He had chosen his codename quickly, without hesitation.
“Raven,” he had said.
The official had raised a brow. “Why?”
“If they are good enough for Odin to choose to be his scouts….” His voice trailed off, and the official shook his head.
“Whatever you want.”
He did not realize at the time just how apt the moniker would become—nor how quickly his reputation would grow.
By the time the colonel’s first tour on the Continent was complete, rumors about the fabled Raven had spread across Europe in the form of hushed, fearful whispers in dark alleys. And by the time his second round of assignments had commenced, his notoriety was that of legends.
But along with fame came enemies.
The first whisper ofLe Corbeaucame not from England, but from a terrified courier in Madrid, who claimed that a French agent—aghost—was executing royalist sympathizers.
Cleanly. Quietly.
Always alone.
Always unseen.
And always with a significant amount of sophisticated torture.
No one knew his real name or his face, but he left a calling card each time: a single black crow’s feather on the victim’s chest or the edge of the scene.
Like an artist signing his painting, Le Corbeau made it clear just who was responsible for each political assassination. The victims were always enemies of Napoleon, and the method of death always reflected a certain level of sadism.
At first, Colonel Fitzwilliam dismissed all of the reports of Le Corbeau as mere stories that grew as they were told, like a small flame being introduced to more air and dry timber.
But then the victims began to change, and a pattern began to emerge.
The banker in Paris. The translator in Brussels. A former general’s widow in Marseille. A shipping magnate with ties to émigré movements in Bordeaux. All murdered without clear cause. All of them people Fitzwilliam had been scheduled to contact—or had just missed by hours.
The worst was Bruges. He had arrived at a safe house under rain-slicked clouds, the window still cracked from a hasty exit. The fire was still warm. On the sill, as if placed deliberately, lay a single crow’s feather, heavy with moisture.
It had been left for him.
That was the first time it felt personal.
From then on, it became a game. One with high stakes and invisible pieces. He would uncover a lead; it would vanish. He would secure a name; the person would disappear or die. Every time he came close, Le Corbeau slipped away like smoke through fingers. Brilliant. Invisible. Unrelenting.
In the dark hours of sleepless nights, Colonel Fitzwilliam wondered: was it luck? Or was he being tested?
They began leaving things for each other. Clues. Warnings. A knife with a Latin inscription left at an abandoned checkpoint. A coded note folded into a false bottom of a diplomatic valise. Once, in Prague, Fitzwilliam found a page torn from a children’s fable—The Raven and the Fox—with a blood-red X over the raven’s eyes.
He had burned it.
It was no longer a pursuit—it was a rivalry.
A battle of wills and wits across half a continent.
Only one would win.
And then, in a tumbled-down town, west of Rouen, Fitzwilliam finally stumbled across a breakthrough. Two decades before, during the great Reign of Terror, there had been a survivor.
A noble child—born to a cousin of the Bourbon line—had been spirited away to grow up in hiding. Raised as the son of a farmer, the young man had grown up, married, and was about to father a child.
