Read Chapter 3: The Missing Brother

The column had stopped again—not for rest, but because the road itself had become a grave. Wagons overturned, horses dead in their traces, their frozen legs pointed at the sky like broken prayers. Marchetti stepped over a discarded musket, its barrel buried in snow, and kept walking.

Corporal Lefebvre fell in beside him. The little Parisian's face was pinched beneath his scarf, but his eyes had that look—the one that meant he was working up to something.

"How long until we reach Smorgoni?" Lefebvre asked.

"Three days. Maybe four." Marchetti didn't look at him. "Depends on whether the snow holds."

"Étienne." Lefebvre's voice dropped. "I need to tell you something."

Marchetti glanced at him. Lefebvre was a decent soldier—not brave exactly, but steady. The kind who kept his head down and did what was asked. He didn't approach sergeants with anything unless it mattered.

"I've been asking around the column," Lefebvre said. "The prisoners we took at Moscow—the Russian officers. I keep hearing they were marched ahead with the supply trains."

"Prisoners don't survive this retreat, Pierre."

"I know that." Lefebvre's jaw tightened. "But my brother—my brother isn't a prisoner. He was captured at Borodino, back in September. They said he was sent to Moscow as a prisoner exchange. We never heard anything after that."

Marchetti walked in silence. The wind picked up, driving needles of ice into exposed skin.

"What's his name?"

"Gustave. Gustave Lefebvre. He's a corporal in the 9th Line, same as me—we enlisted together, before you ask." Lefebvre pulled his coat tighter. "Gustave is all I have. Our parents died of fever when I was nine. He raised me. Taught me to read, to fight, to—"

"Pierre." Marchetti stopped walking. "We're in the middle of a retreat that's killing thousands of men a day. You cannot leave the column to search for a brother who may not even be alive."

"I know." Lefebvre's voice cracked. "But if there's a chance—even one—I have to take it."

Marchetti studied him. The corporal was younger than his rank suggested, younger than he appeared with his face lined by frost and exhaustion. In the old days, Marchetti would have told him to harden up and forget the past. But these were not the old days.

"Where did you hear about this supply train?"

"There's a wagoner further back who says the prisoners were kept at a depot outside the city—they call it Krasnoye. Ahead of us, maybe half a day's march. He says some of them still live."

Marchetti was about to respond when a commotion rippled through the ranks ahead of him. Men were shouting, and there was a scuffle near the edge of the column—the sound of boots crunching through snow, the flat thud of a fist hitting bone.

"Stay here," Marchetti said.

He pushed through the throng of soldiers. Near the roadside ditch, two men from Captain Aubert's company had hold of a boy—a child, really, no more than seventeen—who was fighting them with the desperate fury of a cornered animal. His coat was far too large, and his face was smeared with soot and half-frozen tears.

"Let go of me!" the boy shouted, his voice cracking. "I'm a soldier in the Emperor's army!"

"Deserter more like," one of the men spat. He had the boy by the collar. "Running from the column with your tail between your legs—"

Marchetti grabbed the man's wrist and squeezed until the grip loosened. The boy stumbled free.

"He said he's a soldier," Marchetti said. "Let him speak."

The man—a corporal with a scarred chin—glared at him. "And who the hell are you?"

"Sergeant Marchetti, attached to Captain Aubert's command." His voice was flat, unhurried. "And you are?"

The corporal hesitated. Rank told, even in chaos. He released the boy entirely and stepped back.

"He came running from the south," the corporal said. "No unit, no papers, no weapon. He's either a deserter or a spy."

Marchetti turned to the boy. He was trembling—from cold, from fear, maybe both. His hands were raw and chapped, the hands of a farm boy, not a soldier.

"What's your name?"

"Jean-Baptiste Roux." The boy swallowed hard. "From Toulouse. I was with the 12th Light Infantry. We got caught in the rear guard when the Cossacks hit us four nights ago. I—I ran." His voice dropped. "I know it's shameful. I ran."

A circle of men had gathered now, watching. Marchetti could feel the weight of their judgment, the hunger for something to blame. The retreat had stripped them of warmth, food, order. A deserter gave them something to hate.

"What's your trade, Jean-Baptiste?"

"What?"

"Before the army. What did you do?"

The boy blinked, confused by the question. "I—I helped my father. He's a farrier in Toulouse. Shoeing horses."

Marchetti looked at the corporal with the scarred chin. "He knows horses. That's worth more than gold on this road." He looked at the boy. "You stay with my squad. You'll earn your place. No one will touch you."

The boy's eyes went wide. "Thank you, Sergeant. I—thank you."

Marchetti grabbed him by the shoulder and steered him away from the crowd. Lefebvre fell in on the other side, his earlier confession momentarily forgotten. They walked in silence until they found the rest of the squad huddled around a struggling fire, warming their hands over the pale flames.

Lefebvre found his voice again. "You took in a deserter."

"He took himself in." Marchetti settled onto a log, gesturing for the boy to sit near the fire. "He just needed an excuse to live."

"And my brother? Do you tell me to live too?"

Marchetti looked at Lefebvre. The Frenchman's eyes were red, and not just from the cold.

"Half a day's march," Marchetti said slowly. "That's what the wagoner told you."

"Perhaps less. The depot at Krasnoye—it has an old stone church. The prisoners were held there. If Gustave is alive, he would be there."

"And if he isn't?"

"Then I'll know." Lefebvre's voice was barely a whisper. "That's all I want. To know."

Marchetti stared into the fire. He thought of the locket in his pocket, the weight of it against his chest. The dead officer's face had been unremarkable, but someone had loved him enough to give him a lock of hair, a portrait of a woman. Someone out there was waiting for news that would never come.

"Tomorrow at first light," Marchetti said. "We'll find the wagoner and see what his route is. If the church is close to the road, we'll look. But if it isn't—"

"If it isn't, I understand." Lefebvre exhaled, some of the tension leaving his shoulders. "Thank you, Étienne."

"Don't thank me yet. We still have to get through tonight."

The boy—Jean-Baptiste—was sitting close to the fire now, holding his hands out to the flames with a look of pure gratitude on his gaunt face. Marchetti sat down beside him.

"Tomorrow," he said to the boy, "you're going to help with the horses. You're going to work, and you're going to stay quiet, and you're going to do exactly what I tell you. Understood?"

"Yes, Sergeant."

"And if anyone asks—you've been with us since Moscow. Your unit was wiped out in the fighting. You don't know anything else."

A shadow fell across them. Marchetti looked up.

Captain Aubert stood at the edge of the firelight, his greatcoat wrapped tight around him. His gaze moved from Marchetti to the boy and lingered there.

"A straggler, Sergeant?"

"A conscript, sir. Found him wandering. He's a farrier's son—useful with horses."

Aubert studied Jean-Baptiste for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly.

"Useful men are hard to find on this road." His eyes met Marchetti's. "As are men who keep their word. I trust you'll see that he earns his place."

"Of course, sir."

Aubert turned to go, then paused. "The wagoners have reported Cossack scouts moving east of the column. They're probing for weak points. I want extra vigilance tonight, Sergeant."

"Understood, sir."

Marchetti watched him disappear into the gloom. The captain hadn't asked about the dispatch, hadn't hinted. But there was something in the way he'd looked at the boy—a calculation, an assessment. Marchetti was being watched, tested.

And now he had added another mouth to feed, another soul to protect, in the middle of a retreat that swallowed souls by the thousands.

He pulled the locket from his coat and thumbed it open. The woman's face looked back at him in the firelight, her painted smile frozen in a moment that had passed a century ago.

Somewhere ahead of them, in a stone church half a day's march away, Lefebvre's brother might be waiting.

And somewhere behind them, in the ice and the ash, the Emperor was running for his life.

Marchetti closed the locket and tucked it away.

He did not sleep.