Read Chapter 24: The Lie Exposed

The tent flap slammed back and the wind of the camp rushed in with me. The King looked up from the map table, his eyes flat and cold. Greyhill stood at his shoulder, and York beside him, hand resting on his dagger. I had the merchant's seal in my fist, and I held it out before anyone could speak.

"Your Grace," I said, and my voice was hoarse from the stream and the smoke and the running. "The arrows from Calais were never sent."

The King's gaze did not move. "You have proof of this, or you have rumor?"

I set the seal on the table. It was lead, broken from the merchant's chest, stamped with the crossed keys of the Calais guild. "I found this on a French knight who calls himself Jean de—" I stopped, steadied myself. "He is not Jean. He is the Viscount of Agincourt. He dug a tunnel beneath the palisade and took one of my archers. I freed the boy. I saw the Viscount's face myself, in the firelight, and heard him name himself to his own men."

York stepped forward. "A Viscount in our camp? Dressed as one of our own?"

"Disguised as the merchant who was to deliver our arrow shipment," I said. "He had the seal. He had the papers. And he told my archer that the barrels were a lie—the arrows never left Calais. The real merchant is taken or dead. The shipment is smoke."

The King picked up the seal, turned it in his fingers. The firelight caught the worn edges. He looked at me for a long moment, and I saw something move behind his eyes—not trust, but calculation. He was weighing the cost of being wrong against the cost of being late.

"Search the prisoners," the King said quietly. "All of them. Every man taken in the night's skirmish. Bring them before me."

The order moved fast. Guards went out, torches bobbing through the half-light of false dawn. I stood in the tent, sweat cooling on my back, and listened to the camp groan awake around us—the stamp of horses, the grind of cart wheels, the distant sound of the muster horn calling men to the road.

They brought the prisoners in a line. French scouts, mostly, their hands tied, their faces grey with cold and fear. I watched each one, looking for the Viscount's dark stare, the scar I had seen at the corner of his jaw.

He was not among them.

But the last prisoner they brought was not French. He was a stout man in a merchant's coat, his beard matted with dirt, his wrists raw from rope. He blinked in the torchlight like a man who had been in the dark for a long time.

The King turned to him. "Who are you?"

The man swallowed. His voice cracked when he spoke. "Edmund Tasker, merchant of Calais, under contract to supply arrows to the English host." He looked at the seal on the table. "That is my seal. It was taken from me."

"Taken?" York said.

"By a knight who called himself French but spoke English like a Yorkshireman," Tasker said. "He took my papers, my seal, my wagon. He left me tied in a ditch with his own men. They kept me prisoner four days." His eyes found me. "You told them, didn't you? That the arrows were false?"

"I did," I said.

Tasker let out a breath. "They were. Every barrel in that depot—the good ones, the ones your quartermasters thought were sound—they came from me, and they were true. But he replaced them. The Viscount. He put his own barrels in my wagon and sent mine into the river." He shook his head. "The arrows you have are cut short, or notched wrong, or fletched with feathers that will spin them into the mud. The true shipment is at the bottom of the Seine."

The King's jaw tightened. He looked at Greyhill, then back to me. "Then we march to Agincourt with what we have."

"We march with what we have, Your Grace," Tasker said, "and it is not enough. I counted what was in that depot before they took me. Twelve thousand bows' worth of arrows, sabotaged or sunk. What remains is a fraction."

The silence in the tent was absolute. I could hear the horn again, farther off, and the drums of the forming army.

I stepped forward. "Your Grace, the arrows that are sound are few, but my archers know their craft. We cannot outshoot a full French army with a quarter of our shafts. But we can make every shaft count—if we know where their attack will fall."

"He told you the left flank," York said.

"He told me what he wanted me to know," I said. "But he is not done. He set a signal on the eastern hedge, to call the French in. He slipped away before I could seal the gate. He is still out there, Your Grace, and he knows our positions, our supply lines, our weaknesses. He will not stop until the arrows fail us in the field."

The King looked at the merchant, then at the seal, then at me. He stood slowly, and when he spoke, his voice was low and even.

"Then we find him before the fog lifts." He turned to York. "Double the guard on the eastern wood. Send riders to every hedge gate and every gap in the palisade. No one crosses the lines without my word." He looked at me. "You have done what you swore to do, archer. The lie is exposed."

I nodded, but I could not feel the victory. The Viscount was out there, and dawn was breaking over the fields of Agincourt.