Read Chapter 22: The Road to Reims

The road to Reims was mud and bones.

Claude rode at the rear of the mercenary column, keeping his hood low and his tongue quieter still. Eight men ahead of him, their captain a scarred veteran who called himself Bricot, laughed at something crude and spat into the ditch. They were deserters from the Burgundian siege lines, men who had decided the war was better plundered than fought. Claude had fallen in with them at a crossroads tavern, claiming he was a discharged man-at-arms from Lorraine, and they had accepted him with the indifference of wolves who do not count the teeth of strangers.

His horse was a sorry beast, a sway-backed roan with a limp in its left foreleg, but it carried him south and that was enough. The pawnbroker's coin had bought the saddle, the sword, and four days of bread. Claude kept his hand near the hilt as they rode, watching the tree lines for movement.

The ambush came at midday, in a stretch of oak forest where the road bent sharply around a shallow stream.

Bricot raised his fist. The column halted. Claude heard it a breath later—the snap of a branch, the whisper of something metal brushing leather. Then the arrows came.

The first shaft took the lead rider in the throat. He made a sound like a punctured bellows and slid from his saddle, boots catching in the stirrups as his horse bolted. The second arrow struck Bricot's shield, splintering against the painted wood.

"Armagnacs!" someone screamed.

Claude wrenched his horse's head around, but the way behind was already closing. A dozen riders in the white-and-red surcoats of the Dauphin's men emerged from the trees, lances lowered. The mercenaries broke, scattering like chaff.

Claude kicked his roan hard, driving it off the road and into the undergrowth. Branches whipped his face. Behind him, steel sang against steel and a man howled. He did not look back.

The pursuit lasted a mile. Claude's horse stumbled twice, nearly pitching him over its ears, and the third time it came up lame, favoring its right foreleg badly. He slid off, sword drawn, and dragged the animal into a thicket of hazel. The sound of hooves passed on the road—two, three riders, shouting to one another in the clipped accents of the Armagnac south. Claude held his breath until they faded.

The horse was finished. Its leg had swollen to the size of a man's thigh, and it stood trembling with its head low. Claude drew his knife and ended it quickly, then stripped the saddle and hid it beneath a fallen log. He walked south on foot, following the road at a careful distance, the sun sinking toward the treetops.

He found the monastery at dusk.

It was a small house, stone and timber, crouched in a clearing with a bell tower that had seen better centuries. A wooden sign hung crooked above the gate, its lettering worn to nothing. Claude approached with his hands visible, sword sheathed, and called out in the name of Saint Martin, patron of soldiers and beggars, hoping one of those would prove sympathetic.

The door opened a crack. An old monk peered out, face creased like dried fruit. His eyes went to Claude's sword, then to the road behind him.

"Alone?" the monk asked.

"Alone."

The door opened wider. "Come. The Armagnacs do not respect sanctuary, but God's roof is still warmer than the forest."

Brother Anselm was the monastery's only permanent resident, a man so thin his habit seemed to hang on a skeleton. He fed Claude bread and weak beer, and listened without comment as Claude explained he was a soldier who had lost his company in the skirmish. The monk nodded with the weariness of a man who had heard many such stories.

They sat in the refectory as night fell, a single candle between them. The monastery was silent, empty of the chant and routine that should have filled it. Anselm saw Claude noticing.

"The others left," the monk said. "When the fighting came close. I stayed. Someone must keep the lamps lit."

"For whom?" Claude asked.

"For whoever comes." Anselm's eyes flickered to the window, to the dark road beyond. "There are many who come, these days. Soldiers, messengers, women in need of shelter. The war has made pilgrims of everyone."

Claude nodded, reaching for his cup. Then he stopped.

On the table beside the candle lay a folded square of parchment, sealed with a drop of red wax. The seal bore a mark Claude had seen before—a small web, delicately pressed, like the track of a spider across the wax.

His hand moved before his mind caught up. He reached for it. Anselm's voice cut through the silence.

"I would not read that, if I were you."

Claude's fingers hovered over the seal. "Where did this come from?"

"A messenger brought it this morning. He did not stay." Anselm's voice was careful, measured. "He rides for the French lines, I think. I do not ask questions of men who carry such tokens."

"Tokens?"

Anselm paused. The candle guttered. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped to a whisper.

"You are not a soldier, are you? Not a deserter from the siege. I have seen soldiers eat. You eat like a clerk who has forgotten to be hungry."

Claude's throat tightened. "I am a traveller."

"You are a man with questions." Anselm folded his hands. "And I am a monk with a sin on his conscience. Perhaps we can help each other."

He reached into his sleeve and drew out a small object, placing it on the table between them. A coin—but not one Claude recognized. It was heavier than a livre, stamped with a strange device: a single eye, open, with a tear falling from it.

"I have carried letters for them," Anselm said. "The French. I told myself it was charity. A nun came to me, months ago—small, dark-haired, with a voice that could charm the birds from the trees. She said she was from a convent in the south, that she needed a safe hand to carry messages between houses of God. I believed her."

Claude's breath caught. Small. Dark-haired. A voice that could charm.

"What did she look like?" he asked, too quickly.

Anselm studied him. "Young. Twenty years, perhaps. A scar on her jaw, like a crescent moon. She spoke of her brother often. Said he was a good man, caught in a bad service."

The candle flickered. Claude's blood turned to ice.

"When you carried these letters," he said, forcing the words out, "where did you take them?"

"To Reims. To a house behind the cathedral, where a widow takes in boarders. The letters passed to her, and from her, I do not know where." Anselm pushed the coin across the table. "She gave me this before she left. Said anyone who held it was a friend to her cause. I have no use for it."

Claude picked up the coin. It was warm in his palm, heavier than it looked.

"The woman," he said. "The one who gave you this. What name did she use?"

The monk's lips moved in a smile that did not reach his eyes.

"She said her name was Marguerite. But I have learned that in times like these, the name a person gives you is rarely the name God knows them by."

Outside, the wind rose, rattling the shutters. Claude closed his fingers around the coin. He had thought the network was a town, a node of conspirators in a single place. But the monk's words opened a wider map—letters moving between monasteries, a nun in the south, a widow in Reims, a coin that passed from hand to hand like a key turning in a lock.

The Spider was not in one place. It was everywhere.

And his sister had woven the first thread he had touched.