Read Chapter 12: The Missing Clerk

The mill stood dark against the paling sky, its wheel silent, the stream that should have driven it reduced to a trickle of mud and stone. Claude approached from the treeline, keeping to the shadows of the hawthorn hedge, his hand resting on the knife at his belt. The note had said Compline, but the bells of Saint-Jacques had rung the hour long ago, and no light burned in the mill's single window.

He circled the building once before entering. The door hung half-open, swollen with damp, and the air inside smelled of rotting grain and old straw. Empty sacks lay crumpled in corners like sleeping men. Nothing moved. No breath sounded save his own.

"Margeurite," he whispered into the dark. The name fell flat, swallowed by the silence.

He searched the lower floor first—beneath the grinding stones, between the loose planks of the floor, inside the rusted iron hopper. Nothing. The ladder to the loft creaked under his weight, and he climbed with the knife drawn, half-expecting a blade to greet him at the top. But the loft was empty too, save for a pallet of straw and a mouse that skittered into the shadows.

He was about to leave when his boot caught on a plank that gave more than it should. He knelt, ran his fingers along the seam, and found the hidden latch disguised as a knot in the wood. It lifted with a soft click.

Inside the compartment lay a leather satchel, cracked with age, its strap snapped. Claude pulled it free and sat back on his heels. The weight of it told him what it held before he opened it—papers, and something heavier, a small object that clinked against the buckle.

He opened the satchel. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, were a wax tablet, a broken seal of the Burgundian chancellery, and a journal bound in calfskin. The name on the first page stopped his breath.

*Pierre Laurent.*

The previous clerk. The man whose disappearance had opened the post in Compiègne that Claude had been sent to fill. The man Chancellor Rolin had described as "lost to fever" when Claude had asked after him.

But Laurent's journal held no mention of a fever. Instead, the entries were written in a tight, hurried hand, each one scrawled as if the writer expected to be interrupted at any moment.

*Three weeks since I arrived. The town smiles at me in the daylight, but at night the walls have ears. I have begun to suspect that the Spider's network reaches further than the French lines. Someone close to the Duke's own court feeds her information. I cannot name it yet, but the pattern is there—supply movements known only to the chancellery appear in Armagnac hands within days.*

Claude turned the page. The next entry was dated a fortnight later.

*I have narrowed my suspicions to three names. The quartermaster's deputy, who knows the routes but not the dates. The confessor at Saint-Jacques, who hears too much and says too little. And the chancellor's own courier, who travels between Compiègne and Dijon with sealed dispatches. But the courier is a fool—he drinks too much and talks to whores. Unless the drinking is a mask.*

The journal grew more erratic as the entries continued. Dates were missed. The handwriting stretched thinner, more desperate.

*I am being followed. Twice today I saw the same face in different quarters of town. A woman in grey, too tall to be a nun, too plain to be a lady. She watches me from doorways and disappears when I approach.*

Claude's stomach turned cold. A woman in grey. Too tall to be a nun.

*The pattern is clearer now. The leaks stopped during the Feast of Saint Michael, when the chancellery closed and no dispatches moved. Whoever the traitor is, they do not act alone—they wait for a sign, a signal that the time is right. I have begun to map the signals. Breadcrumbs left in windowsills. A blue thread tied to a gatepost. Small things, easily missed, unless you know to look.*

The final entry was dated six days before Laurent's disappearance. The writing was almost illegible, the ink smeared as if the page had been wet.

*I have found it. The name. The proof. I cannot write it here—if this journal is found, they will burn it and I will have died for nothing. But I have hidden the evidence where the spider cannot reach. Trust the loom's shadow. Trust the man who has nothing to lose. If you are reading this, I am already dead. Do not trust the one who speaks of peace. Do not trust the Chancellor's smile. And the woman in grey—*

The entry ended mid-sentence. The rest of the page was blank, but at the bottom, in a different ink, was a single mark.

A tiny spider, drawn with a single stroke of the pen.

Claude stared at it. The same symbol that had appeared in Étienne Vaux's last message. The same symbol that marked the network his sister commanded. He closed the journal and pressed his palms against his eyes, trying to force the thoughts into order.

Pierre Laurent had suspected a traitor in the Burgundian camp. He had narrowed it to three names. And then he had disappeared. Officially, fever. Unofficially, the Spider's work.

Claude had assumed, when he read the file in Dijon, that the Spider had killed Laurent. It was the obvious reading—a discovery followed by a silencing. But now, holding the journal, he saw a different possibility. Laurent had hidden his evidence. He had left a trail pointing to the loom's shadow. And the woman in grey who had watched him, followed him—

Marguerite had killed before. Claude knew this—had accepted it, even, in the cold light of logic. She was the Spider. She commanded assassins. The men who had died on the walls of Compiègne had died at her word.

But Laurent was not a soldier. He was a clerk, like Claude. A man with a quill and a measure of courage, who had stumbled onto something too large for him.

Something his sister had silenced.

Claude sat back, the journal heavy in his hands. The satchel held one more object—the small, heavy thing that had clinked against the buckle. He reached in and pulled it out.

It was a signet ring. The seal of the Burgundian chancellery, the ducal arms engraved in brass. Laurent would have been issued one on his appointment, and would have surrendered it on his death. If the ring was here, in a hidden compartment beneath a mill floor, then no one in Compiègne had reported it. The chancellery still believed Laurent's ring had been lost with him.

But it hadn't been lost. It had been hidden. And the only person who would hide a dead man's ring was the person who had killed him.

He thought of his sister's face in the candle maker's shop. Marguerite, who spoke of their father's illness with tears in her eyes. Marguerite, who asked him to switch sides for the sake of family. Marguerite, who had protected him from the agents who had seen his face.

And Marguerite, who wore grey when she moved through the town as Sister Marie-Claire.

The journal said the woman in grey had followed Laurent. It said the leak had continued during the Feast of Saint Michael, when the chancellery was closed. It said—

Claude stopped. His breath caught in his throat.

The Feast of Saint Michael. A year past. Claude had been in Dijon then, newly appointed to the chancellery as a junior copyist. And Marguerite had been at their father's bedside in Reims, or so she had written.

But their father's illness had been a lie. Marguerite had confirmed as much when she had told him the truth of her work. She had been the Spider for years, moving where the cause demanded, pretending to be a nun or a merchant's widow or a lady of the court.

She might have been in Compiègne during the Feast of Saint Michael.

She might have silenced Pierre Laurent.

The realization settled over Claude like a cold rain. He looked down at the journal, at the smeared ink of the final entry, at the spider drawn at the bottom of the page.

"Do not trust the one who speaks of peace," Laurent had written.

But Marguerite spoke of a different peace—the peace of the Dauphin's reign, the promise of a France free of Burgundian rule. And she had asked Claude to believe her.

He did believe her. That was the horror of it. He believed she loved him, believed she would not lie to him about their father, believed she had protected him because she was his sister.

But a sister who could kill a clerk for what he had discovered could kill again.

Claude tucked the journal into his tunic and closed the satchel. He could not leave Laurent's evidence here, where Marguerite might find it. He would take it to his room, hide it with the Armagnac letter and the wax tablet, and decide what to do when he had time to breathe.

He was halfway down the ladder when he heard the sound.

Footsteps, slow and deliberate, approaching the mill from the path he had taken. Two sets, at least, and the scuff of a third dragging behind.

He pressed himself into the shadow of the grinding stones, his hand on his knife, and waited.

The door creaked open. A shaft of grey light fell across the floor, and a figure stepped through.

"Claude," Marguerite said. "I know you're here. We need to talk."

Her voice was calm, unhurried—the voice of a woman who had already won. And in that moment, with Laurent's journal burning against his chest, Claude was not certain she had not.