Read Chapter 15: The Trial at Chainbreak

The hearing began in the rain.

More than four hundred people crowded inside and outside Chainbreak Hall: villagers, merchants, monks, widows, wounded soldiers, two minor knights, and several men who insisted they had come merely to observe. Martin suspected half of them were spies.

Marconne appeared in a clean tunic with his hands unbound.

This was Ysabeau's idea.

“If you chain him, nobles will remember only the chains.”

“If he runs?”

“He is fifty years old and has never carried his own bag. We will catch him.”

Brother Matthieu read from the ledgers seized at Licques. He listed purchase contracts below market price, delayed deliveries, payments to armed companies, and stores held during famine. Merchants testified anonymously from behind a screen. Colin Berset described being paid to delay grain wagons. Village reeves spoke of compulsory sales.

Marconne listened with bored courtesy.

When invited to answer, he stood.

“You have heard numbers,” he said. “You have heard grief. You have not heard law.”

His voice carried easily.

“Every sack purchased by my agents was purchased under contract. Every warehouse was licensed by a lawful lord. Every armed escort protected private property from brigands—many of whom now wear Captain Vautrin's badge.”

Murmurs moved through the crowd.

Martin felt the danger.

Marconne continued. “You blame merchants for prices raised by war. You blame nobles for collecting what kings demand. You blame me because I understood scarcity before you did.”

A woman shouted that her son had starved.

Marconne turned toward her.

“And if I had not gathered grain into defended stores, English riders might have burned it. Would your son then live?”

The woman began to cry.

Martin wanted to strike him.

Instead, he stood.

“No one is accusing you of knowing there would be scarcity,” he said. “We accuse you of making scarcity worse because scarcity paid.”

Marconne smiled. “Prove intent.”

Matthieu lifted the schedule from Licques.

“We can.”

He read instructions to delay shipments specifically “until market distress becomes advantageous.” Another entry ordered three mills to stop buying independent grain for ten days. A third authorised payment to riders who destroyed a merchant's wagons.

The crowd changed.

Not louder.

Quieter.

Marconne's face hardened.

Then bells rang from the west tower.

Three times.

Enemy approaching.

The hearing dissolved into movement. Free Hounds ran to walls. Villagers were led into cellars and the inner yard. Martin climbed the tower.

Two forces were visible.

From the north came French troops under royal colours.

From the west came English riders.

They had not coordinated; their scouts were already skirmishing in the fields.

Will Hobb laughed beside Martin.

“We have achieved diplomacy again.”

Both armies sent heralds.

Both demanded Marconne.

Both promised pardon if Martin surrendered him.

Martin asked each herald the same question: “Will your commander permit the hearing to continue?”

Both said no.

“Then no.”

The siege began before sunset.

Not a formal siege with engines and trenches. Neither force wished the other to gain Chainbreak. Instead they surrounded roads, cut supply lines, and waited for Martin's company to collapse.

Inside, there was food for perhaps twenty days.

Marconne learned this and smiled again.

“You see?” he told Martin. “In the end, everything becomes grain.”

Martin looked at him.

“Yes,” he said. “That is why you are going to lose.”

The public hearing also created a precedent Martin had not intended. Villagers began bringing other complaints against lesser lords, merchants, and even Free Hounds. One man accused a company patrol of taking chickens without payment. Another claimed a miller in the League mixed husks into flour. A widow demanded return of land seized for debt years before the Concord existed.

Martin tried to refuse cases unrelated to grain.

People kept coming.

“Congratulations,” Greybourne wrote after hearing of it. “You have invented government. My condolences.”

Martin showed the letter to Ysabeau.

“He thinks this is funny.”

“He is English.”

To avoid becoming sole judge, Martin persuaded nearby villages to select representatives for a monthly council. Chainbreak provided guards and clerks but not final authority in ordinary disputes. Nobles mocked the arrangement as a peasant parliament.

Martin did not care what they called it as long as fewer people waited outside his door.

The council's existence later mattered during the siege. Civilians obeyed rationing because representatives had seen the stores and approved the measures. Soldiers grumbled, but they could not claim Martin hid food for favourites.

Transparency did not create abundance.

It made scarcity less likely to become mutiny.