Read Chapter 6: Contract Broken

The pursuit ended at a flooded meadow where Hugues made his first serious mistake.

He assumed the river crossing was still usable.

Spring rain had turned the ford into a brown, violent sheet. The Grey Hounds reached it with Marconne's riders less than a mile behind.

“We cross,” Hugues said.

Ysabeau stared at the water. “The cart will not.”

“Leave it.”

The company protested. Their food, spare quarrels, tent cloth, and most of the wounded rode in that cart.

Martin looked upstream. A line of pollarded willows marked an old causeway beneath the flood.

“Not the ford,” he said. “There.”

Hugues saw it at once.

They turned north. The horses stumbled in water up to their knees, but the hidden causeway held. The baggage cart followed slowly.

Marconne's men reached the river and charged directly into the ford.

Two horses went down.

The rest turned toward the causeway.

“Crossbows!” Hugues shouted.

Martin and six others dismounted on the far bank. They drove stakes between the willow roots and rested their arbalests across them. At sixty paces, a mounted man presented a large target. At forty, armour mattered less.

Martin waited.

His bolt struck the first rider's horse in the chest. The animal collapsed, blocking the narrow path. Two men behind crashed into it. The Grey Hounds fired again.

The causeway became a trap.

Marconne's riders withdrew after losing four men and three horses.

One dead rider carried sealed orders.

Hugues read them in silence.

“What?” Martin asked.

“We are to be arrested for theft of royal grain, desertion, and treasonous correspondence with the English.”

“We did correspond with the English.”

“Months ago. Under contract.”

“Truth ages badly.”

Hugues handed him the parchment.

At the bottom was Captain Arnaud's seal.

They were now criminals in French territory and unreliable mercenaries in English eyes. Their safe choices had narrowed to almost none.

The company hid for a week in marshland near the Lys. Food ran low. Two men deserted. Another developed fever.

Then a messenger found them.

He was a monk from an abbey near Saint-Omer, riding a donkey and carrying a letter without a seal.

The abbot needed armed men.

Not to fight.

To move grain.

The abbey had stored three years of tithe reserves. Local nobles demanded the grain be sold exclusively through approved merchants. The abbot had refused. Now riders watched every road.

“He wants us to steal his own grain?” Ysabeau asked.

The monk nodded.

Hugues laughed for the first time in days.

“I like him already.”

The plan was simple and therefore dangerous. At night, villagers would bring carts to a rear gate. The Grey Hounds would escort them through forest tracks and distribute the grain among parishes before Marconne's agents could seize it.

Martin asked the monk why the abbot trusted mercenaries.

“He does not,” the monk said. “He trusts hunger less.”

They moved the first convoy without trouble.

The second was spotted.

Near dawn, riders attacked from both sides of a sunken road. Martin fought from behind an overturned cart while villagers scrambled into the ditch. A spear grazed his ribs. Hugues took a sword cut across the shoulder.

The attackers withdrew when abbey bells began ringing in villages ahead, warning locals to gather.

Hundreds of people came onto the road with tools, hunting bows, and stones.

Marconne's men could fight mercenaries.

They could not easily slaughter an entire countryside in daylight.

The grain reached the villages.

By evening, the Grey Hounds had become heroes to people who would have hidden their chickens from them a month before.

Hugues hated it.

“Heroes are expected to work for free,” he complained.

Martin smiled.

But the victory had a price.

Hugues's shoulder wound blackened at the edges.

Two days later, fever took him.

The flight through the flooded meadow taught Martin more about command than all his years beneath Raoul. Hugues had chosen the wrong ford. Nobody challenged him until Martin saw the causeway. Under a lord, correction could be insolence; under a mercenary captain, silence could drown the baggage train.

After the danger passed, Hugues assembled the men.

“I was wrong,” he said.

That was all.

Martin waited for an excuse. None came.

Later he asked why the captain had admitted it publicly.

“Because they saw it publicly.”

“Does that not weaken you?”

“Pretending the river was shallow would weaken me more.”

The idea lodged in Martin's mind beside the rules about pay and fire.

When Hugues's fever worsened, leadership already began shifting before anyone named it. Men asked Martin where to place sentries. Ysabeau brought him ration counts. Jehan reported desertions. Martin kept directing them toward Hugues until the dying captain finally cursed him.

“A company can smell hesitation,” Hugues said. “So can a horse. Both become stupid when they smell too much.”

“I am not ready.”

“No captain is. The dangerous ones are ready before anyone asks.”

Outside, abbey bells rang the hours. Martin realised he was terrified not of dying, but of becoming responsible for decisions that killed others.

Hugues seemed almost pleased when he said so.

“Good. Keep some of that.”