Read Chapter 37: The Witness

The council chamber of the Hôtel de Bourgogne stank of wax, wool, and fear. Claude stood in the center of the marble floor, his left arm bound tight against his chest, the bandage beneath his tunic still damp with the ointment the physicians had pressed into the burn. Before him, on a raised dais of oak and gilt, sat the two dukes—Philip the Good of Burgundy, his own master, and Charles, the Dauphin’s regent for the Île-de-France. Between them, a table of clerks scratched at parchment, recording every word.

Philip leaned forward, his heavy jaw set. “You stand before this council not as a clerk, but as a man who has cost the Cardinal of Bar his liberty and this city its church. Speak plainly, Claude D’Argent. What do you bring us?”

Claude reached into his satchel with his good hand. The letters were brittle, their wax seals cracked—the cardinal’s own hand, his private correspondence. He laid them on the table. Then the journal, bound in cracked leather, Marguerite’s looping script filling page after page.

“The cardinal’s orders,” Claude said. “His correspondence with the provost of Paris, detailing the disposition of troops, the purchase of oil, the schedule of the church’s nightly prayers. And my sister’s journal—a record of her infiltration of his network, the names of every agent she unmasked, the dates of every shipment she intercepted.”

The Dauphin’s regent—a thin, hawk-faced man named Jean de Clermont—picked up the letters with two fingers, as if they might burn him. “Forged. You would bring us papers your own kin wrote, claiming they prove a plot against both our crowns?”

Claude shook his head. “Check the cardinal’s hand against any treaty he has signed. Check the seals—Burgundian wax, French wax, all bought from the same merchant in the Rue des Lombards. The cardinal did not discriminate in his treachery. He meant to burn a Burgundian church and blame the French. Then he would have burned a French church and blamed Burgundy. Either way, the war would continue, and he would rise in the Chaos.”

The regent’s lip curled. “And your sister? The woman who stood in that church with a torch in her hand?”

“She stood there to ignite the oil before the soldiers arrived—so that the fire would reveal the plot, not conceal it,” Claude said. “She did not light the church. I stopped her. The explosion came from the oil barrels when we struggled. The stones burned, but no congregation died. That is the truth.”

A murmur rippled through the chamber. Philip raised a hand, and the room fell silent. “What of Pierre Laurent?”

Claude felt the name like a blade in his ribs. He had rehearsed this. He had told himself it was necessary. And yet the words came slow.

“Pierre Laurent was murdered,” he said. “By a rogue agent in the cardinal’s pay—a man named Étienne Roche, who had infiltrated Laurent’s household. He killed Laurent to prevent word of the cardinal’s plot reaching Duke Philip’s ears. I have the agent’s confession.” He did not. He had Roche’s corpse, but the confession was a lie he had written himself, on paper filched from the cardinal’s own study, sealed with a ring he had pried from Roche’s cold finger. “It is in the journal’s back pages.”

The clerk flipped to the end of the journal. There it was—Roche’s name, his methods, his confession, all in Claude’s neat hand, disguised as Marguerite’s. He had thought of that lie for three sleepless nights, through the fever of his burn, through the guards who had beaten him on the way to the cells. It was a small lie. It bought Laurent’s family peace—vengeance for a killer who would never face trial, a clean death for a man who had died in a gutter with Claude’s hands around his throat.

The regent scanned the page, then looked up. His eyes were cold, but they were also uncertain. He did not believe fully. Claude did not need him to believe. He needed him to hesitate.

“And your sister’s wounds?” the regent asked.

“She is unconscious,” Philip said, his voice heavy. “The physicians say she will live, but she has not spoken. Her account is unconfirmed.”

Claude felt the room tilt. Marguerite had not woken. He had not allowed himself to think of that—of her burning lungs, her broken ribs from the beam that had fallen across her chest. He had left her to the physicians and walked into this chamber with his lies and his letters and his dead friend’s memory, and she had not woken.

“I am her witness,” he said, and his voice cracked. “I saw what she did. I saw her turn from the torch. I saw her try to undo what the cardinal had built. If she does not wake, her word lives in my testimony. She is no arsonist. She is the one who stopped the massacre. Not the army. Not this council. Her.”

The chamber was silent. Philip looked at the regent. The regent looked at the table. The clerks stopped scratching.

Finally, Philip rose. “Claude D’Argent, you have served this duchy with your mind and your blood. You have exposed a plot that would have set Paris aflame and drowned Burgundy in blame. This council does not see a traitor. We see a hero.” He paused, and his voice dropped. “But heroes must choose a side. The war is not over. The Dauphin is not forgiven. We ask you now, before this council: do you swear fealty to Burgundy and to my house? Do you swear to serve my heir as you would serve me?”

Claude looked at the two dukes. He thought of his father’s ring, cold in his pocket, given to him by Marguerite’s messenger in the catacombs—a promise that their brother, held hostage in some Burgundian keep, might yet be ransomed. But he had spent the ring already. He had sent the messenger back with it, to buy that freedom. Nothing remained but his word.

He thought of Marguerite, unconscious, her account unspoken. He thought of the provost of Paris, still in power, still the cardinal’s man, watching this chamber from the shadows. He thought of Roche, dead by his hands, and the lie he had written to bury a truth that would have undone everything.

“I serve the peace,” Claude said. “Not Burgundy. Not France. The peace that lets a clerk walk the street without watching for a knife. The peace that lets a sister kneel in a church without fearing its stones will burn. If that makes me no one’s man, then I am no one’s man.”

Philip’s face hardened. The regent smiled, slow and cold. “Then you are a danger to both crowns,” the regent said. “A man who serves no master cannot be trusted by any.”

Claude felt the room close around him. He had refused. He had known he would refuse. But he had not known how alone that would make him.

“Then send me away,” he said. “Strike my name from the rolls. But know this: the cardinal’s men are not all in chains. The provost still holds his office. There are others, in both your courts, who would see this plot succeed. I have their names in my head—and nowhere else. If I am cast out, those names go with me.”

The silence stretched. Philip sat down. The regent leaned back. The clerks looked at one another, then at the dukes, waiting.

“We will deliberate,” Philip said at last. “You will wait in the antechamber.”

Claude bowed, turned, and walked toward the doors. His burn throbbed. His heart hammered. He heard the guards fall in step behind him.

And then the door opened, and a messenger burst through, pale and breathless, his voice cutting through the chamber like a knife.

“My lords—the provost of Paris has been found dead in his quarters. And the cardinal—the cardinal has escaped his cell.”