Read Chapter 23: The Monk's Confession

The monastery’s bell tolled compline as I found Brother Anselm in the herb garden, his hands stained green to the wrist. He did not startle when I stepped from the shadow of the cloister wall. He only looked at me with the weary patience of a man who had been expecting a reckoning for some time.

“You are the one who fought the Armagnacs,” he said. “The others spoke of you at supper.”

“I am the one who found your letters.”

He set down his trowel. The last light bled orange across his tonsure, making him look older than I had first judged—fifty, perhaps, with a face lined not by hard living but by the quiet corrosion of a secret kept too long.

“I thought they burned the letters,” he said.

“They burned some.” I stepped closer, my hand resting on the pommel of the sword I had bought with my father’s ring. “But an inquisitive mind kept one. A letter in a woman’s hand, directing troop movements through Ferrières. A woman who signed herself as a nun of Saint-Jean.”

The monk’s breath went out of him. He sat heavily on the stone bench, his garden apron crumpling.

“You are Burgundian,” he said.

“I am.”

“Then you will kill me.”

“I am also a clerk. I want the truth first, and I will decide on killing after.”

He stared at me for a long moment, reading my face with the practiced eye of a confessor who had heard every shade of lie and truth. Then he nodded, as if he had found whatever he sought.

“Her name is Sister Marguerite,” he said. “Or so she told me.”

My blood sang. I kept my face still, but my hand tightened on the sword.

“Describe her.”

“Tall. Dark hair, always pinned back fiercely. A scar on her left wrist, like a burn. She walked like a soldier, not a nun, and she never prayed when she visited the chapel.”

Marguerite. My sister. The burn was from the summer she was twelve, reaching into the cookfire for a fallen skewer. She had worn the scar like a badge ever since.

“You met her here?” I asked.

“Three times. She came with letters to send north, and took letters that arrived for her. I never read them—I could not read Latin or French well. But I could see the seals were noble.”

“And you never asked who she truly was?”

The monk’s face twisted. “I asked once. She told me that God’s work often required discretion, and that I should consider the souls saved by our correspondence. What kind of abbot would I be if I refused to help a nun who said she carried messages for the Church?”

“The Church does not move soldiers through Ferrières.”

“I know that now.” He said it without defense, a simple admission of his own corruption. “But by the time I suspected, it was too late. She had said she would expose my sister’s family in Lille if I ever spoke. My sister’s husband is a wool merchant who trades in Burgundian territories. One letter from the wrong hand would ruin him.”

Blackmail. Of course. Marguerite did not persuade—she collected weaknesses and wielded them with surgical cruelty. I had learned that at the same hearth where she earned her scar.

“You said she gave you letters to send north,” I said. “Could you identify her contacts?”

The monk shook his head. “I sent them to a broker in Reims, a man who sells reliquaries on the Rue des Chanoines. She told me he would know the destination.”

A broker in Reims. Not a name, but a place. A thread, at least.

“And what did she give you, in return for these favors?”

The monk’s hand went to his belt pouch. He loosened the drawstring and drew out a small object that caught the fading light—a coin, but not struck in any mint I knew. He held it out to me.

“She gave me this. She said that if I ever needed to reach her network, I should present it to the sacristan of the cathedral in Reims. A token, she said. To identify a friend.”

I took it from his palm. The coin was silver, heavier than it looked, and on one face was stamped a web—not a spider’s work, but a schemer’s map, lines converging on a single point. On the obverse, a single key, crossed with a short blade.

I turned it over. The key.

My father’s ring had borne two crossed keys. This coin bore one key crossed with a sword.

“She gave you this willingly?” I asked.

“She did. I think she meant to bind me closer to her cause. She said that anyone who carried one of these was sworn to her service, and that the network would feed and shelter them. It was a mark of trust.”

I closed my fist around the coin. In Marguerite’s mind, this monk had been a tool, a thread in a tapestry she wove from here to Reims and beyond. But tools could be taken. Threads could be pulled.

“Do you know where she went?” I asked.

“South. She came three weeks ago to take her last letter and said God was calling her to new fields. She spoke of Troyes, and then of the lines beyond. She seemed excited, which frightened me more than anger would have. She is not a woman who shows emotion without purpose.”

Something cold settled in my chest. Troyes. The town on the road to Reims, the gateway to the French heartland. If Marguerite was moving toward the advancing French army, she was carrying something more important than troop positions. She was carrying the shape of a plot that could end the Burgundian cause in a single stroke.

“You said she spoke of anyone else. A man. Someone who commanded her.”

The monk frowned. “She never spoke of a superior. But once, when she thought I was asleep, I heard her pray. Not in the way of our order—she spoke like a soldier reporting to an officer. She called him, ‘The Conspirator.’ And she said, ‘Your design will be complete soon, and the world will know your name.’“

The hairs on my neck rose. Not Marguerite. Someone above her. A master architect moving pawns across a board that stretched from Dijon to the Loire.

And my sister, the Spider of the Armagnac network, was a thread in his web.

I pocketed the coin. The monk watched me with apprehension.

“You will not kill me,” he said. It was not a question.

“No,” I said. “You will come with me.”

“Where?”

“To Reims. You delivered her letters—you will show me the broker who received them.” I saw his face work through half a dozen objections, and I cut them all off. “Your sister’s family is safe if you cooperate. If you refuse, I will leave you here for the Burgundian soldiers who will arrive within a day, searching for the man who aided the enemy.”

The lie did what the truth could not. The monk rose, brushed the soil from his apron, and gave me a nod of grim resignation.

“The bell will be missed,” he said.

“So will you. Get your boots.”

As he shuffled toward the dormitory, I turned the coin over in my palm. The web. The key. Two symbols joined in silver.

My father had sold a promise in Reims. Marguerite had built a network in Reims. And somewhere in that city of coronation and kings, the Conspirator waited to make his final move.

I had lost my ring, my name, and my honor. But I held in my hand the key to a door my sister had never expected me to find.

The monk was my shadow now. But Marguerite’s coin would open doors I had not yet imagined.