Read Chapter 36: The Morning After

The dawn came grey and cold, and the crows were already at their work.

Thomas walked among the dead with a spade over his shoulder. The field stretched away from him like a thing discarded, churned to mud by thousands of feet, scattered with broken shafts and trampled banners and the still forms of men who would not rise again. The air carried the smell of blood and wet wool and the sour tang of opened bowels, and Thomas breathed it without flinching because flinching did no good on a field like this.

He found his first man lying against a shattered cart. A boy from Derbyshire—Thomas did not know his name. Barely old enough for a beard, the kind of lad who had joined the company with a bow too big for him and a laugh too loud for the camp. One of Jack's recruits from the muster at Southampton. Thomas had never learned his name, and now he would never need to.

He took the boy by the shoulders and dragged him toward the pit they had dug at the edge of the wood. Others were doing the same. Men moved in silence, their faces hollowed by the night's work. The dead were laid in rows, side by side, and the priests moved among them with their Latin and their incense, blessing bodies that had no more need of blessing.

Thomas worked for hours. The sun climbed pale behind the clouds and the mist burned off the valley floor, revealing more of the field than Thomas wanted to see. He found men he had trained, men who had marched beside him from Harfleur, men who had stood in the line with him and loosed when he loosed and died when the French came through. Each one he lifted with care, laying them straight in the earth, arranging their hands over their chests as if they might rise again.

It was not until mid-morning that Thomas found what he was looking for.

He had been dragging a French knight toward the pit—heavy work, the man armored in plate that had been hammered and dented and finally pierced through the gorget—when something caught his eye in the churned mud beside a fallen standard. A scatter of pale wood, almost white against the dark soil.

Thomas let the knight's legs drop and knelt.

The arrows lay broken. Three of them, snapped at the shaft, their heads still sharp and their fletching torn and muddy. Thomas picked one up and turned it over in his hands. The wood was yew, the grain straight, the nock cut clean. It might have been any arrow from any quiver in the army.

But Thomas knew it.

He turned the second one over. Same yew. Same cut. The fletching was goose feather, trimmed tight and even. And there, near the nock, a small mark burned into the wood. A circle with a cross through it—the mark of the fletcher's guild in York.

Thomas sat back on his heels.

These were the arrows that had started it all. The ones that had gone missing from the stores before Agincourt. The ones that had been doctored—their shafts weakened, their heads loosened—so that they would fail at the moment of release. The ones that had killed Thomas's own men when their bows betrayed them in the heat of battle.

He had found the cache in the Viscount's tent. He had captured Roger, who had confessed. He had killed the Viscount over the royal standard with these very arrows scattered at his feet. But he had never found the arrows themselves. They had been lost in the chaos of the charge, scattered across the field when the Viscount's knights had fled.

Now here they were. Broken. Useless. Like the plot that had made them.

Thomas gathered the pieces carefully, cradling them in his palms. He stood and looked across the field. The burial detail was still at work, and the smoke of funeral pyres rose in thin columns from beyond the treeline. The French were burning their dead in great pits, while the English laid theirs in the earth with proper rites. Thomas had heard that the heralds had counted the French dead at six thousand. The English had lost fewer than three hundred.

He thought of the arrows in his hands. How many deaths had they caused? How many good men had drawn them back and watched the shafts snap at the full draw, sending the heads tumbling wild or falling short into the mud? How many had died because the Viscount had wanted a kingdom and had fed his ambition with shaved yew and lies?

Thomas found a clear patch of ground near the edge of the wood, away from the burial pits and the working parties. He set the broken arrows down in a careful bundle and piled dry brush and dead wood over them. He worked slowly, deliberately, the way he had once worked in his fletcher's shop in York, matching grain and cutting nocks and shaping heads until every arrow was true.

When the pyre was built, Thomas knelt and struck his flint against the steel. The spark caught the dry tinder and quickly grew. The flames licked up through the brush and took hold of the broken shafts, sending sparks spiraling into the grey morning sky.

Thomas watched them burn. He watched the flames consume the arrows that had started all of this, the arrows that had nearly destroyed his company, that had killed men who trusted their bows, that had set him on a path that ended with a Viscount's blood on his hands and a king's banner in his grasp.

The wood blackened. The fletching curled and vanished. The yew cracked and split and fell into ash.

Thomas stood and watched until the fire burned itself down to nothing.

He did not know how long he stood there. Long enough for the smoke to clear and the fire to die. Long enough for the sounds of the burial work to fade behind him. Long enough that when a voice spoke from the trees, he startled like a man woken from a sleep.

"You're a hard man to find."

Thomas turned. Greyhill stood at the edge of the wood, leaning on a makeshift crutch, his arm bound across his chest. The bolt wound in his shoulder had been dressed and bandaged, and a fresh red stain had soaked through the linen, but his face had more color than it had the night before. He moved carefully, favoring his leg, but he moved on his own.

"You should be in the tents," Thomas said.

"I should be dead," Greyhill said. "But the surgeons say the bolt missed the bone. The fever has not taken me yet, and they think it will not now." He took a step forward, testing the ground, and his mouth tightened with pain. "The King has ordered me to stand guard over his tent through the night. I told him I could not stand. He told me I could sit."

Thomas almost smiled.

The knight came closer, until he stood beside Thomas at the edge of the burned patch. He looked down at the smoldering ash. "What was that?"

"The arrows," Thomas said.

Greyhill's face showed understanding. He did not ask which arrows. He knew the whole story now—Thomas had told it plainly enough in the aftermath of the battle, when the Viscount's body lay cooling in the mud and the King had demanded a reckoning.

"I found them broken on the field," Thomas said. "It seemed fitting to burn them."

Greyhill was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "What will you do now?"

Thomas looked at the fire, at the last thin tendrils of smoke rising into the grey sky. The field beyond was quiet now. The burial pits were full. The priests had fallen silent. In the distance, he could see the tents of the English camp, the banners snapping in the wind, the movement of men who had survived.

"I will serve," he said. "The King has given us a great victory, but the war is not over. The French will come again. They will always come again. And when they do, my men will need someone who knows how to stand in a line and draw a bow."

Greyhill nodded slowly.

"But I will not forget this night," Thomas said. "I will not forget that a man who called himself a nobleman fed his ambition with the lives of archers. I will not forget the arrows in my stores that were shaved and weakened and given to my men to die on." He looked down at his hands, scarred and callused from years of bow work. "I have served lords and kings all my life. I have watched them scheme and plot and spend men's lives like coin. But this time, I saw it with my own eyes. I saw what their games cost. And I will never let such deceit happen again."

Greyhill was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. "It is a heavy vow."

"Good," Thomas said. "It should be."

The wind moved through the trees, carrying the smoke away. Thomas turned from the ash and looked across the camp.

"I will have my men mustered by noon," he said. "We have losses to make good, bows to repair, and a march ahead of us. The King will want to move soon, while the French are still reeling. There is work to do."

Greyhill shifted, reaching out as if to take Thomas's arm, but the movement made his face go white and he caught himself on his crutch. "Thomas," he said. "I was wrong about you."

Thomas looked at him.

"I thought you a common archer who had risen above his station," Greyhill said. "I thought your place was in the ranks, not beside gentlemen. I was a fool." He met Thomas's eyes. "The King asked me what sort of man you were. I told him you were the sort of man who would carry a broken knight to the burial pit and then burn the arrows that had killed his friends. I told him you were a man of honor."

Thomas did not know what to say to that. He looked away, out across the field where the crows were still circling.

"That is high praise from a knight," he said.

"It is deserved," Greyhill said. "And I do not give it lightly." He took a breath, wincing at the movement. "If you need anything—when the army moves, when you must reorganize your company—you have only to ask."

Thomas nodded. "I will remember that."

They stood together for a moment longer, two men who had been enemies and were now something else. Then Greyhill turned and began the slow, painful walk back toward the camp.

Thomas watched him go. Then he knelt beside the fire and stirred the ash with a stick, making sure nothing remained alive beneath the surface.

The arrows were gone. The plot was gone. The Viscount was dead and his banner sent to his widow as a trophy of the battle he had tried to lose.

Thomas stood and hefted his spade. There were still dead to bury, and the day was only beginning.