Alexei wrote his first agreement for men his father had already called rebels.
His son was seventeen. He separated those whom the search was accustomed to reducing to a single line. A proven attack would be tried by a local court with witnesses from the tsar. A fugitive labourer could choose a stated term of paid service. A stanitsa retained the right to conduct its own inquiries if it surrendered men accused of a specific murder. Voluntary surrender before the appointed day ended the pursuit.
The text looked coherent until the military laid a supply map beside it.
The army was short of salt, carts and men capable of repairing river craft. Several important landing stages depended on labourers who had fled to the Don. If they waited for a local hearing on every name, the supply trains might halt before a decision was reached. But if merely calling oneself a fugitive labourer was enough, men who had committed murder could hide under that name as well.
"Your agreement protects the innocent," Peter said. "But it does not deliver salt to the regiment."
"Your search delivers salt," Alexei answered. "But it creates the next revolt itself."
Both were only half right.
Peter accepted the term for voluntary surrender, paid service and local hearings. At the same time he retained a special list of military supply workers who could be hunted by force. Gavrila was on it.
Trofim asked how his brother differed from the other fugitives. He was told: skill. What the state had taught Gavrila had now become its reason for refusing to let him go.
Trofim left for the Don before the search detachment.
He found his brother among Kondraty Bulavin's men. There were fugitive labourers, Cossacks, salt workers, ruined peasants and brigands who used the fight for freedom as cover. A common hatred held them together better than a common purpose.
Trofim knew how to reckon timber, carts and days on the road. Bulavin put him in charge of supplies. The skill Trofim had learnt at the tsar's shipyard now served Peter's armed enemies.
After their first successful skirmish, several men demanded that the prisoners be killed before the tsar's detachment returned. Trofim stepped between the bound soldiers and the man with the sabre.
"They came for us," they told him.
"This one was lying unarmed when you bound him."
Trofim lowered his musket to the ground. The other supply men did the same. Without them, the detachment received neither powder nor bread. Bulavin stopped the execution, not from mercy, but because he could not afford to lose the men who kept the supply train moving.
The prisoners lived. One was released as a messenger, and a day later he returned with a sheet bearing new terms of surrender. The document named a deadline, boundary posts and a promise: until the appointed day, the tsar's detachments would not cross the line unless they were fired on from beyond it.
Gavrila decided to come out.
Coming out did not mean consenting to service without a term: the conditions allowed Gavrila to demand a term before the local hearing. Trofim gave him a copy and told him to go to the white post by the reeds.
Meanwhile, the commander of the search detachment received word that men from the special list were hiding beyond the line. He decided that the written boundary protected ordinary fugitives, but not military supply workers. The new terms contained no such exemption. It remained in Peter's earlier order, and the commander decided that military need outweighed the terms of surrender on paper.
The detachment crossed the line before dawn.
Trofim heard shots and ran towards the reeds. Two dead men lay among the stalks. A third was still breathing, clutching a folded sheet to his side.
It was Gavrila.
Trofim dropped beside him and tried to pull his hand away from the wound. The paper had stuck to his palm. The red seal and half of one validating signature had bled across it.
"Did I reach the post?" Gavrila asked.
The white post stood behind them. The tracks of the tsar's detachment led deeper into the reeds.
"You were beyond it," Trofim answered.
He unfolded the sheet and pressed it to the wound. The paper darkened at once. The sheet that had promised Gavrila safety beyond the white post now served as a bandage and was quickly soaking through.
Gavrila tried to draw a deeper breath. Instead of words, a short rasp came from his throat.
Trofim called for help. Men came running, but there was nothing they could do.
His brother was looking not at him but at the white post. He needed to see that he had not taken the wrong road.
"You made it," Trofim said.
Gavrila died still gripping the edge of the sheet.
Trofim did not close his eyes at once. First he lifted the paper, found the surviving line about the boundary and wrapped the sodden half-signature in it. Then he wiped his brother's face with his sleeve.
By midday the neighbouring stanitsas knew of the breach. Those who that morning had meant to open their gates to the tsar's men admitted Bulavin's detachments instead. Peter's terms still lay on their tables. Nobody believed them now.
The search was indeed driving into Bulavin's ranks men who had still intended to surrender. But Alexei's agreement had left a gap too: the new boundaries did not revoke the old exemption for military workers. The commander of the search detachment had used that very gap.
The sodden sheet remained with Trofim. Gavrila had not fallen in battle. He had died because the commander of the search detachment placed an old order above the new terms of surrender.
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