Read Chapter 6: The Duke's Letter

The morning light was weak and grey when the tap on my door came—three quick knocks, then a pause, then one more. I had been awake since before Matins, staring at the rafters of Jacques’s workshop below, listening to the rhythmic thump of his loom through the floorboards.

The knock came again.

I crossed the room and opened the door a crack. Jacques stood there, his face creased with suspicion, holding a folded square of parchment sealed with plain wax. No sigil. No mark.

“A boy brought this for the relic merchant,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “Said you were expecting correspondence from your abbey.”

My abbey. The cover story I had crafted with Rolin’s clerks—a lay brother seeking relics for a Benedictine house in Dijon. It had held for three days. Whether it would hold much longer was another matter.

I took the letter and closed the door. The seal cracked easily beneath my thumb. The hand was cramped and hurried, but I knew it well. Rolin wrote the way he governed—impatiently.

*Clerk,*

*Twelve days have passed since your departure. The Duke grows restless. The Armagnac faction tightens its grip on the river trade, and our agents in Paris report that the Dauphinists prepare a spring offensive. Compiègne stands as a splinter in our paw. You were sent to find the source of this treachery, not to count church windows. I want the name of the Spider before the month turns or you will find yourself copying charters in the coldest garrison we own.*

*The Duke expects progress. So do I.*

*—N. Rolin*

I read it twice, then held the parchment over the candle flame until it blackened at the edges and curled into ash. The smell of burning tallow filled the small room. I crushed the cinders beneath my boot.

Progress. He wanted progress while I stood in a town where my own sister might be the enemy I had sworn to unmask. Progress while the woman who bore our mother’s cross walked the streets of Compiègne with the ease of a woman who belonged there.

I needed answers. And the only man who seemed to have any was Étienne Vaux.

---

The cloth merchant was not in his shop when I arrived. His apprentice, a boy of perhaps fourteen with quick eyes and quicker hands, told me that Maître Vaux had been called to the guild hall on business and would return by midday. I took the opportunity to wander the aisles, running my fingers over bolts of wool and linen as if appraising their worth.

The shop was larger than I had first realized. Beyond the main counter, a narrow passage led to a back room where Vaux kept his finer goods—silks from the south, velvets that had traveled through Lyon and beyond. And there, in the corner, partially obscured by a stack of folded damask, stood a loom.

Not a working loom. That much was clear from the dust layered upon its frame. An old thing, maybe, inherited from a previous owner or kept for some sentimental purpose.

I was still looking at it when the door behind me opened.

“Curious about the antiquities, Brother?”

I turned. Vaux stood in the doorway, his round face composed but his eyes watchful. He closed the door behind him with a soft click.

“I wondered if it was for sale,” I said.

“It is not.” He moved past me and placed a hand on the loom’s crossbar. “It belonged to the weaver who owned this building before I took it over. Jacques’s father, actually. When the old man died, his son sold the business to me, but I kept the loom. Felt wrong to break it apart for kindling.”

“Sentimental.”

“Practical.” He met my gaze. “The old weaver was known for his tapestries. The ones he wove in his final years were strange—patterns that didn’t quite match the images they depicted. No one could make sense of them. He took the meaning to his grave.”

I looked at the loom again. Dust clung to the frame, but when I ran my finger along the crossbar, something caught my eye. A faint groove, worn into the wood by something other than thread.

“He left patterns, did he?” I asked.

“Pieces of them. Sold a few to collectors before he died. Unfinished work, mostly.”

“And the finished pieces?”

Vaux smiled—a thin, knowing smile. “Went to his patrons. Wealthy families. Town officials.” He paused. “Men who paid well for quiet luxuries.”

The message was clear enough. I had been looking for the Spider’s communications in letters and messengers, in the comings and goings of the crypt. But a network that survived in a town under siege would use what was constantly in sight, constantly moving past the guards and patrols without a second glance.

Tapestries. Woven with codes hidden in their patterns. Delivered to the homes of the powerful—

Where the Spider could read them at her leisure.

“I need to see one,” I said.

Vaux’s smile faded. “That is easier said than done. They hang behind closed doors.”

“Then name me the door worth knocking on.”

He was silent for a long moment. Then he moved to a shelf near the back of the room and pulled down a wooden box. Inside lay a folded fragment of cloth, perhaps a foot square. It was a tapestry sample—the border of a larger piece, decorated with a repeating pattern of leaves and berries.

“This was taken from a piece delivered to the provost’s house three weeks ago,” he said. “One of my men trimmed a portion before it was framed. Thought it might prove useful.”

I took the fragment. The stitching was fine, the colors rich. Green leaves. Red berries. A pattern that repeated with mechanical precision.

Except it didn’t. Not quite.

I looked more closely. Every third row of leaves, a berry was missing. Not damaged—absent. The gaps formed a rhythm.

“How does the pattern continue?” I asked.

“I don’t have more of it here.”

“Then I need to see the whole piece.”

Vaux shook his head. “The provost’s house is not a place where I can simply—”

“You know the people of this town,” I said. “You know who watches and who sleeps. And you owe me your list of names—but names are just letters until I can match them to faces.”

He studied me for a long moment. “Tomorrow. The provost attends a council meeting at the town hall each afternoon. The house will have fewer servants than usual. I will arrange a visit—a cloth merchant offering a private viewing of wares to the provost’s wife. You will accompany me as my assistant.”

I nodded. “Tomorrow, then.”

---

The afternoon passed slowly. I returned to my room above the weaver’s shop and laid out the fragment on the small table. The pattern of leaves and berries stared back at me.

I worked by candlelight, counting the gaps, marking them on a scrap of parchment. Fifteen berries were missing across the fragment’s width. I numbered them in sequence, then assigned letters based on position—first gap, first letter of the alphabet. It was crude, but coding this way was common enough among merchants who needed to pass messages past toll collectors.

When I reached the fifteenth, the letters spelled something. Not a name. A number.

Seven.

I stared at it. Seven, repeated three times across the fragment. The fragment itself was only a border—the full piece would contain more. More gaps, more numbers. Enough to encode an entire message.

Seven. What did seven mean? Was it the number of names on the council? A date of an attack?

I was still puzzling over it when movement below caught my eye. Through the window, I watched the street that fronted Jacques’s shop. Two figures had emerged from the direction of the church—a woman in a grey cloak, and a man in the dark robe of a town official.

The woman turned her head and I saw the familiar sharpness of my sister’s profile beneath her hood.

And she was walking beside the provost himself—the very man whose house held the tapestry that might unravel the Spider’s network.

Marguerite spoke. The provost listened, his face serious, nodding slowly as if she had given him an order. Then they parted, and she vanished into the alleyway without looking back.

I stood frozen at the window, the fragment of tapestry burning in my hand.

The Spider was not some distant shadow. She wore my mother’s face, and she was walking arm-in-arm with the highest authority in Compiègne.

And I had just agreed to walk into the provost’s house tomorrow—with no idea whether the door would open for me, or for the trap.