Read Chapter 33: The General's Reward

The smoke parted like a curtain as Marchetti stepped from the cathedral, Rapp’s blood still wet on his hands. The gold was a dead weight in his coat, and the list burned against his chest where he’d folded it beside the portrait of a woman he’d never met.

Garnier stood guard at the broken doors, rifle low but ready. His eyes tracked the street, where flames licked at rooftops and the distant crack of muskets punctuated the chaos.

“Well?” Garnier asked.

“He’s dead.” Marchetti walked past him into the gray dawn. “We need to move. Now.”

They found the others in the narrow alley behind the cathedral where they’d agreed to wait. Anya crouched beside Lefebvre, her hands pressed against the blood-soaked bandage at his side. The artilleryman’s face was the color of old tallow, sheened with sweat despite the cold. Aubry stood watch at the alley’s mouth, peering toward the main road where the fire was pulling French patrols like moths.

“He’s getting worse,” Anya said without looking up. “The wound is hot to the touch.”

Marchetti crouched beside them. Lefebvre’s eyes fluttered open, found his face, attempted a grin that came out as a grimace. “Did you get him, Sergeant?”

“He won’t be chasing anyone else.”

“Good.” Lefebvre coughed, and a fleck of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth. “Then I can die in peace.”

“You’re not dying,” Marchetti said. “You’re too stubborn. Stubborn men die in their beds.”

“That’s a comfort.” Lefebvre closed his eyes.

Marchetti stood, turning to Anya. “You know this city. Where would a Prussian general be garrisoned?”

She looked up at him, question in her eyes but none on her tongue. “There was talk among the civilians before the fire started. The Prussians have taken the governor’s house on the hill, past the magazine. They’re waiting for orders from their king.”

“Then that’s where we go.” Marchetti gestured to Garnier. “Take his other arm. We move fast, we move quiet, and we don’t stop for anything.”

Aubry fell in beside him as they helped Lefebvre to his feet. “The gold,” he said quietly. “What did you do with it?”

Marchetti touched his coat. “I’ve got it. And a list of names from Paris that’s worth more than the gold and will probably kill us faster.”

“Lovely.” Aubry spat into the gutter. “What now?”

“Now we get out of this burning city and find a Prussian who doesn’t want us dead.” Marchetti led them toward the eastern edge of Vilna, keeping to the back streets where the fire hadn’t yet reached. The smoke was thick here, stinging their eyes, but it also covered their movements from the French patrols shouting orders in the distance.

They crossed a square where a fountain had become a reservoir of blood and snow, frozen bodies stacked like cordwood around its rim. Anya made a small sound but kept walking. Lefebvre stumbled, and Garnier hauled him upright with a grunt.

“The Prussians,” Marchetti said, watching Anya. “Will they know us?”

“They know everyone with a French uniform,” she said. “But you don’t look like soldiers anymore. You look like what you are—survivors.”

She was right. Their greatcoats were torn and crusted with frost, their faces blackened with smoke and grime, their weapons the only things that marked them as anything other than ghosts. The city had been a charnel house for weeks, and the living who moved through it were indistinguishable from the dead except for the fact that they still breathed.

The governor’s house stood at the crest of a low hill, sandstone walls still intact, Prussian flags hanging limp in the windless dawn. Prussian sentries lined the approach, their blue coats stark against the white snow. They leveled their muskets as the squad approached.

Marchetti raised his hands. “We need to speak to your commanding officer.”

The sentry’s face was young, pink with cold, uncertain. He barked something in German.

“Do you speak French?” Marchetti asked.

A door opened behind the sentries, and an older man in an officer’s coat stepped out. His face was weathered, scarred along the jaw, and he wore the rank of a major general. He looked at the squad with the weary appraisal of a man who had seen too many desperate souls come to his door.

“I speak French,” he said. “Who are you, and why should I not have you shot?”

“We have a dispatch for you,” Marchetti said. “From the army of the Emperor. A message that has been carried from Moscow.”

The general’s eyebrows rose. “From Moscow? That city is a graveyard.”

“It is,” Marchetti agreed. “We dug our way out of it.”

He reached into his coat and withdrew the dispatch case, the one Rapp had carried in his own breast pocket before Marchetti had met him in the cathedral. The wax seal was broken, but the hand of the bearer mattered more than the seal. The general took it, examined it, then opened it and read.

His face did not change. He read it twice, then looked up at the ragged men before him.

“This is a list of names,” he said. “And a confession from General Rapp, claiming he acted as an agent of a conspiracy known as Montbrun, and that he was stopped in his treachery by a sergeant of the Imperial Guard.” He looked at Marchetti. “Is this you?”

“Yes.”

“And the men with you?”

“They’re mine. All of them.”

The Prussian general studied them for a long moment. Behind him, the bonfires of his encampment crackled as soldiers warmed themselves in the cold light of morning. The smell of coffee drifted from a cook tent, and Marchetti felt his stomach clench with a hunger he hadn’t allowed himself to acknowledge in days.

“The Emperor wintered in Paris,” the general said slowly. “He left before the retreat began. His generals are a tangled web of loyalties, and I have no desire to be caught in it.” He folded the dispatch and tucked it away. “You are French soldiers who have brought me information that will serve my king. That makes you valuable, not enemies.”

He gestured to a pair of orderlies standing nearby. “Get these men inside. Hot food, a surgeon for the wounded one.” His eyes moved to Anya. “And clothing for the woman. She will not walk through my camp dressed as a peasant.”

They were fed. They were warmed. They were given fresh coats and boots that did not leak and bandages that did not come from shirts torn off the dead. The surgeon looked at Lefebvre’s wound, cleaned it with brandy, and bound it with linen that whiter than anything they’d seen in months. He said nothing, which Aubry took as a good sign. Lefebvre slept through all of it, his breath steadier than it had been in days.

When they were human again, the Prussian general received them in a study that still smelled of the former Russian occupant’s tobacco. He sat behind a desk, a sheaf of papers before him.

“I am granting each of you safe passage through Prussian territory,” he said. “And a document that identifies you as French civilians repatriating to their homeland. It will not protect you from your own countrymen—and given what you have done, you would be wise not to approach any French command with it.”

He slid the papers across the desk, five of them in a neat stack. Marchetti took them, counting with his fingers. Five.

“There are six of us,” he said.

The general’s eyes moved to Anya, standing by the window with her arms folded over her chest. “The woman is not French.”

“She is with us.”

“That will make your passage more difficult.” The general did not sound unkind. He sounded practical.

Anya turned from the window. “My father was French,” she said. “I have papers from his house.” She hesitated. “They are not the papers of a woman who travels alone. But with these men, I will not be alone.”

The general studied her for a long moment. Then he took up his pen and wrote something on the last sheet, adding a line she could not see. He pressed his seal into the wax and handed it to her.

“You are a widow,” he said, “traveling to France to live with her husband’s family. Do not contradict that story until you cross the border.”

She took the paper, stared at it, and then tucked it into her coat without a word.

“You have supplies enough for two weeks if you travel south,” the general said. “But I would not recommend south. The remnants of your army are still disintegrating in the countryside, and they will not look kindly on deserters who have papers signed by a Prussian.”

“Then where do we go?” Marchetti asked.

“West. To the Baltic coast. There are ships at Königsberg that will take refugees.” The general smiled without warmth. “For a price. You have gold?”

Marchetti touched his coat, where Rapp’s pouch sat heavy. “We have something.”

“Then that will do.” The general stood, signaling the audience was over. “I wish you good roads and warm fires. You will need both.”

They left the governor’s house in the weak light of full morning, walking east first to shake any observers and then dog-legging west toward the coast. Lefebvre leaned on Garnier’s shoulder, but he walked—slowly, painfully, but he walked. Aubry carried their ransom of supplies in a pack that had belonged to a dead Russian. Anya walked beside Marchetti, her new papers folded inside her coat.

Behind them, Vilna burned. The smoke climbed into a pale sky, visible for miles, marking the grave of a conspiracy that had died in a cathedral with a general’s blood on the stones.

None of them looked back.

“What happens now?” Anya asked.

Marchetti considered the question, felt the weight of Rapp’s gold against his chest and the portrait of a woman whose name he still did not know, folded in the same pocket. The list of co-conspirators was there too, sealed in wax and ambition.

“We go home,” he said. “All of us.”

The road stretched ahead, white and empty and waiting.