Read Chapter 32: The Final Decoy

The morning mist clung to the Loire like a shroud as they gathered in the hollow of a chestnut grove, the river a silver thread below the ridge. Roland’s sword arm ached from the night ride, but the ache was familiar—an old companion that kept him honest. Aelis stood apart from the mercenaries, her nun’s habit traded for a rider’s cloak, but the steel in her eyes had not softened.

“The Count knows you slipped his net,” she said, unrolling a map across her saddle. The parchment was creased and stained, marked with ink crosses that charted their desperation. “Poitiers is three days behind us. The patrols will be thicker than fleas on a dog once word reaches his reeves.”

Isabelle bent over the map, her finger tracing the river south. “Then we don’t travel as three. We travel as none.”

Roland raised an eyebrow. “You have a manner of becoming invisible that I have yet to witness.”

Isabelle smiled—rare, tight, and dangerous. “We don’t need to be invisible. We need to be unremarkable. A merchant’s widow returning to her family’s lands. A hired sword escorting her to Paris to settle a debt.” She glanced at Aelis. “And a nun who carries letters for a convent. The roads are full of such folk. No one stops to count them.”

Aelis nodded slowly. “The court at Paris is a hive. A nun seeking alms for a sick abbess can walk through more doors than a captain with a warrant.” She folded the map and pressed it into Isabelle’s hands. “I’ll make for the city ahead of you. I know a sisterhood in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine that will shelter me without questions. They owe me favours older than your years, Roland.”

“And what do you expect to find at court?” he asked.

“The name of the man who commanded the envoy. The Count of Poitou is a blade, but someone holds the hilt. The bishop is a fool with gold, but this scheme—sealing a ledger in a box, sending a false mission, laying a trap for whoever carried it—that requires a mind that thinks in moves, not coins.” Her gaze met Isabelle’s. “Your uncle’s house is one of the oldest in Paris. If his servants talk, I’ll hear it. If the King’s council debates the ledger’s return, I’ll know the faces and names behind the whispers.”

Roland grunted. “And if you’re caught with a copy of the bishop’s muster in your habit?”

Aelis tapped the small leather scrip at her belt. “I carry no copy. The muster is in my head—names, numbers, troop strengths. I recited it until it was as familiar as my prayers.” She touched the wooden cross at her throat, a gesture that might have been piety or mockery. “Even if they strip me, they’ll find nothing but a woman of God.”

Isabelle stepped forward and took Aelis’s hands. “You risk more than we ask.”

“I risk what I choose.” Aelis squeezed once, then released. “Ashcombe’s gold bought the horses and the men. My life buys the truth. It is a fair trade.”

They parted at noon, the mercenaries scattering in pairs across the countryside—a deliberate chaos meant to seed false trails. The priest and the woman with the boy had already been sent north with coin and a story of a pilgrimage. Aelis rode east with two hard-faced riders, her cloak pulled high against the wind.

Roland and Isabelle crossed the Loire at a stone ford near a Benedictine mill, the water dark and quick around their horses’ hocks. The animals were good stock—Ashcombe had not pinched pennies—and they drove them hard through the afternoon, keeping to the lesser roads where the dust would not betray them. The autumn light was thin and yellow, and the fields were being stripped for harvest, the vines heavy with fruit that no one would press into wine if the armies came.

They stopped at a village whose name Roland did not ask, where a smith sold them a remount and a farmer’s wife sold them bread and salted pork. Isabelle kept her hood low and her voice soft, playing the part of a widow with such ease that Roland wondered how much of it was disguise.

“You did that well,” he said as they led the horses to a trough. “The widow’s grief. The way you dropped your eyes.”

Isabelle watched the water ripple. “I learned it from my mother. She was a widow for eleven years before the Church allowed her to remarry. She wore the black so long she forgot what colour suited her.” She looked up. “My brother Hugh was born in that black. He used to say it was like being born into a shadow.”

Roland said nothing. She had spoken of Hugh only in fragments—a brother, older, who had disappeared years ago. The name sat between them now like a stone in a crossing.

“We should reach the Gâtinais by nightfall,” he said, changing the water’s course. “Pâté’s country. The Count’s writ weakens there.”

They rode on as the light bled from the sky. The road wound through a stretch of close-set trees, and Roland’s hand drifted to his sword hilt, a habit he had not lost in the dungeon. The horses were tired, their heads low, and he was about to suggest they find a haystack when Isabelle’s hand shot out and gripped his forearm.

“Riders,” she hissed. “Behind us. Two dozen, maybe more.”

He twisted in the saddle. The road behind dipped into a shallow valley, and there, just clearing the rise, came a column of horsemen—banners furled but harness bright under the failing sun. The lead rider wore the livery of the Count of Poitou.

“Quick,” he said. “Off the road. The woods are thick here.”

They spurred their mounts into the undergrowth, branches whipping across their faces. The horses stumbled on roots and stones, but he pushed them deeper, seeking a fold in the land, a stream to break the scent. Isabelle’s mare staggered and nearly fell, and he caught her rein, dragging the animal forward.

Behind them, a horn. Short. Recognizable.

“They’ve seen us,” Isabelle said, her voice flat.

Roland pulled up beneath a massive oak whose roots clutched the bank of a dry creek bed. “Not us. Them.” He pointed west, where a haze of dust rose above the trees—their own path, but also where he had sent the priest and the woman. “They’ll follow that trail. They’ll think we’re together.”

Isabelle stared at him. “You sent them north not to sow false trails. You sent them to be bait.”

“I sent them to live,” he said. “The Count’s men will chase a fleeing flock. They’ll spend a day proving it was a false lead. We’ll be across the Yonne by then.”

“And if they catch them?”

“They won’t. The priest knows the woods better than any cavalryman. He survived the Inquisition’s hunt for three years.” Roland dismounted and led his horse into the creek bed, where the water ran shallow and cold. “Follow the stream until it joins the river. Then we ride north until the horses founder. We can’t afford to stop.”

Isabelle hesitated, and for a moment he saw the weight of what they had done—the prisoners, the priest, the woman and her boy, all of them loose threads in a tapestry of pursuit. Then she touched her heels to her mare’s sides and followed him into the water.

The night came fast, and they rode until the horses were lathered and trembling. Only when the moon was high and the shadows lay long and still over a bare ridgeline did Roland call a halt. They had crossed the Yonne at a place he knew, a shallow gravel ford used by charcoal burners, and the ground about them was empty and silent.

Isabelle slid from her saddle and stood unsteadily, her legs trembling. “How far to Paris?”

“Four days, if the horses hold. Three if we push.”

She looked back the way they had come, at the dark country swallowing their trail. “And the road behind?”

“We’ll learn soon enough.” He loosened his saddle and began to unsheathe his sword, not for battle but to wipe the river mud from the blade. “The Count’s men will find the priest’s trail by dawn. They’ll chase him until midday, then realize their error. That gives us a day. Perhaps two, if they’re slow to double back.”

“A day to reach the King’s protection?”

Roland looked at her, at the exhaustion in her face that she would not admit to. “A day to reach the chapel you spoke of.”

Isabelle’s eyes widened. She had not mentioned it since the escape from Poitiers—a place she remembered from childhood, a link to her family’s secrets. He had stored it in his mind the way he stored escape routes and water sources, as a possibility to be opened when needed.

“The Chapel of the White Lady,” she said softly. “It’s three miles from here. I thought—I had buried it so deep.”

“Then dig it up,” Roland said, sheathing his sword. “Because if the Count reaches Paris before we do, there will be no King’s protection. Only another trap. And I would rather face whatever waits in that chapel than walk into a net I cannot see.”

For a long moment Isabelle did not move. Then she nodded, and he watched her gather herself around a purpose she had not yet spoken aloud.

“You should know something,” she said. “About the chapel. About why I remembered it.”

“Tell me on the way.”

“There are things there,” she said, “that I have never told anyone. Not you. Not Aelis. Not even my own prayers.”

“Then they are things that have waited long enough.” He swung back into the saddle and offered her his hand. “Whatever haunts that chapel, we will face it together. Or not at all.”

She took his hand, and they rode on into a darkness that felt, for the first time in weeks, less like a road behind them than a threshold ahead.