Read Chapter 15: The Bowstring Revisited

The rope binding was wolf's gut, cured hard, and Thomas knew it the moment his fingers found it in the dark of the pigsty. He had carried the broken bowstring from the first sabotaged weapon he'd unstrung back in Chapter Three, when the morning alarm had gone up and half the yard had blamed the damp. He'd kept it out of habit, the way a fletcher keeps a flawed shaft to remind himself what a bad day's work looks like.

Now, in the gray half-light before dawn, he crouched behind the sty wall and held the broken string up to the seam of sky. The knot at the snapped end was no soldier's knot. It was a fletcher's knot—a figure-eight hitch, drawn tight and finished with a half-hitch on the standing part. The same knot he'd seen on the guard captain's own bowstring at the mill. Ashworth. The same man who had burst in to "arrest" Roger.

Thomas's jaw tightened. A soldier didn't tie a string like that. A soldier tied what he was taught, when he was taught, and let it go at that. This knot was deliberate. A craftsman's signature. And Ashworth, with his clean gloves and his careful words, had been wearing that signature on his weapon while Roger laughed and Jean slipped away.

He rolled the string between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the fray where it had snapped—not clean, but sawed. Someone had cut it partway through the night before the last march. The archers who'd drawn it had been lucky not to have it snap in their faces. Thomas had unstrung it himself before it could.

The borrowed sword was cold at his hip. Greyhill's map crackled in his chest. The passages led to Ashworth's tent, and the captain did not know he was coming.

The camp was stirring. Horses stamped somewhere beyond the trees; a sergeant bellowed a roll call. The army would form within the hour. Thomas had no time left for proof—only for action.

He slipped from behind the sty, keeping low, and found the map's first marker: a gnarled oak beside a broken cart. Greyhill's hand had drawn an arrow indicating a gap beneath the cart's bed. Thomas dropped to his belly and wriggled through, into a shallow trench that ran alongside the supply lines. The smell of dung and piss was strong, but it masked his scent from the dogs.

He crawled for a hundred yards beneath the noise of the camp, past tents where men coughed and cursed and rattled their gear. Once, a boot landed inches from his face, and he froze. A voice above him said something about the king's temper and the damned archers, and then the boot moved on.

At the next marker—a barrel stave jammed upright in the earth—Thomas turned left, into a narrow passage that ran between the picket lines and the quartermaster's stores. The canvas walls around him grew thicker, closer. He was deep in the command cluster now, where the banners flew and the officers didn't expect to look down.

Ashworth's tent was the third from the end. Greyhill's map marked it with a cross and a single word: *captain*. The tent flaps were tied closed, but the rear corner was staked loose. Thomas worked the stake free with his fingers, eased the canvas up, and slid inside.

The tent was orderly in the way of a man who commands others. A cot with wool blankets folded square. A writing slope on a camp table, its lid shut. A small chest at the foot of the cot, iron-bound. Thomas crossed to the table, unlatched the writing slope, and began to work through the papers inside.

Most were requisition lists and watch rosters. A few were letters in a clerical hand, nothing more than logistics. But beneath the bottom leaf of writing paper, his fingers closed on a folded sheet sealed with wax.

He turned it to the light of the tent's single candle, still burning low from the night watch. The seal was not English. It was a fleur-de-lis pressed in dark green wax—the mark of the French command. He broke it open and read.

The letter was in French, written in a fast, cramped hand. Thomas had enough of the tongue from years along the border to piece it out. It named the eastern hedge gate as the point of entry. It gave the hour—first light. It requested that the "English friend" ensure the gate remained unbarred and the sentries replaced with loyal men. And at the bottom, in a different hand, was an addendum:

*The left flank breaks first. The archers there are the king's pride. Kill them and the rest will fall.*

Thomas stared at the words. His archers. The men of Yorkshire and Lancashire who had stood with him through Harfleur, through the march, through the mud and the sickness and the hunger. The French did not intend to wait for the gate. They intended to strike at the flank, where the archers were clustered, and break the English heart before the day even began.

His hand shook. Not from fear. From a cold, certain rage.

He read the letter three more times, memorizing the words. Then he lifted the sheet and slipped it into his tunic, against his chest. He closed the writing slope, restoring it exactly as he had found it. For a moment, he considered leaving the broken bowstring beside the letter—proof, if Ashworth found it, that Thomas knew. But proof was not what he needed. He needed fear.

He drew the borrowed sword, but not to fight. He knelt, and with the point of the blade he scratched a single word into the wax of the camp table. Not a message. A name.

*Barrow.*

Then he pulled two feathers from his belt—flights from the sabotaged arrows he had found by the stream. Black goose, barred with white. He laid them on the writing slope, crossed like a signature.

He was back at the tent's rear corner in four steps, ducking through the loosened canvas, re-staking the flap as best he could. He was twenty yards down the passage when he heard it.

A shout. Not alarm—recognition. A voice raised, then cut off. Thomas flattened himself against the earth, heart hammering. Boots. Several sets. Moving fast, toward the tent.

Ashworth had found the feathers early.

Thomas reached the gap beneath the cart just as the first horn sounded from the English lines. Not an attack horn. A muster. The army was forming. He had minutes, not hours.

He scrambled through the trench, out past the gnarled oak, and came up crouched behind the broken cart. The camp was a blur of motion now—men buckling armor, horses led to pickets, wagon wheels grinding. In the mass of it, a tall figure in a captain's harness was striding toward the command tent, a pair of guards at his heels. Ashworth.

Thomas held his breath. Ashworth paused, looked around, and for one terrible moment his eyes passed directly over the broken cart.

Then he turned and continued toward the command tent, shouting orders. He did not know. Not yet.

Thomas pressed the letter against his chest. He had proof. He had the captain's name in his mouth. He had minutes before first light, and the eastern gate stood unbarred.

He began to run.