Read Chapter 2: Snowfall and Secrets

The column had stopped again. That was the worst part—the stopping. Movement meant warmth, however faint. Stopping meant the cold crept in through every gap in wool and leather and settled into the bones like a patient enemy.

Marchetti leaned against the wheel of an abandoned cart, watching the snow fall in thick, indifferent sheets. Behind him, the road stretched back toward Moscow, though the city had long vanished behind a curtain of white. Ahead, nothing but more white, and the dark smudge of the army's tail end shuffling forward at the pace of dying men.

He'd lost his squad in the chaos of the bridge crossing. Not lost—scattered. The press of bodies had been too thick, the horses too frantic. One moment Lefebvre had been at his shoulder, cursing the cold in that wheezy voice of his. The next, Marchetti had turned to find a stranger's face staring back at him, eyes already glazed with frost.

He should find them. He would find them. But the road only went one way, and the army was a river of exhausted men. Sooner or later, they would all fetch up against the same rocks.

The dead officer lay half-buried in a drift beside the cart. French, by the cut of his coat—a lieutenant, maybe, from one of the regiments that had broken first. His face was blue-white, peaceful in the way that only the frozen ever looked. Marchetti had seen enough dead men to know the difference between rest and ending.

He crouched, more from habit than curiosity, and noticed the chain glinting at the dead man's collar. A thin silver thing, delicate as a whisper. He pulled it free.

The locket was small, oval, warm against his frozen fingers despite its owner's stillness. He worked the catch with numb thumbs. Inside, a miniature portrait—a woman with dark hair and a serious mouth, painted in soft colors that seemed obscenely vivid against the gray world. On the opposite side, a lock of hair the color of wheat, bound with silk thread.

Marchetti closed the locket. He should leave it. The dead had no need of keepsakes, and the living had no room for sentiment. But his fingers closed around it anyway, and he slipped it into the inner pocket of his coat, next to the letter he'd been carrying since Vilna. The letter he hadn't opened in three weeks because he already knew what it would say.

"Marchetti."

The voice came from behind him, measured and calm. Captain Aubert stood a few paces off, his greatcoat dusted with snow, his bearing still erect despite the retreat. He looked like a man who had decided not to die and was daring the winter to argue.

"Found something?"

Marchetti straightened. "A locket, sir. On a dead officer."

Aubert's eyes—pale gray, the color of the sky before a storm—held his for a moment. "Keep it. Someone may ask after him, one day." He paused. "If anyone ever comes back this way to ask."

There was something in the way he said it. Not bitterness—Aubert was too controlled for that. Something else. A weight.

"You've been watching me, Captain."

"You've been easy to watch. You move like a man who knows where he's going, even when the road doesn't agree." Aubert stepped closer, lowering his voice. "The lieutenant has questions about you. About the child you pulled from that building."

"She was eight years old. Maybe nine. There wasn't a choice to make."

"No. There wasn't." Aubert glanced back down the road, where the snow had begun to swallow the tracks of the men ahead. "Gerhard doesn't see it that way. He sees choices everywhere—and he keeps a ledger of the ones he thinks others have gotten wrong."

Marchetti said nothing. He'd met men like Gerhard before. Men who watched from the edges, who kept their hands clean and their judgments sharp. Men who wrote reports that outlived the soldiers they condemned.

"There's something you should know," Aubert said. "Not because I trust you—I don't trust anyone in this army, not anymore. But because you're one of the few men I've seen who still acts like a man, and I find I'd rather not have you shot for ignorance."

Marchetti waited.

"Gerhard and I are not retreating to France. We're retreating to the Emperor."

The words hung in the air, strange as birds in a snowstorm. Marchetti blinked. "To the Emperor. He's in Paris."

"He is not." Aubert's voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "He left the army at Smorgoni. Took a sleigh, a handful of men, and disappeared south. He's traveling under a false name—calls himself the Duke of Vicenza when he needs one."

"Smorgoni," Marchetti repeated. The name meant nothing to him. Another frozen village, another point on a map that had become a graveyard.

"Before he left, he gave me a dispatch. Secret orders—the kind that get a man promoted or shot, depending on how the wind blows." Aubert's hand went to his breast, touching something beneath his coat. "I'm to deliver it to him personally. I'm to place it in his hands and no other's."

"And Gerhard?"

"Gerhard is my escort. Or my warder. I haven't decided which." A thin smile crossed Aubert's face. "He has his own orders, I suspect. From someone who wants to know what the Emperor's last words to his army were."

Marchetti turned this over in his mind. It was dangerous knowledge. The kind that made a man a target simply for having heard it. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I need men who aren't part of Gerhard's ledger." Aubert's eyes were steady, unblinking. "Men who might be willing to carry a message, should the need arise. Men who can move through this army without being noticed."

"Men who can be shot in your place, you mean."

"If it comes to that." Aubert didn't flinch. "I won't insult you by pretending otherwise. But I'll also tell you that whatever's in this dispatch, it's worth more than any of our lives. Worth more than the whole damned army, perhaps."

The snow had begun to fall harder, driving into their faces. Marchetti could feel the cold seeping through his boots, the familiar ache in his fingers. He thought of the letter in his pocket, the one he hadn't opened. He thought of the girl with the dark hair, wherever she was now. He thought of his squad, strung out somewhere along this endless white road.

"What's in the dispatch?" he asked.

Aubert's smile deepened, and something in it was very tired. "If I told you that, Sergeant, you wouldn't need to carry it. You'd just need to survive." He turned, gesturing up the road. "Come. There's a farmhouse a few miles ahead—or there was, when I scouted it this morning. We'll find shelter, and I'll tell you what I can."

Marchetti fell into step beside him. The locket was a small weight against his chest, the letter another. He felt like a man collecting stones in his pockets before walking into a river.

"One more thing," Aubert said, not looking at him. "The girl. The one you saved."

Marchetti's step faltered. "What about her?"

"I saw you hand her to a woman in the crowd. A camp follower, by the look of her. She'll be all right, as much as any of us will." He paused. "But Gerhard saw it too. And he'll remember it. He remembers everything."

They walked on in silence. The wind picked up, howling across the open ground, and Marchetti pulled his collar higher against his throat. Behind them, the road to Moscow vanished beneath the falling snow. Ahead, nothing but the white road and the dark shapes of men staggering forward.

He thought about the dispatch, hidden somewhere against the captain's chest. Thought about the Emperor, fleeing south under a false name while his army froze behind him. Thought about the look in Aubert's eyes when he'd said the words worth more than the whole damned army.

Somewhere up ahead, the column had stopped again. Voices called out in the gloom—a shout, then a scream, thin and distant. The kind of sound that didn't carry hope in it.

Marchetti walked toward it, one foot in front of the other, the locket and the letter pressing against his heart like twin accusations. He had survived Moscow. He had survived the fire and the chaos and the long, stumbling retreat. But as the snow closed in around him and the screams grew closer, he had the sudden, certain feeling that the real test had not yet begun.