Read Chapter 10: The Jacquerie Road

The peasant rising had burned itself out by the time Martin reached Beauvaisis, but the land still remembered.

Manor houses stood roofless. Gallows stood full.

The Free Hounds had been hired to escort refugees north—not nobles, but millers, craftsmen, widows, and children fleeing reprisals. It was poor work for soldiers and excellent work for reputation.

Martin accepted because one of the refugees claimed to have driven grain for the Concord.

His name was Colin Berset, a wagoner with two missing fingers.

“They paid us double,” Colin said. “Not to carry grain fast. To carry it slowly.”

“Explain.”

“We would leave one depot, wait in a wood or manor yard for two days, then enter a town after prices rose. Sometimes orders changed and we turned around entirely.”

“Who gave the orders?”

“Clerks with red cords around their seals.”

Matthieu showed him copies from Licques.

Colin pointed at three names.

One belonged to a Burgundian merchant. One to Marconne's steward. The third was a noble Martin had never heard of: Count Amaury de Rochefort.

Matthieu went pale.

“You know him?”

“Everyone knows the house. Rochefort advises princes. His lands lie mostly south of here, but his marriage ties reach Flanders.”

“Could he be the Prior?”

“Could be a man like him.”

The next day, their column was stopped by French troops at a stone bridge.

The captain demanded Martin surrender himself as an outlaw.

Martin refused.

There were eighty soldiers on the bridge and sixty Free Hounds in the road. Refugees crowded between carts.

The French captain smiled. “You cannot win.”

Martin looked at the river.

“No.”

He ordered Ysabeau to turn the carts around.

The captain laughed. “Running?”

“Yes.”

The Free Hounds withdrew in good order.

Two miles back, they took a forest path Colin knew, crossed the river at a mill ford, and reached the far side of the bridge before sunset.

The French captain arrived after dark, furious.

Martin was waiting with his crossbowmen positioned on a ridge and refugees safely behind walls in a nearby village.

“I still cannot win,” Martin called down. “But now neither can you.”

The captain cursed him and withdrew.

That night, Colin said, “Most soldiers would have fought.”

“Most soldiers die often.”

“You do not care about honour?”

Martin checked the fletching on a quarrel.

“Honour is useful when it keeps men from doing shameful things. Less useful when it makes them do stupid ones.”

The answer travelled through the company. By morning, Will Hobb had improved it into a proverb Martin never said.

Within weeks people were repeating: Captain Vautrin fears shame more than death and hunger more than shame.

Martin hated the sentence.

It made him sound wise.

He knew better.

The refugees from Beauvaisis carried stories that hardened Martin against simple ideas of justice. Some had joined the peasant rising and burned manor records because those records contained debts impossible to repay. Others had watched neighbours murder women merely because they belonged to noble households. Retaliating knights had then hanged men who had taken no part at all.

At night, refugees argued around fires about who had begun the violence.

Martin stopped listening for a first cause.

One old carpenter told him, “When the roof collapses, everyone says the beam above him broke first.”

The remark reminded Martin of the war itself.

He asked Colin Berset why wagoners obeyed the Concord's delay orders when they knew towns were hungry.

“Because we were paid,” Colin said.

“That simple?”

“No. Because if I refused, another man took the job and I still had children. Because the clerk knew which village my wife lived in. Because everyone said one wagon could not change a famine.”

Martin wrote that down.

Systems, he was learning, were made of ordinary excuses repeated until no one person felt responsible.

That discovery frightened him more than Rochefort later would. A villain could be killed. A thousand reasonable decisions pointing in the same cruel direction were harder to fight.

When the refugees reached safety, Martin paid Colin to remain with the company as master wagoner. His missing fingers made sword work difficult, but nobody knew roads and depots better.

A mercenary army, Martin realised, needed men who understood wheels as much as weapons.