Read Chapter 3: The Weaver's Loom

The gatekeeper’s lantern swung low as Claude approached, and he kept his hood drawn against the drizzle that had begun to fall. The walls of Compiègne rose above him like a clenched fist, and the guard who stepped forward had the tired, suspicious eyes of a man who had seen too many deceits.

“Your business?” the guard asked, voice flat through the portcullis slats.

Claude let his shoulders soften, his posture shift into something humbler. He had practiced this in the mirror at the chancellery, and again in the cart on the road: the stoop, the slightly parted lips, the way a man who spent his life in prayer might blink too slowly.

“Sanctuary, brother,” he said. “I am a lay brother from the Abbey of Saint Lucien, sent to seek relics for our chapel. The shrine of Saint Valerian has drawn me here.”

He pulled the forged letter from his breast—the one Rolin’s scribes had aged with tea and candle smoke—and pressed it through the gap between the iron bars. The guard took it, squinting in the lamplight.

“A brother,” the guard said, reading. He peered at Claude, then at the letter, then at the ring on Claude’s finger. The silver band Marguerite had given him. “You carry silver. The abbey allows that?”

Claude’s pulse jumped, but his voice stayed measured. “A gift from my sister, brother. She took vows at the convent of Sainte-Anne in Dijon. The ring is a reminder of her prayers. I could not leave it behind.”

The guard grunted, suspicion flickering before it died. He handed the letter back. “The shrine is in the chapel of the Virgin, behind the choir. Mind your time there. This town doesn’t welcome strangers who linger.”

“I will pray and be gone.”

The gate groaned open. And Claude D’Argent, clerk of the Burgundian chancellery, spy of Duke Philip’s war machine, stepped into Compiègne as Brother Étienne, a humble relic-seeker with nothing but faith in his satchel.

The streets were darker than he expected. The town had an air of siege about it—barred shutters, fewer torches than a loyalist city should have, and a silence that pressed against the ears. Claude walked slowly, letting his eyes adjust, noting the routes, the blind corners, the way the cathedral tower loomed over the rooftops like a shepherd watching over a flock.

He found the house he was looking for on the weaver’s lane, a crooked timber building with the sign of a golden shuttle over the door. Master Jacques’s workshop. Rolin had a list of safe sleepers in the region, and Jacques was on it—a man who grieved for his son in Burgundian service and hated Armagnac interference in trade.

Jacques was a broad man, gray-bearded, with arms like rope from pulling looms. He opened the door at Claude’s knock, took one look at his pilgrim’s garb, and shook his head.

“We’re full,” he said, already closing.

“Your son gave me your name,” Claude said quietly.

The door stopped moving. Jacques’s eyes narrowed. His son, Michel, had been a foot soldier under Duke Philip, dead near Paris three years ago. Only someone from inside the chancellery would know the old man’s grief.

“The attic is clean, but the stairs are steep,” Jacques said after a pause. “Ten pennies a week, and you keep your voice low. This town hears everything twice.”

The attic room was small, windowed with a narrow arrow-slit that looked out over the rooftops toward the market square. Straw mattress, a wooden stool, a cracked basin. Claude set down his satchel and turned to the old weaver.

“You think I’m a deserter,” Claude said.

“I think you’re a man who doesn’t belong in holy robes,” Jacques replied, leaning against the doorframe. “But you knew my boy’s name, and that buys you one night.”

“It buys me more than that,” Claude said. “I need to understand this town. The mood. Who speaks boldly, who keeps silent.”

Jacques crossed his thick arms. “Speak what you mean, then.”

“Is there talk of the Armagnacs? Of the Dauphin’s cause?”

A shadow passed over the weaver’s face. “Careful even in this room,” he said, glancing at the walls. “But you’ll hear it anyway. The church bells ring for Mass, and the prayer is for Charles of Valois, not your Duke Philip. The market women sell bread under the Dauphin’s colors on feast days. The inn at the Blue Boar is where the men drink and where the talk gets fat and foolish. The church crypt has a locked door they open only on certain nights.”

Claude stored each detail away. The church. The market. The inn.

“The Blue Boar,” he repeated.

Jacques grunted. “You’d be a fool to drink there. It’s not for travelers. It’s for locals, and strangers who come too often get noticed. If you want parchment and news, try the market square booth of Étienne Vaux. He’s a cloth merchant, but he keeps a table of legal papers beside the cloth bolts. He sells to anyone, and he listens well when he pours wine.”

Claude committed the name to memory. Étienne Vaux. A potential contact—or a trap wrapped in wool and legal parchments.

“Thank you for the counsel, Master Jacques.”

“Didn’t give it for free,” the weaver muttered, turning his heavy frame to leave. “Keep your promises, brother, or whatever you are. This town will eat a man who walks in the dark without knowing the night watch’s habits. They change after vespers. Two guards, and they pass by the weaver’s lane at the hour of the candle, not before.”

The latch clicked shut. Claude stood by the window, watching the wisps of chimney smoke rise from Compiègne’s rooftops, curling into a sky the color of charcoal. He knew the shape of a network when he saw one emerging: a church for secret gatherings, a market for messages, an inn for braggarts and leaks.

But a network needed leader. Rolin had warned him that he would be hunting a clever adversary. Someone who knew how to use the town’s rhythms against its occupiers.

Claude sat on the stool and pulled out his writing case. A small bottle, a quill, a blade of smooth parchment. He had been trained in the chancellery’s darker arts—how to write letters that only a certain heat would reveal. The ink was a trick of lemon juice and vinegar, invisible when dry, scorched brown when held to a flame.

He dipped the quill, but paused.

The ring on his finger caught the light. Marguerite’s silver band, plain but for the tiny etching on the inner curve—an oak tree with roots spreading beyond the circle’s edge. He traced it with his thumb, thinking of her parting words.

*Trust what is written in ways you cannot see.*

He didn’t know why that surfaced now, but it pressed against his mind like a stone in his shoe. He shook it off and wrote his first report to Chancellor Rolin.

*Compiègne is quiet on the surface but seething beneath. The church crypt is locked on certain nights. A cloth merchant named Étienne Vaux might serve. The inn called the Blue Boar collects its share of loud mouths. No sign yet of the network’s head, but the town’s devotion to Charles is not complete—some hold coins of Burgundy close even as they cheer for the Dauphin.*

He signed it with the coded mark Rolin had given him—a single oak leaf, drawn at the bottom corner. He would pass it to Rolin’s courier in the market square beneath the butcher’s stall, the next time the bells of Saint Valerian rang tercet.

He pressed the parchment flat to dry, but as he blew softly to hurry it, his eye caught the ring again.

The oak on the ring. The oak leaf on his report.

That was coincidence. It had to be.

He dismissed it, rolled the parchment, and sealed it with a plain wax blob. Then he knelt on the straw, not to pray—he hadn’t prayed properly since he was an altar boy—but to think. To plan.

He had come as a spy. He would leave a spider’s web in his wake. But something in the silence of the attic clawed at him, a whisper that he was not the only one weaving threads in Compiègne tonight.

He looked up at the ceiling. Somewhere in this town, in a crypt or an inn or a weaver’s shop, someone else was writing a report in invisible ink. Someone else was watching the night watch, counting guards, memorizing the rhythms of the cathedral bells.

And he knew, with a chill that had nothing to do with the autumn air, that when their two threads met, one of them would fray.

He set the writing case aside and blew out the candle. In the dark, the silver ring still seemed to catch a glimmer of light that wasn’t there.