Read Chapter 35: The Embers of Brotherhood

The inn at Memel stank of fish oil and cheap tallow, but it was warm, and that counted for more than any perfume the city could offer. Timbered walls held the Baltic wind at bay, and a fire large enough to roast a pig roared in the central hearth. Five of them crowded around a scarred oak table in the corner, their packs piled by their feet. The sixth chair stood empty, its back pushed against the wall, and Marchetti could not stop looking at it.

"He'll meet us at the docks," Gerhard said, following his gaze. The boy had gone to sniff out a ship going south, his sea-itch too strong to let him sit still. "He said his goodbyes already."

"Boys are good at disappearing," Lefebvre muttered. He sat with his leg propped on a stool, his face still pale but his eyes clear. The wound had closed, though the walk from Vilna had cost him. Twelve days of frozen roads and borrowed carts, and Lefebvre had complained only when they forced him to rest. "That one will find his fortune or his grave. Maybe both."

Anya poured the last of the wine into five cups. The innkeeper had offered to sell them something better, but Rapp's gold had to stretch to France, and Marchetti had learned long ago that a full purse and a loose tongue made for short lives. The wine was sour and brown, but it was wine, and it was wine that had gotten them this far.

Marchetti lifted his cup. The others followed, even Lefebvre hoisting his with a grimace that had nothing to do with his leg.

"To the dead," Marchetti said quietly. "We carry them the rest of the way."

They drank. The wine burned going down, and for a moment no one spoke. The fire popped. Somewhere in the inn, a fiddle started up a tune that had no business being so cheerful in a place like this.

"The secret," Gerhard said, setting his cup down with a hollow knock. "We bury it here. In this room. In this night."

Lefebvre nodded, slow and deliberate. "What happened in Russia stays in Russia. What happened in Vilna stays in Vilna. If anyone asks, we were prisoners of war who escaped our escort. Nothing more."

"And the name?" Anya asked. She did not say which name. She did not need to.

Marchetti looked at her for a long moment. The firelight caught the sharp angles of her face, and he thought of her father, of the name she carried and the name that had followed them across a burning city. "That name dies with Rapp," he said. "The rest of it goes to Paris in my pocket, and it stays there until I decide otherwise."

"You decided otherwise already," Gerhard observed. He was not accusing. His voice was flat, the voice of a man stating facts. "You decided the moment you killed him. You just haven't told yourself yet."

"I told myself plenty." Marchetti turned the cup in his hands. "I told myself it was justice. I told myself it was survival. I told myself the Emperor has no right to a secret that kills his own soldiers for knowing it."

"And does that make it true?" Anya asked.

Marchetti let out a breath that fogged in the chill of the room. "True enough for tonight."

Lefebvre leaned forward, his jaw set. "We could throw the list in the fire. Right now. End it. No one in Paris ever knows we existed. We scatter to the four winds and live out our years as ordinary men."

Marchetti's hand went to his breast pocket. The paper crackled under his fingers. He could feel the weight of the names on it, names of men and women across Europe who served a committee that answered to Montbrun. He had not read it. Not fully. Some things could not be unlearned, and he had spent a month learning things he wished he could forget.

"If we burn it," he said slowly, "we are no better than Rapp. He fed the fire with every man who knew the truth. If we feed it too, we join him."

"Or we become him," Gerhard said.

Marchetti stared at him. The Saxon had a way of speaking that cut straight to the bone of things, no wasted effort, no soft edges. "I am not him."

"No," Gerhard agreed. "You are the man who killed him. Which is worse, in some ledgers."

"He's right," Lefebvre said, surprising them all. He tapped the table with one thick finger. "The Prussians know. That general is no fool. He'll keep our papers on file, and if we disappear into smoke, he'll wonder why. But if we walk into Paris and hand that list to someone who can use it, we become useful. Useful men live longer."

"Or die quicker," Anya said.

"Death is the only thing that comes quick in this world," Lefebvre replied. "Living is the slow part."

Silence settled over the table again. The fiddle had stopped. The inn had grown quieter, the other patrons drifting off to their rooms or their cups. Marchetti felt the weight of the night pressing down on his shoulders, the slow accumulation of months, of miles, of everything he had seen and done.

He looked at each of them in turn. Lefebvre, the giant from the ranks who had carried him through snow and fire. Gerhard, the deserter who had once been the enemy and now was closer than a brother. Anya, the stranger who had become something else entirely, a thread of warmth in a frozen country, carrying her own grief and her own secrets. And the boy, somewhere out in the dark, chasing the sea.

He raised his cup again. "One more toast."

They lifted their own.

"To the road," Marchetti said. "To Memel and its stinking fish. To the cold we are leaving behind, and the cold that waits for us in France. To the lies we will tell and the truths we will keep."

"To the dead," Gerhard added.

"To the living," Anya said.

"To my leg," Lefebvre said, and they laughed, the first honest laugh any of them had managed in weeks.

They drank.

Lefebvre set his cup down with a clatter. "Tomorrow I go east to Berlin. My sister's husband runs a lumber yard. He is a coward and a miser, and he owes me money from before the war. I will collect that debt and drink my way through the winter, and by spring I will be as good as new."

"By spring," Marchetti said, "you will be fat and boring and married to a widow with three children."

Lefebvre grinned, a flash of white teeth in his weathered face. "That is the dream."

"And you?" Marchetti turned to Anya. He had asked her before, and she had not answered. He did not expect an answer now.

Anya looked into her cup. "I cannot go back to Vilna. I have no home left. My father's name was Montbrun's, and whatever that means now, it closes doors in Russia behind me." She looked up. "I will go with you to Paris. I will find the men who used my father's name and I will learn what they did with him."

"That is a dangerous road," Marchetti said.

"That is the only road I have left." She held his gaze. "Unless you have another suggestion."

Marchetti did not. He understood, perhaps better than anyone at that table, what it meant to lose everything and have nothing left but a name and a purpose. He nodded slowly.

"The paperwork says five men," he said. "We will have to make you a man for the border crossings. Gerhard, you will have to teach her to walk like a soldier."

Gerhard studied Anya for a moment. "She walks like a woman who has buried a father and crossed a war. That will pass for soldier enough."

Lefebvre laughed, but it was a kind laugh. He reached across the table and covered Anya's hand with his own huge one. "When this is done, come to Berlin. My sister's coward of a husband will hire you to keep his books, and you will be safe."

Anya turned her hand over and squeezed his fingers. "When this is done," she repeated. "We will see who is alive to make good on promises."

The fire burned low. Outside, the wind rattled the shutters, and the sea muttered against the harbor walls. Marchetti sat with them until the candles guttered, sharing stories that did not touch on what had happened in Russia, sharing silences that did. They were men and a woman brought together by catastrophe, and they would scatter with the dawn.

When the boy returned, stamping snow from his boots, his cheeks red with wind, he found them still at the table. His eyes shone. "A Dutch merchant," he said. "Bound for Amsterdam with wool and glass. He needs a cabin boy who doesn't mind hard work and colder seas. I sail at dawn."

Marchetti rose and clasped the boy's shoulders. He was not a boy anymore, Marchetti realized, not after everything they had crossed. But there was still light in his eyes, a hunger for salt air that nothing in the snows had killed.

"You will write," Marchetti said. It was not a question.

"If I learn my letters," the boy said, and grinned. "Maybe I will find someone to write for me."

"Do not find a wife too young," Lefebvre called from his seat. "Find a ship first. A wife is a ship that never docks."

The boy laughed, and he clapped Marchetti's arm, and then he was gone, thundering up the stairs to the room he would share with three sailors he had never met. The door slammed, and the silence settled back in.

Marchetti sat down. He looked around the table one last time. Lefebvre was already reaching for his crutch, his face set toward the dawn. Gerhard was studying his hands, his old scars catching the last light of the fire. Anya was watching Marchetti, and her eyes were steady.

He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the list. The paper was creased and worn from his body's warmth. He unfolded it, looked at the names he had not dared to read, and then folded it back and returned it to his pocket.

"Not tonight," he said, answering a question no one had asked. "I will read it when I am ready. Until then, it sleeps with me."

They understood. None of them pressed.

Lefebvre reached across and gripped Marchetti's wrist. "You are a good man, Marchetti. You were a good soldier, and you will be a good civilian. That is the hardest thing to be, after all this."

"I have not been a civilian since I was fourteen," Marchetti said. "I am not sure I remember how."

"You remember," Lefebvre said. "It is like riding a horse. Once you learn, your bones keep it."

Marchetti smiled, and it felt strange on his face, a thing he had not used in months. "And if the horse throws me?"

"Then you get back on," Gerhard said. "That is all there is to it."

Anya stood, stretching. "We should sleep. Dawn comes early, and the road does not wait for anyone who is not stubborn enough to meet it."

They rose, one by one. Lefebvre made his slow way toward the stairs, accepting Gerhard's arm. Marchetti lingered at the table a moment longer, watching the fire catch the last of the wood and collapse into embers.

He thought of the locket in his pocket, the portrait of Elise staring up at the inside of his coat. He thought of Paris, of the print shop where he had once set type, of the smell of ink and paper that had been the first thing he ever loved. He had not thought of it in years. Now it came back to him like a half-remembered song.

France. He was going home.

He did not know what waited for him there. He did not know if the Montbrun committee would find him first, or if the list would bring him down in the very city where he hoped to find peace. But he knew this: he was alive, and the men in this room had made it so.

Marchetti laid his palm flat on the table where the six of them had touched, and he kept it there until the wood warmed to his skin.

Then he went upstairs, one step at a time, into the dark.