Read Chapter 10: The Pursuit Begins

The furrow ran straight as a sword-cut through the snow, and Marchetti had been following it for the better part of an hour. Prisoner column or supply train, whatever had made this track was no more than a day ahead—hoofprints punched deep, wheel ruts frozen solid, the churned mud of a dozen boots gone to glass.

Simon walked at his shoulder, breathing hard through his teeth. Behind them, the others trailed in a loose line, Lefebvre at the rear with his eyes fixed on the horizon as if he could conjure his brother out of the white.

“Slowing,” Simon muttered.

“No.” Marchetti shook his head. “They’re not slowing. They’re stopping. Look at the spacing.”

The prints clustered. Men had stood here in a huddle, then spread out again. A rest halt, maybe, or a check of the prisoners against a manifest. Either way, it meant the column had not rushed past this ground. It had breathed here.

“We can gain on them,” Marchetti said.

“And do what when we catch them?” Simon’s voice carried no accusation, only the flat weariness of a man who had stopped hoping for answers.

Marchetti did not answer. The question had been sitting in his chest since Lefebvre had first spotted the mended coat through the trees. Catch them. Then what? They were five men, one dying, one a girl who could barely walk, one a crippled lieutenant who refused to be carried. And against them, imperial gendarmes with muskets and powder and orders.

“We keep pace,” Marchetti said finally. “We watch. We wait for an opening.”

“And if there isn’t one?”

“Then we make one.”

Simon let out a breath that fogged and hung in the air. He did not argue. That was worse than if he had.

They pushed on through the afternoon, the light failing early and grudgingly. The temperature dropped with the sun, and Marchetti felt the cold creeping through the seams of his greatcoat like a living thing. The food from the cellar had given them strength, but strength burned fast in this weather, and they rationed it with the care of men who knew the difference between hunger and starvation.

Aubert rode slumped in the saddle of the surviving packhorse, his head bowed against the wind. Jean-Baptiste walked beside him, one hand steadying the captain’s leg, his face turned away from the rest of them. Marchetti watched the boy from the corner of his eye. Since the incident with the bread, Jean-Baptiste had spoken barely a dozen words, and those only when asked directly. He did not look at Marchetti. He did not look at anyone.

Lefebvre broke ahead of the column, moving to the crest of a low rise. He stood there a moment, then dropped to his haunches so suddenly that Marchetti’s hand went to his knife.

“What is it?” Marchetti hissed, half-running toward him.

Lefebvre pointed. Below the rise, the ground fell away into a shallow valley, and in the floor of that valley, a cluster of buildings squatted around a crossroads. A village, or what remained of one. Several roofs had collapsed under the weight of snow, but a larger structure—a barn, or a way station—still stood whole, its walls dark against the white.

And there were men in the yard.

Marchetti crawled forward until he could see. French uniforms. Blue coats, white facings. Not soldiers of the line—the bearing was wrong, the equipment too clean. They moved with the unhurried confidence of men who had not been running for their lives for six weeks.

Gendarmes.

There were six of them, maybe seven, gathered around a fire in the lee of the barn. Horses stood tethered at a rail, heads down, coats steaming. One of the gendarmes was examining a piece of paper, holding it close to the flames to read.

Marchetti felt the cold settling between his shoulder blades. It was not the weather.

“They’re not moving,” Simon said, coming up beside him. “They’re camped.”

“They’re waiting,” Marchetti corrected.

The girl had crawled up behind them, silent as a shadow. She looked down at the Frenchmen and crossed herself.

“Do you know them?” Lefebvre asked her.

“No.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “But I know what they are. They are the ones who took my father’s papers. The ones who put him in the cage.”

Marchetti looked back at the yard. A cage. The word settled into him with the weight of a stone.

“We go around,” he said. “Wide. Through the trees to the east of the village.”

But even as he said it, he knew it would not be that simple. Behind them came the horse, Aubert swaying in the saddle, unable to move fast or far. In front of them, the prisoner column was walking east toward Vyazma, and every hour they spent skirting a gendarme camp was another hour of distance between Lefebvre and his brother.

“No,” Lefebvre said. His voice was quiet, but it carried the stubbornness of a man who had made up his mind. “We need information. What they know. Where the column is headed. A map, if they have one.”

“You want to walk into a gendarme camp and ask questions?”

“I want to watch them long enough to learn what they know.” Lefebvre’s jaw tightened. “They don’t know we’re here. We have the element of surprise.”

“We’re five men and a girl, no powder, knives only.”

“Then we don’t fight them. We observe. We wait until they move, and then we move through what they leave behind.”

It was reckless. Marchetti opened his mouth to say so, but the words died on his tongue. Because Lefebvre was right about one thing: information. They were walking blind into enemy territory without any sense of what lay ahead, and information was the only currency they had left.

“Two hours,” Marchetti said. “We watch. Then we move.”

They pulled back into the trees and made an uneasy camp in a hollow where the wind could not reach them. Simon produced a small piece of the cellar bread and divided it with the care of a man weighing gold. Natalia ate hers in three quick bites, then went to check the captain.

He was worse. Marchetti saw it in the way she touched his forehead, the way she frowned when she drew her hand away. Aubert’s eyes were open, but there was a distance in them that Marchetti did not like.

“Water,” Aubert rasped. “Just water.”

Simon gave it to him, cupping the man’s head with the tenderness of a mother with a child. Marchetti looked away. He could not watch this.

He took first watch, lying at the lip of the hollow with his eyes fixed on the flicker of the gendarmes’ fire. The night deepened, the stars emerging hard and cold as chips of flint. The fire burned down. Figures moved between the barn and the yard, but with less frequency as the hours wore on.

It was near midnight when Marchetti saw one of the gendarmes step away from the barn alone. The man walked to the edge of the yard, unbuttoned his trousers, and relieved himself against a fence post. Marchetti watched him idly, already dismissing him, when a second figure emerged from the barn and called out.

The voice carried on the frozen air. French. Distinctly French.

“—checked the dispatch yet?”

“Waste of time. They’re not coming this far north. He’ll have taken the southern route.”

“The colonel says they’re heading for Vyazma. He wants to be sure.”

“So we sit in this frozen hellhole and wait for a sergeant and his broken company that may or may not be walking into a trap?”

Marchetti’s blood stopped.

“Just check the papers, will you? If someone asks why we left the column to chase ghosts, I want proof they were fools first.”

The first gendarme laughed, a sound like a knife scraping stone. “They’re dead men walking and they don’t know it yet.”

Marchetti eased back from the lip, his heart hammering against his ribs. He crawled through the snow to where Simon lay, half-asleep, and shook him awake.

“We’re the target,” he whispered. “Not the prison column. They’ve been sent to find us.”

Simon’s face went still. “The false orders. The seal.”

“They know we have them. They know who we are.”

And in that moment, Marchetti understood the full depth of what Captain Aubert had done when he’d recognized the forgery. They were not fleeing the Russian army. They were fleeing their own.