Read Chapter 36: The Long Road to Paris

The breath froze in Élodie’s lungs before the shout even finished. Horses. Dozens of them, the drum of hooves on the frozen coastal road unmistakable in the pre-dawn stillness. She grabbed Ashworth’s arm, pulling him off the track and into the skeletal embrace of a bare poplar grove.

“How far?” he rasped, his face a mask of grey pain.

“They’ll pass us or they won’t. Quiet.”

She pressed her back against the bark, dragging Ashworth’s weight against her. The jingle of harness and the snap of tack grew louder, then crested. Through the lattice of branches, she saw them—French cavalry, a full squadron, blue coats dark with frost, sabres sheathed but ready. The officer at their head scanned the road with the practiced gaze of a man who had hunted deserters from Spain to the Rhine.

He did not slow. Neither did his men. The column passed in a clatter of iron and breath, and when the last horse had vanished behind the curve of the hill, Élodie allowed herself a single exhale.

“They’re searching for us, then,” Ashworth muttered.

“Or for Vernet.” She pulled the leather tube from inside her coat—still there, still marked with the Medallion of Peace, its wax seal intact. “We need to reach the post road before dawn breaks the frost.”

By the time the sun burned the mist off the fields, they had covered four miles. Calais lay behind them, a memory of salt and fear. The road ahead was a ribbon of frozen mud, finger-thin and unprotected. Every hedge, every haystack, every distant church tower, could hide a picket.

Ashworth stumbled on a stone, and she caught him by the belt. His hand, when she took it, was dry and searing.

“You’re burning.”

“I’m thinking of the English climate,” he said, forcing a grin. “It’s warmer.”

She didn’t laugh. She looked at the road ahead and the empty fields beyond, and she began to pull him faster.

---

At mid-morning they reached the village of Marquise. It was a pitiful assembly of slate roofs and one stone church, the sort of place where a stranger’s face was remembered for a decade. Élodie had hoped to pass through without stopping, but Ashworth’s steps had slowed to a shuffle. He needed rest. He needed warmth.

The inn was little more than a taproom with a hearth, but the fire was real and the patronne’s eyes were kind. Élodie ordered bread, cheese, and a bottle of wine that burned going down. She found a corner table, sat Ashworth with his back to the wall, and pretended to be a wife tending a sick husband.

“Will you let me look at it?” she asked quietly.

“No.”

“You cannot keep marching on that leg.”

“I can march until it won’t carry me. Then I’ll find another way.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but the patronne arrived with the food. The woman lingered a moment too long, her gaze flickering from Ashworth’s military bearing to the coat that did not quite fit Élodie’s shoulders.

“You are travelling far?” the woman asked.

“To my mother’s farm, east of Amiens,” Élodie said without blinking. “My husband has the fever.”

The patronne nodded slowly, but her eyes had narrowed. Élodie forced herself to eat, to appear calm, while her skin crawled. When the woman returned to the kitchen, she leaned across the table.

“We go the moment I’ve paid.”

“She’ll send word.”

“That’s why we go.”

They made it to the next cover of woods before the village bell rang—not Sunday, not midday. An alarm. Élodie looked back and saw two figures on horseback leaving Marquise at a gallop, heading west.

“They’re not following us,” Ashworth said, squinting.

“No. They’re going to intercept the patrol ahead.”

---

The afternoon turned brutal. Snow began to fall, too early and too thick, blanketing the world in mute white. The road disappeared entirely; they moved by instinct, by the lie of the land, by the memory of maps Élodie had studied as a girl when her father had first taught her to read.

By dusk, Ashworth could no longer hold his weight. She found them shelter beneath an overturned cart, its canvas ripped but still warm on one side. She pressed him into the dry corner, packed snow around the edges to block the wind, and lay beside him, sharing what little heat their bodies could muster for two hours before she shook him awake.

“We have to move.”

“Élodie—” His voice cracked. “If I cannot go on, you leave me. You take the treaty. You finish it.”

“No.”

“You must.”

“No,” she repeated, harder. “I buried one husband who chose honour over his own life. I will not bury another.”

He stared at her, the words hanging between them like a blade.

“Is that what we are, then?” he asked softly.

“I don’t know what we are,” she admitted, and the truth of it stung. “But I know what I will not do again.”

He held her gaze, and something in his face eased—a tension she hadn’t known he’d been carrying.

“Very well,” he said. “Then you’ll have to carry me a little further.”

---

They did not reach the post road that night. Instead they reached a checkpoint—a hastily erected barricade of felled logs and loosed barrels, manned by a dozen men in infantry blue, their muskets angled outward like a steel hedge. The torches had not yet been lit; the men were stamping their feet against the cold, half-blinded by the falling snow.

Élodie saw them before they saw her. She pulled Ashworth behind a frozen hedgerow, her heart hammering. There was no way around—the road here ran between a canal and a flooded ditch, both impassable.

“This is where it ends,” she whispered.

Ashworth said nothing. His hand rested on his side, where the blood was soaking through his tunic again.

The senior officer at the barricade looked their way. He was a heavy man, grey at the temples, with the patient face of a career soldier who had seen everything. He approached.

“Out here, in this weather? No one travels this road in this hour.” His voice carried no suspicion yet.

Élodie might have spun a lie, but there was something in the man’s manner that made her pause. He was studying her coat. Not the fit—the symbol. The wax seal on the leather tube, half-pressed against her side.

“Show me what you carry,” the officer said quietly.

She could have refused. She could have run. But there was no run left in her.

She pulled the tube free and handed it over.

He opened it. He read—slowly, one page, then a second. The snow fell on his shoulders, and he did not shake it off. When he looked up, his eyes held no hatred. Only wonder.

“I was at Friedland,” he said. “I saw what this war costs, away from the banners and the glory.”

Élodie found nothing to say.

He rolled the papers carefully, returned them to the tube, and handed it back.

“The garrison at Saint-Omer will have an escort with a forged pass waiting at the crossroads east of here. The password is ‘Vernet.’” He looked at Ashworth, then back at her. “You have one hour. After that, I will burn the pass and tell my men I saw no one.”

He turned and walked back to the barricade.

Ashworth’s grip tightened on her arm. “Who was that?”

“A man who saw enough of the war, perhaps,” Élodie said. “Or a liar with a different price.”

“You don’t trust him?”

She resumed walking, pulling him north through the fall. The snow swallowed their tracks as fast as they left them.

“I trust the treaty,” she said. “And I will find the man who sold us at the Admiralty before I trust anyone with a title and a role in this dance.” She looked ahead into the white road, ice crusting her lashes. “We have one chance. After this, there is no second.”