Read Chapter 20: The Missing Herbalist

The crypt smelled of old stone and colder things. Thomas held the lantern low, and the light crawled across the floor like a living thing, afraid to go too far ahead. Brother Mark followed close behind him, his breathing shallow, the silence of the abbey pressing down on their shoulders like the weight of the vaulted ceiling above them.

"The steward?" Mark whispered. "You saw his footprint?"

"I saw it," Thomas said. "And he will see mine if I leave him time to act. The abbot is confined, but his men are not."

They moved past the rows of tombs where the old abbots lay in stone sleep, their carved faces worn smooth by centuries of prayer. Mark's hand tightened on the iron rod he had brought from the forge—a clumsy weapon, but a comforting one. Thomas had no weapon but his eyes, and the sudden certainty that Anselm had never left the abbey grounds at all.

The thought had come to him during Matins, when the choir had chanted the psalm for the dead. *Quia non est in morte qui memor sit tui.* There is no one in death who remembers you. And yet Anselm had been so careful, so precise in all his records. He would never have vanished without leaving a trail.

Unless the trail ended here.

They found the loose stone behind the third pillar from the altar's old site, where the floor had shifted over generations and a crack had widened enough to admit a man's fingers. Thomas set the lantern down and worked the stone free. The opening beneath was dark and cold, no more than a narrow gap before a rough-hewn stair descended into blackness.

"Should we go down?" Mark asked.

"Anselm thought something was worth hiding here," Thomas said. "And I will not leave him alone."

He took the lantern and went first, the steps uneven beneath his feet, the air growing colder with every step until his breath misted before him. The staircase ended in a small chamber, no larger than the abbot's cell, its walls lined with niches where the oldest abbots had once been laid to rest before the great crypt was built. The stone shelves stood empty now, save for dust and the bones of mice.

And one other thing.

The body lay on a shelf cut into the far wall, as if it had been placed there for burial and forgotten. The robes were the brown of a Benedictine habit, and what remained of the face was not a face at all—sunken, greyed, waxy in a way that made Thomas's stomach turn. But he had known this man. He had studied his hand in a hundred marginal notes, had argued with him over the placement of a comma in a Galenic text, had watched him feed the library cat scraps of dried fish from his pocket.

Brother Mark crossed himself and turned away. "God rest his soul."

"God has had him for days," Thomas said quietly. He stepped closer, raising the lantern. The body was not fresh. The skin had drawn tight against the bones, the lips pulled back in a grimace that was not pain but the slow drying of flesh. He had seen this once before, in a distant parish, when an old woman had been left in her cottage for a month before anyone broke the door. But the woman had been ninety. Anselm had been fifty, and hearty as a plough-horse.

"He was hidden here," Thomas said. "Not buried. Hidden."

"In the crypt?" Mark's voice trembled. "Who would—"

"The abbot. Or someone the abbot sent." Thomas knelt, careful not to disturb the body. He had seen the marks of violence many ways—in the margins of medical tracts, in the eyes of soldiers come back from the wars. There was no wound on Anselm that he could see. No blood. No bruising about the throat.

But the lips were dark. Almost black.

Thomas's pulse quickened. He reached out, hesitated, then gently pressed on Anselm's jaw. The mouth gaped open, and the light caught the state of what lay within. The tongue was swollen, discolored, the gums stained dark as ink.

"Poison," Thomas said. "The same that was in the ink."

"But you said it took time," Mark said. "That the cat is still alive."

"The cat drank a diluted dose," Thomas said. "Anselm must have ingested enough to finish him quickly. Or—" He stopped. He reached beneath the body's habit, moving stiffly, and found the hidden pocket sewn into the lining. It held a folded piece of parchment, brittle and stained.

Mark leaned in. "What is it?"

Thomas unfolded it, careful not to tear the edges. The writing was Anselm's—that same tight, meticulous script Thomas had seen a hundred times in the margins of the library's medical volumes. But this was not a recipe or a note on herbals. It was a warning, begun and then abandoned in haste.

*Brother William—*

*I must tell you plainly. The ink you agreed to write your confession with is poisoned. I have seen the blending of its elements. Not an accident. The dragon's wort that quickens the drying also lies in wait within your blood, a footpad in the veins, striking when you least expect. The one who gave it to me meant for you to die at the very moment of your repentance. Do not trust the new supply N—*

The last stroke of the pen had slashed across the parchment in a jagged, violent line, as if the hand had been interrupted. But not by fear. By the onset of the poison itself.

"He knew," Thomas said slowly. "He knew about the ink. He was trying to warn William." He looked up at Mark, his face grim in the lantern light. "Anselm was the herbalist. Whoever gave him the ink—the abbot, or the cellarer through him—must have realized that Anselm would recognize the dragon's wort. So they silenced him before he could speak."

Mark's face had gone pale as chalk. "And William is still alive?"

"He is. But he is still using that ink." Thomas folded the note carefully and tucked it into his own sleeve. "We must go to William now. Show him this. Let him see what he put in his own body."

"And the body?" Mark looked at Anselm's remains with something between pity and fear. "We cannot leave him here. It is not right."

Thomas hesitated. The crypt was hidden. The body was evidence. If he removed Anselm now, the abbot's men would know that someone had found their handiwork. But if he left him, the body would wait in the darkness, patient and secret, while the poison worked its slower course through William's veins.

"We leave him for now," Thomas said. "But we mark the place." He pulled a small piece of charcoal from his pouch—always with him, for jotting observations—and drew a simple cross on the wall above the shelf, just visible in the lantern light. "If we do not return within the day, Mark, you will bring Brother Ambrose here. You will show him the cross and the body. Promise me."

Mark swallowed. "I promise. But where will you go?"

"To find William before the ink does what it was made to do." Thomas paused at the foot of the stairs, looking back at the motionless shape on the stone shelf. "Anselm tried to warn him. And whoever killed Anselm knows that warning was never delivered."

He climbed the stairs two at a time, the lantern swinging, his mind already racing ahead. If the abbey was a body, the abbot had just severed its head. But the hands still moved—the steward, the city-shoed watcher, the cellarer gone to Saint-Gilles with his mouth full of secrets. Thomas had thought the abbot was the architect. Now he saw the truth: the abbot was merely the hand that closed around the throat.

The baron's nephew had planned it all. Godfrey. The meadow. The fragile inheritance. But Godfrey had not killed Anselm with his own hands. He had paid the abbot to do it.

And the abbot had paid in poison, having the same ink the poison was in, and letting Anselm taste the drafts before he could warn William. The irony was almost too cold to think about.

Brother Mark came up behind him, breathing heavily. "Where will you find William? He was to meet with the steward this morning."

Thomas stopped. He had not known that. The words hung in the air between them, and then Thomas was running, his sandals slapping the stone as he crossed the courtyard toward the gate where the steward's horse would wait, toward the place he could not name but could feel in his bones.

He had been a fool. The baron's nephew had not abandoned the plan when the abbot fell.

He had just found a new hand.