Read Chapter 9: The Second Ambush

The fire came from the eastern ridge, high and dry, where the pines gave way to scree and deadfall. Étienne heard the first crack and knew it for what it was before the ball whined past his ear—a Baker rifle, English issue, the sort that could put a man down at two hundred paces. He hit the ground and rolled, dragging La Rue down with him by the collar of his filthy coat.

"Moreau! Down!"

The lieutenant was already moving, or trying to, his wounded shoulder screaming against the motion. He threw himself behind a fallen maple and came up with his pistol, firing blind at the ridge. The shot echoed and died. No answering fire. Just the whistle of wind through the rocks.

Then a second crack, and the servant—old Baptiste, who had walked behind Moreau's horse for three weeks without a word of complaint—made a sound like a punctured bellows and folded sideways into the brush.

Étienne crawled to him, already knowing. The ball had taken him high in the chest, just under the collarbone. Baptiste's eyes were open and surprised, the way men's eyes always were when the end came faster than they'd expected. His lips moved, but no sound came out. Then the light went out of him, and he was still.

"Sang de Dieu." La Rue's voice was hoarse against the dirt. "They've found us."

Étienne tore his gaze from Baptiste's face and scanned the ridge. He saw a flicker of movement—a dark shape shifting between two boulders, maybe eighty yards up. The tracker was good, but he was confident, and confidence made men careless. He'd taken his shot from a position that gave him a clear view of the trail below, but it left him exposed to the north. If they could get to the gully—

Another shot. This one tore through the brush where La Rue had been lying a heartbeat before. The deserter yelped and scrambled, kicking up leaves and dirt.

"Stop running!" Étienne hissed. "You run, you die. Crawl. Crawl to the gully, now."

Moreau had reached the same conclusion. He was already dragging himself toward the narrow cut in the earth, his good arm scrabbling at the roots and stones. His face was grey with pain, but his jaw was set. A stubborn man, even when bleeding.

Étienne grabbed La Rue's shoulder and shoved him toward the gully. "Go. Help the lieutenant. I'll cover you."

"And then what?" La Rue's eyes were wild.

"Then I come. Now move."

The deserter moved. Étienne brought up his musket and fired at the ridge—not to hit, but to make the tracker keep his head down. The ball smacked into a boulder and screamed off. He ducked, reloaded, and fired again. Then he was up and running, a low sprint that carried him to the lip of the gully just as another ball tore past his shoulder, close enough to flick his sleeve.

He dropped into the cut and slid down the steep bank, landing hard at the bottom. Moreau was already crouched there, his pistol reloaded, watching back the way they'd come. La Rue was on his knees, gasping.

"How many?" Moreau's voice was taut.

"One shooter on the ridge," Étienne said. "But that Baker's too slow to lay down that kind of fire alone. He's got at least one more with him, maybe two, moving up on our flanks."

"Then we run."

"No." Étienne shook his head. "We run, they track us. We've been running since the chute, and it hasn't done us a bit of good. We need to break their line, get across the river, put water between us."

"The river's a mile east," La Rue said. "And they'll see us the moment we leave this gully."

"Then we don't leave this gully." Étienne was already moving, following the cut eastward as it deepened and turned. The walls rose around them, and the light grew thin and green. "There's a bend up ahead where the bank's undercut. We can water there, then double back."

"Double back toward them?" Moreau's eyes narrowed.

"Double back around them. The tracker knows we're heading for the fort. He'll expect us to keep pushing east. If we go south for half a day, then swing east again, we lose him in the bogs."

Moreau held his gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded. "You're the guide."

Étienne didn't say what he was thinking: that Simon Hart was too good to lose in bogs, that the man had tracked Étienne's own father through worse ground than this, that the only chance they had was to make Hart think they were dead. He kept that to himself, and he kept moving.

The gully ran a hundred more yards before it pinched shut and forced them up onto open ground. Étienne paused at the lip, scanning the treeline. Nothing moved. No birds sang. The silence was wrong—too full, too deliberate.

"They've stopped," he murmured. "That's bad."

"Bad how?" La Rue's voice cracked.

"Bad because they know we've stopped too, and they're calculating. Hart doesn't waste ammunition on guesses. He waits until he's sure."

He led them at a low crouch through the ferns, angling south. The ground grew soft beneath their feet, then wet, then mired. Birch gave way to alder and then to marsh grass tall as a man. Water seeped into their boots, cold and black.

They waded for an hour. The sun climbed and burned off the morning mist, and still they pushed south. La Rue stumbled twice, and each time Moreau hauled him up with his good arm, cursing under his breath. The lieutenant's shoulder had soaked through its bandage and dripped a thin trail of red into the water, but he didn't slow.

When the marsh finally gave way to firmer ground, Étienne called a halt. They collapsed in the shade of an old cedar, lungs heaving. Water dripped from their clothes, pooling in the dirt beneath them.

"We lost them?" La Rue managed between gasps.

Étienne didn't answer. He was studying the ground behind them, the bent reeds and the disturbed mud. He'd done what he could to cover their passage, but no tracker alive could hide a man bleeding from a shoulder wound. Moreau's blood was a breadcrumb trail straight to their position.

"We've bought time," he said finally. "Not much. An hour, maybe two."

Moreau's eyes were closed, his face pale. "Then we use it. La Rue, check the packs. What did we keep?"

The deserter crawled to the wet lump of canvas that had been his pack and began sorting through it with shaking hands. Étienne watched him for a moment, then turned to check the river bend map still safe inside his own coat—the coat he'd never let out of his sight, not even to sleep. The waxed paper crinkled beneath his fingers. It was there. Good. That was the only thing that truly mattered.

He looked at Baptiste's pack, lying abandoned near the cedar roots where the servant had dropped it in the confusion of the ambush. His throat tightened. He hadn't wanted to leave the man back there, but there'd been no choice. The English would find him soon enough, and they'd know they were still alive by the freshness of his wounds.

Then something caught his eye—a corner of dark cloth poking out of Baptiste's pack. A scarf, maybe, or a spare shirt. Étienne pulled it free and it unfolded in his hands: a military tunic, French, but not the plain grey-blue of a private soldier. This one had a lieutenant's silver braid on the shoulders, worn but clean, and on the breast—

He stopped. The metal badge was shaped like a fleur-de-lis, engraved with the number of the regiment. And beneath it, scratched into the silver with a knife point, was a small mark: a four-pointed star, the symbol of the Royal Artillery. Étienne had seen that symbol before, on a battlefield near the St. Lawrence, on the chest of a man who'd walked out of a French command tent and straight into the waiting arms of an English patrol.

His father's patrol.

His father's death.

Étienne's hand closed around the badge. The metal was warm from the sun, but his blood ran cold.

"La Rue." His voice was barely a whisper. "Where did you get this?"

The deserter looked up, saw what Étienne was holding, and went white. "I—I didn't. That's not mine. It was his. Baptiste's. He said he'd been a servant to an officer before—before he came to us."

"Which officer?"

"I don't know. He never said. Just that the man had died and left him his coat." La Rue swallowed hard. "Why? What's wrong?"

Étienne didn't answer. He was staring at the badge, at the star scratched beneath the fleur-de-lis, at the letter of the regiment that had commanded the fort where his father had been stationed—the fort that had been betrayed from the inside, its gates opened to the English in the night.

The man who'd worn this coat had been a traitor. And if Baptiste had been his servant, then Baptiste had known. He had served the traitor, followed him, and then slipped away when the man died. The old man had been quiet, unobtrusive, helpful—everything a spy's servant might be, if the spy were still alive and still watching.

But Baptiste was dead now, shot by the English tracker's ball.

Convenient.

Étienne turned the badge over in his palm. On the back, scratched into the edge of the metal, was a name. He had to squint to read it in the shifting light.

*Claude Moreau.*

The same name as the man he was guiding. The same name as the wounded lieutenant now lying in the shade, watching him with dark and careful eyes.

"Étienne?" Moreau's voice was quiet. "What have you found?"

Étienne looked up. The pistol in Moreau's unwounded hand was aimed at his chest, steady and certain. And in that moment, the name on the badge and the man who wore it fitted together like a key in a lock.

The officer he was guiding was not the traitor who'd betrayed his father. But he was the traitor's brother.