Read Chapter 26: The Road to Paris

The autumn road north from Limoges ran pale as bone between hedgerows gone to rust and thorn. Roland walked with a pilgrim’s staff in his fist, his sword hidden beneath a grey wool cloak, the weight of the true ledger’s third—folded, waxed, and strapped against his ribs—a familiar pressure with every step. Beside him, Isabelle wore a coarse kirtle and a linen veil, her pale hair hacked short with his knife two mornings past and stained walnut-dark with boiled bark.

They were brother and sister now, bound for the shrine of Sainte-Foy at Conques. That was the story. They practiced it over campfires and in the ditches where they slept, until the lie sat easy as an old coat.

The church stood at a crossroads three days north of Limoges, its stone dark with weather, its bell silent. A priest came out as they approached, a thin man with a face like a plucked bird, and he looked at Isabelle a moment too long. His hand went to the small wooden crucifix at his belt.

“You’ll want shelter before the rain,” he said, but his eyes kept drifting to her face, to the shape of her jaw beneath the veil. “We have a hospice for pilgrims.”

They followed him inside. The nave was cold and smelled of candle fat and old incense. The priest lit a taper and turned to face them, and now his gaze was frank and fearful.

“They call you the heretic,” he said to Isabelle. “The one who poisoned a bishop’s mind and stole papers from the King’s own courier. Your face is on the notice nailed to the lych-gate.” He paused. “Or it was. Before I tore it down.”

Isabelle said nothing, but her hand went to the pouch at her belt, where she kept her third of the ledger. Roland felt his own pulse quicken.

“You’ve a good eye, Father,” Roland said carefully. “And a generous heart. But my sister is no heretic. We are simple pilgrims.”

“Your boots are not pilgrim’s boots,” the priest said. He nodded at Roland’s feet. “Pilgrims wear broken shoes by the third week. Yours are whole. And your hands—” he looked at Roland’s scarred knuckles, the heavy muscle at his shoulders, “—those are a soldier’s hands.”

Roland let the silence stretch. Then he said, “And yet you tore down the notice.”

“Because I saw the woman dragged from a chapel by armed men in the spring,” the priest said. “She was the one who gave my niece bread when the harvest failed. The King’s envoy can burn in whatever fire he is cooking; I know what I saw.” He looked at Isabelle again. “But others are not so discerning. The notice is on every door between here and Narbonne. The envoy has named you.”

“Named me what?” Isabelle’s voice was flat.

“Sorceress. Poisoner. The woman who conspired with the Templars to bring down the Church.” The priest made a small gesture of helplessness. “He describes you as having hair like winter hay and eyes like a storm. You’ve cut the hair and dyed what remains, but your eyes—” He shook his head. “He knows you. He must have seen you in Limoges.”

Isabelle closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, they were steady. “Then we change the eyes too. Or we do not pass through towns in daylight.”

The priest led them to the sacristy, where a fire burned low, and produced shears and a pot of dark dye. Isabelle cut her hair to the skull in some places, shaving patches close as a penitent, so that the effect was less that of a woman and more of a strange, shorn thing that belonged to no sex or station. Roland watched her work the dye through what remained, turning it a dull black that caught no light.

They buried her cut hair in the churchyard, beneath the roots of a yew, and the priest gave them bread and cheese and a leather flask of thin wine. As they prepared to leave at dusk, he pressed a folded page into Roland’s hand.

“The notice,” he said. “Take it. Know what you are walking toward.”

Roland unfolded it in the failing light. The ink was fresh, the hand neat and legal. BENEATH IT, in a larger script: *Isabelle de Saint-Véran, heretic and poisoner, consort of the fallen. Reward for her delivery: fifty livres. Dead or living, the sum is the same.*

The words were a cold blade between his ribs. “He offers the same for her dead.”

Isabelle took the page from him, read it, and handed it back without expression. “Then we must not be dead.”

They travelled by night after that, sleeping in ditches and abandoned shepherds’ huts, keeping off the main road. The countryside grew wilder as they drove north into the Limousin hills, the farms thinning, the woods pressing closer to the track. On the fourth day, at a ford where three valleys met, they walked into the arms of a patrol.

There were six of them, men-at-arms in the colours of the Count of Marche, with a sergeant at their head whose face had been broken in some old fight and badly set. His eyes went to Roland first—the staff, the cloak, the unhurried gait of a man who had learned to hide his fear—and then to Isabelle, with her shorn head and her veil tucked into her belt. He did not look away.

“Pilgrims?” he said.

“Brother and sister,” Roland said, and blessed himself. “Bound for Conques. Our mother died of the sweating sickness. We carry her alms to Sainte-Foy on her behalf.”

“You picked a bad road,” the sergeant said. “There’s a heretic abroad. Women with short hair, men with soldier’s hands.” He looked at Roland’s staff, the way he held it. “You’re a long way from any fighting. What was your trade?”

“My father was a farrier.” Roland kept his voice mild. “We are as we were made.”

The sergeant walked around them slowly, his hand resting on his pommel. He stopped in front of Isabelle and studied her face with a frankness that made Roland’s fingers itch. Then he reached up and took her chin in his gauntleted hand, turning her head to the light.

“Pretty,” he said. “Even shaved like a sheep.”

Roland’s pulse roared in his ears. But he did not move. He had learned, in the mud outside Acre and in a hundred cold camps since, that the first move belongs to the other man.

The sergeant’s eyes moved from Isabelle’s face to the pouch at her belt, where the folded pages of the ledger lay. He reached for it.

“What do you carry?”

“Alms and relics,” Isabelle said. Her voice did not waver. “And a few coins to pay our way. You may have them. A toll is a toll.”

She drew the pouch and opened it, spilling a handful of silver deniers into her palm. Among them, as if by accident, rolled a single gold coin—heavy, well-struck, stamped with a mark the sergeant would know.

Roland saw the instant he recognized it. The sergeant’s gaze went sharp; his hand fell from Isabelle’s chin and moved to his sword.

“That is no pilgrim’s coin,” he said. “That is Templar gold.”

“It was my husband’s,” Isabelle said, too quickly.

“Your husband’s?” The sergeant laughed, a short ugly sound. “There has been no Templar able to spend gold since the arrests. Unless your husband was hanged at the stake, and then he is unlikely to have left you much.” He looked at Roland. “Where did you get this?”

Roland felt the world narrow. The other men-at-arms had spread out now, a loose circle, their hands resting on their weapons. The ford was shallow behind them; the woods were close on either side. They could run, perhaps. But running from six armed men across open water was a fool’s gamble.

“There is a vault in Carcassonne,” Roland said slowly, “where the ghosts of dead Templars keep their hoard. I stole it from the dust and the dead, and I will spend it as I please.”

The sergeant smiled. It was not a friendly expression. “You’ll spend it in the Count’s dungeons, friend. And tell him whose vault it was and how you came by it.” He gestured with his chin to two of his men. “Bind them. The woman goes to the Count; the man goes to the envoy. There’s a price on both of them, and I’ll—”

Roland moved. He had not meant to, not with Isabelle hostage-drilled into his bones from a dozen escapes, but the sergeant’s hand was still on his pommel and the distance was nothing. The pilgrim’s staff came up, swung low and hard, catching the sergeant in the knee. The man went down with a shout, and Roland was already moving, yanking Isabelle by the arm, the two of them splashing through the ford as arrows began to whicker past their heads.