Read Chapter 16: The Escape

The chimney passage was colder than the cell had been, and tighter. Moreau pressed his back against the damp brick, sliding sideways with the waterproof tube clutched to his chest, the oilcloth bundle biting into his ribs beneath the borrowed coat. His breath came shallow. Behind him, Duval's whisper barely carried.

"Six o'clock. The gate guard changes. A man named Berger takes the post—he owes me his life. Show him the token. He will not ask questions."

Moreau had the pewter token in his palm before Duval finished speaking. It was warm from his grip, soft-edged from years of handling. He still did not trust it. He trusted nothing now except the weight of the ledger against his sternum.

He reached the end of the passage, where a rusted grate gave way to a narrow alley choked with refuse. He pushed. It swung open with a groan that sounded like a cannon shot in the silence. Moreau froze, listening. No shouts. No boots. Just the distant hum of a town still awake despite the hour.

He slipped through, rolled onto the cobblestones, and came up crouched in shadow. The passage behind him swallowed the grate again. He was out.

The horse was where Duval said it would be—a nondescript bay gelding tied to a hitching post outside a cooper's workshop, saddled with plain military tack. A civilian coat and a wide-brimmed hat lay rolled behind the saddle. Moreau stripped off his sergeant-major's jacket, the Legion of Honor cross catching the lamplight as it fell. He hesitated one breath, then shoved it into the saddlebag. It was Lefebvre's gift, and he would not wear it. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

He dressed quickly. The coat was wool, a shade of brown that would pass for anything in the dark. The hat pulled low. He checked the ledger was still secure inside his shirt, the waterproof tube strapped across his back beneath the coat, the oilcloth bundle tied flat against his thigh. Three copies of the truth. He would need all of them if one was lost.

The gate at the eastern wall was quiet when he reached it, a squat arch of stone with a single guard box. Moreau kept the horse to a walk. His hand found the pewter token again.

The guard who stepped out was young, maybe twenty, with the pinched look of a man who had not slept well. He saw the token in Moreau's outstretched palm and blinked.

"Berger," Moreau said.

The guard's eyes flicked to Moreau's face, then to the road beyond. "You're early. The change was supposed to be at six."

"It is six."

Berger glanced at the sky, at the position of the moon, and seemed to decide that arguing was not worth it. He stepped aside and pulled the gate's iron bolt. It slid back with a scrape that set Moreau's teeth on edge.

"Ride west until the fork," Berger muttered, not meeting his eyes. "Then take the south road. The north is watched."

Moreau nodded once. He did not ask who watched it. He knew.

The gate swung open just wide enough for horse and rider. Moreau nudged the gelding through, and then the road was open before him, pale dirt stretching into darkness. He did not look back.

---

He rode for three hours before he allowed himself to stop.

The fork came as Berger promised, a split in the road marked by a crooked milepost. Moreau took the south road and held the horse to a steady canter until the animal began to flag. Then he walked it, listening to the night, watching the tree lines for movement.

He knew Lefebvre's methods. The general did not chase. He set traps. He had men in every town between here and Paris, men who owed him their commissions or their lives, men with sharp eyes and quicker knives. The forged treason letter was already on its way to the Minister of War, Moreau was certain. By now, half the army believed he was a traitor. The other half was waiting for proof.

Dawn came gray and cold. Moreau found a hay barn off the road and slept for two hours with the horse tied inside, one hand on the ledger, the other on his knife. He dreamed of Roland's face, pale behind bars, and woke with his heart beating too fast.

He moved again before full light.

---

By noon he had joined a cargo convoy.

It was Duval's second piece of advice, scrawled on a scrap of paper pressed into Moreau's palm before the escape: *Move with the merchants. The army watches lone riders. It ignores wagons.*

The convoy was a string of heavy carts hauling grain toward the capital, their drivers a mix of farmers and petty traders who asked no questions of a man with dust on his coat and a tired horse. Moreau fell in beside a wagon carrying barrels of salted pork. The driver, a stooped old man with a face like cracked leather, glanced at him once and said nothing. That was fine. Moreau preferred silence.

They made good time through the afternoon, the roads thick with the traffic of an empire at war. Twice Moreau saw horsemen on the horizon, riding fast, and each time he pulled his hat lower and let the wagons swallow him. The soldiers were not stopping carts. They were looking for a lone rider, a sergeant-major with a price on his head.

He wondered what the price was. Lefebvre would not want him dead—not yet. A corpse cannot be court-martialed. The general needed Moreau alive, in chains, to be tried and condemned for treason so that the scandal would die with him. The evidence would be dismissed as the ravings of a desperate man. The letters, the ledger, all of it would be buried.

Unless Moreau reached Paris first.

---

The third day brought rain.

It came sideways, a cold autumn downpour that turned the roads to mud and sent the convoy drivers cursing. Moreau's wool coat soaked through within the hour, the cold creeping into his bones, but he did not complain. The rain was good. It kept the horsemen off the roads. It washed away tracks. It made him invisible.

He was thinking about Paris when he saw them.

Three riders, coming up fast behind the convoy, their horses lathered and blowing despite the weather. They were not soldiers in uniform—civilian dress, dark coats, hats pulled low. But Moreau had seen enough of Lefebvre's men to recognize the way they rode: purposeful, unhurried, certain of their quarry.

He did not reach for his knife. That would be a mistake. Instead, he pulled the horse out of the line and guided it toward a drover's lane that branched off the main road, rutted and overgrown. The lane led to a copse of trees, then a shallow stream that would break his tracks.

Behind him, one of the riders turned his head. For a moment, their eyes met across the distance.

Moreau did not run. He rode at the same pace, steady, unremarkable, a farmer heading home. The rider held his gaze a breath longer, then looked away.

Moreau kept riding. He did not look back until the copse swallowed the road, and then he stopped, listening. The rain drummed on the leaves. The stream gurgled past. No hoofbeats.

He exhaled. His hands were shaking. He had not realized until now how close it had been.

---

That night he made camp in the hollow of an oak, wrapped in his wet coat and a feed sack, the horse tied nearby. He ate hard bread and salt pork and stared at the embers of a fire he barely dared to light.

The pewter token sat in his palm. The address in Paris was a tenement on the Rue de la Roquette, a poor street near the cemetery. Duval had not told him who lived there. The senior Imperial aide, he had said, would know how to find Moreau. All Moreau needed to do was wait at the address and the aide would come.

But that was the part that gnawed at him. Duval was honest—Moreau believed that now, believed it with the desperate certainty of a man who has no other choice. But Lefebvre had family in Paris. Cousins, patrons, men who owed him favors. What if the address was not what Duval thought? What if Lefebvre's private network had already burrowed into the Ministry of War itself?

He looked down at the ledger in his hands. Coded. Every entry a transaction of blood. If he delivered this to the wrong man, he would be dead by morning.

Moreau closed his eyes and saw Roland again, gaunt and silent behind bars, the last man who had stood beside him in the killing field at Friedland. If Moreau failed, Roland would hang. If Moreau succeeded, Lefebvre would hang, and Roland would be freed.

There was no third way. There was only the ride to Paris, and the cold that came after.

He tucked the token away, wrapped his arms around the ledger, and waited for dawn.