Read Chapter 15: The Ring's Riddle

The key was cold iron, rough with rust, and it felt absurdly small in Claude’s palm. A key to a city. A key to a betrayal. He stood at the cell’s threshold, the corridor beyond lit by a single guttering torch, and listened. No footsteps. No jingle of guard’s mail. The masked figure had vanished as silently as he had come, leaving only the key and the echo of his words.

*Puppet. True master.*

Claude pressed his back to the damp stone and moved. The sewers—the figure had said the second cistern. He found the grate at the end of the corridor, where the floor sloped and the smell of rot and lime thickened. The key fit a lock he hadn’t noticed, hidden in the mortar beside the grate. It turned with a groan that seemed louder than thunder.

He dropped into darkness.

The fall was shorter than he expected—six feet, maybe less—and he landed in fetid water up to his calves. The chill shot through his boots, up his legs, and settled in his chest. He stood still, letting his eyes adjust. The sewer was a stone channel barely wide enough for two men, its walls slick with moss and mineral stains. Water trickled somewhere ahead, a gentle, indifferent sound.

He had no torch. No light. He moved by touch, one hand trailing the wall, counting his steps. The masked figure’s words circled in his mind like carrion birds. *Not the leader. A puppet.* Marguerite had sworn against him in open court, her voice steady, her eyes dry—and yet she had whispered *trust me* in the warehouse, and the masked figure had said she asked for his help.

None of it made sense. Unless it was meant not to.

He found the second cistern by the change in the water’s sound—a hollow, echoing splash where the channel opened into a broader chamber. The room was circular, brick-lined, with a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow. And there, set into the far wall at waist height, was an iron door.

The key turned again.

The door opened onto a small, dry alcove—a smuggler’s niche, perhaps, or a forgotten priest’s hole. A straw pallet lay in the corner, and a single tallow candle stood on a stone ledge beside a flint and steel. Someone had prepared this. The masked figure, or someone before him. Claude lit the candle, letting its weak flame push back the dark, and sat on the pallet. The water dripped. His clothes clung to him, cold and sour.

He pulled the ring from his finger.

It was Marguerite’s gift—a thin silver band, worn smooth by years. He had worn it since their father’s death, when she had pressed it into his palm and said, *“So you remember where you come from.”* He had never looked at it closely. Not really. It was just a ring, a piece of the past, a comfort he carried into the Chancellor’s service.

But now, in the candle’s wavering light, he saw what he had missed.

On the inside of the band, where the metal had worn thin, there was an engraving. Not a maker’s mark, not a family crest—he knew the D’Argent arms well enough. This was something else. A series of small, angular scratches, almost invisible against the silver’s patina. He held the ring close to the flame, turning it, and the scratches resolved into shapes.

Not letters. Not words.

A pattern.

Four lines, intersecting at angles, with a small circle at the crossing point, and a single dot beside the circle. It looked like a map, or a compass diagram, or the kind of geometric doodle a clerk might scratch in the margin of a ledger while thinking of something else.

Claude’s breath caught.

He had seen this pattern before. In the journal of Pierre Laurent, the vanished Burgundian clerk whose belongings he had found beneath the mill. Laurent had drawn it on the last page of his journal, beneath a scrawled entry about a *“hawk in the dovecote”*—an entry Claude had dismissed as the rambling of a frightened man.

But Laurent hadn’t been rambling. He had discovered a traitor, and then he had disappeared.

Claude traced the engraving with his thumb. A map. It had to be. But a map of what? Of where? He closed his eyes, trying to recall the layout of Beaune—the streets, the squares, the old walls. He had walked them often enough, carrying dispatches, memorizing routes, learning the town’s secrets.

The pattern was familiar. The four lines could be the four main roads converging on the market square. The circle at their crossing—the fountain. And the dot, set slightly south-east of the center…

The Tanner’s Alley.

A narrow, crooked passage that ran behind the Church of Saint-Étienne, lined with workshops that stank of lime and curing hides. It was a place a clerk would have no reason to visit—and a place where a spy could meet without being seen.

Claude opened his eyes.

*The ring’s riddle,* he thought. Marguerite had given him this ring years ago, long before the Armagnac network, before the plots, before the Truce Mass. Had she known what it contained? Or had their father placed the engraving there, passing it to her as a family secret she had never fully understood?

And what would he find in Tanner’s Alley?

He needed a new identity. A man skulking through the sewers in a torn clerk’s tunic would be stopped within a hundred paces. But the alcove held more than a pallet and a candle. Hanging from a peg on the wall was a rough woolen cloak, stained brown with mud, and a wide-brimmed hat of the kind worn by drovers and laborers. He put them on, feeling the disguise settle over him like a second skin.

Then he considered his next move.

The armagnac letter was still hidden in his room. His reports to Chancellor Rolin were planted to mislead—but not to save. The assassination plot was still ticking toward the Truce Mass, and the glass merchant, Aubert, was still out there, ready to pour poison into the Duke’s cup. Captain de Beauvais had received his warning, but whether the captain would act on it in time was another question entirely.

But the masked figure’s words had shifted his focus.

*Your sister is a puppet.*

If Marguerite was not the true leader, then the plot was not hers. And if the plot was not hers, then someone else was using her—using her guilt, her fear, her love for Claude—to control her movements. The same someone, perhaps, who had used Pierre Laurent and then erased him.

Claude blew out the candle, pocketed the ring, and felt his way back to the tunnel’s mouth.

Whoever held the strings was in Beaune. Claude intended to find them.

He ducked low and followed the water toward the daylight.