here, had been alive, had been running.

"When did he come through?" Étienne asked.

"Three nights ago. Maybe four. He didn't stop long. Bought his corn, sharpened his blade on my whetstone, and left north." The trader's eyes narrowed. "He wasn't alone. There was a man waiting for him at the tree line. English dress. Professional. Carried himself like a hunter."

The words landed in Étienne's chest like a stone dropped into still water. The English tracker. The man who had killed his father. The man whose throwing knife now sat weighted and cold in Étienne's belt.

"Did my brother speak to him?"

"They spoke." The trader's voice dropped. "Low, fast. Like men who shared a secret they didn't trust the trees to hear. Your brother did most of the talking. The Englishman listened." He paused, then added, almost gently, "Your brother has gone over to them, Étienne. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you."

Étienne felt the words like a blow to the gut. He had heard rumors, of course — whispers that filters through the canoe routes and portages, that a métis man with his coloring and his skill had been seen with English rangers, that he had sold his birthright for foreign coin. He had dismissed them as the jealous lies of men who could not track a wounded deer through soft snow. His brother was angry. His brother was grieving. But Jean-Baptiste was not a traitor. He was not a man who would turn his back on everything their father had died to protect.

"I need to see it," Étienne said. "Whatever proof you have. I need to see it."

The trader studied him for a long moment, then reached beneath the counter and pulled out a folded sheet of paper, creased and dirty, sealed with a blob of wax the color of dried blood. He held it out but did not release it.

"You'll understand if I ask what this is worth to you."

Étienne unclasped the small pouch at his belt and tossed it onto the counter. It clinked with the sound of lead balls — not powder, not shot, but trade goods of a different kind. The trader weighed it in his palm, nodded, and released the letter.

The paper was rough and foxed, the ink faded to a pale brown, but the handwriting was unmistakable. Étienne had seen it on a hundred notes left beside a cold campfire, on the margins of maps, on the scraps of birch bark they had used as children to send messages between their father's traplines. Jean-Baptiste's hand was sharp and angular now, harder than it had been, but it was still his hand. Still his voice, caught in ink.

*Father is dead because of men like you. Because of the French and their wars, their taxes, their promises that mean nothing. I have watched our people starve while the officers dine on silver plate. I have watched the English traders offer fairer price and honest dealing, and I have watched the French burn their posts and call it loyalty.*

*Do not look for me. I have chosen my path. I have taken service with those who will not waste my blood for their glory. If we meet again, it will be as strangers.*

*— J-B*

Étienne read the letter twice. The first time, the words were just noise, a blur of accusation and pain that he could not parse. The second time, they settled into him like cold water finding the cracks in a hull. His brother had not just joined the English. He had joined them with fury. With purpose. With a hatred that Étienne recognized because it was his own, before he had learned to bank the fire and let it burn slow instead of hot.

Would Jean-Baptiste take service with an English tracker? Would he follow a man who had killed their father?

Étienne's hand moved to the knife at his belt. The throwing knife. The one the English hunter had used in the ambush at the chute, the one that had been buried in the shoulder of a French soldier while his brother's medal hung from a tree ahead of them on the trail. He pulled it out and laid it on the counter beside the letter.

"This knife. Did you see a man carrying its match?"

The trader's eyes went wide, then flat. He recognized the weapon. He knew its maker, or its owner, or both.

"That's Simon Hart's blade," he said. "English hunter from the Mohawk country. Comes through here sometimes with furs and news. Trades straight, pays fair, but there's no light in his eyes. He's the kind of man who kills for a living and sleeps well at night."

"Was he the man with my brother?"

The trader hesitated. Then he shook his head.

"No. The man with your brother was younger. Darker. Built like a canoe paddler, not a woodsman." He glanced at the knife, then at Étienne's face. "But Hart was here too. A week before. Asked the same questions you're asking. Wanted to know if a man had come through — a young métis with a scar on his jaw, wearing a soldier's coat. Said he had business with him."

A scar on his jaw. A soldier's coat. Étienne's breath caught in his throat.

La Rue. The deserter who had stumbled into the Huron camp, whose bandages carried the stripes of Jean-Baptiste's regiment. The man who had spoken of a secret fort besieged by an English professional tracker. The man who had carried Simon Hart's knife.

The pieces clicked together with a sound like a rifle cocking.

Jean-Baptiste was not with Hart. Jean-Baptiste was hunting Hart — or Hart was hunting Jean-Baptiste. And the deserter La Rue was the center of the web, the man who knew the fort, who knew the English plan, who knew enough to make both sides want him dead or captured.

Étienne folded the letter and pressed it into his shirt against his heart. He left the knife on the counter where the trader could see it.

"I need supplies," he said. "Powder, shot, salt, a sack of corn. And I need you to forget you saw me."

The trader's eyes moved to the knife, then back to Étienne's face. He nodded slowly.

"Ten minutes. Bundle's by the back door."

Étienne turned to leave, then stopped with his hand on the door frame.

"If the man with the scar comes through again," he said, "you tell him his brother was here. Tell him I'm going to the fort at the river bend. Tell him I'll be waiting."

The trader's face went pale. "The river bend fort? You're a fool to go there. That's English country now — Hart's country. If you walk into that valley, you won't walk out."

Étienne met his eyes.

"Then I'll fly."

He stepped out into the gray light, the letter burning against his chest, the weight of the knife still on his belt, and the shape of an impossible truth forming in his mind. The English tracker who had killed his father. The brother who had vanished with a baptismal medal and a heart full of fury. The fort that did not exist on any map his father had traced. And the deserter, the servant, the man with the scar who had come to them with a story that made too much sense and not enough.

Simon Hart was the man who had killed his father. But Jean-Baptiste — his blood, his brother, the only family he had left — was hunting the same man. Or running with him. Or leading him straight to the fort that Étienne was now bound to reach first.

He did not know which answer he feared more.