Read Chapter 1: A Lordless Man

Martin Vautrin learned that his lord was dead from a groom who had stolen the dead man's boots.

The boy came limping across a turnip field outside Saint-Pol, one boot brown and one black, both too large for him. Behind him the road was crowded with men who no longer marched in ranks. Some carried spears without heads. Some had thrown away their shields. A wounded destrier wandered among them with a saddle soaked dark at the cantle.

“Messire Raoul?” Martin asked.

The groom looked down at the mismatched boots. “At the bridge. An English arrow in the throat. Then another in the eye when he fell.”

That was all. No priest, no bell, no final order. Raoul de Beaulieu, who had fed Martin for seven years and fined him twice for gambling, had ceased to exist somewhere beside a muddy bridge on the Somme. With him vanished Martin's wages, his place in a household, and the small legal shelter that separated an armed man from a bandit.

Martin sat on a milestone and unstrung his crossbow. The weapon was a compact arbalest of yew and horn with a steel stirrup worn bright by his boot. He had repaired its cord himself the week before. It was the only thing he owned worth more than his cloak.

By dusk, three men had offered to buy it for less than the price of a hen.

He refused them all.

At night the remnants of Raoul's retinue camped in a ruined sheepfold. Nobody knew who commanded. The sergeant wanted to ride south and seek employment from the Count of Eu. Two men from Arras meant to go home. A Gascon said the English paid better and was nearly killed for saying it.

Martin slept with the crossbow under his arm.

Near midnight he woke to the sound of somebody cutting the thong of his coin purse. He caught a wrist, twisted, and drove his forehead into a man's nose. The thief rolled away cursing. Nobody intervened.

At dawn, Martin left.

The countryside of northern France looked less like a kingdom than a garment torn between dogs. Smoke hung over farmsteads that had paid taxes to French lords in spring, protection money to English riders in summer, and ransom to free companies in autumn. The churches still stood, mostly. Granaries did not.

Two days later, on the road toward Hesdin, Martin found twelve corpses hanging from elms. A board nailed beneath them read ROBBERS.

One of the dead men wore the red-and-white badge of a company Martin knew had been hired by a French captain only a month before.

“Robber is what they call a soldier after payday,” said a voice behind him.

Martin turned.

A broad man with iron-grey hair sat astride a mule. He wore a patched mail shirt beneath a wool coat and had the red nose of someone who drank because water could not be trusted. A sword hung at his left hip; at his right, a wooden spoon.

“Name?” the man asked.

“Martin Vautrin.”

“Trade?”

Martin lifted the crossbow.

“Good. I am Hugues Brachet. I command forty-three men when none are dead and fifty when the tavern is dark enough.”

Martin glanced at the trees. “And when someone hangs you?”

“Then I shall be a robber.” Hugues grinned. “Until then, I have a contract.”

“With whom?”

“Does it matter?”

Martin considered the road behind him, the empty purse, and the fact that nobody in the world now owed him supper.

“Yes,” he said.

Hugues's grin widened. “Then you are not hungry enough yet.”

He turned the mule and started away.

Martin followed.

By noon he knew the company was called the Grey Hounds. It contained Picards, Flemings, two English deserters, a Breton who claimed to be a priest, and a woman named Ysabeau who drove the baggage cart and could throw a knife through a leather bucket at ten paces. Their contract was to escort wagons from Montreuil to Thérouanne.

The wagons carried grain.

“Whose grain?” Martin asked.

Hugues scratched his beard. “The man who pays us says it is his.”

“And the man who grew it?”

“He is not paying us.”

That evening Martin received his first meal in three days: beans, onions, and a heel of black bread.

He ate slowly.

A lordless man could ask questions, he decided. A hungry man could not afford too many answers.

Before sleeping that first night with the Grey Hounds, Martin learned another fact about lordless men: nobody asked where they had come from unless blood followed them. The company camped in an orchard abandoned after a raid. Hugues posted sentries before allowing fires, then made every newcomer empty his purse and count his quarrels in front of the quartermaster. The ritual offended Martin until he understood its purpose. A man who began service with twelve deniers could not later claim thirty had been stolen; a man with nineteen bolts could not sell ten and blame an ambush. Hugues distrusted memory almost as much as nobility.

The two English deserters were brothers, Will and Stephen Hobb, though Will insisted they were unrelated whenever Stephen sang. Alain the Breton had once been a sailor. Jehan Leclerc could read enough Latin to recognise a debt he did not intend to pay. Ysabeau had inherited a cooper's wagon from a husband who died of fever and had discovered that soldiers respected anyone who controlled their spare boots.

Martin expected questions about Raoul de Beaulieu. None came until Hugues sat beside him after dark.

“Good lord?” the captain asked.

“Better than some.”

“That means no.”

“He kept his word to his household.”

“Then better than many.”

Martin watched sparks rise through apple branches. “Does service mean nothing to you?”

“It means what both sides can still remember when payment is due.”

For years Martin had believed loyalty was a chain descending from God to king, lord, captain, and man. Hugues described it like a rope bridge: useful while both ends held, fatal if only one did.

Martin did not agree. Not then.

But he slept inside the Grey Hounds' sentry line, and for the first time since the bridge, no one tried to cut his purse.