Read Chapter 11: The Armagnac Plot

The candle guttered. Claude leaned close to the wax tablet he’d hidden beneath his pallet, the prior’s suspicious glance still fresh in his mind. He had retrieved it an hour past midnight, when the dormitory lay silent save for the wind’s complaint against the shutters. Now, by the stolen light, he traced the carved letters of the Armagnac dispatch with his fingertip, working the cipher the way Vaux had taught him in the warehouse’s dying glow.

*Glass merchant. Aubert. Feast of Saint André. The Duke will come to the chapel for Truce Mass. A chalice of Northern glass, laced with nightshade, placed by a deacon who owes the Dauphin silver.*

Claude’s breath stopped.

The Truce Mass. Duke Philippe had announced it himself—a gesture of piety before the peace negotiations at Arras. Every noble in Burgundy would attend, including Chancellor Rolin, who would sit two pews from the altar. And Aubert, the glass merchant, had standing commission to supply the chapel’s vessels. Claude had seen the man’s mark on a crate in the warehouse. The same mark was stamped on the letter beneath his fingers.

His hand trembled. The flame danced.

He could take this to Rolin tomorrow. The chancellor would reward him, restore the D’Argent name, end the whispers of his father’s disgrace. But the letter also contained a list of the Spider’s couriers—intercepts routed through Marguerite’s own convent. If Claude sent the full dispatch, his sister’s name would rise from the page like smoke. Rolin would burn her at the stake before the week was out.

Claude pressed his palms into his eyes until colors bloomed. His oath to the Duke. His blood to Marguerite. The prior’s suspicion. The masked figure’s warning: *Your sister is not the Spider.* But she was. She had told him so herself, with the same calm voice she used to scold him as a boy for stealing honey from the larder.

He could not send the letter. He could not ignore it. The Duke would die, and the realm would fracture, and his sister would have compelled a murder Claude had chosen to enable by silence.

There was only one path left.

He blew out the candle and dressed in the dark.

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Dawn mist clung to the cobblestones as Claude crossed the town toward the convent’s outer wall. He knew the place—a whitewashed almshouse beside the church of Saint-Michel where Sister Marie-Claire received penitents on Thursdays. But today was not Thursday. He circled to the garden gate, the one she used when she slipped out on what she called her *errands of mercy*. The gate hung on a rusted hinge, unlatched. He pushed it open.

The garden lay empty. Lettuce rows stood unweeded. A bucket of washing sat abandoned by the well, water going grey.

He moved to the cloister door and knocked once, twice, three times—the pattern Vaux had taught him. Nothing. He tried the latch. Locked.

A novice appeared at the far end of the corridor, her face round and frightened. “The sister is gone,” she said before Claude could ask. “She left last evening for Sainte-Croix. A sick aunt, she said.”

Sainte-Croix was twenty miles east. Marguerite had no aunt.

Claude thanked the novice and retreated the way he came, his mind spinning possibilities. Had she fled? Had one of her agents turned? Or had the prior’s suspicion already reached the chancellor’s ears, and Marguerite had been forced to run?

He ducked into the alehouse beside the river gate—a neutral ground where clerks rubbed shoulders with carters—and took a corner table. He ordered bread and watered wine he did not drink. His eyes scanned the room’s comings and goings, waiting for a familiar face, a coded gesture, something.

Minutes crawled.

Then a boy in a patched tunic sidled to his table. He dropped a folded scrap of parchment into Claude’s palm without a word and vanished into the crowd before Claude could open his mouth.

The note was in Marguerite’s hand—sharp, slanted, urgent:

*Brother. You have found what I feared you would find. Do not bring it to Rolin. He is not what he seems. Meet me at the old mill on the Loire road before Compline, or all is lost. I will explain everything. —M.*

Claude read it twice. Three times. *He is not what he seems.* What did that mean? That Rolin was a traitor? That the chancellor himself played both ends against the middle, whispering the Duke’s plans into Armagnac ears while taking the Duke’s purse?

He thought of the chancellor’s letter, impatient and demanding, and the way Rolin had pressed him for the list of names with a hunger that seemed more than political. A man with debts, perhaps. A man with a French sword at his back.

Claude’s fingers tightened around the parchment. The mill on the Loire road was an hour’s walk. Compline was two hours away. He had time to return to his cell, retrieve the letter and tablet, and make for the mill. Or he had time to ride to Dijon and lay the truth at Rolin’s feet.

*Or all is lost.*

His father’s face rose in his mind—how grey and broken it had looked when Marguerite described it. The Duke had forgotten the D’Argents who bled for him at Marignano. Had forgotten the farmlands confiscated after his father’s arrest on trumped-up charges. Had forgotten, and would keep forgetting, while the family withered.

But the Duke would not forget the assassin’s chalice if Claude did nothing.

He stood, leaving coins on the table. His feet carried him first toward the cathedral quarter, where the chancellery stood—then stopped him at the crossroads before the bridge.

The wind shifted, carrying the rot of the river.

Claude turned left, toward the Loire road, the mill, and whatever truth his sister meant to deal him. The parchment crinkled in his fist; he swore he could feel the weight of his oath pressing against it from the other side.

Somewhere behind him, he heard the soft scrape of a boot on stone. He looked back. The street was empty.

But the watching, he knew, had already begun.

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