Read Chapter 19: The Hidden Path

The eastern wood swallowed the last of the twilight, and Thomas moved through it like a ghost. His breath came hard and fast, sword heavy in his fist, the weight of Greyhill’s trust pressing at his back. He could still hear the muster horn echoing off the palisade—third call, maybe fourth, he’d lost count—and the distant thunder of thousands of men shuffling into formation. Dawn would break soon, and with it, the arrows. But none of that mattered now. Only Will.

The stream cut shallow and cold ahead, its banks churned with fresh prints. Thomas dropped to a knee, ran his fingers over the mud. Small boots. Heel-deep, toes dragging—someone carrying weight, stumbling. A boy. Will. And beside those prints, a longer stride, heel hard in the earth, toes kicked through the mud in a soldier’s deliberate pace. Jean.

Thomas followed the waterline east, where the palisade curved toward the wood and the ground rose into scrub and tangled root. The stakes loomed above him, sharpened tips black against the fading stars. But there, where the stream widened and the bank cut low beneath the timber, the earth had been disturbed. Fresh loam piled like a mole’s work, only wider. He knelt, pushing aside a screen of cut bramble. A hole. Darkness inside. And at its mouth, caught on a root, a scrap of wool—Will’s cap, torn at the seam.

“Christ,” Thomas breathed.

He slid into the tunnel on his belly. The earth pressed close, cold and damp, roots scraping his shoulders. It ran low, maybe twelve feet, dug from the forest side inward, then stopped—incomplete. A hand’s width short of breaking through the camp’s perimeter. But enough. Enough for a man to crawl under if he knew where to dig. Enough for a knife to finish the last of it in minutes. Thomas’s fingers found the cut marks in the ceiling, deliberate and clean. This wasn’t a rat’s work. French shovels. French plans.

Will’s cap lay crushed in the dirt beside him. Torn at the crown, as if wrenched off a head. Thomas pressed it to his chest for a moment, then tucked it into his belt.

Voices. Low, foreign, drifting down the tunnel’s far end where the bramble screen had been pulled aside. Thomas crawled forward, belly scraping, until his head broke free of the palisade’s shadow and he could see into the eastern wood.

A campfire guttered in a shallow dip between two oaks. Four men crouched around it, their surcoats unmarked, but their accents—Norman, sharp and clipped—gave them away. French scouts. One stood, stretched, and gestured toward the palisade with an open palm. “Soon. The English march at first light. We hold here until the signal.” Another spat into the fire. “And the boy? What of him?”

Thomas’s gaze snapped past the fire, to the rope binding a thin figure to the nearest oak. Will. He was slumped, head lolling, wrists lashed behind the trunk. A bruise darkened his cheek, and his wool tunic was torn at the shoulder. But he moved—a twitch, a stir of breath. Alive. Thank God. Alive.

Thomas’s jaw set. He counted the scouts again: four. Two awake, one half-dozing, one gone off into the trees for the call of nature, no doubt. Each wore a short sword and a dagger. Five or six arrows scattered near the fire, but their bows leaned against a log—unstrung, distant. They weren’t watching the tunnel. They thought themselves hidden.

Thomas slid back out of the entrance, pressed himself against the bramble, and studied the ground between him and the fire. Fifteen feet of open leaf litter. If he rushed them fast, before the fifth returned, he could put down two with the sword and scatter the rest. But he’d give away the tunnel’s existence, and if even one Frenchman escaped, he’d run straight for Agincourt with word that the English had found the breach. Worse, if he killed all but one, the living might talk—and then Jean would know Thomas was closing.

He needed to be quieter. And he needed his bow.

Thomas looked down at the sword in his hand. Greyhill’s blade. Good steel, but it was not the ash longbow that had sung in his grip since childhood. A bow could fell a man from sixty yards and never show his face. But his bow lay in the pigsty, abandoned, and the camp was behind him now, already stirring toward the march. There was no time to run for it. Not with Will tied to that tree and the dawn stealing fast across the sky.

The sleeping scout rolled, grumbled, and settled deeper into his cloak. The awake one fed the fire and muttered something about the cold. Thomas’s eyes swept the edge of the camp. A sling hung from the saddlebags of a tied mule—A sling. A stone, a leather pouch, and a good arm could silence a man from thirty feet. Not a bow. But close enough.

The fifth scout returned from the trees, buckling his belt, and settled into conversation with the others. Four again, all in a loose knot around the flames. Their backs were to him. One of them laughed.

Thomas crawled back into the tunnel, fetched the heaviest stone he could find, and wrapped it in a strip torn from his own tunic. Then he crawled out again, keeping to the shadows behind the tunnel’s screen, and crept through the brush until he was level with the scouts. He could hear better now, and the words turned his blood cold.

“—the viscount rides ahead to gather the rest. We strike when the signal comes.”

“And if the boy’s told him all he knows of the archers’ barrels?”

“He told us enough. The arrows are spoiled already; the rest will rust by noon. The English will be fighting with sticks by the time we reach their line.”

Thomas froze. Spoil the arrows. Rust. Not just the barrels for the forewheel—what Will must have heard in that cellar, what he’d tried to tell him before Jean had come rushing out of the mist. If the arrowheads were coated with something, if they rusted in their sheaves, the archers might draw and loose and find nothing but splinters flying from their bows. A thousand men, mouths open in a battle cry, and nothing behind their arrows but feathered silence. Slaughter.

Will shifted against the tree, and one of the scouts turned, gave him a sharp kick to the shins. Will gasped but did not cry out. Thomas felt his knuckles go white around the stone.

He had expected to free Will and put an end to Jean’s scheming. But now there was more—the arrows themselves, every quiver in every cart, carrying the seed of their own ruin. Even if he could wake the whole camp, even if the King believed him down to the last arrowhead, the rust was already set. Unless he could find the source of the poison and cut it out before the barrels rolled.

Thomas watched the fire. Four scouts, a tied boy, and a tunnel that would swallow them all if he sealed it. But sealing the tunnel meant risking the fight, and the fight meant noise, and the noise would reach any other hidden ears for a mile. Perhaps that was the right play. Perhaps it was the only one.

He looked at Will’s bruised face, at the way the boy’s shoulders shook in the cold, and made his choice.

He tucked the stone against his palm, slid closer through the shadow of an oak’s spreading root, and waited for the scout nearest him to turn his head.

“When the signal comes,” the man said, scratching his chin, “we take the archers from behind, the viscount sweeps the flank. Easy as cutting sheep.”

Easy as cutting sheep.

Thomas’s hand rose. The first scout dropped without a sound. The second looked up, startled, and caught a fistful of darkness before the stone crashed into his temple. The third—he went for his sword, mouth opening, but Thomas was already in the firelight, sword swinging low, and the man’s knee buckled beneath him. A stifled cry, then silence.

The fourth spun, dagger flashing, and Thomas lunged. Steel rang, sparks off the blade, and then Thomas’s shoulder drove into the man’s chest, slamming him onto his back against the oak root. The dagger skittered away. Thomas pressed Greyhill’s sword to the man’s throat.

“The signal,” Thomas hissed in the man’s ear, his voice ragged French cracking at the edges. “What signal? What does it look like?”

The scout’s eyes flicked toward Will’s tree, then back. He smiled through broken teeth. “It has already gone.” He nodded eastward, where the wood sloped toward the faint grey line of the horizon, toward the low hills beyond, where Thomas now made out the glint of a shielded lantern blinking behind a ridge in a long, slow rhythm.

Cold dread gripped him. “No,” Thomas whispered. “That’s not the signal.”

“It is,” the scout said, and spat blood. “Father Guillaume’s lantern. You’re already too late. The English march into the trap at dawn, and the viscount rides to meet them.” A low, rattling laugh. “Your boy told us everything.”

Thomas drove his hilt down. The man went limp.

He stood, swaying, and looked from the eastern ridge—where the lantern still blinked its patient, awful message—to the tunnel mouth. His hand crept to Will’s torn cap in his belt.

Too late. He was too late.

Then he looked at Will straining against his ropes, eyes wide, mouth open, and Thomas heard the boy speak his name. Not a plea. A warning.

“Thomas.” Fear cracked his voice. “Behind you.”

Thomas spun, sword rising, just in time to catch Jean’s descending blade and hear the French knight’s low, cruel laugh. “You should have burned the letter, archer,” Jean said, his face inches from Thomas’s own. “Now you will watch the dawn from the other side of the stake.”