Read Chapter 6: The Ambush at the Mill

The mill sat at the base of a shallow valley, its wheel silent and furred with green, the stream that should have turned it reduced to a muddy trickle. The building itself leaned like a tired man, its timber frame warped and its roof patchy with rot. Roland reined in his borrowed mare at the tree line and studied it for a long moment.

Marguerite stood at his stirrup, one hand resting on his boot. She had not complained once in three hours of riding double, though the wound in his arm had leaked through its bandage and she must have felt the wet warmth against her back.

“You said a brother,” Roland said.

“Half-brother,” she corrected, and her voice was thinner than he remembered it in the abbey. “He works the mill for a lord who never comes. There’s a loft above the grain store where you can rest. He’ll fetch a healer from the village if I ask him.”

“And he’ll ask no questions about the box.”

She looked up at him, and her eyes were very clear and very young. “He owes me. Like your friend owed you.”

The words stung. Roland pressed his lips together and nudged the mare forward. The animal stepped cautiously over the uneven ground, ears pricked, and Roland let her have her head. A horse’s instincts had saved him more than once.

At the mill’s sagging door, Marguerite slipped down and pushed it open. The interior smelled of dry rot and old flour dust, the air thick with the memory of work long abandoned. A ladder led to the loft she had promised, and beneath it, in the deeper shadows where the grain had once been stored, something glinted.

Roland saw it a heartbeat before the door slammed shut behind him.

“Now!” a man shouted, and the glint became a blade, and the shadows disgorged four men.

He had time to drag the mare sideways—she screamed and reared, hooves catching the nearest man in the chest with a sound like a splitting melon—and then Roland was on the ground with a knee in his back and hands on the box. He twisted, got an arm free, drove his elbow into a face, and felt teeth give way. But there were too many, and the wound in his arm burned like a brand, and the box was wrenched from his grip.

They hauled him upright. A man with a gap-toothed grin held the box under one arm as if it were a sack of turnips. The one Roland had elbowed spat blood onto the floor and drew a knife.

“The Bishop sends his regards,” the knife-man said.

Behind them, Marguerite stood in the doorway. The light came through the cracked planks and lay across her face, and Roland saw that she was not afraid. She was watching him the way a cat watches a bird with a broken wing.

“You,” he said.

She tilted her head. “I told you. I was recruited. You just didn’t want to hear it.”

The knife-man stepped closer. “We’ll make it quick. The box goes to Narbonne. You go to rot.”

Roland did not answer. He was measuring the gap between himself and the man holding the box, and the route through the two men between them, and the likelihood that the mare—still wild-eyed and stamping against the wall—would bolt through the door he could not reach.

The knife-man saw the calculation. He grinned. “Go on, then. Try.”

So Roland did.

He threw himself forward not at the knife-man but at the man holding the box, taking the fellow’s knees out with his shoulder, and as they went down together, he got his hand on the box’s leather strap. The other man drove a fist into his ribs, and Roland took the blow and answered with a head-butt that crunched cartilage. The box came free.

He was still rising when the knife-man was on him, blade sweeping for his throat. Roland caught the wrist, barely, the edge stopping a finger’s breadth from his neck, and they strained against each other, locked in a grotesque embrace.

“You’re hurt, old man,” the knife-man hissed. “You’re slow.”

“I’ve been slow before,” Roland said, and hooked his foot behind the man’s heel and twisted.

They went down together. The knife skittered away. Roland got his knee onto the man’s chest and his hands around his throat, and for three heartbeats he pressed, watching the man’s face redden and then purple, until a blow landed on the back of his skull and drove him sideways.

The fourth man—the one who had taken the mare’s hoof and somehow risen—swung a length of broken timber at him again. Roland rolled under it, came up with the knife he had spotted on the floor, and put it through the man’s thigh.

The man screamed and went down.

The knife-man was crawling toward the door, coughing and retching. Roland stepped over him, grabbed a fistful of hair, and pressed the blade against the exposed throat.

“Who told you I would come here?”

The knife-man made a wet sound. “She did. She’s been on the road behind you since Carcassonne. The Bishop’s ledger—” He coughed. “He wants it. He fears it. But he ain’t the only one.”

“What does the Bishop fear?”

“Not me,” the man said, and then Roland felt the weight shift in his grip, saw the man’s eyes roll white, and let him drop. The fellow’s own audacity had been his last act—he’d managed to work his other hand beneath him and open something in his own chest. There was a thin trickle of blood from a wound under the ribs, and then nothing.

Roland straightened, breathing hard. The man he had stabbed in the thigh was dragging himself toward the door, leaving a broad red smear. The one he had elbowed was unconscious. The one the mare had struck was not moving.

And Marguerite was gone.

Roland found her twenty paces outside the mill, sitting against the trunk of an oak with her knees drawn up and her face buried in her arms, sobbing so hard her shoulders shook. His knife was still in his hand. He stood over her, and the blade felt very heavy.

“Look at me.”

She did, and her face was blotched and running with tears, and the fear in it was real. That, more than anything, made him lower the knife.

“They would have killed my sister,” she said, the words coming in a rush. “The Bishop’s man—Brother Maurice. He took her from the village. Said she’d be returned when I delivered you. Said the box mattered more than the man carrying it, that you were nothing, that no one would miss a mercenary.”

“And the abbey?”

“I was to make you trust me. They knew you’d come through the valley. They knew about the storm. They—” She broke off, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I watched you kill a man to protect me. I didn’t know they’d want you dead. I thought they only wanted the box.”

Roland sheathed the knife. The box was still under his arm, and he could feel the weight of it against his injured ribs, a solid, patient pressure.

“Your sister,” he said. “Where is she held?”

“I don’t know. Brother Maurice said she was safe. He said when the box came to Narbonne, I’d get her back.”

“And you believed him.”

Marguerite’s laugh was small and bitter. “What choice did I have?”

Roland looked at the mill, and the bodies it contained, and the mare who had saved him with her hooves, and then at the girl, shivering in the late light. He had killed for lies before. He had trusted and been betrayed, and the scar that Enguerrand had left in him was still fresh.

But he had also walked alone for a long time.

“There’s a village two miles east,” he said. “You’ll find coin in my saddlebag, enough to get you somewhere the Bishop’s reach doesn’t stretch.”

She stared at him. “You’re letting me go.”

“If you come with me, you’ll get us both killed. And I have no more room for companions.” He knelt so his eyes were level with hers. “But if you know anything about Isabelle de Clermont—anything at all—you’ll tell me now, and I’ll count it as your debt paid.”

Marguerite’s lips parted. For a moment she looked as if she would deny everything, and then she let out a long breath.

“There’s a passage under the Bishop’s crypt,” she said softly. “It leads to the dungeons. She’s kept in a cell apart from the others, and they don’t treat her like a prisoner. They treat her like a guest who’s forgotten the way out.”

“What does she know?”

“I don’t know.” Marguerite’s voice dropped even lower. “But Brother Maurice said she was the key. He said the man who holds the ledger holds her, and the man who holds her holds the box.”

Roland’s fingers tightened on the wooden case. The ledger. She had said the word as if it were ordinary, as if it were not the thing that had followed him from Avignon and cost him his horse and nearly his life.

“Thank you,” he said, and stood.

She caught his sleeve. “One more thing. The men who hunt you aren’t only the Bishop’s. There’s a scarred man with a limp, and he asks different questions. He doesn’t want the box.”

“What does he want?”

Marguerite shook her head. “You,” she said, and Roland felt the word settle in his chest like a cold stone as she turned and walked toward the village, disappearing into the gathering dusk.