Read Chapter 1: The First Stroke

The first stroke of that night’s copying had been clean. Brother Thomas’s hand had moved with the steady grace of a man who had spent twenty years practicing the same letters, the same loops of *p* and *q*, the same careful bend of the *long s*. The vellum was smooth, the ink a deep, even brown. He had been working on the third folio of Galen’s *On the Affected Parts*, a text that made his fingers itch with a curiosity he was careful to keep off his face.

Then the scream cut through the cloister.

It was not the sound of a man startled, nor the cry of a boy in a rough game. It was a single, raw howl of terror, torn from a throat that knew it was dying. Thomas’s quill snapped under his grip before he even knew he had closed his fist. He was on his feet, the bench scraping against the cold stone floor, before the echo died in the rafters.

Brother Mark, who had been dozing over a ledger of tithes two desks away, woke with a snort. “What in the Lord’s name—?”

Thomas was already at the door. The cloister garth lay before him, a square of moonlit grass surrounded by the arched walkways of the abbey. The air was cold, smelling of damp earth and wet stone. He did not see anyone at first. Then his eyes adjusted.

A figure lay crumpled near the far corner, half in the shadow of a pillar, half sprawled on the grass. The shape was wrong, twisted in a way that a sleeping body should not be. Thomas ran, his sandals slapping against the flagstones. Mark followed, cursing under his breath.

“It’s Brother William,” Thomas said, though he did not need to say it. He could see the brown wool of William’s habit, the patch on the shoulder he had sewn himself just last week. The man was lying on his back, arms thrown out as if he had been pushed backward by some great force. His face was visible in the patchwork of moonlight and shadow.

His face was the thing Thomas could not stop staring at.

Brother William had been a stout, good-natured man of forty with a ruddy complexion and the voice of a man who sang the responses loud enough for the whole chapel to hear. He had been, God forgive the thought, one of the most annoyingly *alive* men Thomas knew. Now his face was locked in a wide, screaming rictus. The jaw hung low, the lips pulled back from the teeth, and the eyes, those eyes, were open so wide that the white surrounded the dark center entirely, as if his soul had tried to escape through them and left the empty sockets behind.

“He’s dead,” Mark breathed. “He’s dead. God help us, he’s dead.”

Thomas knelt. The grass was damp, and he felt the cold seep through the wool of his own habit almost immediately. He did not touch William at first. He looked. That was his way. He looked at the angle of the limbs, the way the left arm was bent beneath the body, the way the fingers were clawed into the dirt. He looked at the face again. There was no blood. No wound that he could see. And yet—

“The mark,” Thomas said softly.

“What?”

Thomas pointed, though it was barely visible in the dim light. William’s right hand lay palm-up, frozen in a cruel hook. In the center of the palm, just below the calluses of his manual work, was a dark blot. It looked like ink, but it was not the brown of the scribe’s workshop nor the blue-black of the chapel’s writing materials. It was a deep, shining purple, almost black, and it had a strange shape—not a smear, not a stain. It looked drawn. It looked, Thomas thought with a cold worm of unease in his stomach, like a cross.

“What is that?” Mark whispered.

Before Thomas could answer, footsteps pounded on the stones of the north walk. Brother Cuthbert, the infirmarer, came hurrying around the corner, his lanky frame hunched forward in alarm. He stopped short when he saw the body. He made the sign of the cross, his lips moving in a quick, silent prayer.

“What happened?” Cuthbert said, his voice thin. “I heard the scream from the infirmary. I thought—I thought one of the novices had fallen.”

Thomas shook his head. “I don’t know. He was here. There’s no one else.”

Cuthbert knelt hesitantly, then seemed to force himself to look at the face. He recoiled. “Lord preserve us. His face—I’ve seen men die of fever, of the wasting sickness, of accidents in the fields. I’ve never seen a man’s face do that.”

“It’s divine punishment,” Mark said. His voice was awed, cracked. “He must have sinned. The judgment came upon him sudden.”

Cuthbert shot him a sharp look. “Hold your tongue, Brother. You don’t know that.”

But Thomas said nothing. He was still looking at the hand. At the mark. At the way the stained flesh had begun to crack at the edges, a dry, papery split that ran up between the fingers. He leaned closer. He caught a smell—faint, but distinct. It was not the sourness of death, not yet it was too soon. It was something else. Astringent, sharp, almost metallic. It reminded him of something, a memory just out of reach.

“Get the abbot,” Thomas said quietly.

The Abbot came quickly enough, woken from his first sleep by Cuthbert’s urgent rapping on his door. Abbot Laurence was a lean, weathered man in his sixties, with a hawk’s nose and eyes that missed very little. He did not hurry. He walked to the cloister with measured strides, his hands folded into his sleeves, his face impassive. He looked down at Brother William’s body for a long moment. He did not kneel.

“Who found him?” the abbot asked.

“I heard the scream,” Thomas said. “I was in the scriptorium.”

“Alone?”

“Brother Mark was with me. We are both working late on the texts for the Bishop of Ely.”

“Had William spoken with you today? Said anything of ill health, of trouble in his soul?”

Thomas shook his head. “No, Father. He was at supper, as usual. He ate heartily. He said nothing of pain or fear.”

The abbot’s eyes moved to William’s hand. He looked at the mark for a long, silent moment. Then he straightened, his back stiff, and made the sign of the cross over the body.

“Take him to the infirmary,” he said. “Prepare him for burial. I must address the community at Matins.”

“But Father,” Thomas said, “there’s the matter of the cause. He was not ill. He is a young man, strong. The mark on his hand—there’s something strange.”

The abbot’s gaze was cold, flat, like the surface of a winter pond. “Brother Thomas. You have seen what I have seen. The Lord strikes where He will, and His ways are not ours to question. The mark is His sign. The judgment was His own.”

Thomas opened his mouth, then closed it. He knew that tone. He knew the abbot’s certainties, the neat God-shaped box into which all misfortune was tucked. To argue now would be to argue against the abbot in front of Brother Mark and Brother Cuthbert, against a judgment that had already been rendered. He bowed his head.

“Yes, Father,” he said.

They carried William’s body to the infirmary, Cuthbert and Mark taking the shoulders and arms, Thomas taking the feet. The body was still warm. Thomas could feel it through the wool of his habit, the last residual heat of a life’s furnace. It was not yet stiff. William’s head lolled; his mouth hung open. The screaming face stared up at the beams of the ceiling as they laid him on a trestle in the cold room at the back of the infirmary.

“I’ll wash him,” Cuthbert said quietly. “Will you stay, Thomas? You have steady hands.”

Thomas nodded, though steady was not what his hands were. They were trembling, and not from the cold. He watched Cuthbert pour water into a earthen basin, watched him pick up a linen cloth. He helped turn the body onto its side so Cuthbert could wash the back. And it was then, when the tunic was lifted and the pale flesh of William’s shoulder blade was exposed, that Thomas saw the second mark.

It was under the skin, a faint, mottled bloom of darkness that spread from William’s spine out toward his back, like a map of a strange country. The flesh was not bruised, not broken. It was simply darker, as if something inside had begun to blacken.

“Cuthbert,” Thomas said, his voice low. “Look at this.”

The infirmarer leaned over, squinting. He touched the skin with a fingertip. “It’s cold,” he said. “He’s only been dead an hour. It should not be cold there.”

Thomas lifted his own hand. He sniffed the air above the skin. There it was again, the sharp, metallic tang. This time, he knew what it was. He had read about it, in the margins of a manuscript no Brother of the abbey was supposed to read, a text kept hidden because it dealt not with the soul but with the cunning poisons of the East. He had copied the passage twice, and the words were branded into his memory: *arsenic*. The substance that acts not by wounding but by its very nature, entering the blood through the flesh, darkening the body from within, racking the sufferer with convulsions and the death-grin on the face.

There was no divine punishment about it. He was looking at a murder.

“Say nothing,” Thomas whispered. “Not yet.”

Cuthbert stared at him, wide-eyed. “Thomas. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that our abbot has decided the Lord’s work is done. But the Lord works through familiar hands, Brother. And someone in this abbey knew William.” Thomas looked at the second mark again, at the spreading darkness that would soon cover the whole back. He tucked his hands into his sleeves to hide their tremble. “I need to see the dead man’s cell.”