Read Chapter 34: The Countdown

The morning light was wrong. It came through the leaded windows of the inn's upper chamber like watered wine, thin and colorless, as if the city itself knew what Claude was about to do.

He turned the silver coin over in his fingers. Étienne Vaux's coin, earned with a dead man's blood. On one face, the cross of Burgundy. On the other, the fleur-de-lis of France. The agreement between the two authorities, stamped in metal, that a clerk of Dijon might walk freely through the streets of Paris to deliver a message of warning.

The provost of Paris maintained an office in the Châtelet, a grim fortress of justice that smelled of old parchment and older sins. Claude had walked past it twice already, watching the guards, counting the windows, memorizing the exits. He knew the risk. But the cardinal's schedule burned in his memory—the cryptic word *Purgare* repeated like a prayer, the date circled in a hand that had signed death warrants without trembling.

*If I do nothing, people die. If I do this, I might die instead.*

He tucked the coin into his purse and went down the stairs.

The provost's anteroom was crowded with petitioners, all of them clutching papers and grievances like talismans. Claude pushed through them to the clerk's desk, a balding man with ink-stained fingers who looked up with the particular boredom of one who has heard every lie a desperate man can tell.

"I have urgent intelligence for the provost," Claude said, keeping his voice low. "Regarding a plot against the crown's peace. A fire, set to blame Burgundians."

The clerk's pen stopped moving. His eyes flicked to Claude's face, then to his hands, then to the purse at his belt. "Your name?"

"Merchant's assistant. From Rouen. I came as fast as I could."

The clerk set down his pen with deliberate care. "Wait here."

He disappeared through a door behind the desk. Claude stood among the petitioners, feeling their impatient stares on his back. The minutes stretched like pulled taffy. He counted the stones in the wall. He counted his heartbeats. He was counting the cracks in the floor when the door opened again and the clerk gestured him forward.

The provost's chamber was larger than he expected, dominated by a heavy oak desk scattered with maps and dispatches. The provost himself was a bull-necked man with a soldier's bearing, his doublet strained across shoulders that had known armor. He rose as Claude entered, and his smile was practiced, warm.

"A merchant's assistant with intelligence about a plot. You understand I must verify such claims carefully."

Claude produced the coin and placed it on the desk. "This grants me passage. The word of Burgundy stands behind what I say."

The provost picked up the coin, turning it between thick fingers. His smile did not waver. "Burgundy's word has grown hollow lately. They say a clerk of Dijon lost his faith, then found it again. They say he rides now with a price on his head, though his own duke has pardoned him."

Claude's blood went cold. "I don't know what rumors you've heard—"

"No rumors." The provost set the coin down with a click. "A description. A tall man, dark-haired, with a clerk's hands and a soldier's eyes. Traveling with a merchant's wagon, wearing a merchant's clothes." He leaned forward. "You think I don't read the dispatches from Dijon? You think your Cardinal de Bar doesn't pay me well enough to read them carefully?"

*Cardinal de Bar.*

The world narrowed to the provost's smile, the guards who had materialized at the door, the weight of his own stupidity pressing down on his chest like a millstone.

"You've been waiting for me," Claude said.

"Since dawn. Your sister was more careful. But you—" The provost shook his head. "You walked into my cage wearing a merchant's hat, and you thought the coin would save you."

There was nothing to say. Nothing to do but run, and there were three guards between him and the door, and the windows were barred.

They took him without ceremony. Rough hands, rope around his wrists, a hood over his head that smelled of sweat and mold. He was marched through corridors, down stairs that grew colder and more damp, and when the hood came off he was in a chamber that smelled of incense and old blood, and Cardinal Louis de Bar was sitting before him like a spider in the center of its web.

The cardinal was older than Claude had imagined, with a face like carved ivory and eyes that held no warmth at all. He studied Claude the way a man studies a ledger, looking for the error that would balance the account.

"The clerk's brother," the cardinal said. "I wondered when you would come."

"I came to warn Paris of your plot."

"Did you?" The cardinal's lips curved. "How noble. How doomed." He gestured, and a guard struck Claude across the jaw. The world went white, then red, then steady again. "You have cost me time. You have stolen letters from my study. You have sent my plans to the winds, and you expect me to thank you for the courtesy of a warning?"

"I expect you to burn in hell for what you've done."

The cardinal laughed, a dry sound like paper tearing. "Perhaps. But I will do my burning with God's blessing, while you—" He turned to the guards. "Take him to the oubliette. Let the rats judge him."

They dragged Claude toward a door in the floor, a black square that smelled of rot and ancient despair. He fought, but their grips were iron, and the hole gaped beneath him like a mouth, and he was one heartbeat from falling into darkness when a voice cut through the chamber.

"Wait."

The guards froze. Claude looked up, his vision swimming, and saw her outlined in the doorway like a vision from a stained-glass window.

Marguerite.

She wore a gown of deep blue, the color of the Virgin's mantle, and her hair was pinned beneath a veil. She looked like a saint. She looked like a liar. She looked at Claude with eyes that held no recognition, and then she turned to the cardinal and smiled.

"Eminence," she said, "throwing him away is wasteful. He knows things. He has read your letters, walked your corridors, seen your plans. Such knowledge is a weapon—and weapons should be used, not buried."

The cardinal's eyes narrowed. "You would have me spare him?"

"I would have you use him." She stepped closer, her voice dropping to honey and silk. "He came to warn the provost. The provost is your man. No one else knows he is here. If you send him back into the city, he will run to the church. He will try to stop the fire himself. And when he is found with oil on his hands and fire in his heart, who will believe he came as a savior?"

Claude understood, in the space between one breath and the next, what she was doing. She was not saving him. She was making him the arsonist.

And it was the only chance he had to live.

The cardinal was silent for a long moment. His eyes moved between them, brother and sister, and Claude could see him weighing the options like a merchant counting coin.

"You trust him to run where I want him to run?"

"I trust him to do what is right," Marguerite said. "That is his curse. It always has been."

Another silence. Then the cardinal smiled, and it was the coldest thing Claude had ever seen.

"Release him."

The ropes fell away. Claude stood on shaking legs, his jaw throbbing, his mind spinning. Marguerite did not look at him. She had already turned away, already moving toward the door, already becoming the cardinal's creature again.

A guard shoved him forward. He stumbled past the cardinal's chair, past his sister's retreating back, and out into a corridor that smelled of candle smoke and freedom.

He was free.

He was free, and marked, and every guard in Paris would be watching for him, and somewhere a fire was waiting to burn.