Read Chapter 16: The Web Weaver

The rope-ladder stank of mildew and old water, but it held. Claude climbed out of the sewer mouth into a ditch choked with nettles, the night air cold against his wet skin. He had followed the ring’s engraving—a tiny heron, beak pointed east—through the tunnels until the symbol matched a storm drain beneath the town’s eastern wall. Beyond the wall lay pastureland, a scattering of crofters’ huts, and, a quarter-mile off, a solitary stone house with a moss-eaten roof and a single lit window.

The house of the elderly archivist, Étienne Fauvel. He had catalogued the town’s charters for forty years. Bent, rheumatic, harmless. Every clerk in Vaucouleurs had dismissed him as a relic.

Claude circled the property twice before approaching. No guards. No dogs. The door was oak, banded with iron that had not been replaced since the English wars. He tried the latch. Unlocked.

Inside, the room smelled of tallow and dust. Shelves lined every wall, crammed with ledgers, rolls of parchment, and wax tablets stacked like firewood. A single candle burned on a reading desk, and beside it sat an old man, his back to the door, his shoulders hunched over an open codex.

“You are late, Clerk D’Argent,” the old man said without turning. “The sewers add an hour to any journey. I should know. I designed the exit myself.”

Claude’s hand went to his belt, where the masked figure’s blade hung—borrowed, unbloodied. “You are the archivist?”

“I am the archivist’s ghost.” The old man rose slowly, and with his rise came a transformation Claude had seen only in troupe plays. He straightened his spine, rolled his shoulders, and reached up to peel away a mask of painted wax and grey horsehair. Beneath it, a face of perhaps fifty years, lean and scarred, with eyes the colour of slate and a nose that had been broken more than once. The man wore a tunic of fine wool beneath his scholar’s robe. A silver cross hung at his throat, but the hilt of a sword gleamed from a gap between the shelves.

He smiled, thin and dry. “My true name is Guilhem de Fiennes, envoy of His Most Christian Majesty, King Charles VII. But here, in this dung-heap of a Burgundian town, I am the man who remembers everything and says nothing. It makes an excellent disguise.”

Claude stepped back, mind racing. A French agent. In Vaucouleurs. The town was loyalist ground, honeycombed with Burgundian spies. How long had he been here? Fauvel—de Fiennes—had catalogued every charter, every letter, every scrap of parchment that passed through the town hall. He had read them all. Every dispatch Claude had prepared. Every coded note he’d intercepted.

He had been spying on the spies from the inside.

“You,” Claude said, “know everything.”

“I know enough.” De Fiennes gestured to a stool. “Sit. You smell of the river and you have blood on your cuffs. We have much to discuss, and I prefer my guests conscious.” When Claude did not move, the Frenchman sighed and poured two cups of wine from a jug on the desk. He pushed one across. “It is not poisoned. If I wanted you dead, you would not have found my door. That ring of yours was carved by a man who owes me his life.”

Claude looked at the silver ring on his thumb. Marguerite had given it to him the night before her testimony. He had thought it a keepsake, a sister’s gesture to soften the blow of betrayal.

“It was hers,” Claude said. “My sister’s.”

“It was made by Jean Aubert, the glass merchant. A fine craftsman.” De Fiennes took a sip of his own wine. “Also a servant of the Crown of France. As is your sister. As am I. We are all, in our way, pieces on a board that stretches from Paris to Dijon.”

The words struck like a mailed fist. Claude’s hand tightened on the borrowed blade. “You are telling me my sister is a French agent.”

“No. I am telling you she is a hostage.”

Claude went still.

De Fiennes set down his cup and folded his hands on the desk. His face lost its mocking edge. In the candlelight, he looked older, and tired. “Three years ago, your younger brother, Robert, was taken by a French raiding party near Saint-Dizier. He was fourteen. He had been sent to a cousin’s house for schooling. The cousin was a man of weak spirit. He sold the boy’s whereabouts for silver.” He paused. “Robert lives in the care of my king’s household in Bourges. Not as a prisoner, precisely. He is fed, clothed, given tutors. But he is watched. Always watched.”

Claude’s mind spun. Robert. He had not seen his brother in two years. Letters arrived, infrequent, in a hand that grew unsure, claiming he was content, studying his Latin, hoping to enter the Church. Claude had been too busy with his own duties to question it. Too trusting.

“And Marguerite,” Claude said, his voice hoarse. “What did you offer her?”

“We offered her nothing. We demanded. A French agent, one of our better ones, approached her at Michaelmas two years ago. She was given a choice: serve us, or receive your brother’s body in a coffin. She chose to serve.” De Fiennes spread his hands. “It was not a noble choice. It was the only choice. You would have done the same for her.”

“You are the Spider,” Claude said. “You are the one who runs the network.”

De Fiennes laughed, a dry rustle. “No. I am a weaver of threads, yes, but the Spider—the architect, the one your masters fear—he is above me. He is above us all, I suspect. I have never met him. I receive my orders through channels so tortuous they could make a serpent weep.” He leaned forward. “That is the truth of it. Your sister and I are puppets dancing on strings held by a hand none of us have seen. You think you understand betrayal. You do not yet understand the shape of the cage.”

Claude’s hands shook. He gripped the edge of the desk to steady them. “She denounced me.”

“She had to. We learned that your arrest was to be ordered by Dijon regardless. Marguerite’s testimony was a shield—if she accused you from within our ranks, she would be trusted again, and you would be kept somewhere we could reach you, rather than spirited to a cell in Dijon and hanged without witness.” De Fiennes paused. “Your sister is not the enemy. Your sister is the one who kept you alive.”

A log shifted in the hearth. Claude stared at the old man’s face, the lean lines of it, the stone-grey eyes. A French envoy. A puppet master’s agent. And his sister, a hostage to a war she had never chosen.

The truce mass was in three days. The Duke would drink from a poisoned chalice purchased from a glass merchant. A merchant who had made the ring on his finger.

“The glass merchant,” Claude said. “Aubert. He made my ring. He works for you.”

De Fiennes’s mouth twitched. “He works for whom he must. Which is why you have a problem, Clerk.” He drew a sealed parchment from his sleeve and laid it on the desk. “This arrived tonight by pigeon from Bourges. Aubert has learned that your message reached Captain de Beauvais—the warning you sent from your cell. He assumes, correctly, that you have penetrated the network’s outer skin. And so the plot has changed.”

Claude’s blood chilled. “Changed how?”

“The poisoned chalice is no longer the method.” De Fiennes tapped the parchment. “As of this hour, the glass merchant has been replaced. The new assassin is unknown to us. They will strike at the truce mass in a manner we cannot anticipate, because Aubert himself has only received a name, not a plan.” He met Claude’s eyes. “There is a code for the Truce Mass—a single phrase to signal the assassin to strike. Aubert was to carry it. Now it passes to another. And I do not know who that is.”

The candle guttered. De Fiennes’s face was half shadow, half light.

“But there is one person who does.” Claude’s voice was barely a whisper.

“Yes.” The Frenchman inclined his head. “Your sister knows the messengers. She knows who has been sent to replace him. If she will tell you, and if you can trust it, you might still stop the murder.”

Claude’s blade was in his hand before he knew he had drawn it. He pointed it at the archivist’s chest.

“Then take me to her. Now.”