Anne-Marie de Parthenay
New France
Dawn broke, and at long last, the river flowed into the lake. Anne-Marie and her fellow fugitives reached Fort Frontenac, the lonely castle of wood by the bank of the St. Lawrence. To their horror, they found it abandoned, the land around blood-stained and smoldering. Was Chrétien even here? Was he alive? There was no way to know. The ground was littered with bodies, French and Iroquois, mutilated and mud-smothered. The ground was wet with freezing rain, and what little grass there had been had been uprooted and scattered in the chaos. In some parts, there were more corpses than there was land, piled atop each other, as if they had trampled one another. The stench of blood and decay permeated the frosty air, and it took all Anne-Marie’s willpower not to hurl.
At first, all they could do was sit and survey the carnage from the riverbank, frozen in horror. Anne-Marie looked at the bodies of the Frenchmen, hoping she would see one breathing. None were. Her head swam, wracked with fear and sorrow. She feared the worst for her brother. This was all part of Le Vicomte’s plan—La Madame and Chrétien were both obstacles in his quest to claim Anne-Marie as his wife. When you were a noble, the laws stopped applying to you—at least, to a certain extent. Enough money, and accidents will begin to mysteriously happen in your favor. Enough power, and you can order your subordinates to their death. But it was too much for her to think that her brother would be dead—she could not even entreat it, not after everything else. She clasped her hands and prayed to God that he had escaped somehow, that he was alive and well.
Then they heard the sounds of war cries coming from the camps in the distance. It was a sound Anne-Marie had never heard, and she would never want to hear again. More than that—it was a sound she wished no one would ever hear. Horrible, foreboding shrieks that filled the air and struck terror into your heart. The Iroquois had won the battle here. They lingered in those camps, licking their wounds, waiting for their next targets. And now, they had found them.
Ezekiel immediately changed course, and began to row towards the eastern bank of the lake. They needed to find land and the cover of forest as soon as possible, even if they would be fleeing straight into Iroquois country. Anne-Marie looked to the north bank–a dozen Iroquois loaded onto four of their own canoes to give chase. She watched with bated breath, heart clutching in terror as they began to gain on them. Ezekiel was strong, but he had been rowing down the river for four hours now since the early morning, and he was beginning to tire. What’s more, the other boats rowed in pairs, working in tandem to further bolster their speed, and their canoes were smaller, only made to hold three each. Ezekiel had a headstart, but the distance began to shrink with every passing second.
Out of the corner of her eye, Anne-Marie saw the old doctor start to move. He reached down to the bottom of the canoe and grabbed a musket.
“Pardonne-moi, ma chérie,” he said. She stepped to the side, and he planted himself firmly in the back of the canoe.
“Don’t miss,” Ezekiel called to him from the front. “I don’t have many bullets.”
“You worry about rowing,” the doctor shot back. “I was a fine shot back in my heyday, I’ll have you know.”
The old man nocked the musket on the canoe’s back edge, aiming it at the boat in front of the pursuit. He took a moment to lick his finger and hold it up in the air, measuring the speed of the wind and the direction it blew. He focused down the barrel, taking a second to aim and think, like he was calculating the trajectory in his mind. Then, he pulled the trigger. The shot rang out across the open lake. It was much louder than Anne-Marie expected, resounding in her eardrums with an awful blare. The bullet found its target, burying itself into the head of the left rower. The force knocked the man from his canoe, landing with a splash in the lake. The other rower just plowed ahead, leaving the other to his fate. The third man in the canoe loaded his own musket and fired back, though he aimed hastily, and his shot went wide.
“Down!” Ezekiel barked as he heard the return shot, and the women ducked down as far as they could, trying to shield themselves. The canoe was rather shallow, and did not have much allowance, so they huddled next to one another, trembling in fear. One shot rang out after another, and with each one, Anne-Marie’s spirit cracked further. Is this what her brother endured as a soldier? These noises, this terror, day after day? She thought she knew what to expect when she left Quebec. She thought she knew what awaited her. How wrong she’d been.
Another shot, and then a thud. Anne-Marie heard it just before she felt a weight come crashing down on her. She didn’t have time to even think about what it was before she felt something warm drip onto her neck. She scrambled to shove the thing off of her, half-rising to look at it. The smell of blood came again, too slow to prepare her for it. She saw the kind doctor’s wide eyes, his chest rising arrhythmically as he struggled to breathe. She saw the crimson tide that gushed from his throat where the bullet had struck. His hands flailed wildly, trying in vain to plug the hole. Her mind could hardly process what her eyes saw, her body paralyzed from the shock. All she could do was watch.
Gusteau gurgled and spat out more blood as he tried to choke something out. Some last words to remember him by, some hopeless attempt to calm her. Some eulogy for himself, to tell himself he would go where his wife and daughter did. Anything to give him some semblance of peace. God did not grant him any. The old man’s wrinkled hands stopped convulsing, his sputtering turning to wheezing, then to no sound at all. Nothing but the roar of gunfire, each bullet waiting to claim its next victim, tearing through the air with the speed and sound of thunder.
Anne-Marie screamed, the only thing her body would let her do. All her pain and horror and anguish left her body with the wail of a banshee, piercing through the cold sky, up to the clouds and through them, all the way to the heavens. By some strange miracle, they must have heard it, for a mighty wind whipped up out of nothing, pushing them towards the distant bank. Of course, the wind pushed the Iroquois just the same, though it rocked their smaller vessels and made them unstable, giving the five who still lived a breath of fresh air from God himself.
Behind her, Anne-Marie could faintly hear a shuffling. Ezekiel’s wife pushed past her, and shoved her hands underneath the doctor’s corpse, trying to lift it.
“Taye’ndiara’s!” She yelled in her tongue. Help me! But Anne-Marie couldn’t. She could do nothing but sit there in some grievous torpor, even as another bullet whizzed right past her ear.
“Taye’ndiara’s!” The woman pleaded again, and her desperate tone rang out in the empty caverns of the girl’s mind. Still, she could not process the words, but she felt her body begin to move on her own. Through tear-blurred eyes she vaguely saw her own hands reach out. They touched the body of the man who had saved her life no less than three times. Thankfully, her mind took pity on her, and she could no longer feel the warmth of his blood or the clamminess of his skin. What she did feel was the weight. She lifted that formless thing she could no longer see, her vision blurred further. She pushed it off the boat. She heard the splash, felt the water on her face. What a cruel thing her mind was, to not make her numb to it all.
She felt a hand on her back, pushing her back down. She felt her face smack against the wood. It would bruise, probably–she always did. She lingered on it for a while–the bruise. It was something to focus on, something that would take her away from all this. She thought about how they hurt. That familiar pain became the strangest of salves. It dulled the new ones that stabbed at her like a thousand knives, tearing her to shreds. It was a cruel, murderous thing, this fate. It would destroy even a man with a heart of iron, let alone a poor girl of papier-mâché.
Time began to fade from her mind, and she lulled into some half-living torpor, her heart shutting itself down to save it from imploding. How long had they been rowing? For how long would they row now? She had no idea. In all the chaos, she had never once looked at the horizon ahead. Perhaps that was an ill omen–not for the others, necessarily. Just for her. What did it say about her, that she did not even think to find hope in the horizon?
Her mind drifted to her bruising cheek again, and she could keep despair at bay no longer. They flooded through the burst dam of her last protections, flowing out from her eyes. They were right. She lay there on the sides, Adah and Delilah trembling in her lost periphery. They always laughed at my bruises. Even reminiscing hurt. They said I was too fragile. To think I took it to heart. They were right. I am too fragile, too frail for this world. Should the next bullet take someone, please, God: let it be me. Free these poor souls from the curse that I am.
Then, as if to answer, the canoe bucked underneath her. She and the girls lurched upwards, almost falling out of the canoe. They had run aground. The others scrambled onto land, and Anne-Marie followed. Her mind was still lost in misery and grief, but her body moved with a will of its own. She clambered onto the shore, running as fast as she could to the cover of the forest beyond. She looked back to glean the distance of her pursuers, then stopped in her tracks. Ezekiel was not following them. He knelt on the riverbank, firing shot after shot at the Iroquois with what little bullets he had left.
“Ezekiel!” She screamed.
“They are almost here," he said. "Run now, into the forest."
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Please,” she begged. “You can’t fight them. They’ll kill you. You can’t… you can’t leave me, too.”
“This isn’t about you,” he said as he fired into the chest of one of their marksmen. “And it isn’t about me. My precious daughters are running for their lives. They are the shining lights of my future, and wicked men row to this shore to kill them. They’ll be here any second now.”
Ezekiel went to reload. He looked in his small leather pouch of bullets, then overturned it. He had finally run out. He stood, turning to her for only a moment.
“Run,” he told her. “Run as fast and as far as you can. Run away from the others–you will be harder to hunt if you’re separated.”
“I can’t,” she cried. “I won’t leave you. I just saved you, dammit. You can’t die now. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
Ezekiel just smiled. It was a broad, shining smile that crossed his whole face, and suddenly Anne-Marie knew: he was not afraid to die. She knew the man he was, the way he thought. He was supposed to be dead already, hanging from a noose in Quebec. Getting this far was a blessing, and he was not the kind of man to squander one.
The broad-shouldered Huron turned back to face the tribe that had destroyed his own. They were mere seconds to the shore, and they had already readied their weapons, having run out of ammo as well. Ezekiel knelt down for a moment to grab something from the canoe. To Anne-Marie’s surprise, it was a scabbard, familiar to her. He unsheathed the sabre she had bought him for Christmas and held it aloft. The white light of the winter sun shone off its gleaming blade, so brilliant it was almost blinding.
“All my life I have run from my destiny,” he bellowed. “My mother gave me this holy name of Ezekiel, filled it with her wishes and hopes. Today, with God as my witness, I will see them met. For thirty years, she has watched her son from heaven. Today, I will finally make her proud.”
The first canoe reached the bank. The one man left on it leaped onto the sand, hacking at Ezekiel with his tomahawk. Ezekiel dodged him handily, and ran him straight through with the sword. With a roar, he dug his moccasin into the dead man’s shoulder, kicking it off his blade, ready for the next one.
“Go now,” the man said, standing tall in the face of his demise. “And do not give yourself to guilt or sorrow. You gave me this sword, little one, and the Lord Himself guides it in my hands. Go!”
At once, Anne-Marie broke into a run, sprinting away with an energy she had never felt, at a speed that confused and surprised her. Even if her mind wished her to die, her body would not let her, thundering towards the trees like it didn’t know its own weakness. She heard the sounds of clashing metal and slicing flesh behind her, but she could not turn back now.
On she went, dashing through an endless maze of leafless trees. She tried to scan in front of her, to see any sign of the others, but they were gone. She stopped for a moment to gather her breath, and fear began to set in as the last of her energy left her. She had hardly ever run in her life, and certainly not like this. How little the life of a noble girl had prepared her to survive–her thoughts raced as she continued to trudge through the snow. Even if she made it out, what would she eat? Where would she sleep? And where in the world was she supposed to go now?
Suddenly, to her horror, she heard the sounds of whoops behind her. Two Iroquois men gave chase from twenty yards away. Oh God. If Ezekiel didn’t stop them—
Her body did not give her time to think of it. It sprang to action again of its own volition, sprinting away from them with a newfound desire to live. If she would not live for herself, she would survive, at least, so his death would not be in vain.
Fate, however, had made its choice again, and once again it had forsaken her. She tripped on a tree root hidden by the snow, falling face-first onto the ground. She tried to keep going, crawling on her hands and knees to the creek just ahead. But her fall had given the men time to catch up, and now they were upon her. She whirled around, trying to kick the first one away. He batted her legs away like flies, then descended on her, pinning her down with his weight. He began to tear at her dress, and she screamed, flailing hopelessly under him. Her eyes flew to his face, eyes mad with lust, mouth cocked in a horrid sneer. Then his nose. Suddenly, for reasons that eluded her, she remembered something. Her brother holding her hand, placing it right underneath his own nose. Right here, he had told her. Hard as you can. Right into the brain.
For a split second, the man loosened his grip on her, moving his hands to rip open her blouse. She seized the moment, slamming her right palm upwards into his nose as hard as she could. She heard a gut-wrenching crack, but to her horror, the man did not die. He did scream and recoil from the pain of his shattered nose, though, which gave her a chance to roll out from under him. The other man yelled in anger, and raised a pistol to fire on her. She had never before looked down the barrel of a gun, and she found her legs give out again. She could do nothing but close her eyes and wait for death. This is it. This is how it goes. At least it'll all be over.
A gunshot rang out. To her surprise, she felt no pain. That was a relief. Then, after a moment, she realized she was not dead yet, either. She opened her eyes to see a bullet hole in her attacker’s head. He fell forward, collapsing onto the snow. The living one screamed in anger, standing and running past Anne-Marie. She whirled around and saw a canoe of all things in the lake. It was smaller than hers had been, piloted by a lone Indian boy. The Iroquois leaped at him, Tomahawk held high. In an instant, the young man dashed from his canoe onto dry land. He used the other’s surprise against him, grabbing and twisting his dominant hand to force the hatchet from his grip. In the same smooth motion, he caught the weapon, then spun around, burying it into his assailant’s neck. The man went down, and Anne-Marie just sat there, stunned. The young man paced over to her, kneeling in the snow.
“English or French?” He asked. Each word he spoke in their respective language.
“F–French,” Anne-Marie said, somehow finding the energy to speak. “Je suis français.”
“Are there others?”
“W–what?”
“Iroquois.” He said the word like it was unfamiliar to him, the sounds rolling off his tongue uncomfortably. “Are there any more chasing you?”
Anne-Marie looked around. The rest of the woods were empty, as far as she could see.
“I… I don’t know,” she stammered. “I don’t think so. I… I…”
The man began to reload his musket, scanning the woods as well.
“Doesn’t seem to be anyone else,” he said. “That’s good. Come on. A girl like you shouldn’t be in a place like this. I can take you to the fort nearby.”
“No!” She cried, the horrors of the day replaying in her mind. “No, you can’t. It’s… it’s gone…”
The young man sighed, and scratched his mostly hairless head. As he pondered something, Anne-Marie took a second to actually look at him. He looked too young to be traveling all on his own–he seemed a little older than her brother, perhaps, but she couldn’t be sure. He wore deerskin leggings and a long shirt for the winter, and around his neck lay a necklace of beautiful white and purple shells. He wore paint on his face—a thick horizontal streak of black just beneath his eyes, accented with two dashes of bright red on either side like wings. Despite his youth, he was bald–shaved, perhaps, but he wore a headdress of some kind so his head wasn’t completely barren. It was like a tall ring of thick, dark fur, and she could not shake the thought that it looked like the strangest of halos.
What truly caught her eye, though, were his eyes. They were as dark as night and deep as infinity—deeper than the bottom of the ocean, deeper than the furthest limits of the cosmos. He couldn’t have been much older than her, and yet he looked like he had witnessed a hundred lifetimes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I don’t know what else I can do for you. There isn’t another French settlement for miles, and I’m not headed that way, anyway.”
“That’s good,” Anne-Marie said. “I don’t want to go back to New France. In fact, I want to go as far away as I possibly can. Are you headed somewhere far?”
Her savior shrugged.
“I go East, to New England. I guess I have no choice but to take you along. Can’t just leave you to die out here. But you’ll help row and get food on our way. I can’t afford any dead weight tying me down.”
With that, he stood, then headed back to his canoe. He sat himself down in it, then noticed that Anne-Marie had not followed him. She sat there in the snow, still lost in a daze.
“Come on,” he said.
“I… I can’t,” she said. She found herself again, and the guilt that came with it. “I can’t go with you. I’m sorry. I… I’ll find my own way. You should just leave me. I’ll be fine. Promise.”
“You won’t be fine. You look like a stiff wind will knock you over. Just get on the boat.”
“I can’t…”
“What’s the issue?”
“I…” the words caught in her throat, and her eyes welled with tears. She collapsed onto the snow, sobbing uncontrollably.
“I just can’t,” she cried. “It wouldn’t be fair to you. You must understand that I am cursed. Everyone I meet, everyone I come to know or to love. They all die. Every last one of them.”
She buried her face in her hands. Through all the suffering, she had somehow made it this far. Now that the worst was over, she found herself finally falling to pieces.
She felt two hands grab her shoulders–they were firm enough to support her, yet there was a tenderness to them. Her legs were weak, but the young man who saved her slung her arm over his shoulder, and walked with her side-by-side to his canoe.
“You’ll be in good company, then,” he said somberly, and the look in his infinite eyes told her that in the strangest of ways, he knew her pain exactly. “Come on. We’re in their lands now, and we can’t stop moving, not until the sun goes down.”
He helped her onto the wooden seat, and then took his own. He shoved off the bank with his foot, and they began to head down that narrow stream to some distant, unknowable place. Anne-Marie looked around, straining her eyes to see any sign of the others. She never did. Despair and worry began to rise in her throat, but she tried her best to swallow them down. At the very least, she was alive, and if that was true, she could hope that the others were, too.
“I never thanked you,” Anne-Marie suddenly found herself saying. “For saving me.”
“It wasn’t much,” the stranger said. “I’d like to think that if it was me being attacked and you with the gun, you would’ve done the same. You did do some nasty work to that one’s nose. I apologize for not shooting earlier, actually. Always takes me a second to aim, but that way, at least, I rarely miss.”
“I, um… I haven’t yet asked you your name.”
“I am no one, really,” he shrugged. “The man I was is dead and gone, and I haven’t yet been able to replace him. For now, though, you can call me Black Bird.”
End of Winter