Read Chapter 11: The Torn Fragment

The cloth was gone.

Thomas stood in the doorway of his cell, the morning light slanting through the single narrow window. He had hidden the fragment of Brother Anselm's recipe—the portion that remained after the fire had claimed the rest—beneath a loose stone beside his cot. He had wrapped it in a scrap of linen, pressed it flat between the mortar and the flag.

He dropped to his knees. The stone was still loose. He pried it up with trembling fingers.

Empty.

The hollow beneath held nothing but dust and a single strand of spider silk. Someone had found it. Someone had taken it. The only copy of the ink recipe that might prove what the poison was, where it came from, who had used it—gone.

Thomas sat back on his heels. His heart moved strangely in his chest, quick and light.

He thought of Brother Mark's eyes the evening before. The way they had lingered on Thomas's hands. The way Mark had spoken of the abbot's impending announcement, as if he knew something Thomas did not, as if he were waiting for exactly this moment of discovery.

Thomas began checking the rest of his cell. His mattress—nothing. His writing desk—the inkwell was dry, the quills undisturbed. His habit, folded at the foot of the cot. Beneath it, where he had tucked the parchment deed he had taken from the chapel floor—

Also gone.

He stood, breathing shallowly. The deed. The annotated deed that proved someone had rewritten the boundary agreement in copper-laced ink. Whoever had taken it had taken both pieces of evidence. They had swept his cell clean while he slept, while he lay senseless after compline, dreaming of poisoned rats and buried parchments.

A shadow crossed the window.

Thomas turned sharply. Through the iron grate he saw Brother Benedict hobbling past with his water pail, paying no attention. Nothing else. Just the slow rhythm of morning in the abbey—birds, bells, the distant murmur of the brothers in the cloister.

But the feeling would not leave him. The sense of eyes, patient and close.

He stood there a long moment, listening. Footsteps—more than one pair—approaching along the corridor. Heavy, deliberate, coming toward his door.

The abbot.

Thomas knew it before the knock came. The knock was not a knock at all, but a fist against wood, twice, commanding. He composed himself, pulling his habit straight, arranging his face into the calm obedience that had served him for fifteen years.

The door swung open.

Abbot Walter stood in the corridor, flanked by Brother Mark and Brother Cuthbert, the infirmarian. The abbot's face was gray, his mouth a thin line. Behind them, in the shadows of the passage, Thomas caught sight of two of the abbey's lay servants—hard men who tended the oxen and the pigs—their arms crossed, their eyes flat.

"Brother Thomas," the abbot said. His voice was low and deliberate.

"My lord abbot." Thomas bowed his head.

"I have received a report," Walter continued, "that a quantity of vellum has gone missing from the scriptorium. Fine vellum. The kind used for charters and deeds."

Thomas's mouth went dry.

"A deed, specifically," the abbot said. "The deed that records the abbey's claim to the river meadow. It was kept locked in the scriptorium chest. It is no longer there."

Thomas's mind raced. The deed he had found in the chapel floor—he had assumed it had been moved from the scriptorium years ago. But if the abbot thought it had been in the locked chest until recently—

"I did not take it from the scriptorium," Thomas said. "I found it. In the chapel."

The abbot's eyes narrowed. "The chapel?"

"Beneath a loose floor stone, before the altar." Thomas kept his voice steady, though his hands had begun to tremble. "Someone had hidden it there. I removed it for safekeeping."

"Then produce it."

Thomas hesitated. The pause stretched. He saw Brother Mark's mouth curve into something that was almost a smile, though he hid it quickly behind a cough.

"It is gone," Thomas said. "Someone removed it from my cell while I slept."

Silence.

The abbot's face hardened. "You claim a deed was hidden beneath the chapel stones. You claim you took it for safekeeping. You claim it has since vanished from your locked cell."

"My cell was not locked."

"No," the abbot said. "Because a good monk has nothing to hide. But you, Brother Thomas—you have been seen. Coming and going at odd hours. Skulking about the infirmary. Speaking with the novices about matters that do not concern you."

Brother Mark stepped forward. "We also found something in your cell, Brother Thomas." He held up a small linen pouch. Thomas recognized it—the pouch of copper filings Brother Anselm had kept in his writing desk. "This was in your mattress."

Thomas stared at it. He had never put it there. He had never touched it.

"I never saw that before this moment," he said.

Brother Cuthbert made a sound of disgust. "He has been taken by madness," he said. "All this talk of poison, of plots. We should have sent him to the infirmary a week ago."

The abbot raised his hand. The corridor fell silent.

"Brother Thomas," he said. "You have stolen from the abbey. You have lied to your brothers. You have spread discord and fear during a time of mourning. What am I to do with you?"

Thomas met his eyes. He saw something there—behind the fury, beneath the disappointment—that he had seen once before, when the abbot had announced the donation of the new bell, when Thomas had noticed how frightened he seemed.

Fear.

"Ask Brother Mark where Brother Anselm went," Thomas said quietly. "Ask him what he promised the merchant in exchange for silence."

Brother Mark's face went white.

The abbot's own face closed like a fist.

"That is enough," he said. "You will be confined to your cell until the chapter convenes." He turned to the lay servants. "Take him."

They crossed the room in two heavy strides. Calloused hands clamped onto Thomas's arms. He did not resist. There was no point.

They dragged him from the room, down the corridor, past the brothers who had gathered silently to watch. He passed Andrew, the novice, whose eyes were wide and wet. He passed Brother Benedict, whose face was carefully blank.

They shoved him into the last cell in the corridor—a cold, bare room that smelled of damp stone, used only for brothers in need of discipline. The door slammed shut behind him. A key turned. Footsteps retreated.

Thomas stood alone in the half-dark, listening to the sound of the abbey continuing without him. The bell for midday office began to toll.

He was trapped. His evidence was gone. And whoever had taken it was still walking free among the brothers.

He looked at the floor. There, in the corner, half-shoved beneath a broken stool, lay a torn scrap of parchment. He picked it up.

It was not his recipe. It was older. The ink was faded brown, the letters unsteady. But he recognized the handwriting.

Brother Anselm.

One line was legible, the rest torn away:

*must speak before the Annunciation. The deed proves…*

The deed. Anselm had been writing about the deed. And he had been running out of time.