Read Chapter 29: The English Agent

The rain in Dijon was a fine, miserable drizzle that seeped through wool and settled into the bones. Roland stood beneath the awning of a chandler's shop, watching the street through a curtain of water. Isabelle huddled beside him, her dyed hair plastered to her skull, her fingers white-knuckled around the satchel at her hip. Every third passerby wore the cross of the Church or the livery of a noble house. None looked twice at two weary pilgrims, but Roland felt the weight of every glance like a blade between his shoulder blades.

"There," Isabelle said, her voice barely a whisper.

A man emerged from a door painted with a faded merchant's mark—a ship, a crescent, the letter *E* intertwined. He was stout, balding, dressed in the plain fustian of a cloth trader, but his boots were good English leather and his cloak was cut with a tailor's care. He carried a ledger under his arm that looked heavier than his satchel of samples.

Roland touched Isabelle's elbow. They crossed the street at an angle, timing it so they arrived at the merchant's door just as he turned to lock it.

"Master Ashcombe," Roland said.

The man froze, key halfway to the lock. His eyes flicked over Roland's pilgrim's staff, Isabelle's shabby gown. When they rose to Roland's face, they sharpened.

"I fear you have the advantage of me, pilgrim."

"I was told you buy wool from the English garrisons. Fair coin, no questions about provenance."

Ashcombe's mouth twitched. "Who tells such stories?"

"A man in Calais. Lost his tongue to the French, but he writes well enough with his left hand."

Something moved behind Ashcombe's eyes. He glanced down the street, then unlocked the door with a twist of the key. "Come inside before you drown, both of you."

The interior smelled of lanolin and dust, bolts of cloth stacked to the rafters. Ashcombe led them past the shop floor into a cramped counting room. He bolted the door behind them and gestured to two stools.

"Speak plainly."

Roland drew the folded page from inside his tunic—one of the ledger's leaves, wrapped in oiled cloth. He laid it on the scarred oak table and smoothed it flat.

Ashcombe leaned over it. His lips moved silently as his eyes tracked the columns of spidery script. The sums. The names. The Bishop of Narbonne's tidy, damning strokes. When he straightened, his face had changed—less a merchant, more a knife.

"Where did you come by this?"

"From a dead man's chest, and through the hands of men who died to carry it."

"And why bring it to me?"

"Because the King of England has a quarrel with the Bishop of Narbonne's patron, and a man who knows the shape of every debt in France is worth the price of passage."

Ashcombe laughed, short and humorless. "Passage to where?"

"Calais."

The merchant stared at him for a long moment, then looked at Isabelle. She met his gaze without blinking, her hand resting on the satchel strap.

"You're the ones," Ashcombe said slowly. "The ones the Church has named. The heretic and her mercenary."

"We are the ones who know where the bodies are buried," Isabelle said. "And whose hands hold the shovels."

Ashcombe sat back. His stool creaked. "There's a bishop's ransom on your heads. And the Inquisitor's men have been through Dijon twice in the last week, shaking trees."

"Then you know what they fear."

"I know what they'll do to anyone caught helping you."

Roland said nothing. He folded the page carefully, deliberately, and tucked it back into his tunic. He made as if to rise.

Ashcombe held up a hand. "Sit down, you fool. I didn't say I wouldn't help. But you'll not go to Calais by road. The cordon's too tight. There's a fishing boat leaving from a cove north of here, three nights hence. It can put you ashore at Guînes if the wind holds."

"The king's men patrol the coast," Roland said.

"The king's men patrol the roads, looking for heretics. I have papers that will get you past the watch at Auxerre if you travel as my agents, carrying samples for the Calais wool fair." Ashcombe's eyes glittered. "And I'll take that page off your hands as my fee."

Roland's hand moved instinctively to his tunic. "No. The page travels with us."

"Then you'll travel without my help."

Isabelle touched Roland's arm. "Show him the second page."

Roland hesitated, then drew out another leaf—this one bearing the Bishop's own hand, a note Andre had copied before they burned the original. It detailed the muster at Issoire, the count of men, the payment promised.

Ashcombe read it, and his eyes widened. "This is new."

"It's yours if you get us to the coast," Isabelle said. "A token of our good faith. The full accounting goes to King Edward."

Ashcombe studied her, then Roland. "You drive a hard bargain for a pair of pilgrims."

"We're not pilgrims," Roland said. "We're survivors."

Ashcombe took the page, folded it, and tucked it into his own tunic with the ease of a man accustomed to secrets. "Three days. Travel north along the river road. At the village of Pont-sur-Seine, ask for Mother Margaux's hostelry. Say you have wool to sell for Ashcombe of Dijon. She'll keep you hidden until the boat comes."

"And if the boat doesn't come?"

"Then you'll have made the acquaintance of a very fine woman and will die comfortable." Ashcombe unlocked the door. "Now go. The fewer hours you spend in my shop, the better for both of us."

---

Two days later, the sky had cleared to a bitter blue and the road to Pont-sur-Seine lay pale before them. Roland walked with his staff in hand, Isabelle at his side, carrying a bundle of coarse wool samples over her shoulder like any merchant's apprentice. The disguise was thin—Roland's hands were too hard, Isabelle's bearing too straight—but they'd passed two patrols already and neither had looked twice.

"There," Isabelle said, nodding toward a spire rising above the poplars.

The village of Pont-sur-Seine was small, a cluster of timber houses around a stone church and a cobbled square. Mother Margaux's hostelry sat at the edge of the village, its sign creaking in the wind. They were twenty paces from the door when Roland heard the jingle of harness behind them.

He didn't turn. He kept walking, adjusting his grip on the staff.

"Roland," Isabelle whispered.

"I know."

Hoofbeats drummed closer. The patrol came around them at a gallop—six men in the livery of the Count of Poitou, their captain a scarred brute with a sergeant's stripes. They wheeled their horses, boxing the pair against the stone wall of the hostelry.

"You," the captain said, reining in. "Drop the staff."

Roland's hand tightened. Isabelle grabbed his arm.

"Please," she breathed.

He let the staff fall. The clatter of wood on stone was loud in the sudden quiet.

The captain dismounted, unhurried. He walked around them, his eyes cataloguing their clothes, their faces, their trembling stillness.

"Two pilgrims," he said. "Traveling north. Toward Calais." He stopped before Roland, close enough that Roland could smell the wine on his breath. "We were told to watch for two pilgrims. A man and a woman. The woman with hair the color of wheat."

Isabelle had dyed hers nearly black. The captain reached out and seized a strand of it, twisted it between his fingers.

"Alum and walnut dye," he said. "The Inquisitor's men taught me that trick. You can't get it out of your skin." He held his fingers up to Isabelle's face. "Look at the roots. The shading. She's blonde underneath."

Roland lunged. A sergeant's club caught him across the jaw and the world went white. He hit the ground with the taste of blood in his mouth and found himself staring up at the gray sky, at the stones of the hostelry wall, at the captain's face swimming above him.

"Did you think we wouldn't check the villages?" the captain said. "The Inquisitor posts a description on every door between here and the sea. And he pays well for diligence."

Isabelle was struggling, her wrists twisted behind her back by one of the soldiers. She didn't scream. She only looked at Roland with an expression he had seen before—on the walls of the siege camp, when the assault had failed and the dead were being counted.

*We were so close.*

The captain pulled a folded paper from his jerkin and held it up. Roland recognized the seal, the crisp black ink of the envoy's hand.

"The Inquisitor says you'll be taken to Poitiers," the captain said. "The castle has a dungeon that has held better men than you. And he says to tell you, when you wake on the straw, that the road to Calais was never the road you should have taken."

Roland tried to speak, but the world was tilting, and the captain's face was dissolving into darkness.

*The road we should have taken.*

The last thing he saw before the black took him was Isabelle's hair, a strand of black dye streaking down her cheek like a tear.

Then nothing.