Read Chapter 10: Testing the Water

Thomas stood at the scriptorium door before Prime, when the light was still gray and the brothers were at their prayers. He had told himself he was only retrieving a mislaid psalter. The lie was thin enough to choke on, but it held him upright.

The room smelled of cold stone and dried oak gall. The desks stood in their neat rows like sleeping penitents. Thomas crossed to Brother Mark's station—the one nearest the window, where the light fell best and where the inkpot sat in its brass collar.

He had examined the pot before, in horror. Now he examined it as a physician would a wound.

The ink inside was black, glossy, alive with a copper sheen that caught the dawn like the eye of a crow. Thomas lifted a clean quill from Mark's tray and dipped it—just the tip—then touched the nib to a scrap of parchment. The ink spread slowly, pooling at the edge of the stroke, refusing to bite into the fiber the way good ink should. Vinegar, perhaps. Or something worse.

He knew only one way to be certain.

He wrapped the scrap in a cloth and slipped it into his sleeve as the sound of shuffling feet echoed from the cloister. The brothers were rising from prayer.

Thomas kept his head down and walked the long way around the cloister to the infirmary. Brother Cuthbert would be at matins still, or so he hoped. The infirmary door yielded easily. The room was warm, smelling of hyssop and old sweat. Along the far wall stood cages of woven willow where Cuthbert kept his specimens—mice, mostly, and a pair of rabbits for testing purgatives.

Thomas did not enjoy what he was about to do.

He found a rat in the corner cage, a lean gray creature with a scarred ear and eyes like black beads. It had been used for fever cures, he guessed, and it had survived everything Cuthbert had thrown at it. Thomas said a quiet prayer of apology, then took bread from the infirmary stores, soaked it in water, and let a few drops of the ink fall onto the crumb.

The rat sniffed once. Then it ate.

Thomas sat on a stool and watched it. He counted heartbeats. He watched the rat groom its whiskers, circle its cage, settle into the straw. His own hands were steady, though his stomach knotted. He had learned patience in the gardens with Anselm, who had taught him that plants take their time about everything, especially their poison.

The rat circled once more. Then it stopped.

It had been perhaps the length of a psalm. The rat's head tilted, its body trembling through stiffening limbs. A thin line of pink foam appeared at its mouth. The creature convulsed once, twice, and then lay still, its weight settling into the straw as though it had been poured there.

Thomas stared at it. He did not need to check its breathing. He had seen death before, in men and beasts, and it never followed a different script. It came, and it stayed.

Poisoned ink, then. Not merely spoiled. Not merely old. Threaded with something lethal, something copper-born, something that killed in the space of a song.

He stood. His knees were weak. He steadied himself on the table and looked at the scrap of parchment where he had written the test stroke. The ink had dried to a dull black-brown, but at its edge, where it had pooled thickest, there was a faint green crust.

Arsenic. Copper. Perhaps verdigris ground fine with a binder. He had read of such things in a forbidden text of Galen's commentators, and in the margins of a Saracen physician's treatise that the previous infirmarian had kept hidden under his mattress. He had thought them fables. He had thought poisoners were the stuff of court intrigue in Constantinople, not of village parchment in this cold stone-cold abbey.

He wrapped the rat's body in his cloth alongside the parchment. He would bury it in the garden, later. He would not leave evidence of what he had done.

But as he turned toward the door, a shadow moved in the threshold.

Brother Mark stood there, his round face composed and pleasant, his hands clasped in front of his belly. He was wearing his copying smock, though there was no ink on his fingers. He had not been working.

"Brother Thomas." Mark's voice was mild, almost kind. "You are abroad early. I thought you would still be at prayer."

Thomas felt the cloth at his sleeve, heavy with its dead contents. He resisted the urge to touch it.

"I had need of the infirmary," he said. "The night left me with a headache."

Mark's gaze traveled over Thomas's face, over his shoulders, over the cloth at his sleeve where the shape of the cloth-wrapped rat pressed a vague outline. He did not let his eyes rest there. He was too clever for that. He let them drift around the room, taking in the open cages, the clear table, the small dishes of bread and water laid out for testing.

"Brother Cuthbert is not here," Mark observed.

"He is at service."

"Then I wonder," Mark said, "what brings you into the infirmary without the infirmarian."

Thomas raised his chin. "The infirmary is open to any brother who needs rest, as you know. The hours before Prime are quiet ones. I hoped to pray away the ache."

Mark smiled. It was a smile that reached his eyes, but the eyes themselves were flat, like stones under still water. "I, too, have need of rest sometimes. And yet I find I cannot sleep well when I know something has been taken from my desk."

Thomas's heart stuttered, but he held his face calm. He was a scribe. He had learned to school his expression in the scriptorium, where a tremor could ruin a page and where Brother Mark himself had once instructed him: *The hand is a servant of the will. The will must be undisturbed.*

"Taken?" Thomas repeated. "Surely not. The scriptorium is a sacred place."

"Indeed." Mark's smile did not waver. "Which is why I am puzzled. A scrap of parchment—the edge of a sheet I meant to trim—was missing from my station when I returned from Prime. A small thing. An inconsequential thing. And yet my spirit was troubled."

He stepped forward, and Thomas, without meaning to, stepped back. His heel struck the leg of the stool, and he felt the rat shift in his sleeve.

"You may have seen it," Mark said, "in your wanderings. If it comes back to you, I would be grateful for its return. Parchment is precious here. Everything is accounted for."

Thomas met his eyes. "I will pray that you find it."

"Yes," Mark said. "I am sure you will."

He stood in the doorway a moment longer, blocking the exit, his body a comfortable, immovable thing. Then he stepped aside with a gesture of his hand, as though granting passage to a fellow traveler on a narrow road.

"Make sure, Brother Thomas," he said, "that you are not late for the midday office. The abbot has called us together. He has news, I think."

Thomas walked past him, feeling the heat of Mark's gaze on his back like a brand. The corridor stretched ahead of him, cold and gray, and he moved along it with measured paces, fighting the urge to run.

He did not stop walking until he reached the garden, and even then his hands would not be still. He dug a shallow grave beneath the rosemary bush with a trowel he had left there weeks ago, and he buried the rat in it, and he buried the scrap of parchment too, and he said another prayer that was half apology and half plea.

When he stood, he was breathing hard. His eyes were wet, though he could not have said why.

Mark knew. He knew something. Whether he knew the ink was poison, or simply knew that Thomas had taken it, the result was the same: Thomas had painted a target on his own back, and the archer was already drawing his bow.

The abbot's bell began to toll for midday.

Thomas wiped his hands on his robe and walked toward it. His mind, trained to order, was already sorting through what Mark had revealed in that brief exchange—not by what he had said, but by what his exacting, comfortable, always-accounted-for nature had failed to mention.

He had not once asked, in all his watching, what Thomas had wanted with a scrap of his ink.

Because he already knew.