Read Chapter 17: The Curse's Whisper

The rain had stopped sometime before dawn, leaving the château courtyard slick and silver. Roland stood at the window of the guest chamber, watching the eastern sky bleed pale gold between the clouds. Behind him, Aelis slept on the narrow bed, one hand still curled around the leather-wrapped copy of the ledger they had labored over for two days.

Guy's body lay in the wine cellar beneath a burlap shroud. The Baron had not yet been told.

Roland turned from the window. The pouch was in his hand before he realized he had reached for it—small, worn, the leather dark with age and sweat. Émile had pressed it into his palm at Acre, his fingers slick with blood, his breath already rattling.

*Take this. Find her. She will know what to do with what I could not finish.*

Roland had never opened it. Not once. The weight of it had sat against his chest through every mile since, a splinter he could not remove.

He loosened the drawstring now.

Aelis stirred behind him. "Roland?"

He did not answer. Into his palm fell a ring—heavy gold, set with a deep blue stone carved with a device he did not recognize—and a scrap of parchment folded into a square so small it might have held a prayer.

He unfolded it. The writing was cramped, hurried, a woman's hand.

*Isabelle de Clermont. Convent of Saint-Antoine. If you read this, I am already dead. Tell her Émile kept his word.*

Roland read it twice. The name meant nothing to him. Guy's dying words had spoken it as well, though—*Isabelle de Clermont holds the key*—and now here it was again, written in a dead man's hand.

Aelis sat up, blanket pooling at her waist. "What is that?"

He held out the ring. She took it, turning it toward the window light, her brow furrowing. "This is a Templar seal. A Master's ring, not a knight's." She looked up at him. "Where did you get this?"

"Émile gave it to me. When he died."

"Émile who? The friend you mentioned at Mirepoix?"

Roland nodded, the words coming slowly. He had not spoken of Émile in years—had not let himself. "I met him in the Holy Land, before Acre. He was not like the other Templars I knew. Quieter. Carried himself like a man with something heavy on his shoulders." He paused. "He told me he was not a soldier. Said he had been a scribe in Paris, a keeper of records. They sent him east to punish him for asking too many questions."

Aelis's fingers closed around the ring. "Asking questions about what?"

"The Temple's ledgers." Roland heard his own voice grow rough. "He never spoke of it directly. But the night before the siege broke, he came to my tent. He was shaking. Said the vaults in Paris were not the only place the Temple kept its accounts. Said there were copies scattered across Christendom, hidden where no one would think to look."

"And you did not wonder at this then?"

"I was a mercenary captain. Men whispered about the Temple's secrets all the time. I thought it was fear talking, nothing more."

Aelis set the ring on the bed between them. "But he gave you this as he was dying."

Roland closed his eyes. The memory came unbidden—the smoke, the screams, the walls of Acre crumbling. Émile had crawled to him through the corpse-littered street, one hand pressed to the wound in his side, the other clutching the pouch.

*I failed them,* Émile had said. *The brothers who trusted me. The Grand Master. I thought I could protect it by keeping it out of their hands, but I was a fool. It found its way to the infidel's purse, and now it is lost, and the debt is mine.*

Roland had not understood. He had only held Émile as the light went out of his eyes, and then the English had come through the breach, and there had been no time for anything but survival.

"He spoke of a debt," Roland said slowly. "He said he had failed the Grand Master. That he had tried to keep something out of the wrong hands but it was lost."

"The ledger," Aelis whispered. "He was speaking of the ledger."

"I did not know that then. I know it now."

He picked up the scrap of parchment, held it out to her. She read it, her lips moving silently, and when she looked up her face had changed—the curiosity replaced by a sharp-edged alertness.

"She is supposed to be dead," Aelis said.

"Who?"

"Isabelle de Clermont. I heard her name spoken at court when I was young—my mother's circle, the old families who kept their histories close. She was the daughter of a powerful house in the Limousin, betrothed to a cousin of the Count of Poitou. The marriage was meant to bind the families together." She paused. "Then her father died, and the betrothal was broken. She was sent to a convent, and within a year the family announced she had taken ill and died."

"But the rumors?"

Aelis's mouth curved, barely. "There are always rumors. That she did not die. That she was hidden away because she knew something her family did not wish spoken. My mother's cousin once said the Clermonts paid a fortune in silver to keep her silent, and that the convent that took her received an annual sum that did not pass through the Church's books."

Roland looked at the ring again. The blue stone seemed to pulse in the morning light, a heart beating beneath a century of dust.

"She was the Grand Master's sister," he said.

"What?"

It came to him like a door swinging open in a dark room. He did not know how he knew it—something in Émile's voice when he spoke her name, some fragment of a memory he had buried along with his friend.

"Émile told me once, near the end, that he had loved a woman who had chosen God over him. I thought it was a story, a dying man's confession." He shook his head. "He said her name was Isabelle. He said she had taken his secret with her into the convent, and that it would be safe there, because no one looks for truth among the dead."

Aelis stared at him. "She is not dead. You think she is alive."

"I think Guy was sent to find this ledger, and he said she held its key. I think the English want what is in this book badly enough to have a man killed for it. And I think Émile asked me to find her on his deathbed, and I have carried that request for years without honor." He pushed himself up from the window ledge. "I will not carry it any longer."

"The rendezvous in Limoges—"

"Can wait." He began gathering his gear—the worn leather jerkin, the sword that had been his father's, the heavy cloak that had kept him alive through a dozen winters. "The Convent of Saint-Antoine is two days south, if the roads hold. We go there first."

"You do not even know she is alive."

"I know Guy believed she was. I know Émile believed she was. And I know the ledger speaks of debts that reach to the Pope himself." He turned to face her, and for a moment Aelis saw the man he must have been before Acre—the captain who had held a company together through a decade of war. "If she is dead, we go to Limoges and finish the contract. If she is alive, she may know what the ledger truly means—and why the Grand Master put a curse on it before he burned."

Aelis was silent a long moment. Then she rose from the bed and began to dress.

"I will need ink," she said. "And paper. If we are walking into a convent full of women who have kept a secret for twenty years, we should not go empty-handed."

Roland strapped the sword to his hip. The ring he slipped back into Émile's pouch, and the pouch back against his chest, where it had rested for so long.

Outside, the sky was fully light now. Somewhere beyond the walls, the Baron would be waking to find his guest gone, a question in his mouth that would never be answered.

Roland did not look back.