Read Chapter 4: The Price of Oats

The Grey Hounds left English service with thirty-seven days' pay for forty days' work.

Hugues called it a victory.

They rode south toward Béthune, where a French captain was hiring men to protect tax collectors. Along the road, Martin saw entire villages boiling nettles for soup. Oats cost more than wine. Bread was being cut with ground acorns and chalk.

Outside Lillers, a crowd had surrounded a grain merchant's cart.

The merchant's guards held spears crosswise, trying to push people back without stabbing them. A woman screamed that her children had not eaten in two days. The merchant shouted that the grain belonged to Lord Marconne and would be sold in Arras.

Martin heard the name and stopped his horse.

Hugues stopped beside him. “Do not.”

“Do not what?”

“Whatever your face is planning.”

The crowd surged. A guard panicked and thrust his spear. The point entered an old man's belly.

Then everything broke.

Martin was off his horse before he knew he had moved. He struck the spear shaft aside, punched the guard, and shouted for the crowd to back away. Hugues swore and ordered the Grey Hounds into a line.

For one dangerous moment, villagers and guards both thought the mercenaries had come to attack them.

Then Ysabeau climbed onto the cart.

“Anyone who throws a stone gets no bread!” she shouted.

The crowd froze.

She had understood the problem faster than all the armed men.

Hugues forced the merchant to sell half the load at the previous month's price. He paid the difference from the company's chest, cursing with each coin.

“You have made us poor,” he told Martin afterward.

“We were already poor.”

“We were professionally poor. Now we are amateurs.”

The stabbed old man died before sunset.

His daughter gave Martin a piece of information instead of thanks. She had worked in a manor kitchen near Aire-sur-la-Lys. The barns there were full—so full that grain had been stored in the chapel and stable lofts. Armed riders came at night, moving sacks north toward the coast and south toward Arras.

“Whose manor?” Martin asked.

She hesitated. “Lord Géraud de Vaux.”

Hugues heard and spat into the mud.

“Another friend of Marconne.”

Martin looked at him. “How many friends does he have?”

“Enough to own a famine.”

That night Hugues finally explained.

Before becoming a mercenary, he had served as sergeant to a minor noble near Boulogne. After Crécy, grain prices had risen sharply. Several lords began buying harvests in advance, offering peasants protection from raiders in exchange for fixed low prices. Then they moved the grain to fortified depots and resold it to armies.

“At first it was business,” Hugues said. “Ugly business, but business. Now there are too many warehouses, too many guards, too many roads closed by private men.”

“And Marconne?”

“Eustache de Marconne has land, cousins, clerks, and no conscience. He also has friends on both sides. One brother-in-law trades through Calais. Another cousin sits in the household of a French prince. War makes borders. Money walks through them.”

Martin thought of the silver coins sewn into the ambushers' belts.

“Why attack Bellon's convoy?”

“Perhaps Bellon would not join them. Perhaps the grain was cheaper than they wanted. Perhaps someone wished to keep a road empty.”

“Can we prove any of it?”

Hugues laughed softly.

“To whom?”

Martin had no answer.

The next morning they signed with a French captain named Arnaud de Châtillon.

Their first order was to seize grain from villages accused of withholding royal tax.

Martin read the order twice.

At the bottom was a list of approved buyers who could purchase confiscated surplus.

The first name was Eustache de Marconne.

The old man killed outside Lillers was buried in ground too wet for a proper grave. Martin helped dig because his daughter had no sons nearby and because the guard whose spear caused the death had fled during the confusion. The work took longer than expected. Clay stuck to the spades. Rain filled the bottom as fast as they cleared it.

The daughter, Margot, watched without weeping. When they finished, she handed Martin a small cloth packet.

Inside was a handful of rye.

“My father saved seed from every harvest,” she said. “He said a family that eats all its seed has already agreed to die next year.”

Martin tried to return it.

“Keep it. So you remember what soldiers call surplus.”

He carried the packet for years.

At the tavern that evening, Hugues warned him not to make a religion of guilt. “You cannot bury everyone hurt by men with weapons.”

“No.”

“And if you try, you will stop being useful to the living.”

Martin stared at the table. “So we do nothing?”

“We choose where doing something changes tomorrow.”

It was a mercenary's morality: practical, limited, suspicious of grand gestures. Martin had once found such thinking dishonourable. Now he saw its discipline.

The next morning he purchased two sacks of oats with his own pay and sent them anonymously to Margot's village. Hugues discovered it and fined him one denier for using company transport without permission.

“You are charging me for charity?”

“I am charging you for poor administration.”

Then Hugues quietly added another sack from his own share.

Martin never mentioned it.