Read Chapter 14: After the Clash

The stench of pig shit was a small mercy. It masked the blood.

Thomas pressed his palm against the gash on his forearm—a parting gift from Captain Ashworth's blade during his mad scramble out of the mill. The cut was shallow but angry, weeping red through the gaps in his fingers. He'd bound it with a strip torn from his own tunic, but the cloth was already soaked through.

He sat in the muck with his back against the sty's rotting timber, listening to the camp wake around him. Boots stamped past on the hard-packed earth. Someone bellowed about cold porridge. A cart creaked under the weight of arrows—God, so many arrows—and Thomas felt the familiar ache in his shoulders that came before a battle.

But there would be no battle. Not unless he stopped the slaughter first.

The pigs grunted in the corner, indifferent to the fate of armies. Thomas envied them.

He forced himself to breathe. Slow. Measured. Like drawing a bow. He catalogued what he knew: Roger was arrested but in Ashworth's custody. Ashworth was the protector, the man who made sure the sabotage went unnoticed. Jean had escaped into the night, carrying word to the French. The attack would come at first light through the eastern hedge gate—three taps, a thrown stone.

And dawn was already breaking, grey and cold, over the English camp.

Thomas closed his eyes and saw the mill again. Roger's laugh. Ashworth's hand on his sword hilt, the three-thread mark stitched into his glove. The captain had looked at Thomas with the calm certainty of a man who expected to win. He probably did. Who would believe a common archer over a captain of the Duke's own guard?

He needed Greyhill.

The thought stuck in his throat. Greyhill was the only noble who'd ever treated him as more than a peasant with a bow. But the ring sat heavy in Thomas's pocket—Greyhill's signet ring, pulled from Jean's pack days ago. If Greyhill was innocent, the ring's theft would have set him to hunting. If Greyhill was guilty, Thomas would be walking into a trap with his eyes open.

He had no other choice.

Thomas crawled to the sty's edge and peered through the slats. The camp stretched before him in the grey dawn light—row upon row of tents, cooking fires sending thin ribbons of smoke into the sky. Men moved between them, yawning, stretching, checking their gear. The army would march within the hour. He could feel it in the air, the way he could feel weather coming in his bones.

His bow was still at the mill. His arrows were scattered or sabotaged. He had nothing but a knife, a stolen ring, and the truth.

Not nearly enough.

Thomas slipped out of the sty and moved through the shadows between tents. He kept his head down, his pace steady. An archer running through camp drew questions. A man walking with purpose drew none.

Greyhill's tent stood apart from the others, at the edge of the noble enclosure where the banners hung limp in the still morning air. Two guards flanked the entrance—men Thomas didn't know, their faces hard and closed.

He approached and one of them stepped forward, hand on his sword. "State your business."

"Thomas Barrow. I serve Sir John Greyhill. I need to speak with him."

The guard's eyes flicked over Thomas's mud-streaked clothes, the blood staining his sleeve. "Sir John is preparing for the march. He's not to be—"

"Let him through."

The voice came from inside the tent. The guards stepped aside, exchanging glances, and Thomas pushed through the canvas flap.

Greyhill stood at a campaign table cluttered with maps and letters. He was already armoured—polished plate over a quilted gambeson, his surcoat bearing the grey falcon of his house. He looked up as Thomas entered, and his eyes narrowed.

"Thomas." The word was flat. "You look like you've been through a war already."

"Nearly was, sir." Thomas stopped a few paces from the table. "I need to tell you something. And I need you to hear it before you decide to hang me."

Greyhill's brow furrowed. He set down the letter he'd been reading. "Hang you? For what?"

Thomas reached into his pocket and set the ring on the table between them.

The silence that followed was sharp enough to cut.

Greyhill stared at the ring. His hand moved to it, hesitated, then picked it up. He turned it over, reading the inscription he must have known by heart. When he looked up at Thomas, his face had gone pale.

"Where did you find this?"

"In the pack of a French knight who's been masquerading as one of our supply men. He's been working with a false squire named Roger. They've been sabotaging our arrows." Thomas paused. "And I believe Captain Ashworth is the man protecting them."

Greyhill's jaw tightened. He looked from the ring to Thomas, then back to the ring. For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

"You believe," Greyhill said at last, his voice careful. "You have evidence?"

"Saw it with my own eyes. Roger and the Frenchman at the mill. Ashworth came in and arrested Roger, but he let the Frenchman escape into the dark. And I saw the mark on his glove—the same three-thread stitch that's been appearing on every sabotaged bowstring." Thomas lifted his bound arm. "He gave me this when I ran."

Greyhill sat down heavily on a folding stool. He was a tall man, lean, with the weathered face of a soldier who'd risen on merit rather than birth. Thomas had heard the rumours—that Greyhill had been a commoner himself once, knighted for valour at a dozen sieges. It was why Thomas trusted him.

"When I came to you about the arrows days ago, you told me to keep watching. I thought you didn't believe me."

"I believed you," Greyhill said quietly. "I just didn't know who to trust." He held up the ring. "This was stolen from my tent two nights before the French knight appeared. I thought—" He shook his head. "I thought it was personal. A petty thief. I never considered it was part of something larger."

"It's how Jean got into the supply stores. He had your authority."

Greyhill closed his fist around the ring. "And Ashworth. You're certain?"

"As certain as I can be without putting a knife to his throat." Thomas hesitated. "There's more. The French are planning to attack through the eastern hedge gate at first light. Three taps on the gate and a thrown stone as a signal. Roger was meant to open it from the inside."

Greyhill was on his feet. "First light? That's—"

"Within the hour. Maybe less." Thomas met his eyes. "I know I'm an archer. I know I'm nobody. But I'm not mad, and I'm not lying. If we don't stop this before the march, we're walking into a slaughter."

Greyhill stood motionless for a long moment. Then he did something that surprised Thomas—he laughed.

"You know what the Duke of York thinks of your company?" Greyhill said. "He's spoken of you men as expendable. He believes—believed—that the northern archers drink too much, pray too little, and would break at the first charge. When I vouched for you, he told me my judgment was clouded by sentiment."

"He's not entirely wrong about the drinking," Thomas said.

Greyhill grinned, a flash of white in his weathered face. "No. But he's wrong about the rest." He moved to the back of the tent and began pulling at the straps of a heavy chest. When he lifted the lid, he revealed a rack of swords—plain, workmanlike blades, well-oiled and sharp.

"Take this." He handed Thomas a sword with a worn leather grip. "You'll need more than a knife if you're going to face Ashworth."

Thomas took the weapon, testing its weight. It was a good blade. Serviceable. The kind a man could trust his life to.

"You believe me, then," Thomas said.

"I believe the ring you returned to me," Greyhill said. "A saboteur wouldn't walk into my tent and hand back his leverage. And I believe the wound on your arm." He looked at Thomas, and his eyes were hard. "What do you intend to do?"

"Ashworth is the key," Thomas said. "If I can prove he's the protector—catch him in the act—the Duke will have to listen. But I need to get close to him without being seen."

Greyhill moved to the corner of the tent and knelt, lifting a canvas tarp to reveal a narrow opening in the earth below. "There are passageways beneath the camp. The engineers dug them for the supply stores, but they connect several of the command tents. I know the way to Ashworth's."

Thomas stared at the dark hole in the ground. "You kept a secret passage to your captain's tent?"

"I kept a secret passage to everyone's tent." Greyhill handed him a rolled parchment. "This is a map. The safe routes, the weak spots in the camp's layout. If you're going to move unseen, you'll need it."

Thomas unrolled the map. The ink was fresh, the lines crisp—Greyhill had drawn this himself. He traced the route from the noble enclosure to the eastern edge of camp. It was marked clearly: Ashworth's tent, the guard Captain's billet, with two access points circled in red.

"You knew," Thomas said slowly. "You knew something was wrong before I came to you."

Greyhill's face was unreadable. "I knew the arrows were being sabotaged. I suspected it was someone high in the command chain. I just didn't know who." He met Thomas's eyes. "You gave me the name. Now I need you to finish the work."

A horn sounded somewhere in the camp—the call to assemble. The march was beginning.

Thomas tucked the map into his boot and slid the sword through his belt. He looked at Greyhill, at the ring still clutched in the old knight's fist.

"What will you do?"

"I'll go to the Duke," Greyhill said. "I'll tell him what I know. If Ashworth moves against you, I'll be the stop between his blade and your back." He paused. "But I don't know how much longer I can keep the Duke from marching. You'll have to move fast."

Thomas nodded. He didn't trust himself to speak.

He turned to leave, then stopped at the tent's entrance. "Sir John. The boy—Will. He was a page in your service."

Greyhill's face tightened. "I know. I've been searching for him since yesterday."

"He vanished near the stream by the forest. I found drag marks, a French knife. I think they silenced him for what he saw."

Greyhill closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, they were bright with something that might have been grief or rage—or both. "Find who did this, Thomas. Find them and make them answer for it."

"I intend to."

Thomas slipped out of the tent and into the grey morning light. The camp was stirring now, the orderly chaos of an army preparing to march. Horses being saddled. Wagons being loaded. Men calling to each other in the accents of every corner of England—and in the voices of Thomas's own Yorkshire kin, rough and familiar.

He looked toward the eastern edge of camp, where the hedge gate stood unbarred and waiting.

Somewhere out there, Ashworth was doing whatever it was he did when he thought no one was watching. Jean was running toward the French lines with word that the plan had been compromised. And in the space between, Thomas Barrow—archer, fletcher, a man who had been told his whole life that he was worth less than the nobles who led him—walked with a borrowed sword and a map drawn in a knight's careful hand.

He had nothing left but the truth and the will to make it heard.

That would have to be enough.