Read Chapter 5: The Girl in the Ruined Abbey

The storm arrived without warning, a wall of black cloud that swallowed the twilight and turned the road to mud within minutes. Roland pressed his hood tight against his skull and drove forward, the box wrapped in oilcloth against his chest, his horse—a sorry nag bought from a Carcassonne trader with the last of the bishop’s silver—stumbling through the deepening mire.

The abbey appeared as a shadow against a darker shadow, its roofline jagged where the nave had fallen centuries ago. Broken arches gaped like ribs against the lightning. Roland did not hesitate. A man could freeze to death on the open road in a storm like this, and he had bled enough in the last three days to know better than to test his luck twice.

He tied the horse in what remained of the cloister, where enough of the vaulted ceiling still stood to offer some shelter, and pushed through a door half off its hinges into the old refectory. The roof had held here, barely. Rain sheeted through a hole the size of a cart, but the far corner stayed dry beneath a stretch of intact ceiling.

A small sound stopped him cold. He had his hand on his knife before his eyes found the source.

She was huddled in the corner, wrapped in a threadbare cloak that might once have been grey wool. A girl, no more than fifteen or sixteen, with dark hair plastered to her face and eyes that burned too bright in the dim light. She had been watching the door when he entered, and she had not moved, had not cried out, had not even seemed to breathe.

Roland let his hand fall from the knife. “I mean you no harm, child.”

“I’m not a child.” Her voice was thin but steady. “And you might mean me harm and still say that.”

A fair point. Roland pulled the oilcloth from the box and set it against the wall, then began gathering what dry wood he could find among the rubble. The girl watched him move, her eyes tracking every step. He built a small fire in a corner where the smoke could find its way through the broken roof, and soon the flames cast dancing shadows across the ruined walls.

“Where are you bound?” she asked.

“North.”

“That’s not a place.”

“It’s the direction I’m going. You?”

She hesitated. The firelight caught the hollows of her cheeks, the shadows under her eyes. She had not eaten well for days. “I’m running.”

Roland said nothing. He had seen enough running people in his life to know when the truth was being parceled out like bread from a dwindling loaf.

They shared the fire in silence for a time. Roland unwrapped a piece of hard cheese and a heel of bread and offered her half without ceremony. She took it with a murmured thanks and ate like someone who had forgotten what food tasted like.

“You’re a soldier,” she said finally.

“I was. Once.”

“What are you now?”

Roland considered the question longer than it deserved. “A courier,” he said. “Of sorts.”

She glanced at the box, then quickly away. In the firelight, her face betrayed something—recognition, or calculation. He could not tell which.

“What’s in the box?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I was told not to open it. Told by a man who died for the trust he placed in me.”

The girl was quiet a long moment. Then she said, softly, “My name is Marguerite.”

“Roland.”

She nodded, as if testing the name against her memory. “You should sleep, Roland. I’ll keep watch.”

He did not sleep. He sat with his back against the wall, the box between his knees, and he watched the girl watch the fire until the rain slowed and the dark loosened its grip on the world outside.

Morning came grey and sodden. Roland was kicking dirt over the embers when he heard them—horses, several of them, picking their way through the rubble toward the refectory door.

Marguerite went rigid. “They found me.”

“Who?”

“The men. The ones who—” She broke off, her face draining of color. “They’ve been hunting me since Carcassonne. Please. I have a document. They want it back.”

“What kind of document?”

She pulled a fold of parchment from inside her bodice, crumpled and stained. “I don’t know. I couldn’t read it. But they killed Jehan to get it. He was the bishop’s clerk, and he gave it to me and said run, and they caught him at the gate.”

The horses stopped outside. Voices, low and spare. Roland counted three, maybe four distinct tones. He looked at the girl, at the parchment trembling in her hands, and made a decision he would have cause to question later.

“Give it here.”

She hesitated, then pressed it into his palm. Roland tucked it inside his tunic without looking at it. He drew his sword—the old blade Enguerrand had once mocked him for favoring—and moved toward the door.

“Stay behind the fire,” he said. “And if it goes badly, take the horse and ride north.”

The men came through the doorway in a pack, four of them, weather-worn and hard-eyed. They wore no livery, no badge of any house, but they moved like men who had served together for years. Their leader, a thick-shouldered brute with a scar through one eyebrow, saw Roland and stopped.

“We’ve no quarrel with you,” he said. “We’re here for the girl.”

“She’s under my protection.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a mistake.”

“It wouldn’t be the first I’ve made.”

The fight was short and ugly. Roland took the first man on the left before he could draw, a quick thrust through the throat, and used his body as a shield to turn the second man’s stroke. The scar-faced leader came in hard, and Roland gave ground, letting the man’s momentum carry him past the point of his blade. The third man—younger, slower—made the mistake of glancing toward the girl instead of watching his flank, and Roland put his pommel through the man’s temple. He fell like a sack of grain.

The scar-faced man circled, sword low, breathing hard. “You don’t know what you’re carrying.”

“The box is not the girl’s concern.”

“Not the box.” The man spat blood. “Her. You think she’s some servant fleeing her master? She’s a decoy. A lure. She’s been baiting men like you for weeks.”

Roland did not take his eyes off him. “Then she’s chosen the wrong one.”

He closed the distance in three strides. The scar-faced man met him, blade to blade, and for a moment they matched stroke for stroke, the ring of steel loud in the ruined hall. But Roland had fought at the siege of Orléans, had held a breach line against men who had killed to eat since they could walk, and this man was not that. A low cut took the man behind the knee, and when he dropped, Roland finished it.

Silence settled. Rain dripped through the broken roof. Roland stood over the bodies, chest heaving, and turned to find Marguerite still crouched by the dead fire, staring at him with wide eyes and bloodless lips.

“You weren’t lying,” she said. “About being a soldier.”

“No.” He wiped his blade on the dead man’s tunic and sheathed it. “Now tell me what they meant.”

“What?”

“Decoy. Lure. What was that about?”

Marguerite looked at the bodies, at the box, at the road beyond the broken arch. Her jaw tightened. “I was fleeing from the bishop’s household, but not as a servant. I was taken from my village six months ago, and I was kept in his service with others like me. Hunters, he called us. We were to find travelers carrying certain goods, certain papers—befriend them, learn their routes, and report back. The document I took, it was from his own chambers. I wasn’t supposed to read it, but I did. And I don’t understand all of it.”

“What do you understand?”

She wet her lips. “The bishop is afraid. Someone is coming for him, someone he cannot buy or kill or pray away. And there’s a woman in his dungeon—a noble woman, kept in chains, and he’s trying to make her tell him where something is hidden. Something that has to do with a ledger.”

Roland went still. The word landed like a stone in still water.

“What woman?”

“I heard her name.” Marguerite swallowed. “Isabelle de Clermont. She’s been his prisoner for months, and he’s been writing letters about her to Avignon, asking what he should do when the family comes looking.”

The family. The de Clermont sigil, silver on the box, burned in Roland’s mind. He looked down at the oilcloth-wrapped box, then at the girl who had appeared out of the storm with a document and a story that fit too neatly around the threads of his own.

He did not trust her. He would have been a fool to trust her.

But the road north ran through the mountains, and the mountains would kill him as surely as the men hunting the box if he tried to cross them alone.

“You said you know the way through the passes,” he said.

“I know the way.”

Roland held her gaze a long moment. Then he bent, lifted the box, and nodded toward the door.

“Then let’s go. And if you betray me, I’ll know before you finish the lie.”