Read Chapter 1: Broken Shafts

The light was going fast, the sky bleeding from grey to a bruised purple over the low hedgerows west of Maisoncelles. Thomas Barrow sat on an upturned arrow chest, his back against a wagon wheel, and pulled the last sheaf from his oilcloth. Twenty-four arrows. He counted them out by feel, fingers moving down each shaft like a man saying a rosary.

He stopped at the twelfth.

The head was seated true, but the socket was cracked. A hairline, running from the collar down into the wood, just behind the bodkin point. He turned the arrow over. The nock was split too, a clean vertical fracture that would snap the string on the draw or send the arrow wide of a barn door at ten paces.

He laid it aside and checked the next. Same crack. Same split. He checked the next three in quick succession, his hands moving faster now, the calm of routine giving way to something cold in his gut. All damaged. Not a single one of the twelve that had sat at the top of the sheaf, the ones he would have drawn first when the French came, was sound.

He ran his thumb along the shaft of the thirteenth. Clean. The fourteenth. Clean. Fifteen through twenty-four. Clean.

Someone had gone through his arrows with care and patience. Someone who knew which ones he’d reach for first.

"Jesus wept," he muttered, and stood.

The camp was settling into its evening hum—fires crackling in pits, the low murmur of men who knew tomorrow would be a hard day, the clang of a farrier’s hammer somewhere beyond the horse lines. The smell of woodsmoke and wet wool and unwashed men hung thick in the air. Thomas threaded his way through the press of bodies, past men mending bridles and honing blades, past a knot of Cheshire archers singing something coarse and low. He carried the broken arrows in his left hand, fanned out like a handful of dead twigs.

The quartermaster’s tent sat at the edge of the baggage train, a sagging canvas lean-to guarded by a mountain of barrels and crates. A man named Perkin Wray, with a face like a kicked turnip and a voice that grated like a rusty hinge, sat on a stool by the entrance, picking at his teeth with a splinter.

"Barrow," Wray said, not looking up. "What’s the matter? Run out of something to kill?"

Thomas stopped in front of him and held out the arrows. "These."

Wray squinted, took one, and turned it over in his thick fingers. "What about ’em?"

"Look at the socket. Look at the nock. They’re cracked. Deliberately."

Wray snorted and tossed the arrow back. "You’re a fletcher, Barrow. You know better than most. You water your shafts, you season your wood, they warp in the damp. We’ve been in this godforsaken country for weeks. It rains every other bloody day. Wood splits. It’s misery, not malice."

Thomas shook his head. "This isn’t warp. This is work. Look at it." He held the arrow up, pointing at the nock. "That cut goes straight through. A split from seasoning runs jagged, follows the grain. This is a blade cut. Made after the arrow was finished. And it’s not just mine—"

He stopped. He hadn’t checked the others yet. He’d only just found his own damage and come straight here. But the confidence in his voice had come from somewhere, and he felt it now as a rising certainty, the same instinct that told him where the wind would be at two hundred paces.

Wray waved a hand. "You march with the shire levies. You got your arrows from the royal train at Harfleur. The king’s fletchers made them. You think one of the king’s own fletchers is sawing through his master’s arrows on the eve of battle?"

Thomas looked down at the arrows in his hand. His gaze caught on the fletching of the nearest broken shaft—three goose feathers, bound with linen thread and sealed with wax. He turned it so the firelight hit it. The bindings were clean, the feathers trimmed straight. But the mark on the wax, where the maker had pressed his seal, was not the crowned harp he’d seen stamped on every other arrow he’d drawn from the royal train.

This one was a simple cross. A plain, unadorned cross, pressed deep into the wax of two of the shafts. The other ten had no mark at all.

He pocketed the marked arrow and dropped the rest at Wray’s feet. "These are mine. I want replacements."

"Come back in the morning. I’ll see what’s left."

"Morning might be too late," Thomas said, and turned before Wray could answer.

He walked back through the camp, the marked arrow a quiet weight against his hip. The fires were burning brighter now, the last of the day’s stew being ladled out from a great black cauldron. Men sat in circles, heads bowed over their bowls, eating in silence. Tomorrow they’d march to Agincourt. Or rather, they’d stand and wait to be attacked, because that’s what the French would do—come at them in waves, across that rain-soaked field, and the first volley from the English archers would have to be true.

Thomas had been at Crécy as a boy of fourteen, not yet an archer, carrying water for his father’s company. He remembered the sound of the French charge—not the horses, not the shouts, but the rain of arrows falling, the sky dark with them, the terrible music of their arrival. If that first volley faltered now, if a third of the bows fell silent on the wrong beat, the French line would close before the archers could loose again.

He’d seen enough to know what that meant. A butcher’s yard, not a battle.

He reached the lane that ran between the commanders’ tents, a wider strip of ground where the banners hung limp in the dying air. The royal standard was there, and the lions of several great houses, and the arms of the Earl of Suffolk, who commanded the vanguard. Thomas slowed as he drew closer, his eyes catching on a particular banner.

A grey field. A hill of black. A single white tower.

Sir John Greyhill.

Thomas stopped in his tracks, the name hitting him like a cold wind. Greyhill. He knew that name. Every Yorkshire man who could string a bow knew that name. Greyhill had been at the siege of Harfleur, had led the assault on the gate with a broken sword and no shield. He was the kind of lord who rode the lines at dawn and knew his men’s names. He was also the man who, five years ago, had hanged a dozen archers from Thomas’s own village on charges of pilfering from the baggage train—men Thomas had grown up with. Men Thomas had called friends.

Thomas had been away that season, taking a shipment of yew to a dealer in York. He’d come home to find the gibbets still standing by the crossroads, three of his kinsmen’s bones creaking in the wind.

He stood at the edge of the lane, the arrow in his pocket, and watched the banner stir in a breath of wind.

The archers trusted Greyhill’s word like they trusted their own fathers. They called him a soldier’s lord. Thomas called him a rope-maker with a clean glove.

And yet.

Thomas had come to report sabotage to whoever commanded. The officers were all here, all under this cluster of tents. Suffolk would listen—or he wouldn’t. Greyhill would likely listen too, with that level gaze of his, and then decide whether the son of a fletcher was worth his time.

Thomas thought of the cracked sockets. The split nocks. The plain cross stamped in the wax.

He turned his back on the commanders’ lane and walked the other way, toward the ring of tents where the archers’ captains were billeted. The men capable of such work, the ones with the steady hands and the patient knowledge of wood and blade, were not the lords. They were the quartermasters’ men. The fletchers. The archers themselves.

He found Jack Vennor outside his tent, a pipe clamped between his teeth, a half-pint of something sour in his fist. Jack was the captain of the Yorkshire company, a bear of a man with a scar that split his eyebrows and a voice that could carry across a field in a gale.

“Tommy,” Jack said, not moving. “Shouldn’t you be counting arrows?”

“Already counted them.” Thomas drew the marked arrow from his pocket and held it out. “You ever see this mark before?”

Jack took the arrow, turned it toward the fire. He went still, his jaw working on the pipe stem, then handed it back. “No.”

“You’re a liar,” Thomas said, without heat.

Jack looked at him for a long moment, then sighed and gestured with the pipe toward his tent. “Get inside. There’s something you should see.”

Thomas ducked under the canvas. The tent smelled of smoke and leather and pipe tobacco. A single tallow candle guttered on a chest.

In the center of the chest lay three arrows. All broken. All with cracked sockets and split nocks. And each one bore a fletching mark: a plain cross, pressed deep into the wax.

“Found those this afternoon,” Jack said from behind him. “In the stocks of the best six shooters in the company. Didn’t want to cause a panic, so I held them. Thought it might be a one-off. A grudge, maybe.”

Thomas turned. “It’s not just my company, Jack. I’d bet my bow it’s not.”

“Already checked,” Jack said, and there was something hard in his voice now, something cold. “I’ve got two dozen broken shafts from three other companies. All with that mark. All ready to be drawn at dawn.”

Thomas looked down at the arrows on the chest, then at the one in his hand. The little cross seemed to mock him.

“Someone’s cut our teeth,” he said.

“Aye,” Jack said. “And if we march tomorrow with our bows full of splints, we’re walking into a slaughter.”

Thomas rolled the arrow between his fingers. The fire crackled. Somewhere beyond the tent, a horse whinnied, and a man laughed, unaware.

“How long until dawn?” Thomas asked.

Jack glanced at the sky through the tent flap. “Six hours, maybe less.”

Thomas put the arrow in his pocket and looked at Jack.

“Then I’ve got six hours to find the bastard who did this.”