Read Chapter 25: The Conspirator's Trap

The Green Goose stood wedged between a cooper’s workshop and a tanner’s yard, its sign creaking in the evening wind. Claude handed the reins of his poor horse to a stable boy who looked at the animal with open pity, then nodded once at Anselm. The monk had exchanged his robes for a laborer’s tunic in Dijon, and now looked less like a man of God and more like a frightened traveling companion.

“Wait here,” Claude said. “If I do not return within the hour, ride for the monastery and forget everything you have seen.”

Anselm opened his mouth to protest, but Claude was already pushing through the tavern door.

The common room was thick with smoke and the mutter of low voices. A trio of soldiers played dice in the corner, their pikes propped against the wall. A fat innkeeper wiped the same cup with the same rag in a rhythm that suggested he was more interested in the door than in the cup. Claude crossed to him and laid the sealed message flat on the counter.

“For Charpentier,” he said.

The innkeeper did not look at the message. He looked at Claude’s face, then at his hands, then back at his face. A long moment passed.

“Follow me.”

He led Claude through a curtained passage into a cramped back room lit by a single tallow candle. The room was empty save for a table, two chairs, and a man sitting in the far chair with his hands folded before him. He was not Charpentier. Claude knew this instantly, the way a clerk knows a forged signature. The man wore the tabard of a French captain, and behind him, in the shadows by the door, stood two armed soldiers who had not been visible until the flame guttered.

“Sit,” the captain said.

Claude did not sit.

“I have a message for Charpentier,” he said, keeping his voice flat. The message was still in his hand. The seal glinted in the candlelight, a web, a key, a blade. “It is for his eyes only.”

The captain smiled. It did not reach his eyes. “Charpentier was hanged last Tuesday for stealing a pig. Poor man. Losing his head over pork.” The smile vanished. “You are not a courier. You are a Burgundian who has been walking with a French noose around his neck since Reims. And you are going to tell me who sent you.”

Claude turned to run and found a sword point at his throat.

---

The dungeon was beneath the city’s old keep, a stone cellar that smelled of rot and old blood. They had taken his sword, his boots, the silver token coin, even the little knife he kept in his belt. They had not taken the thin blade sewn into the lining of his left boot, because they had taken the boot itself. But then the guard had seen it, laughed, and tossed it onto the table with the rest of his possessions before shoving him into the cell.

Claude sat against the damp wall, wrists chained to a ring bolted into the stone. The cell was too small to stand in and too cold to sleep in. He had been here for hours, or perhaps it was only one hour stretched into many by terror. The captain would come again. The captain had questions about the spider, about the network, about the cipher he had carried that was, he now understood, a lure.

He had been the bait.

The network had sent him to deliver a message to a dead man. The message was the trap. The Conspirator had wanted a Burgundian agent in the open, and Claude, with Brother Anselm’s prompting, had walked straight into the snare.

Why? To interrogate him. To learn what the Burgundians knew. To learn who else might be coming.

Or perhaps simpler. Perhaps it was to cut away a loose thread.

The door ground open. The captain entered, followed by a thin man in a clerk’s robe holding a quill and a wax tablet. The guard closed the door behind them and stood with his back to it, arms crossed.

“Let us begin again,” the captain said, pulling a stool close to Claude’s cell. He sat, elbows on knees, the posture of a man settling in for a long afternoon. “What do you know of the woman called the Widow Blanchard?”

“There is no woman,” Claude said.

“Then why did you carry her message?”

“Because I wanted to meet Charpentier.”

“Charpentier is dead.”

“Then the message was not for him,” Claude said. “Tell me, Captain—who paid you to catch a courier who was sent by your own allies? Or did you not know that the seal on that letter matches your master’s own hand?”

The captain’s face flickered. Just for a moment. But Claude was a clerk who had spent years watching men lie for debts and women lie for love. He saw the crack.

The captain stood, walked to the table where Claude’s possessions lay in a neat row—the coin, the folded message, a purse with three silver coins, the small knife—and picked up the coin. He turned it over, watching the candlelight catch the blade-and-key etching.

“This token,” he said slowly. “It is not one of ours.”

“Then why did you take it so carefully?”

He should not have said that. The captain’s eyes hardened. He dropped the coin and walked to Claude’s cell, and the guard was already moving forward with a set of iron pliers that glinted in the lamplight.

“I am going to remove one finger for every lie,” the captain said.

He did not get to the first finger. When the guard opened the cell door, Claude lunged. His wrists were still chained, but the chain was long enough for a desperate man. He wrapped it around the guard’s neck and pulled, dragging the man to the cobblestones. The captain rushed forward, drawing his dagger, and Claude twisted, caught the guard’s sword belt, and pulled the blade free as the man gurgled and went slack.

The captain checked his strike, surprised by the sudden sword in the prisoner’s hand.

Claude did not wait. He drove the blade forward, two-handed, and the captain gasped and crumpled, blood spreading across his chest. Claude dropped the sword, fell to his knees beside the captain, and went through his pockets. The key was in the captain’s purse. He unlocked his shackles, staggered to the table, retrieved the coin and the knife and the purse of coins, and left the message where it lay.

He found the outer door barred from the other side. There was no other way out.

He would have to go deeper.

As he turned down the corridor, he passed the empty cell and noticed, behind a crumbling section of the far wall, a seam of torchlight where there should have been nothing but stone. A hidden passage. He pried at the loose blocks with his knife, and they gave way with a groan of old mortar, revealing a narrow stair descending into darkness.

Claude looked back at the dead guard, the dying captain, and the message still lying on the table like a baited hook.

He descended.