Read Chapter 18: The Night of Rain

The rain came as they crossed the miller’s field, not in spits but in sheets, a hard grey curtain that bent the barley flat and turned the furrows to running rivers. Thomas welcomed it. Every step he took was muffled, every breath lost in the downpour, and the world shrank to the span of his own arms. Behind him, Margery kept pace with a grim silence, her hood pulled so low that only the tip of her chin showed. Micah moved slower, weighted by his years and by the bag of tools he insisted on carrying—a crowbar, a hammer, a coil of greased rope that Thomas had been glad to see, though it was too short for a proper climb.

They had abandoned the village road a quarter mile back, cutting instead through the stand of alders that bordered Sir Richard’s hunting grounds. The ground here was soft, sucking at their boots with every step, and the trees offered some cover but no comfort. Rain dripped from every branch. Thomas’s coat was soaked through by the time they reached the treeline, and his hands had begun to shake with cold he could not afford.

“There,” Micah said, barely louder than the drumming water. He pointed with his chin.

Through the curtain of rain Thomas made out the gamekeeper’s lodge—a long, low building of black timber and wattle, its thatch roof sagging under the weight of the storm. No light showed in the windows. No smoke rose from the chimney. To any passerby, it was an abandoned shell. But Micah had drawn the truth on his scrap of wood: below the lodge lay a cellar, and below that, another chamber, dug into the clay and stone where a man’s cries could never reach the surface.

Margery’s hand found Thomas’s arm. Her grip was fierce. “You’re certain of the guard?”

“Two,” Thomas said. “At last light, I saw two shadows move between the windows. They’ll be tired. They’ll be pressed against whatever warmth they can find. One bottle of ale between them and they won’t hear us at all.”

He wished he believed it.

They crossed the last stretch of open ground in a low crouch, Micah wheezing behind them, the bag of tools clanking softly with every step. Thomas pressed a hand over his mouth to silence him, and Micah nodded, chastened.

The lodge’s rear wall was given over to a leanto where the old keeper had once salted venison. The door hung loose on its hinges, and the space beyond smelled of rust and dried blood and long-abandoned work. Thomas eased inside, motioning the others to follow. The floor was packed earth. There, where Micah’s map had marked it, lay a square trapdoor coated in years of grime.

Thomas knelt, ran his fingers along the edges. The hasp was iron, corroded with rust. Micah had spoken true—the wood around it was soft, what he’d called “foxed timber,” bruised by years of damp and beetle-boring. One hard kick from the right angle would snap it.

“Wait for my signal,” Thomas breathed.

He pressed his ear to the wood. Beneath him, at first, nothing. Then a sound that made his pulse jump: a low, wet cough, human and sick, followed by the clink of chains.

They were here. The pens were not empty.

Thomas signalled to Micah. The carpenter knelt beside him, crowbar already in hand, and worked the flat end under the lip of the trapdoor’s frame. He leaned back. The wood groaned. The hasp shuddered but held.

Micah heaved again, and with a crack like a branch breaking, the hasp gave. The trapdoor sagged open a hand’s breadth, spilling up a gout of stale air—sweat and shit and fear, the reek of packed bodies left too long in their own filth.

Micah pushed the door all the way open, revealing a ladder of rungs leading down into darkness. Thomas swung his leg over the edge, felt for the first rung with his boot.

And then a voice spoke behind them, close enough that Thomas could smell the wine on its breath.

“Well, now,” the guard said. “Ain’t this a pretty picture.”

Thomas turned. The guard stood in the leanto’s doorway, a crossbow in his hands and a lantern at his feet. The rain had soaked him to the skin, but his aim was steady. Behind him, a second shape filled the door—bigger, broader, holding what looked like a cudgel.

“Sir Richard said you might come back,” the guard said. “Said the lamb was a clever one. But you’re not that clever, are you, Doctor? Walking right into our arms.”

Thomas did not think. He threw himself sideways, seizing Micah’s shoulder and dragging the old man down behind the trapdoor’s lip. The crossbow snapped. The bolt buried itself in the wall where Thomas’s head had been a moment before.

“Run!” Margery screamed.

The second guard came through the door swinging. His cudgel caught Micah across the shoulder with a sickening crunch, and the carpenter cried out and crumpled. Thomas lunged, driving his stolen knife into the guard’s thigh. The man roared and staggered, and Thomas seized Margery’s arm and hauled her toward the door.

He did not look back.

The rain swallowed them. They crashed through the undergrowth, branches whipping at their faces, the shouts of the guards chasing them down. Thomas’s lungs burned. Margery stumbled and he caught her, half-dragged her across a ditch, and they ran until the sounds behind them faded and died.

It was only then, beneath the dripping canopy of the alders, that Thomas realized what they had left behind.

Micah.

Margery’s face was a mask of rainwater and terror. “He’s dead. They’ll kill him.”

Thomas forced air into his aching chest. “They’ll want him alive,” he said. “Sir Richard will want to know who helped me. What I know. How many more are coming.”

Margery stared at him. In the rain, her eyes were unreadable. “Micah knows everything. The lodge. The pens. The map. Where we would run.”

Thomas said nothing.

“You led him to that door,” she said, her voice trembling with accusation. “You chose that night. You said the guard would be asleep. You *said*.”

“I was wrong,” Thomas said roughly. “It happens. I am not a soldier. I am a doctor who makes dying men comfortable and sometimes fails at that. If you have a better plan, widow, I would hear it now.”

He expected her to break, to weep, to strike him. Instead she went very still.

“They’ll take him to the manor,” she said quietly. “There’s a room beneath Sir Richard’s solar. His father used it for poachers. Whatever he does to Micah, the walls will not hear it.”

Thomas closed his eyes. The rain continued to fall, indifferent. He was cold, weaponless, his only ally the dread in his own gut.

Then he thought of the chapel, and the crypt, and the fallen stone.

“We cannot help him,” he said at last. “Not tonight. But we can make certain his sacrifice means something.” He opened his eyes. “You said the cart moves the prisoners at the full moon. If the guard recognized me, if the count is done early, we have less time than we thought. I need rope. I need a lantern. I need somewhere to hide until the moon rises.”

Margery looked at the ground, then back up at him. “I know a place,” she said. “The miller’s daughter died of the pox last spring. He keeps her bed as it was. He does not go near it.”

Thomas had slept in worse places.

He nodded, and she went ahead of him into the dark.