Read Chapter 1: The Sound of Cannon

The first sound was not the cannon. It was the mud.

Cold, sucking, foul-tasting mud filled James Harrow's mouth, his nose, his eyes. He came to with a gasp that pulled more of the brown slurry down his throat, and he choked, rolled, and landed hard on his back in a shallow ditch half-full of rainwater and the trampled remains of what had once been a wheat field.

His head pounded. His lungs burned. And then the world split open with a sound like God tearing a sheet of iron in half.

Harrow's hands flew to his ears too late. The concussion wave hit him a half-second after the sound, pressing against his chest like a giant's palm. He scrambled to his knees, spat mud, and blinked his vision clear.

He was on a slope. Green fields rolled away beneath him, scarred by freshly churned earth, dotted with the dark shapes of men and horses moving in formation. To his right, a farmhouse sat low in a hollow, its walls already cratered by shot. To his left, a long, low ridge bristled with men in red coats and black shako hats.

He was wearing one of those coats.

The wool was coarse, heavy, wet through at the shoulders. His hands—his hands, he saw with a jolt—were not the soft, computer-keyboard-worn hands of a fifty-two-year-old history professor. They were younger. Calloused. The fingers of a man who had held a musket, not a mouse.

"What the—" he breathed.

Another cannon fired. This one closer. The ground beneath him trembled. Harrow's brain, trained by decades of study and a lifetime of obsession, supplied the answer before his conscious mind could catch up: the smoke, the uniforms, the position of the ridge. Mont-Saint-Jean. The British position. The battle lines had not yet fully formed. It was early. It was—

*Waterloo.*

A scream tore through the air to his left. A horse, hit by a ricochet, was thrashing in the mud, its rider crushed beneath it. A young soldier in a surtout coat was running toward the farmhouse, his face a bloody mask.

Harrow turned to run the other way and froze.

A French officer stood twenty yards down the slope, half-hidden behind a shattered hedgerow. He was on foot, separated from his column, his blue coat dark with rain, his brass buttons gleaming dully. He was staring directly at Harrow—not with the wide, panicked eyes of a man caught behind enemy lines, but with calm, assessing curiosity.

He had a narrow face. A scar cut across his left cheek, pale against his skin. His bicorne hat was pulled low, and his hand rested on the hilt of his saber.

Harrow knew that face.

He had seen it a moment ago. No—not a moment. A lifetime? A second? The memory came flooding back with the force of a physical blow: a ballroom filled with candlelight and laughter. A man in a blue coat with a silver pocket watch, raised in a toast. Then the crack of a shot, the bloom of red on his chest, the watch spinning in the air, falling into the mud.

And then the mud in Harrow's mouth again.

"Wait," Harrow said, the word escaping before he could stop it. His voice sounded strange—younger, thicker, with an accent he hadn't used in thirty years. "I know you. You're—"

The officer's eyes narrowed. His hand moved from his saber hilt to his coat, where something glinted. Silver. A chain.

Then the officer turned and vanished into the smoke of a new barrage, moving with the easy, unhurried grace of a man who had all the time in the world.

Harrow ran.

He didn't know why he ran. He didn't know where he was running to. He only knew that the memory was fading, dissolving like a dream upon waking, and that if he lost it, he would lose something essential. He sprinted up the slope, his boots sliding in the mud, his breath coming in ragged gasps. British skirmishers were ahead now, deployed in a loose line, their green-jacketed officers shouting orders.

"Halt! Halt there, you!"

A rifle shot cracked past his ear. Harrow stumbled, thrown forward, landing hard on his hands and knees. A skirmisher was running toward him, his rifle still smoking, his face twisted in confusion.

"Identify yourself!" the man shouted. "You're running the wrong bloody way!"

"I—" Harrow looked back down the slope. The French officer was gone. The memory was gone too, now, leaving only the ghost of urgency behind it. "There was a man. A French officer. Near the hedgerow."

The skirmisher followed Harrow's gaze, then spat. "There's a damned army of 'em, sir. They'll all be on us soon enough." He squinted at Harrow's uniform, at the rank insignia on his shoulders. "Begging your pardon, Captain, but you're not supposed to be forward of the line. Colonel's orders."

"Colonel—" Harrow started. He tried to remember. Who was his colonel? What regiment was he in? The gaps in his memory yawned like open graves. He knew the date. He knew the battle. He knew every battalion, every brigade, every cannon on this field with the intimacy of a man who had devoted his life to it. But he could not remember his own name.

The skirmisher was still staring at him, suspicion hardening into concern. "Are you quite all right, sir? You're bleeding."

Harrow looked down. His hand was cut, a shallow gash across the palm, the blood bright against the mud. It didn't hurt. Nothing hurt except his head and the hollow ache where the memory had been.

"I need to—" he said, and then the world turned white.

He did not hear the cannonball. He never did. One moment he was kneeling in the mud, staring at his own blood, trying to recall a face that was already slipping away. The next there was light, and pressure, and a terrible, silent violence that seemed to lift him off the ground and fling him through the air like a rag doll.

He landed hard. He did not feel it.

Cold mud filled his mouth again.

Harrow woke with a gasp. He rolled over, spat, wiped his face with the back of a hand that was younger than it should have been, and stared at the sky.

The sky was light. The mud was cold. The distant rumble of cannon was just beginning, like a drumroll before a performance.

He was in a ditch. A shallow ditch, half-full of rainwater, at the edge of a trampled wheat field. Below him, a farmhouse sat low in a hollow, its walls intact, smoke rising from its chimneys. Above him, a ridge bristled with men in red coats, still forming their lines.

He looked at his hand. The cut was gone.

The cannon fired. The ground trembled. And James Harrow, a man who had spent his life studying this field, this battle, this day, began to understand something he had no historical precedent for.

He remembered dying. He remembered the mud, the blood, the white light. He remembered a French officer with a scar on his cheek and a silver watch hidden in his coat.

And he remembered, with the certainty of a man who had just experienced it, that he was going to die again. The question was not if. The question was how many times he would have to do it before he understood why.

A shout went up from the ridge. Officers were calling their men to order. The skirmishers were deploying. The battle of Waterloo was about to begin.

Harrow climbed out of the ditch, checked his uniform for wounds he knew he would not find, and began to walk toward the line. This time, he would not run. This time, he would watch. He would learn. He would find the man in the blue coat before the man found him.

The sun broke over the ridge, and the first shot of the morning rang out across the valley.

Harrow smiled, despite himself. He had read everything there was to read about this day. It was time to find out what the books had left out.