Read Chapter 4: The Quartermaster's Ledger

The canvas walls of the quartermaster’s tent billowed once in the night wind, then fell still. Thomas Barrow paused at the entrance flap, listening. Beyond the scattered campfire glow and the murmur of men trying to sleep before a battle they feared would be their last, there was only the creak of wagon wheels being shifted somewhere distant and the low, rhythmic sawing of a man snoring in the next tent over.

No footsteps. No challenge.

He slipped inside.

The tent smelled of tallow, damp wool, and ink gone sour in its pot. A single horn lantern hung from the center pole, turned low, casting just enough light for a man to count coin or curse his ledgers. The quartermaster, Miles Fletcher, was not a tidy man. His table lay buried under wax tablets, stray arrowheads, a half-eaten heel of bread, and a scatter of goose feathers. The ledgers themselves stood in a wooden chest at the tent’s rear, bound in cracked leather, their pages fuzzed with use.

Thomas knelt before the chest. The lock was a simple iron clasp, the sort meant to keep honest men out and thieves inconvenienced. He drew his belt knife, worked the blade between the clasp and the hasp, and twisted. The metal groaned, then gave with a sharp *ping* that sounded loud enough to wake the whole host.

He froze.

Nothing. The snoring continued. The wind moved the flap again.

He lifted the first ledger—supplies for the campaign from Southampton to Harfleur—and flicked through it by the lantern’s dull glow. Lists of sheaves, bundles of shafts, bodkin heads, waxed cord. Every entry marked with a clerk’s neat hand and a date. The last entry for arrows read simply: *Received, 4,000 sheaves, June 12, from L. Whitcombe, York.*

But Thomas’s fingers had stopped three pages earlier. There, pressed between two blank folios, was a single loose page, its top edge ragged where it had been torn from a binding. The ink was newer, the hand less practiced. It read:

*Shipment received in full at Calais, 28 October. 3,000 sheaves of ash, fletched, waxed, ready for issue. Vendor: merchant of record, name struck from register at vendor’s request. Price agreed: 200 marks over standard issue.*

Two hundred marks over standard issue. That was not a merchant’s price. That was a bribe wearing a price tag.

Thomas turned the page over. On the reverse, in a margin note so small he nearly missed it, was a single word in a hand that had tried to be careless but had pressed too hard: *York.*

The Duke of York’s men had been among the most vocal in calling for the attack at dawn. And now this.

Thomas shook his head. It was too easy. A name on a torn page, a marginal scribble—these were threads a man could hang himself with if he pulled them too quickly. He folded the page carefully and slipped it inside his tunic.

He was reaching for the register of issued stores when he heard it: footsteps. Two men, walking fast, their boots scuffing the wet ground. Voices, low and clipped. One of them laughed—a short, ugly sound. Then the laugh stopped, and Thomas heard the unmistakable scratch of a hand on canvas.

He blew out the lantern, dropped behind the chest. The tent flap opened.

A figure filled the gap, backlit by a distant torch. Tall, broad-shouldered, moving with a slight hitch on his right leg—the same limp Thomas had seen slipping away from the arrow carts. The man stepped inside, and behind him came a second, smaller shape: Miles Fletcher himself, the quartermaster, hugging a leather satchel to his chest like a mother with a child.

“I told you, no more,” Fletcher was saying. “They’re starting to count arrows, not just sheaves. There’ll be questions.”

“There will be no questions,” the tall man said. His voice was thin, almost reedy, a strange match for his frame. “Because there will be no battle. Not with what I’ve given you.”

“You’ve given me nothing but trouble.”

“I’ve given you coin.” The tall man reached into his cloak and pulled out a purse that clinked. “And you’ve given me access. That was the price.”

Fletcher set the satchel on the table, unlatched it. By the sliver of moonlight through the tent seam, Thomas saw the contents: a score of arrowheads, their steel dulled with some dark coating. Poisoned? No—too subtle for that. Something else.

“What is this?” Fletcher whispered.

“The rest of your payment,” the tall man said. “The arrows you’ve been setting aside—the ones marked with the plain cross—they’re already in the carts. But these are for the front ranks of the archers. The ones who will step forward first when the French knights charge.” He paused. “They’ll draw, they’ll loose, and their strings will snap before the arrow leaves the bow.”

Fletcher’s hand went to his mouth. “That’s murder. That’s not sabotage—that’s murder.”

“That’s war,” the tall man said. “Men die. The question is which men, and for what cause.”

Thomas’s breath was shallow. He pressed himself deeper into the shadow cast by the chest. The tall man’s limp was more pronounced now; he favored the right leg, almost dragging it. And his voice—there was something familiar in it, a cadence Thomas had heard in the training yards at Harfleur.

“The Duke will have his victory,” the tall man continued. “But he will have it his way, with his own men—not with this rabble of Yorkshire farmers and Cheshire boys who think a bow makes them knights.”

Fletcher was shaking his head. “I want no part of this. I’ll return the coin.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort.” The tall man stepped closer, and Thomas saw his hand drop to the dagger at his belt. “You’ll see those arrowheads are fitted by first light. And you’ll say nothing of the merchant from Calais.”

“The merchant’s name is already rubbed from the ledger.”

“Good. Then no one will find—” The tall man paused. His head turned slowly toward the chest in the corner.

Thomas had moved, but not fast enough. The torn page he’d left behind—he’d folded it, but he’d left the ledger open, and the wax tablet he’d disturbed had skittered to the floor. In the sliver of moonlight, it lay like a pale accusation.

The tall man took a step toward the chest. Then another.

Thomas had nowhere to run but through them. He had his bow strung, but drawing it now would give away everything. The tent seam behind him was loose—he could slip through it, but the noise would be heard.

He needed a distraction.

His hand found his quiver. His arrows were ruined at the nock, but the fletching was fine. He plucked a single gray goose feather—his own, not the camp’s, the one he’d used to mark his family’s work back in York—and flicked it toward the center of the tent.

It fluttered to the ground, landing at Fletcher’s feet.

The quartermaster looked down. “What’s this?”

The tall man turned, and in that moment of misdirection, Thomas dove for the tent’s back seam, slit the canvas with his knife, and rolled out into the night.

Behind him, he heard the tall man curse. “There was someone in here. A feather. That’s a marker—it’s from the new stocks.”

“I don’t—I didn’t—” Fletcher stammered.

“Find him. Find who left that, or I’ll make sure your own arrows find you before dawn.”

Thomas didn’t wait to hear more. He scrambled through the mud, low, keeping to the shadows between tents. In his tunic, the torn page from the ledger—the one naming a merchant of record from Calais and the scribbled word *York*—pressed against his chest like a brand.

He had a name now. Or at least a direction. And he had a dead goose feather, left to burn an innocent trail.

He just hoped the man with the limp could be led astray for long enough to see dawn.