Read Chapter 4: The Debt and the Duel

The column had barely moved three miles before the first shot cracked through the frozen pines.

Marchetti heard the whine of the ball pass close enough to stir the fur on his collar. He dropped to one knee, carbine coming up, scanning the tree line where a thin ribbon of smoke curled against the grey sky. Around him, the remnants of the infantry column pressed on, too exhausted or too numb to register the danger.

Another shot. This one found a horse. The animal screamed and went down, pitching its rider into the snowbank where the road curved between two stands of birch.

Captain Aubert was that rider.

Marchetti saw him clawing at the snow, one arm bent at a wrong angle beneath him, his horse thrashing in its death throes. A third shot kicked up ice a foot from Aubert's head. The shooter was close—too close to miss twice.

"Lefebvre!" Marchetti shouted over his shoulder. "Cover me!"

He didn't wait for an answer. Marchetti launched himself off the road, boots punching through the crust of snow as he angled toward the tree line. The shooter was behind a fallen log, muzzle smoke still curling from the breach. A French coat. A French soldier's coat, ragged and patched, its original blue almost grey with filth.

A straggler. Turned bandit. They were everywhere now, worse than the Cossacks, men who had lost their way and their reason and decided to take what they could from the living.

Marchetti didn't slow. He covered the last twenty yards in a sprint that would have been impossible on fresh legs, but his body had learned to lie about its limits. The bandit saw him coming, fumbled to reload, and Marchetti was on him before the ramrod cleared the barrel.

He drove the butt of his carbine into the man's jaw. The crack of bone was loud in the cold air. The bandit went down but didn't stay down—he came up with a knife, swinging wide, and Marchetti caught the wrist, twisted, felt the joint pop out of socket. The knife fell.

Marchetti put a knee on the man's chest and pressed the muzzle of his carbine against the hollow of his throat.

"Halt!" Lieutenant Gerhard's voice cut through the cold like a blade. "Sergeant, stand down!"

Marchetti didn't move. The man beneath him was young, younger than Jean-Baptiste, his eyes wild with fever and hunger. His lips moved, but no words came out.

"He's dead," Marchetti heard himself say. Then, louder: "The shot that killed the horse came from here. The second shot was his. But the first—the first came from further up the road."

Gerhard had reached them, boots crunching through the snow. His face was a mask of cold displeasure, that unreadable Prussian-angled severity that never seemed to crack. "The first shot killed no one. The captain is alive. Release the prisoner."

"He's not a prisoner." Marchetti looked down at the boy. "He's a deserter who's lost his mind. Look at him. He doesn't even know where he is."

The boy's mouth moved again. This time, sound came out: "Please. Please. I haven't eaten in—"

Marchetti's grip slackened. He understood hunger. He understood what it did to a man's mind, how it peeled back everything until only the animal remained.

"Sergeant." Captain Aubert's voice was strained, but firm. He had made his way to them, cradling his left arm. Blood seeped through the sleeve of his greatcoat. "Lieutenant, the boy is one of ours. We do not execute our own."

"He attempted to shoot an officer of the Imperial Army," Gerhard said, his voice level, betraying no particular outrage. "Moscow was burning. Discipline—"

"Discipline is a luxury we cannot afford to exercise on the starving," Aubert cut him off. He turned to Marchetti. "Let him go."

Marchetti lifted his weight off the boy. The ragged deserter scrambled backward on his elbows, eyes darting between the three of them. Then he was gone, swallowed by the trees, leaving nothing behind but a rust-colored stain in the snow.

Gerhard watched him go, then turned to Aubert. "Captain. I must register my objection—"

Aubert swayed. Marchetti caught him before he went down, feeling the heat of fever through the captain's coat. The wound was worse than it looked. The ball had passed through the upper arm, but the bone had splintered, and a shard of it was visible through the torn flesh.

"Lefebvre!" Marchetti shouted. "Get the surgeon!"

"She's with the rear guard," Lefebvre called back. "Half a mile back, if she's still alive."

Aubert gripped Marchetti's shoulder with his good hand. "Sergeant. You remember the Berezina."

It wasn't a question. It was a statement, weighted with something Marchetti didn't want to acknowledge.

"I remember," he said. He remembered being up to his chest in freezing water, holding a wounded officer above the chaos of the crossing. He remembered the officer's grip, the desperate strength of a dying man's gratitude.

"You carried me across," Aubert said. "I owe you a life."

"You owe me nothing." Marchetti began cutting away Aubert's sleeve to assess the wound. "We were all carrying someone that night."

"Not everyone," Aubert said. His eyes found Marchetti's, and for the first time, the captain's mask slipped. "I was carrying a message. I almost lost it in the water. You saved the message as much as you saved me."

Marchetti's hands stilled. He looked down at the captain, at the fever-flush already blooming beneath his skin, and understood that they were no longer talking about the berezina.

"I'll bind the wound," Marchetti said. "Then I'll find the surgeon. You'll keep the message."

Aubert managed a thin smile. "The message knows where it needs to go, Sergeant. It's the messenger who needs protecting."

The crack of gunfire from the road ahead cut through any response. Marchetti looked up in time to see the column erupt in chaos. Men were diving off the road, dropping into ditches, raising their muskets at a skirmish line that had appeared like ghosts from the treeline.

Cossacks. A patrol of maybe fifteen riders, moving at full gallop, their horses low over the snow, fur hats streaming behind them. They were angling directly toward the wounded cluster around Aubert's position.

"Gerhard!" Marchetti called. "Take the left flank!"

Gerhard looked at him, and for a moment, there was something in the lieutenant's eyes—not anger, not resentment, but assessment. As if he were adding another entry to an account he kept in his head.

Then Gerhard turned and drew his saber. "With me! Form a line! Thirty rounds, then cold steel!"

He moved toward the Cossacks at a run, his coat flaring behind him, and behind him came the broken fragments of the column, men who had no business fighting but who remembered enough to follow a man who knew where to go.

Marchetti pulled Aubert behind the fallen log and pressed him down. "Stay here. Do not move."

"You intend to fight?"

"I intend to make sure you deliver your message." Marchetti took up his carbine and moved to join Gerhard's line.

The Cossacks broke before the first volley, but not before one of them wheeled his horse and rode directly at Gerhard, lance lowered. Gerhard didn't flinch. He waited until the point was three horse-lengths away, then stepped aside and cut the Cossack's lance shaft in half with a single stroke. The second stroke caught the rider low, and the Cossack pitched from his mount.

Gerhard turned, blood on his blade, and caught Marchetti's eye. For a fraction of a second, something passed between them. Not respect. Recognition.

The Cossacks melted back into the treeline. The column regrouped, counted its dead, and kept moving.

By the time Marchetti found Aubert again, the surgeon had reached him. She was already cutting away the ruined sleeve, her fingers red to the wrist. Aubert's face was grey, but his eyes were open, and they found Marchetti in the crowd.

"The message," Aubert said, his voice barely audible over the wind. "It has to reach Smorgoni before the Emperor—before the trail goes cold."

"Krasnoye first," Marchetti said.

Aubert's eyes narrowed. "Krasnoye is a grave. The depot there fell weeks ago. Every prisoner taken—"

"Not every prisoner," Marchetti said. "We saw a church with a light."

Aubert studied him for a long moment. Then he laughed, a dry brittle sound that turned into a cough. "You want to save your corporal's brother and still somehow carry my message to the Emperor."

"I don't want to carry anything," Marchetti said. "But I owe Lefebvre a look at that church. And you owe me a look at that dispatch."

Aubert shook his head slowly. "I thought I was done making bargains with God, Sergeant."

"Good," Marchetti said. "Because I'm not God. I'm just the man who carried you out of the water."

Aubert's eyes closed. His breathing slowed, and Marchetti thought he'd lost him. But then the captain's hand moved, reaching into his coat, and came out holding a folded paper sealed with black wax.

"Krasnoye," Aubert said. "Two hours. Then we talk about the rest." His hand fell, and the dispatch disappeared back into his coat before Marchetti could get a closer look at the seal.

But Marchetti had seen enough.

The seal was the Emperor's. And the wax was black, which meant one thing: the message was not a dispatch.

It was a death warrant.