Read Chapter 3: The Fletcher's Mark

The night air bit at Thomas’s cheeks as he crossed the muddy lane between the supply tents. Behind him, the camp’s cookfires had burned down to orange coals, their smoke hanging low and bitter. Ahead, a single lantern guttered outside the fletcher’s awning, casting a sickly glow across stacks of bundled arrows and coils of hempen string.

Tom Watkins did not look up when Thomas ducked under the canvas. The old man sat on a three-legged stool, his fingers working a length of bowstring with the patient rhythm of a man who had done nothing else for forty years. His face was a map of scars and wrinkles, and his left thumb was missing at the first joint, a badge of his trade.

“Barrow,” Watkins said, still not looking. “Heard you was askin’ questions.”

“Word travels.”

“Word’s got boots and a mouth. Comes and goes.” Watkins set the string down and finally raised his eyes. They were pale, almost colorless in the lantern light. “You’re wantin’ to know about your arrows.”

“Every company’s arrows,” Thomas said. “The front-line stocks.”

Watkins nodded slowly, then reached under his stool and pulled out a length of broken bowstring, coiled and tied with a bit of leather cord. He held it up without offering it.

“This come off a man at Harfleur,” he said. “Dead man. Bowstring snapped mid-draw, caught him in the face. Not clean—nasty. They brought his kit in for salvage.”

Thomas stepped closer. The string was standard issue, three-ply hemp, waxed dark. But where it had snapped, the fibers were twisted in a way that made his stomach clench.

“You see it?” Watkins said.

“The knot.” Thomas pointed. The splice near the loop was off—a half-turn too many, the tuck buried wrong. It would hold under light draw, maybe even a few shots. But under full war draw, at sixty pounds and more, it would let go like a cut mooring line.

“That’s not a soldier’s knot,” Thomas said. “That’s not any knot I’ve seen in the King’s service.”

“Nor I.” Watkins set the string down. “And I’ve tied more knots than you’ve drawn bows. But I seen this one before. Years back. Man named Will Cutter, a deserter out of the Duke of York’s retinue. He was a bowyer by trade, a good one, but he sold his craft to whoever paid. He used this same splice on all his work. Called it his ‘handshake.’ Said any man who knew it, knew him.”

Thomas’s jaw tightened. He’d heard the name, or something like it, in a disciplinary roll read at dawn punishment weeks ago. “Cutter was executed.”

“Aye. Hung at Harfleur for thieving from his own company’s stores. But before he died, he had apprentices. Or men who watched him close enough to learn.” Watkins leaned forward, lowering his voice. “And two nights past, I saw a man I didn’t know, standing by the arrow carts. Not carrying, not stacking. Just standin’. Watchin’. He moved off when I called out.”

“What did he look like?”

“Tall. Wore a hooded cloak, though there’s no rain in the sky. Couldn’t see his face. But he walked with a limp—right leg, favoring it.” Watkins spat onto the ground. “There’s a hundred men in this host with a limp. But there’s only one who’s got reason to be near those carts in the dead of night, and it ain’t a fletcher.”

Thomas turned this over. The deep-cut mark on the arrow in the cart matched Greyhill’s fletcher. But Watkins’s story pulled a different thread: a dead man’s knot, a craft passed down from a deserter, and a stranger with a limp who skulked near the stores. Greyhill’s fletcher was accounted for, came from Yorkshire, had served the family for a decade. No limp that Thomas had heard of.

But he had heard of Will Cutter’s execution. And he remembered, now, that the man who had read the sentence at Harfleur had been a knight of Greyhill’s household.

“Who has the death records?” Thomas asked.

Watkins shrugged. “Quartermaster Miles Fletcher keeps the rolls. All of’em—pay, provisions, punishment. You want to know who was in Cutter’s company, who watched him die, who might’ve picked up his tricks—that’s where you’d look.”

“Fletcher.” Thomas let the name sit. “Quartermaster Fletcher.”

“Same man what called your arrows ‘poor workmanship’ this morning.” Watkins’s lips twitched. “Seems he’s got his hand in more than one pie.”

Thomas turned toward the tent flap, then stopped. He looked back at Watkins. The old man had already picked up his string again, his fingers resuming their conversation with the hemp.

“Tom,” Thomas said. “You watched the carts. Did you see anyone else? Anyone in a position to command?”

Watkins was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Sir John Greyhill came by the stores yesterday, lookin’ over the new shipments. He asked me a question about draw weight and then left. But his squire—the short one with the red hair—he stayed behind. Poked around the cart where your arrows was found.”

“The cart that’s been moved since.”

“Moved and replaced with fresh stock, aye.” Watkins looked up. “Funny thing, though. The fresh stock has the same wax on the strings as the old. You don’t see that much, this deep into a campaign. Supply train’s been runnin’ thin for weeks.”

Thomas nodded. He’d noted the same. The arrows that had arrived two days ago were too clean, too uniform. The wax was fresh, but the fletching was cut by a hand that knew what it was doing—and knew how to leave a mark that most men wouldn’t see.

“I’m going to check Fletcher’s ledger,” Thomas said. “If the records show who was at Cutter’s hanging, we’ll have a name.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then we’ll have a man with something to hide.”

Thomas pushed out under the awning into the chill night. The camp had quieted further, the last murmurs of soldiers settling down for the remaining few hours of what little night was left. He took a step toward the quartermaster’s tent, a hundred yards across the muddy lane, when a flicker of movement caught the edge of his vision.

He froze.

Two tents down, between the sagging ridge of a supply tent and a stack of empty crates, a shadow detach itself from the deeper dark. It was human—tall, moving with a careful, deliberate tread. As it crossed a thin tracery of moonlight from a dying torch, Thomas saw the limp. The right leg dragging slightly, the body compensating with a tilt of the shoulder.

The figure stopped. Turned. For a heartbeat, Thomas thought he saw a pale oval of a face looking directly at him.

Then the figure slipped between two tents and was gone, swallowed by the dark.

Thomas’s hand went to the knife at his belt. His pulse beat a slow, steady rhythm against his ribs. He had a choice: chase the shadow into the dark, where a limp could be a trap and a man with a knife waited, or continue to the quartermaster’s ledger, where the names would tell him everything.

He took one step toward the dark. Then stopped.

Behind him, Watkins’s lantern guttered out with a wet hiss. The old man had gone to sleep, or had doused it deliberately. Either way, Thomas was alone in the dark with a stranger who knew his face and his questions.

And the stranger had not been walking toward the quartermaster’s tent. He had been walking away from it.

Thomas turned on his heel and moved, low and fast, across the lane toward the quartermaster’s tent. Whoever that shadow was, they had gotten there first. Which meant whatever was in Miles Fletcher’s ledger might be gone by the time he arrived.

Or worse—waiting for him.