Read Chapter 4: The Cloth Merchant

The bell above the door chimed before Claude had even finished adjusting his hood. The shop smelled of wool and dye—sharp, alkaline, clinging to the back of the throat. Bolts of cloth stood in rows like silent soldiers, deep blues and Flanders reds stacked to the ceiling beams. A thin man with a face like a ledger page looked up from his counter.

"Help you?" The man's eyes moved over Claude's habit—the rough grey wool of a lay brother, serviceable sandals, the small wooden relic box hung at his belt.

"I was told you might have a bolt of undyed linen," Claude said, keeping his voice low, reverent. "For the chapel of Saint-Antoine."

Étienne Vaux did not blink. His fingers, stained the color of old walnuts, stopped smoothing a fold of crimson wool. "Saint-Antoine's chapel was burned by the Armagnacs three winters ago. If you were truly seeking linen for it, you'd be a fool, and I'd send you to the market square."

Claude felt the weight of the silver ring against his collarbone, hidden beneath his tunic. He'd rehearsed the passphrase a dozen times on the walk from the weaver's shop. Now it seemed flimsy, a thread that might snap at the slightest pull.

"Then I am a fool with good parchment," Claude said, "who pays well for the right advice."

The merchant studied him for a long moment, then made a small gesture toward the back of the shop. Claude followed through a curtain of coarse sacking into a cramped office lit by a single tallow candle. The flame guttered as the curtain fell, casting jumping shadows across the writing desk and the stacked ledgers.

Étienne turned, and the wariness in his face cracked just enough to show something beneath—fear, or the exhaustion of long concealment. "The Chancellery's seal on your forged papers. It was well done, but your old master must be losing his touch. A clerk who uses last year's ink on a fresh document in October might as well paint a target on his back."

Claude's jaw tightened. *The soft wax at the checkpoint. He knows.* "You've heard about that already?"

"This is Compiègne. News travels faster than plague." Étienne pulled a folded slip of parchment from inside his doublet and flattened it on the desk between them. "Names. Seventeen of them. Men and women who shelter the Armagnac couriers, who feed the network that carries messages to and from their King Charles in Chinon."

Claude's eyes traced the list. Names of artisans, a baker, two nuns from a nearby priory, a retired sergeant of the town watch. Ordinary faces. Ordinary lives. But each one was a noose waiting to close.

"How certain are you?"

"Certain enough to hang if found with this on me." Étienne tapped the paper with a nicotine-stained finger. "But I would sooner trust the devil than one name missing from that list. The Spider has burrowed deep into this town, and she spins her thread through every workshop and cloister."

Claude's hand stilled on the parchment. "The Spider."

"A woman. No one knows her true name." Étienne's face tightened. "They say she was born to a noble house, received an education in Paris, and turned her talents to butchery when her family lost everything in the last war. She has agents in every town between Paris and Reims. And her spiders—her couriers—are children, mostly. Altar boys, apprentice girls. No one stops them."

"They think her clever," Claude said slowly, recalling Rolin's warning at the chancellery. The old man's hooded eyes, the weight of his words: *The network's leader is as clever as you are, perhaps more.*

"Clever is the wrong word." Étienne's voice dropped to barely more than a whisper. "She is patient. She is ruthless. And she is here. In this town, right now. The crypt beneath Saint-Jacques sees more traffic under cover of darkness than the market square does at noon."

Claude's blood chilled. The locked door Jacques had pointed to the night before—the one that rattled when he pressed his palm to it—was the crypt of Saint-Jacques. "You've seen her?"

"No. But I've seen what she leaves behind." Étienne straightened and folded his arms across his bony chest. "Two of my informers were found in the river last month, their tongues cut out so they couldn't sing to the Burgundian side. If the Spider gets wind of you, clerk, you will not have the mercy of a quick knife."

The candle sputtered and died, plunging the office into darkness. Claude heard Étienne exhale a heavy breath, then a soft scraping sound as the merchant struck new flint. The flame rose, weak and sputtering, and Claude noticed how the merchant's hand trembled slightly as he relit the candle.

"This list is accurate as of last week," Étienne said, sliding a fresh candle onto a spike. "Memorize what you can. I'll burn my copy before sunrise. If you need me again, don't come by day. Send word through the verger at Saint-Jacques, old man named Antoine. He's loyal to Burgundy."

Claude folded the list and tucked it into his boot, beneath the wool of his sock. "And this network—the Armagnacs are smuggling more than letters? What's their aim?"

"Compiègne is the last real gate between Burgundy and the lands that still call Charles their king. If the Armagnacs hold it, they can funnel troops north when spring comes. If they lose it..." Étienne's thin lips twisted. "Then the Spider will be sent somewhere else to weave her webs. And she is not the sort to leave loose threads behind."

A knock echoed from the shop front—heavy, insistent. Étienne's face went slack with alarm. He pulled the curtain aside, and through the gap Claude saw two men in the grey of the town watch standing beyond the window, their faces half-shadowed against the glass.

"Out the back," Étienne hissed. "Now."

Claude slipped through the rear door into a narrow alley reeking of dye waste and rancid tallow. He pressed himself into a doorway, listening to the muffled exchange of voices from the shop. Étienne's answers came short, casual. Then the sound of boots on wood as the watchmen departed.

He didn't wait to see what they had wanted. He moved through the alleys, keeping to the deepest shadows, until he reached the weaver's house and climbed the ladder to his attic room. Only then did he pull the parchment from his boot and read the names again in the thin light through the shutters.

Seventeen names. And the Spider watching over all of them.

The bell of Saint-Jacques sounded three times in the night. Claude rose, silent as a cat, and eased open the window. Below, the market square lay empty, silvered by a half-moon. A figure crossed it—small, quick, moving like a thread being pulled through dark cloth—and vanished through the lych-gate of the church.

Claude descended the ladder and followed. Three streets later he found the church's side entrance, a low door half-hidden by the buttress of the bell tower. It stood ajar. He slipped through.

The crypt door, the one Jacques had shown him, stood open. A pale shape stood beside it—a tall woman in a grey traveling cloak, her face obscured by a hood. She spoke, low and clipped, to a small figure beside her, visible only as a dark smudge against the stone. Her voice carried notes of aristocratic French—rolled consonants worth more than a courtier's yearly wage.

The child handed her a leather satchel. The woman took it, and as she turned, the moonlight caught something at her throat—a chain, and upon it, a glint of silver. A small cross.

Then she descended the stairs into the crypt, and the door pulled shut behind her with a sound like the closing of a tomb.

Claude's heart hammered. He had seen the cross only for an instant, but the shape of its arms, the simple oak leaf etched into its face, burned behind his eyes like a brand—because it was the twin of the one he had seen but once before, hanging from the neck of a woman on the burial road above Dijon.

His sister's cross, given to her by their mother, whom they had buried fifteen years ago beneath the chestnut tree in the village graveyard.

Impossible, he told himself. Hundreds of crosses look the same. He was tired. The candlelight had played tricks. There was no way—*none*—that Marguerite would be here. She was at the convent. She had blessed his journey and placed the silver ring on his hand with tears in her eyes. She was safe.

Claude retreated to his room and did not sleep. He lay in the dark, the list of seventeen names burning against his ankle, and tried to unsee the silver cross that caught the moonlight like a promise—or a warning.