Read Chapter 8: The Novice's Tale

Thomas found Brother Mark in the tannery yard, ankle-deep in the stench of lime and rotting hide. The parchment keeper was bent over a stretching frame, scraping fat from a sheepskin with a curved knife, his forearms wet to the elbow. He did not look up until Thomas cleared his throat.

“Brother Thomas.” Mark’s voice was flat. He wiped the blade on his apron. “The scriptorium is closed until Sext. You should be at prayer.”

“I have questions about the parchment.”

Mark’s knife paused. “I answered the abbot’s questions. I answered yours.”

“You told me the poisoned batch was destroyed.”

“It was.”

“Then explain why Brother James and Brother William both died copying folios from the same pile, and why that pile came from your stores.”

Mark set the knife down slowly. His face, weathered and red from years of outdoor work, gave nothing away. “I destroyed the batch Anselm complained of. Every sheet. I burned them in the yard myself. Whatever killed those men came from another source.”

“The residue in the inkpot,” Thomas said. “It matches no ink I know. It smells of copper.”

“Then look to your ink makers.”

“The ink is made here. I make it.”

Mark shrugged and returned to his scraping. “Then you have your answer, don’t you?”

Thomas felt the heat rise in his chest but forced himself to breathe. Confronting Mark in the open yard would gain him nothing. The man was a wall. He would need another door.

He found it an hour later, in the novices’ dormitory, in the mouth of a boy named Andrew.

Andrew was twelve, small for his age, with the wide eyes of a creature that had learned to keep its head down. He sat on the edge of his cot, knotting a length of rope, pretending not to see Thomas enter. Thomas sat beside him.

“You spoke to Anselm,” Thomas said. “The night before he left.”

Andrew’s fingers stopped. “I didn’t say that.”

“You said he intended to speak to the abbot. Those were your words.”

The boy’s voice dipped to a whisper. “He told me things. Before he went.”

“What things?”

Andrew glanced toward the door, then back at Thomas. “He said the parchment was marked. Not for us. For someone else. He said if the wrong hands copied it, the deed would be done.”

“What deed?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.” Andrew bit his lip. “But he was scared. I’ve never seen him scared like that. He kept talking about the river meadow.”

The river meadow. Thomas remembered the cellarer’s drunken confession, the debt, Sir Godfrey’s legal claim. “What about it?”

“He said the abbey’s claim on it was written down. All of it. The old grant, the boundaries, the witnesses. He said the parchment that proved it was in the scriptorium.”

Thomas felt a cold stillness settle over him. “The charter.”

“Yes. He told me if something happened to him, I should find it. That no one else would know where to look.”

“Did he tell you where?”

Andrew shook his head. “Only that it was hidden where the dead don’t lie.”

Thomas processed the phrase, turning it over. Where the dead don’t lie. The crypt? The graveyard—those were where the dead do lie. But somewhere with an image of the dead, or a name?

“Then he left,” Andrew continued. “He packed his bag and went out the gate before dawn. I never saw him again.”

“He went after the merchant.”

Andrew nodded. “He told me that too. The merchant who sold him the bad parchment. Anselm said the man owed him answers. He said if the merchant wouldn’t come to the abbey, he’d go to the merchant.”

Thomas stood, his mind racing. “The deed the brothers were copying. Do you know where it is now?”

“Brother Mark took it. After James died.” Andrew’s voice grew quieter. “He said it was cursed. That he’d put it somewhere safe.”

Thomas felt a prickling at the back of his neck. Mark had the deed. Mark had controlled the parchment. Mark had claimed to destroy the poison batch and then fed it to two men. The pieces were fitting together in a shape he did not like.

“Where did Mark put it?”

“I don’t know. But I saw him carrying it toward the chapel after Compline. Tucked under his arm like a missal.”

The chapel. The one place Thomas had spent countless hours in prayer, where documents might be hidden in plain sight—inside the altar, beneath the reliquary, or pressed between the pages of a service book.

He left Andrew with a murmured thanks and walked toward the chapel, keeping to the shadowed cloister. Inside, the air was cold and still, scented with beeswax and old stone. A single novice knelt before the side altar, whispering over a string of beads. Thomas waited until the boy finished and shuffled out, then began his search.

He started at the main altar, running his fingers beneath the carved lip of the stone. Nothing. He checked the sacristy cupboards, the linen press, the wooden chest where the choir kept their antiphonaries. Nothing. Then his eyes fell on the stone floor before the altar, where the image of Saint Vitus was inlaid in colored tile—the saint depicted mid-ecstasy, hands raised, a book at his feet.

Where the dead don’t lie.

Thomas knelt and pressed his fingers against the edge of the book. The tile was loose. He worked it free with his nails, revealing a shallow hollow in the stone beneath. Inside lay a rolled parchment, tied with a ribbon of faded blue silk.

He slipped it out, replaced the tile, and withdrew to the choir stalls, where the shadows ran deep. Unrolling the document, he read quickly by the thin light of the votive candles.

It was a land grant, dated forty years prior. The signature at the bottom was that of the old baron—Godfrey’s uncle—granting the Abbey of Saint Vitus full and perpetual title to the river meadow and its waters, in exchange for a sum of gold paid at the time of the grant, witnessed by two knights and a priest. The seal was intact, pressed in green wax beneath a tassel of gold thread.

Thomas read it twice. The claim was clean. The abbey’s right to the meadow was indisputable.

But as he lowered the parchment, his eye caught a line in the margin, written in a hand smaller and sharper than the rest. It read: *This grant superseded by agreement of the seventh year of King Stephen. The meadow returns to the house of Ashwick in reparation for debts unpaid.*

And below it, in a newer ink that still held a green tinge—copper—someone had added a single word.

*Enforce.*

Thomas’s hand trembled. The deed was not the abbey’s shield. It was Ashwick’s sword. And someone in the abbey had been keeping it sheathed until the moment was right.

He rolled the parchment carefully and tucked it into his habit, just as the chapel door creaked open. Brother Mark stood on the threshold, silhouetted against the white daylight, his eyes adjusting to the dim.

“Brother Thomas,” Mark said. “The abbot is asking for you.”

Thomas rose, his heart hammering. “Is he?”

“He’s received a message. From Sir Godfrey. Bearing news of a donation.”

Thomas walked toward the door, keeping his face neutral, his steps unhurried. When he passed Mark, he caught the faint smell again—copper, under the tannery stink.

“After you,” Thomas said.

Mark’s smile did not reach his eyes.