‘Saving donkeys!’ Pierre thrust a musket into my arms. ‘Here, until you can reload yours! Norseman, help me plant this keg!’
The Indians were finally shooting back, but the stockade was between us and provided some shelter from the bullets. I fired into the crowd and another warrior went down, making them scatter. I saw Red Jacket sitting, cradling the arm wounded by Pierre’s earlier shot and wished I’d spent the bullet on him. Then there was a flare, and a fuse was sizzling towards the keg.
‘Run, run as if the devil himself is behind you, because he is!’ Pierre cried. Angry braves were darting towards the mouse hole we’d just crawled through, so we sprinted away through a stand of birch, adrenalin coursing. There was a roar.
I looked behind. The powder keg had blown up, turning the Indian stockade into a penumbra of flying splinters. Timbers flew up like spears and tumbled. I heard screams and confused yelling as the debris sprayed our tormentors. Others would dash out the main gate and come around to chase us, I knew, but now we had a lead of a good hundred yards to reach the lake shore.
The stockade and longhouse began to burn.
We ran to the canoe Pierre had snuck ashore and skidded into the water, the women tumbling in first and then me.
‘Magnus! Where are you going?’ The Norwegian was running away from us with his axe, back towards the town, but I soon realised his target was the nearest canoes. One chop, two, and they were wrecked for the moment. There were more down the shore but his sabotage had gained us precious moments.
Bloodhammer came sprinting back, arms pumping, axe head bobbing up and down. He crashed through the shallows, water flying, and threw himself over the rim of our canoe, nearly tipping it. We hauled him in and then we were paddling madly, trying to put distance between us and a village boiling like a disturbed hive. Bullets whined.
The Indians rushed to the canoes, found them wrecked, and set up an even greater clamour. Then they dashed back down the shore, smoke roiling over their home.
For an optimistic mile I hoped we’d thrown them into such confusion that they wouldn’t follow.
But no, here came one, two, three, four canoes on Lake Superior, crowded with warriors, paddles flashing in the sun. I didn’t see a red jacket, but a coatless Cecil was standing in one bow, urging them on.
‘There’s a river to the south that will take us inland,’ Pierre panted, ‘but we need distance to make it work. Norwegian, get up and paddle one side while we three do the other. Gage, load your rifle!’
I had ball in the patchbox in the stock. It was reassuring to have the familiar weapon in my hands again, out of the clutches of Aurora Somerset, but annoying that my acacia wood stock was once more marred, this time by Cecil’s sword blade. I poured powder from the horn I’d yanked off Aurora. As I loaded and looked back I could see Lord Somerset, no doubt furious at my treatment of his sister, pointing with his pistol as if will enough could bring us within range.
The distance was one hundred and fifty yards, far too great for a handgun. The occasional shot from the trade muskets of our pursuers went wide. But I had a rifle, crafted for accuracy, and even as we rocked with every paddle stroke I aimed. His white shirt was a tiny flake in my sight. I held my breath and squeezed, my enemy silhouetted against the sky.
Hammer hit pan, a flash, the kick of the butt against my shoulder and then a long second to judge my accuracy.
Cecil Somerset jerked and then pitched neatly over the side, falling into the lake with a splash.
A great cry went up and our pursuers slowed and stopped, demoralised by the dispatch of their leader. They drifted where he’d fallen, hands reaching down to seize him. And then there was a shriek, a female wail of grief that echoed across the water like the midnight cry of a flying witch, an awful keening that carried under it the breath of undying hatred.
Aurora wasn’t dead.
And if I’d killed her brother she would, I guessed, cling as remorsefully as a shadow until she killed me. Or I, her. We were bound now, joined with permanence far deeper than mere lust. Married by hatred.
I put down my rifle, picked up a paddle, and stroked as if my life depended on it. Because it did.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The rest of the day was an exhausting blur. We were stunned and sore from the capture, gauntlet, escape, and chase. We’d gone from the promise of hell to the miracle of Pierre’s timely rescue in an instant, and it was as if we’d all been shocked by one of my electrical experiments. A lightning bolt would not have been more surprising.
‘How did you know to follow us?’ I panted.
‘I saw the Somersets running through camp in the deepest night, half-clothed and anxious, and became curious,’ the voyageur said. ‘They’re a couple always on stage, conscious of the impression they make, and yet here they dropped their illusion. Something momentous was occurring. I watched them march you to their canoes. There was no time to fetch help, so I followed alone in the biggest canoe I could manage.’
‘By the tonsure of Saint Bernard, good thing you did!’
‘It was the women who saved you. Namida saw me and started the argument on your fate, distracting the Indians. It gave me time to intervene. Give thanks to matrimony, my friend!’
I glanced back to Namida, steadily paddling, her face streaked with dirt and the track of tears I hadn’t noticed before. But she smiled shyly.
‘Gage talked like a woman, too,’ Bloodhammer tattled. ‘Told them everything he could.’
‘I was buying Pierre time.’ Not the full truth, but I’d been expecting to have my eye sliced and yet here I was, bruised but not even bloodied. I’d have life figured out if it didn’t keep surprising me.
‘Yes, he manoeuvred that one Indian right into my sights.’ Pierre winked at me.
Magnus scowled. ‘But now they know what we’re after!’
‘So we just have to get it first,’ I said blithely.
‘Bah. Try to lie next time.’
‘I am a paragon of candour.’
‘It helped that I had the wit to bring that extra keg of powder,’ Pierre went on, ‘but now it’s gone and all we have left is what’s in our horns. Two muskets, one rifle, and Magnus with his axe.’
‘I’m not sure he needs more.’ I said. The tool was crusted with blood. ‘Magnus, you belong in the eighth century.’
‘We just came from there,’ he replied.
I looked behind us. ‘A single shot seems to have ended pursuit for now.’
‘They’re simply confident of eventually tracking us,’ Pierre said. ‘They have your map. When are you going to use your sorcery to save us?’
‘Pierre, if I truly had sorcery, wouldn’t I have used it by now? I’m a scholar, not a magician. I need equipment we don’t have to do anything at all with electricity, and I no longer have the secret book I once found.’
‘So you cannot properly sing, you cannot properly paddle, and you can do no real sorcery? Mon dieu, I did inherit a donkey.’
‘I can shoot. That seems to have served well enough.’
‘Oui, it was a good shot – maybe the first truly good thing you’ve done. But it will not stop them. They need to regroup, but will count on you to lead them to the treasure. One key will be whether the Somersets are alive or dead. Red Jacket, I think, was only wounded, which is bad. He will not rest until he has revenge.’
‘If he’d let us be, none of this would have happened.’
‘That’s not how he will see things.’
‘And who said anything to you about treasure?’
‘Do you think voyageurs fools? You two are not priests or company men, and you haven’t taken a note of your surroundings since we met you. You made no surveys, no maps, and asked no questions about routes or trails. Explorers gather information, but you hid it. The only explanation is treasure.’