Read Chapter 1: The Badge of Burgundy

The candle guttered when the door opened, and Claude D'Argent looked up from the ledger to find Chancellor Nicolas Rolin standing in his doorway. That alone was enough to stop his quill mid-stroke. Rolin did not visit clerks. Clerks visited Rolin.

"Close that." Rolin gestured at the parchment Claude had been copying—a routine grain levy for the Auxois district. Claude obeyed without question, sanding the ink and folding the sheet facedown. His fingers were steady, though his pulse had begun to tap a faster rhythm against his throat.

Rolin stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He was a tall man, thin as a blade, with the kind of face that held its age carefully, as if wrinkles were a state secret. His robes were plain wool, but the ring on his right hand—a ducal seal in heavy gold—marked him as the second most powerful man in Burgundy.

"You have a reputation," Rolin said, settling into the chair opposite Claude's desk without being asked. "Sharp eyes. A memory like a steel trap. No family entanglements that would compromise you."

Claude hesitated. "I have a sister."

"Ah." Rolin's mouth twitched. "The nun. Yes. Marguerite of the Poor Clares, if I recall. She took her vows at the convent of Saint-Lazare, outside Dijon. She is in the city presently, visiting for your mother's anniversary mass."

Claude said nothing. That Rolin knew this detail—had it at his fingertips like a coin in his purse—was not a courtesy. It was a message.

"Your sister's vows are not the issue," Rolin continued. "Your loyalty is. And I believe it is sound. I have watched you for two years, Claude. You copy letters you are not meant to read. You file reports whose contents you are not meant to remember. And yet you remember them. You notice discrepancies. You notice *people*."

Claude's mouth had gone dry. "I notice what is placed before me, my lord. No more."

"Modest. Good." Rolin leaned forward, and his voice dropped, not quite to a whisper but close, a tone that was used to being obeyed. "There is a town in the north, on the Oise. Compiègne. It belongs to Duke Philip by right of inheritance, and yet it flies the banner of the false king Charles. Worse, it has become a nest of sedition. Letters pass through it—encoded, signed with false names—that find their way to the Armagnac camp. Someone in that town is running a network of spies that has cost us three victories and two good men."

Claude's breath caught. Spies were the province of captains and lords, not low clerks from the ducal chancellery. "You wish me to countersign a report to the military council?"

"I wish you to go there."

The words hung in the air between them like a struck bell, the sound of it still vibrating in Claude's ears. He must have misheard. "My lord. I am a clerk. I copy letters. I file parchment."

"Precisely." Rolin's smile was thin, economical. "You file parchment. You are invisible. A man who reads and writes and says nothing—you are exactly what a spy network needs, and exactly what it will not suspect. I am not sending a soldier. Soldiers are noticed. I am sending a pen."

"A pen with a heartbeat," Claude heard himself say, and was immediately ashamed of it.

Rolin's smile did not waver. "You will travel as a merchant of parchment and ink. The trade is dull, which is perfect. You will present yourself at the town's markets, open a stall, listen. The network we seek moves its messages through merchants; it is the oldest cover there is. You will learn who in Compiègne handles the post between the town and the Armagnac lines."

"And if I am caught?"

"Then you were never a clerk of Burgundy. You were a merchant from Lorraine, with bad luck and no papers." Rolin reached into his robe and produced a small leather pouch, which he set on the desk between them. It clinked softly. "Money for expenses. And this—"

He produced a second item: a wax-sealed document, folded once, the ducal arms pressed into the dark red seal. Claude recognized it without needing to read it—a safe-conduct, signed in the duke's own hand, granting the bearer passage through Burgundian territory.

"You will not use this in Compiègne," Rolin said. "Only on the road south, if you must retreat. But if the Armagnacs catch you with it, it is a confession. So guard it carefully."

Claude stared at the pouch, at the document, at the pale folded skin of his own hands resting on the ledger. The grain levy for Auxois would sit unfinished. Someone else would copy it. Perhaps that was the true nature of being replaceable: the world continued whether he filled the page or not.

"When do I leave?" he asked.

"Tomorrow. Before dawn." Rolin stood, brushing a speck of ash from his sleeve. "You will need to be seen purchasing supplies. A man who leaves without supplies is a man running. A man with a cart of parchment and a modest purse is a man going to market. Tell anyone who asks that you have received a commission from the Abbey of Saint-Corneille—they buy in bulk for their copyists."

Claude nodded. His mind was already racing, sorting through what he knew of Compiègne—its bridges, its gates, the siege that had been lifted only months before, when the girl from Domrémy had broken the English lines. Joan. The Maid. She had been captured since—burned, some said, though the reports were tangled—but her shadow still lay over that region. Towns that had rallied to her banner now flew the French fleur-de-lis in stubborn defiance of Burgundy.

"One more thing," Rolin said, pausing at the door. "Do not trust anyone in Compiègne. Not the innkeepers. Not the priests. Not the fellow merchants. The network we seek is clever and well-fed with gold. It has survived two purges already. Whoever runs it, they are not a fool."

"I understand, my lord."

Rolin studied him for a moment, and something flickered in his eyes—not warmth, precisely, but an appraisal that suggested Claude had passed some small, unspoken test. Then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him, leaving Claude alone with the candle and the grain levy and the weight of a mission he had not asked for and could not refuse.

He sat for a long time in the darkening room, the flame burning low in its wax. The safe-conduct lay before him like a coiled snake. Tomorrow he would be a merchant of parchment in a town that hated Burgundians. Tomorrow he would begin lying as easily as he copied letters. He tried to imagine it—the market stalls, the strangers' faces, the moment when someone would glance at his hands and wonder if they were the hands of a clerk rather than a tradesman. He had soft fingers. Ink stains. He would need to borrow a set of calluses, perhaps.

A soft knock at the door made him start.

"Brother?"

Marguerite stood in the threshold, her white habit catching the last light of evening. She was younger than him by four years, but the veil made her eyes seem older, ringed with shadows that had not been there when she was a girl. She carried a small wrapped bundle in her hands, and her face was composed in that careful way of hers—the way she had when she was about to tell him something he did not want to hear.

"Marguerite." He stood, crossing to her. "You should not be walking alone after dark."

"I am a nun, Claude. God walks with me." But she smiled, and for a moment she was the girl who had chased him through the orchards of their childhood home. "I came to say farewell. Mother's anniversary mass is done, and I return to Saint-Lazare in the morning."

Claude felt a pang of guilt. He had not attended the mass—he had been copying the grain levy, had told himself he would send a donation instead. "I am sorry I could not be there."

"You were working. It is what you do." She pressed the bundle into his hands. It was small and hard, rectangular, wrapped in coarse linen. "A parting gift. I had it blessed at the altar."

He unwrapped it. A silver ring, plain but heavy, set with a small dark stone—obsidian, or jet. It caught the candlelight for a moment and swallowed it whole.

"I thought it might remind you," she said softly, "that you are more than your ink and your ledgers. You are a man of faith, Claude. Whatever else you become, do not forget that."

He looked at the ring, then at her, and something caught in his throat. He could not tell her where he was going. He could not tell her what he had been asked to do. But her eyes were sharp—had always been sharp—and he had the sudden, uncomfortable sense that she already knew more than she was saying.

"Thank you," he said, slipping the ring onto his finger. It was loose. He would need to have it sized, or wear it on another finger. "It is beautiful."

"It is yours." She reached up and touched his cheek, a gesture so brief it might have been a blessing or a goodbye. "Be careful, Claude. The world is not kind to men who see too much."

He tried to smile. "I am only a clerk, sister. I see what is placed before me."

She looked at him for a long moment, and then she turned and walked away down the corridor, her white habit receding into the shadows like a ghost fading at dawn. Claude stood in the doorway, the ring cold against his skin, and realized he had not asked her how she came to have a silver ring blessed for a brother who was already planning to leave in secret.

He closed the door and sat back down at his desk. The grain levy waited, unfinished. Tomorrow he would be someone else.

Tomorrow he would be a merchant of parchment in a town that flew the banner of his enemies.

He did not sleep.