Read Chapter 5: Greyhill's Debt

Thomas Barrow found Greyhill’s pavilion lit by a single storm lantern, the flap half-open as if the knight had expected company. Sir John Greyhill stood over a folding table scattered with maps, his gauntlets off, a cup of wine untouched at his elbow. He looked up when Thomas entered, and the flicker of relief in his eyes was quick enough to be imagined.

“Barrow.” Greyhill gestured to a stool. “You found something.”

Thomas did not sit. He laid the torn ledger page flat on the table, smoothing the creases with a calloused thumb. “From the quartermaster’s tent. Not ten minutes gone.”

Greyhill leaned in, reading the cramped script by lantern light. His jaw tightened at the marginal note. “York.”

“The arrows came from Calais,” Thomas said. “Inflated prices, a note naming York, and a distribution list that reads like our front-line companies. Someone’s been paid to break our bows before the French get the chance.”

Greyhill straightened slowly. For a long moment he said nothing, and Thomas watched the knight’s face go through several expressions—calculation, then something softer, then a hard resolve that settled his heavy brows.

“You should know something,” Greyhill said, and his voice was quieter than Thomas had ever heard it. “At Harfleur, when the French sortie caught our flank in the orchard—the night your company held the lane alone—I was in the ditch with the wounded. Three men dead on top of me, and I could not move my sword arm.” He touched his right shoulder as if the memory pained him. “You came back for me. You and your bow. You put three shafts through the men who would have finished me, and you dragged me out by the collar while the arrows still sang over your head.”

Thomas remembered the night. He remembered the mud, the screaming horses, the raw ache in his shoulders from drawing the bow beyond exhaustion. He had not known the man in the ditch was Greyhill. “I pulled a lot of men out of that ditch,” he said. “I did not keep a ledger of names.”

“I did.” Greyhill’s eyes were steady. “I promised myself I would not forget the archer with the gray fletching who chose to come back. And I mean to keep that debt tonight.”

Thomas felt a small knot in his chest loosen. He had half expected another dismissal, another lord waving his hand at the concerns of common men. But Greyhill’s voice carried weight, and his offer was concrete.

“If you find proof,” Greyhill continued, “I will stand behind you before the Constable and the King’s own council. I will say what I saw and what I know. But you must find more than a ledger page. Names. Faces. A confession, if you can wring one.” He paused. “And you must be careful. The Duke of York’s personal guard—twelve men, all knights and esquires sworn to his household—answer to no one but him. If they take an interest in you, there will be no trial and no witness. Just a body found at the edge of camp with a knife in its ribs and a story about French scouts.”

“I’ve met York’s men before,” Thomas said dryly.“Why?” Thomas asked. “Why would York’s household want our bows broken? If the line fails at dawn, he fails with it.”

Greyhill’s mouth thinned. “The Duke negotiates his own surrender terms should the day go ill. Ransom arrangements. Favors traded in advance. Some men plant hedges on both sides of a road, Barrow. They mean to walk away clean no matter which army sinks.”

The words settled in Thomas like stones. He had seen enough war to understand the ugly arithmetic of nobility—the way some men counted lives as coin and positions as property. What he had never understood was why they bothered to wear armor and carry banners if they meant to trade their comrades for comfort.

“The quartermaster is compromised,” Thomas said. “Miles Fletcher took payment to distribute arrowheads that will snap bowstrings at the draw. I heard the deal myself.”

Greyhill’s eyebrows rose. “You heard it?”

“From the shadow of his tent. A tall man with a limp—he was the one paying. The same I saw near the arrow carts and slipping from the quartermaster’s tent earlier.”

“A limp,” Greyhill repeated slowly. He picked up his wine cup and set it down again without drinking. “There was a man at York’s muster—a sergeant from his own lands, Thomas pressed the signet into his palm. The circlet of gold was warm from Greyhill’s hand, the engraved arms of his house biting faintly into Thomas’s skin. It was a strange weight to carry—a lord’s name in a commoner’s fist—but it was also passage, proof of trust where trust had been scarce all night.

“Thank you,” Thomas said, and meant it more than he had meant anything in hours.

“Bring me proof,” Greyhill said. “Bring me the man’s name, and I will see it done.”

Thomas turned to go, then stopped at the tent flap. Something had caught at the edge of his mind the moment Greyhill had spoken of York’s sergeant—a detail he had stored without noticing. He looked back at the knight, then past him to the squire who had risen from beside the brazier and was quietly folding maps.

The young man had been with Greyhill since the archers came in from Harfleur, a quiet creature who fetched wine and sharpened blades and never met anyone’s eye. Thomas had seen him at the campfire three nights past, keeping to the shadows, hands busy with a whetstone.

Those hands.

Thomas stared at the squire’s left hand. The fingers that curled around the map’s edge were slender and nimble, moving with the ease of a man who had spent years in service. And they were whole—five fingers, a thumb, none missing, no scarred stump where a wound should have been.

Thomas remembered the day he had first seen Greyhill’s squire, back at the muster before the army crossed from England. The young man had been trimming a torch beside the knight’s tent, and Greyhill had called him Roger. Roger the squire. And Thomas had noticed him then because the boy’s left hand, from the wrist down, had been bound in a leather glove and a brace of iron—a souvenir, so the camp gossips said, of a fall from a horse that had shattered the bones. The hand had been useless, twisted at an angle that could not hold a bridle or a blade.

That hand was straight now. Unmarked.

The squire felt Thomas’s gaze and looked up. His eyes were pale and flat, and for a moment something passed across his face—a flicker of recognition that was not the recognition of a servant meeting a soldier’s stare. Then he smiled, small and polite, and turned back to his maps.

Thomas made himself move. He stepped through the tent flap into the cold night air, and the signet ring was suddenly heavy on his finger like a warning he could not yet read.

The man calling himself Greyhill’s squire was not Roger. Or Roger had been replaced. And the man who wore his face had just watched Thomas walk out of the tent with a ring that would pass him through every checkpoint in the English camp.

Thomas did not stop. He walked toward the quartermaster’s store, where the lantern burned low and the shadows ran long, and he kept Greyhill’s signet pressed hard against his palm—a token of trust, or perhaps a leash pulling him toward a trap he had yet to name.

He did not look back.