Read Chapter 9: A Candle in the Window

The candle maker’s shop sat at the end of a crooked lane where the houses leaned together like gossips sharing secrets. Claude paused beneath the painted sign—a single flame gilded on black wood—and pressed his palm flat against the door. No sound within. No light showing through the shutters. Only a thin wick of smoke curling from the chimney, telling him the hearth was warm.

The invitation had come an hour past, slipped beneath his pallet by a hand he never saw. Three words in a script he recognized from the wax tablet: *Come at compline. The flame keeps counsel.*

He could have ignored it. Should have, perhaps. Every instinct trained into him by the Chancellor’s service screamed trap. But the masked figure had known his name, had known Marguerite, had cut down two killers with a crossbow bolt and a blade and then vanished like morning frost. If that figure wanted him dead, the warehouse would have been his grave.

Claude pushed the door open.

Inside, the air hung thick with beeswax and tallow, smoky and sweet. Rows of candles stood on wooden racks—tapers thick as a man’s wrist, thin as his finger, squat devotional lights in clay cups. A workbench ran the length of the far wall, scattered with molds and a coil of wick. No one in sight. The hearth glowed low, and above it, a single candle burned in a brass holder.

A woman’s voice came from the shadows behind the racks.

“You came alone. Good.”

Claude’s hand went to the knife at his belt. “I came to meet the one who saved my life. Not to be ambushed a second time.”

“No ambush.” Marguerite stepped into the candlelight. She had shed the grey lay sister’s habit, and wore instead a dark wool gown with a white collar, her hair bound in a simple net. She looked, for a moment, like the sister who had taught him his letters at their mother’s table. Then she moved closer, and the moment broke.

“You,” he said. Flat. Accusing.

“Yes.” She folded her hands before her. “I sent word through the verger’s boy. I knew you’d come, hoping for your masked savior. I wanted to see if you still trusted strangers more than blood.”

“You hanged Étienne Vaux.”

“I did what the network required. He was a leak, and leaks drown ships.” Marguerite’s voice held no apology. “You watched him die and took his paper. I know what it said. ‘The loom’s shadow.’ And I know you followed it to the warehouse on the river.”

Claude’s jaw tightened. “Then you know I found your letters. Supply routes, troop movements, the names of French captains.”

“I know you set a fire and cost us three days of messages.” Her lips pressed together. “I know two of my agents saw your face, and that one of them described you to me before I sent him south to Lyon to forget he ever did. They will not trouble you again.”

“You’re cleaning up after me.”

“I’m protecting you.” Marguerite took a step closer. The candle above the hearth guttered, sending her shadow writhing across the wall. “Because you are my brother, and because what I do, I do for all of us.”

Claude laughed, a bitter sound. “For us? You run spies for the Dauphin’s cause while Father sits in Noyon praying you haven’t been burned as a heretic. You denounce merchants to the provost and watch them swing. You wear a silver cross while breaking every commandment our mother taught us.”

Marguerite’s face flickered—something raw passing behind her eyes—and then it was gone. “You think I chose this lightly?”

“I think you chose.”

“I chose survival.” Her voice dropped low, dangerous. “The Duke of Burgundy is a dog gnawing a bone that is not his. He claims the crown of France while the English hold Paris and the mad king’s court dances in Chinon. But John the Fearless was murdered on a bridge at Montereau, and his son Philip knows he will be next if the Armagnacs win. So he makes alliances with the devil’s own countrymen, and he feeds towns like Compiègne to the English wolves while calling it protection.”

“The Duke protects Burgundy.”

“The Duke protects himself.” Marguerite’s hand went to her chest, where beneath the wool gown, Claude knew, lay the other silver cross—the one she had never given him. “Father owes the Duke three hundred livres in back taxes. Do you think Philip of Burgundy cares if a minor noble’s family starves? Do you think Chancellor Rolin—that self-made merchant’s son who fawns at the Duke’s feet—will lift a finger for Claude D’Argent when the mission stops being useful?”

Claude said nothing. He had written to Rolin of progress, of networks and cipher keys. He had not written of his sister.

Marguerite saw his silence and pressed forward. “I asked Rolin for nothing. I did not tell him our father is ill—did you know that? He’s been coughing blood since autumn. The physician says his lungs are rotting. Mother writes to me through safe hands, because she does not know where I truly am.” Her voice cracked, then steadied. “She thinks I’m in a convent in Reims, praying for his soul. She does not know I run a network of seventeen agents who could hang from Compiègne’s walls by week’s end if the provost’s loyalties shift.”

“You run the network.” Claude’s voice came out hoarse. “You are the Spider.”

Marguerite did not deny it. She only watched him with their mother’s grey eyes, patient as judgment. “The Spider is a name the Duke’s men gave me when they lost three couriers in a month and wanted someone to fear. I wear it because fear is a tool. But I am still your sister, Claude. I am still the one who taught you to read Roman numerals on the abacus, who bandaged your knee when you fell from the apple tree, who told you the truth when Mother would not.”

“The truth?” Claude heard the shake in his own voice. “That you are a traitor to Burgundy?”

“That Burgundy is the traitor.” Marguerite stepped close enough that he could smell the smoke in her hair. “The Dauphin Charles is the true heir of France. He is young, yes. Uncertain. Surrounded by counselors who whisper doubts in his ear. But he has promise—and he has Joan.”

Claude flinched. “Joan, the witch-girl who leads armies in armor? The peasant who claims to hear saints?”

“The maiden who broke the siege of Orléans when every general said it was impossible.” Marguerite’s eyes burned. “She is the sign, Claude. The thing we have prayed for. France does not fall because God has abandoned her; she rises because He has sent a sword to cut down the English. And Burgundy stands on the wrong side of that sword.”

“You want me to change sides.” The words felt foreign in his mouth. “You want me to betray my oath to the Duke.”

“I want you to honor a deeper oath.” Marguerite reached out and took his hand. Her fingers were warm, callused from years of work he had not known about. “To our house. To our blood. Father is dying. Mother will not survive losing us both. And the D’Argent name will be worth less than mud if Philip of Burgundy falls—which he will, with or without you. The English are bleeding out in Normandy. The Dauphin’s coronation is months away. Choose now, Claude, or be swept away with the rest of them.”

Claude pulled his hand free. His mind raced—the list of seventeen names folded in his boot, the letters he had copied from the warehouse, the wax tablet with its accusation, the fire he had set, the men he had killed and watched die.

“You let me think you were the Spider,” he said. “You let me suspect you and doubt myself. Why?”

Marguerite smiled, thin and sad. “Because I wanted you to follow the trail yourself. I wanted you to see the network, the tapestries, the shadow, and arrive at the truth with your own eyes.” She touched the silver cross at her throat. “And I wanted to know if you would denounce me, Claude. If your oath to the Duke meant more than your blood.”

“And what did you conclude?”

A long pause. The candle above the hearth burned down, sputtered, and died.

“That you still carry our mother’s cross,” Marguerite said softly, “and you have not yet delivered the names in your boot to Rolin. If you had, the provost would have arrested me this morning.” She turned toward the back of the shop, toward a door that led to the lane behind. “I will ask you once, and then I will not ask again. When the hour comes, will you stand with France—or with a duke who would sell his own mother for a treaty?”

She did not wait for his answer. The door opened, closed, and Claude stood alone in the dark shop, the dead candle smoking above the hearth, seventeen names burning against his boot like coals.