Read Chapter 23: The King's Envoy

The inn at Limoges stank of tallow and spilled wine, and the fat innkeeper had made it clear he wanted no trouble from travelers who came in after dark with mud on their boots and swords at their hips. Roland had paid him double to forget their faces, and the man had taken the coins with a greed that suggested he would remember them all the more.

Isabelle sat in the corner of their rented room, the chest of letters at her feet, her silver cross gleaming in the light of a single candle. She had not spoken since they left Carcassonne, and Roland had not pressed her. He had watched a woman kill a man for the first time today, and he knew the weight of that. It did not lift quickly.

"She said she would meet us here," Roland said, more to himself than to Isabelle.

Isabelle looked up, her face hard. "If she is still free to meet anyone."

Roland pulled the curtain aside and scanned the street below. Rain had begun to fall, turning the ruts of the cart track to silver mirrors. A figure moved at the far end of the lane—too quick, too purposeful for a drunk or a night watchman. He let the curtain fall.

"We should not have split," he said.

"We had no choice. Your Aelis is a liability—"

"She is not my Aelis. And she saved my life more than once."

Isabelle's mouth thinned, but she said nothing. Outside, the patter of rain grew heavier, drumming against the shutters. Roland paced the length of the room, his cloak heavy with the hidden ledger sewn into its hem. He could feel it there, a second skin of condemnation and truth, waiting to be cut free and handed to the highest bidder.

A knock came at the door. Three quick raps, then two slow ones—the signal they had agreed on.

Roland crossed the room in three strides and opened the door. The woman standing on the threshold was not Aelis.

She was younger, perhaps twenty, with the blunt features and flat eyes of a soldier's whore or a soldier herself. She wore a man's tunic and had a blade at her belt. She looked at Roland without fear.

"You are the one called de Vienne," she said. Not a question.

"I am."

The woman jerked her head toward the stairwell. "Your companion is safe. For now. Come with me. The King's envoy would speak with you."

Roland felt Isabelle rise behind him. "Which King's envoy?"

The woman's eyes flicked to Isabelle, then back. "Jacques de Molay. He took the false ledger from your friend two days ago. He knows it is a decoy. He knows you have the true one." A pause. "He also knows what you carry in the chest."

Roland's hand drifted toward his sword, but the woman shook her head. "I am not here to fight you. If I were, I would not have come alone." She turned and started down the stairs without looking back.

Roland exchanged a glance with Isabelle. She was pale, but her jaw was set. "We go," she said. "Or we run."

"We go," Roland said. "I want to know what he knows."

The envoy had taken rooms at the far end of town, in the house of a wool merchant who had been paid to vacate his own bedchamber. Servants with swords stood at the doors, and the woman who had fetched them led Roland and Isabelle through a dark hall to a long table lit by three candles. At the head of the table sat a man with silver-threaded hair and the careful stillness of a hunter. His tunic bore the royal device of the fleur-de-lis, and his hands lay flat on the oak before him.

Jacques de Molay.

So the King had sent a man with a dead Templar's name to hunt dead Templars' secrets. Roland wondered if that was deliberate or simply the cruelty of fate.

"Roland de Vienne," the envoy said, his voice low and pleasant. "I have heard your story. The mercenary who lost the siege of Béziers. The captain who watched his men die in a marsh for a contract that was never paid." He smiled, and it did not touch his eyes. "You are a man of unfortunate loyalties."

Roland did not move. "I have heard of you as well. You serve the King in matters that need no seal."

"Precisely." De Molay rose and walked around the table, his eyes moving from Roland to the chest in Isabelle's arms. "You have something of mine. Or rather, something of the King's."

"I have letters from the Bishop of Narbonne to agents in Italy. They prove his debt is owed to the crown, not to Sienese bankers. They prove a conspiracy to make the King appear weak and fabricate a rebellion."

De Molay's expression did not change. "And you have a ledger. A true ledger, I am told, filled with names and sums that would topple half the nobility of France."

Roland said nothing.

The envoy stopped before him, close enough that Roland could smell the rosemary on his collar. "I am authorized to offer you a full pardon for your crimes—desertion, brigandage, the deaths in Carcassonne. A sum of gold—enough for a lifetime—and safe passage to whatever city you choose. In exchange, you give me the ledger and the chest, and you go your way. Your companions go theirs."

Roland glanced at Isabelle. She was watching de Molay with the intensity of a hawk, her fingers white around the chest.

"And the woman you took from the convent?" Roland asked. "Aelis?"

"She will be released upon your acceptance." De Molay's smile widened slightly. "She is unharmed. You have my word."

Roland believed him about as much as he believed a whore's promise of chastity. A man with the King's seal and no witnesses did not need to keep his word. A full pardon for a dead mercenary was worth less than the wax that stamped it.

He stalled.

"Three days," he said. "I need three days to secure my men, to settle matters over the border."

De Molay's eyes narrowed. "That was not the offer."

"It is my counter-offer."

The room was silent. The candle flames wavered, touched by a draft that came from somewhere Roland could not see. De Molay studied him for a long moment, then inclined his head.

"Two days," he said. "At dawn on the third, if you have not delivered what I ask, your mercenary friend will hang from the town gallows." He turned and walked back to his seat. "I will await your response."

Roland pulled Isabelle out of the house before she could speak. The rain had stopped, leaving the streets slick and black. They stood in the shadow of a doorway, and Isabelle's voice was low and furious.

"He will kill her anyway," she said. "The moment he has both items, we are corpses."

"I know."

"Then why did you accept his terms?"

"I didn't." Roland looked down the empty street, where the palace lights of the wool merchant's house still glowed. "I stalled. He will expect us at dawn. He will post men at the doors. He will think we are bargaining."

Isabelle's eyes widened. "You plan to steal her out tonight."

"The envoy has her somewhere in that house. He thinks we are negotiating. He will have her close, for leverage." Roland began walking, pulling his cloak tight. "We go now. While his guard is down."

The house had too many windows to watch, but too few men to cover them all. Roland counted the patrols from the shadow of a hay cart: two on the main door, one on the garden gate, one making rounds around the back every quarter hour. He had seen worse. He had done worse.

They slipped through the garden wall, and Isabelle knew the way of silent movement—praise to the nuns who had taught her to move through shadowed cloisters. They crossed a screened courtyard where water dripped from a stone lion's mouth, and then they were at a servant's door, and then inside, and Roland found Aelis in a small storeroom off the kitchen, bound to a chair but unhurt, her eyes bright with fury.

"About time," she said.

Roland cut her bonds. "Can you walk?"

"I can run."

They took the chest and they took the ledger—both of them, together, Roland scooping up the heavy leather-bound book and the chest of letters—and they ran through the house, out a side gate, into the dark street.

Behind them, a shout.

Arrows cut the air. Isabelle cried out—not a wound, a name—

But when Roland turned, Aelis was not behind him.

A chain had gone around her leg, cast from the shadows like a shepherd's sling, and a broad-shouldered man in the King's livery was dragging her back toward the gate. She fought, but she was outnumbered.

And Roland had a choice.

He could stay, and fight, and likely die. He could abandon the ledger and the chest—everything they had bled for—to save her.

Or he could run.

He ran.

Behind him, Aelis's voice cut through the dark, fierce and unbroken: "Roland! Don't you dare—you hear me? Don't you dare surrender—"

And then the gate shut, and her voice was gone.

Roland stopped at the far end of the street, chest heaving, the chest of letters clutched against his ribs and the ledger burning against his thigh. Isabelle came up beside him, gasping.

"We have to—" she started.

"He has her," Roland said. "He has her, and he knows what we carry, and he will never let us bargain now." He wiped the rain from his eyes. "He will not wait two days. He will hang her before the sun rises."

Isabelle was silent. Then, quietly: "We could give him the ledger."

Roland looked at her. The weight of Émile's last request pressed against him, heavy as stone.

"He would kill her regardless," he said. "He is a King's man with a dead man's name and no witnesses. His word is worthless."

Isabelle said nothing.

Roland turned and began walking south, toward the darker roads that led out of Limoges and into the forests, where the King's men would not follow.

He had a night. Maybe less.

He had a plan, but it was a mad one, and he knew it would cost him everything.