Read Chapter 19: The Aftermath of Dijon

The gates of Dijon had never seemed so tall, nor the eyes of its guards so heavy upon him. Claude rode slumped in the saddle, his tunic still stained with forest mud and three days of hard travel. The guards at the postern gate recognized him—or rather, recognized what he had become. No salute. No call for the captain of the watch. Just the slow creak of iron hinges and the stares of men who had heard the news before he had arrived to confirm it.

The courtyard of the ducal palace swarmed with clerks and messengers. They parted around him like water around a stone, their faces carefully blank. Claude dismounted and handed his reins to a stable boy who wouldn't meet his eyes. The boy took the horse and scurried away, and Claude stood alone in the middle of the yard, wondering if the heraldry of his house had been scraped from the palace walls already.

The Chancellor's antechamber was fuller than he remembered. Men in fine wool and velvet stood in clusters, murmuring in low voices. When Claude entered, the murmuring stopped. Then, after a beat too long to be natural, it resumed, louder, as if he weren't there at all.

He waited. He had learned patience in a dungeon, in a sewer, in the staring dark of the forest. But patience wore thin when the door to Rolin's private chamber opened and the Chancellor himself appeared in the frame, looking past Claude as if expecting someone else.

"Nicolas Rolin." Claude kept his voice level. "I must speak with you."

Rolin's eyes found him then, and what Claude saw in them was not anger but something worse: disappointment, the kind a father reserves for a son who has squandered everything.

"Claude D'Argent," Rolin said, loud enough for the room to hear. "You are stripped of your rank, your commission, and your seat at the ducal council, effective immediately. You will present yourself to the magistrate's court at the hour of terce tomorrow to answer for the failures that led us into the spider's web."

The words hit like a physical blow. Claude felt his jaw tighten, felt the heat rise in his chest. He stepped forward, lowering his voice so only Rolin could hear. "My lord, I have information you must hear. The intelligence I brought was incomplete because my sister—"

Rolin raised a hand, cutting him off with a gesture so final it might have been carved from stone. "Your sister is not a matter for this chamber, nor for the ducal court. She is a matter for the church, for the confessional, for your family's own conscience." His eyes were cold. "I will not have the affairs of Burgundy held hostage to your sibling disputes."

"This is no dispute," Claude hissed. "She has taken the Duke's secrets south. She walks with the blessing of his court even now, while the true master of the Spider remains unknown to us. If you condemn me, you condemn the only man who can—"

"Condemn you?" Rolin's voice raised slightly, and the rumble of conversation in the antechamber died again. "I am not condemning you, boy. I am giving you a trial. A courtesy. The Duke's own justice, before the noose or the sword finds you of its own accord. Take it or leave it, but do not presume to lecture me on the affairs of nations while you stand here with traitor's mud still on your boots."

The words stung more than the loss of rank. Claude stood tall, forcing his breathing steady. "I came back to face the Duke's justice because I still believe in it. But if you will not hear me, then I will find the truth on my own, and I will return with it nailed to a banner."

Rolin studied him for a long moment. Something flickered in his eyes—not sympathy, but perhaps the ghost of it. "You were a good clerk, D'Argent. Quick with numbers, quicker with people. But you let the people become your weakness. Your sister, your brother, your father's debts—a man of state cannot afford a family, Claude. They are leverage, nothing more."

The words were a curse dressed in advice. Claude felt them settle into his chest like stones. He said nothing.

Rolin turned and walked back into his chamber. The door closed with a soft click, and Claude was left standing in the antechamber, surrounded by men who had been his colleagues the week before and now couldn't look at him without flinching.

He walked out of the palace the same way he'd come, past guards who didn't salute and servants who looked through him. The sun had moved, slanting lower over the rooftops, and the streets of Dijon felt foreign in a way they never had before. He was born in this city. His father had kept a ledger in the merchants' quarter, had taught Claude to count by the glow of tallow candles. The stones under his feet had known his steps for twenty years.

Now they felt like a stranger's road.

He found his way to the house by instinct—the narrow three-story timber frame on the Rue des Tanneries, where he had grown up with Marguerite and little Étienne. The door was latched but not locked. He pushed inside and stopped.

The house was stripped. Not ransacked—stripped, methodical and cold. The furniture was gone from the main hall. The tapestries his mother had sewn, gone. The heavy oak table where his father had reviewed his accounts, gone. Dust motes floated in the shafts of evening light, and Claude's footsteps echoed on the bare boards.

He climbed the stairs to his father's old study, the room where Claude had learned to read contracts and bills of lading. The shelves were empty. The ledger table had been dragged to the center of the room, and on it lay a single folded sheet of parchment.

He picked it up. The seal was his father's own—the D'Argent mark of a silver crescent over a ledger-bound quill. He broke it and read.

The letter was dated six months before his father's death. It was addressed to Claude but had clearly never been sent. The old man's hand was shaky, thinner than Claude remembered.

*My son—*

*I have made arrangements for your future. I know you think I have been careless with the family fortunes, and perhaps I have. But know that everything I have done was to protect what I could not name to you in words. There is a debt, and it is not what it appears. When the time comes, you will understand. Do not trust the ledger. Do not trust the numbers. Trust only the ring and the blood it binds.*

*Your father,* *Antoine D'Argent*

Claude read the letter three times. The ring. He looked down at his hand, at the silver band Marguerite had given him in what felt like another lifetime. The engraving had led him to the archivist, to the old noble, to a truth that had unraveled everything he'd thought he knew.

Now his father's last words pointed at the same ring, the same blood.

"Do not trust the ledger," he murmured to the empty room. The dust motes shifted in the light. Somewhere in the city, a bell rang terce, marking the end of the day's work.

Claude folded the letter and tucked it inside his tunic, next to his heart. He could not go back to the palace. He could not face the magistrate's judgment with nothing but the word of a dead man and a traitor's ring. If he walked into that courtroom tomorrow, he was walking toward a rope.

No. He needed to find Marguerite. Not to turn her in, not to demand answers—but to understand. She had said she was protecting Étienne. She had said the masked figure was not the true master. She had said a hundred things that no longer fit together cleanly, and his father's letter had just scattered the pieces further.

But one thing was clear: whatever his father had done, whatever Marguerite had done, Claude would not find the truth in Dijon. The truth was south, with the French army, with the sister who had branded him a traitor and fled into enemy lines.

He left the empty house without looking back. The door swung shut behind him, and the lock clicked with a finality that felt like an ending.

Or perhaps a beginning.

Claude walked through the darkening streets toward the city's southern gate, a fugitive in the city of his birth, armed with nothing but a letter from a dead man, a silver ring, and a name he no longer knew how to trust.

The gatekeeper tried to stop him. Claude showed his father's letter, sealed with the D'Argent mark, and said he was riding out to settle a debt. The gatekeeper squinted at the seal, at Claude's dirty tunic, at the empty scabbard at his hip.

"Debt," the gatekeeper said, and spat. "Everyone's got debts these days."

He opened the gate anyway.

Claude crossed the bridge over the outer fosse and did not turn around. The city of Dijon fell away behind him, its towers darkening against the last orange smear of the sky. Ahead lay the road south, toward the Loire, toward the French lines, toward a sister he did not know and a truth he could not name.

He walked until the stars came out, and then he kept walking.