Read Chapter 9: Where Is Will?

The Duke’s pavilion still loomed behind him, its silk walls glowing faintly in the pre-dawn grey, when Thomas realized he had nowhere left to run that wasn’t watched. He’d walked three paces past the guard line before he caught himself heading toward the archer’s trench—his own ground, where he knew every shadow. But the impostor Roger had already pointed him out to a man in York’s blue. That ground was poisoned now.

He changed direction, angling through the picket ropes and cook-fires that smoked low against the damp. His hand closed around the bill of lading in his jerkin. Ink on cheap parchment, naming the Viscount of Agincourt. Proof. And yet the Duke had laughed.

*An archer’s cowardice.*

Thomas spat into the mud. Let York laugh. Let him march his men into a French broadside with arrowheads that snapped at the nock. Thomas would find the limping man, or the quartermaster, or the squire who wore Roger’s face, and he would make one of them talk before the sun cleared the treeline.

But first, he needed an ally.

He skirted the horse lines, keeping his head down, and ducked between two supply wagons to the boys’ tent—a low canvas lean-to where the pages and grooms bedded down among the spare tack. The flap was open. Inside, the straw was churned and cold. A few packs lay scattered, none of them touched in hours.

Thomas crouched, scanning the dim space. He knew this tent. He’d slept here on the march up from Harfleur, when the nights had been too wet to risk the open. And he knew, with a lurch that sat heavy in his gut, which pack was missing.

Will’s.

The boy had been assigned to his arrow cart at the muster—a skinny, freckled thing of maybe twelve summers, with elbows like knots and a laugh that cracked when he got excited. He’d helped Thomas count the sheaves at the warehouse in Calais, had carried the first bundle to the cart with both arms wrapped around it, nearly dropping the whole lot. Thomas had cuffed him lightly, called him a clumsy pup. Will had grinned.

Thomas hadn’t seen him since midday.

Frowning, he lifted the nearest pack—Will’s, he confirmed by the frayed strap the boy had mended with twine. Inside: a spare shirt, too large for him, probably handed down from a dead man. A crust of bread gone hard. A smooth white stone, the kind a boy picks up from a riverbed because it looks like a bird’s egg, and keeps for no reason at all.

And no sign the boy had taken anything. No water skin. No knife.

Thomas tossed the pack down. He stepped back out into the grey, and caught the arm of a boy mucking out the horse lines—a younger page, gaptoothed, who flinched at the grip.

“Easy,” Thomas said. “Where’s Will? The page who works the arrow carts.”

The boy’s eyes darted. “Ain’t seen him since yesterday. He went to fetch water.”

“Water. Where?”

“The little stream, out past the latrine pits, by the forest edge.” The boy swallowed. “He said the well rope was broke. Wanted to get clean water for the men.” He hesitated. “That was before the light started fading. He never come back.”

Thomas released the boy’s arm. A cold thread wound through his chest, finer than any bowstring.

Will was a good boy. A simple errand, water from a stream a hundred yards from camp, in broad daylight, in an army of ten thousand men. Nothing should have happened to him.

Unless he’d seen something.

Thomas thought of the way Will had hovered near the arrow carts that morning, quieter than usual. He’d chalked it up to the boy being tired. But what if Will had seen the limping man at the carts before Thomas had? What if he’d recognized the quartermaster’s face, or heard a name spoken over the wrong arrows, and had been too scared to say it out loud?

And what if someone had noticed the boy noticing?

Thomas set off at a hard pace, past the latrine pits and the stink of them, past the last picket rope, into the scrub grass that sloped toward the treeline. The stream ran shallow here, muddy-edged and narrow, and the forest loomed dark and close. Too close for comfort. An arrow could fly from those trees and no man would see the bowman.

He slowed at the bank, scanning. Tracks. Dozens of them—men coming for water, men leading horses, the deep gouges of wagon wheels. But there, at the edge, where the grass bent toward the water: a smaller print. A boy’s bare foot, pressed deep into the mud.

And beside it, drag marks.

Thomas’s jaw tightened. He followed the drag marks upstream, away from camp, along the bank where the reeds grew tall and the trees leaned in overhead. The marks were fresh, the mud still soft and clouded where something heavy had been pulled through it.

Thirty paces. Forty. The stream bent sharply at a fallen oak, its roots torn up and splayed like fingers. And there, half-hidden in the mud beneath the roots, Thomas found the knife.

It was not an English blade. No honest Yorkshire smith had forged that curve. The hilt was wrapped in leather the color of old blood, and the blade was etched with an ornament Thomas had seen once before—on a French captive’s belt, back at Harfleur. A fleur-de-lis, faint, worked into the steel at the guard.

French. A French knife, sitting in the mud beside a drag mark, on the bank of a stream where a twelve-year-old page had gone for water and never come back.

Thomas crouched, not touching it. His eyes tracked the ground. The drag marks continued past the oak, into the reeds, then stopped. The mud was churned broadly there—two sets of boots, he judged, one heavy and one lighter. The lighter pair had waited. The heavy pair had dragged the boy.

They’d silenced him.

Thomas rose slowly. The knife was evidence, but it was also a message. A French blade, dumped in the open where any man might find it—or left deliberately, to make the boy’s disappearance look like a French outrider’s work? Or to warn any who came looking that they would find worse than a missing page?

The first grey light of dawn was spreading now, thin and colorless, and somewhere back in camp a horn sounded. The army would form within the hour. The Duke had said so. And Thomas still had no proof that would make a nobleman pause his march.

He tucked the knife into his belt, careful not to smudge what little might cling to it, and walked back toward the camp, his heart beating a cold, hard rhythm.

Will had seen something. Will had been silenced for it. And Thomas knew, with a certainty that sat like a stone in his chest, that the boy’s disappearance was no random cruelty. It was the same hand that had sabotaged the arrows, the same hand that wore Roger’s face and whispered to men in blue surcoats. The conspirators were not just guarding their secret.

They were killing witnesses.

And Thomas was not the only one they were hunting.

He reached the camp’s edge and stopped, looking back at the forest. The trees were black against the pale sky, and the stream glittered faintly where it caught the first light. Somewhere in there, a boy’s body might be lying in the mud, or worse, taken deeper into the woods so that no one would ever find him.

Thomas turned his face back toward the camp. He had the bill of lading. He had the knife. He had Greyhill’s ring.

But he didn’t have Will. And he was beginning to suspect that finding the boy, or finding what was left of him, would lead him closer to the truth than any parchment ever could.

He walked forward into the waking camp, his shadow long and thin before him, and he did not look back again.