Chapter 19: The Reckoning of Michaelmas

The hall reeked of tallow and damp wool. Sir Hugh de Lacy sat at the head of the trestle table, a half-eaten capon congealing on a pewter plate before him. His tunic, once fine velvet, was stained at the cuffs with wine and road-mud. Beside him stood Ralph, the steward, with a wax tablet balanced on his forearm like a shield.

Tom stopped at the threshold. The fire in the hearth had been banked low, and the shadows crawled up the lime-washed walls. He could feel the weight of the lord’s gaze—not hostile, not kind. Appraising.

“Master Ashwick.” Hugh gestured to the stool opposite him. “Sit. You have kept me waiting.”

“I came as soon as your steward summoned me, my lord.”

“Summoned.” Hugh rolled the word on his tongue. “A fine word for a man who claims to be no one’s vassal. Ralph tells me you have turned the demesne’s yield into something the likes of which this manor has never seen. Three times the barley of last year. Turnips in the fallow field, and a crop of winter wheat sown before the frost.”

Tom sat. The stool was unsteady, one leg shorter than the others. “The seed was good, my lord. And the ploughshares—”

“Yes. The ploughshares.” Hugh leaned forward, his scarred knuckles white on the table’s edge. “Steel that rings like a bell. Steel that holds an edge through a hundred acres. I have seen such metal only in the hands of the King’s best armourers. And you expect me to believe you simply found it in a barn.”

Tom kept his voice level. “I expect you to believe what you saw, my lord. I am not a warlock. I am a steward, as I said. A man trained in methods unfamiliar to this land.”

“Trained where?” Ralph’s voice cut in, sharp as a scythe. “Your accent is strange. Your manner of speech. You claim no parish, no lord, no lineage. The bishop’s steward asks about you, and I have no answer to give him.”

Hugh waved a hand, silencing the steward. “The bishop’s steward can ask all he likes. I have seen the man’s fields, Ralph. I have seen his barns.” He turned back to Tom, and there was something almost hungry in his eyes. “The question is not where you come from. The question is what you can do for me.”

Tom felt the trap close around him. He had known it would come to this—Hugh de Lacy was not a man who shared. He was a man who took.

“My methods can feed this manor,” Tom said carefully. “They can feed your tenants and your soldiers. But they require time, my lord. And peace. If the Church decides I am a heretic, or if the bishop’s steward drags me before the consistory court, those methods die with me.”

Hugh smiled, and it was not a pleasant expression. “Then it is fortunate that I am the lord of this manor, and not the bishop. What is mine, I protect.” He reached for his cup, took a long draught of ale, and set it down with a thud. “But protection has a price.”

Tom nodded. He had expected this. “Name it, my lord.”

“Michaelmas is in three days. Ralph will present the full accounting to the manor court. You will stand before the tenants and the reeve, and you will swear fealty to me as a free tenant of this manor, holding your lands in return for service.” Hugh paused. “And you will give me the secret of the steel.”

The words hung in the air like frost. Tom’s heart quickened, but he kept his face still.

“The steel is not a secret, my lord. It is a craft. I can teach it to your smiths, yes. But it will take months, perhaps a year, before they can match it. And the materials—the ore, the charcoal, the flux—they are not easy to come by in this land.”

“Then you will find them.” Hugh leaned back, satisfied. “You have until the spring planting to prove your worth. Until then, you will live. You will work. And you will not speak of your origins to anyone—not to the priest, not to the bishop’s steward, not to the King’s justices if they come sniffing. You are my man now, Ashwick. My secret. My treasure.”

Tom rose, his legs unsteady. “I understand, my lord.”

“See that you do.” Hugh turned to Ralph, dismissing Tom with a wave of his hand. “Send the reeve in. We have soldiers to muster.”

Tom walked out of the hall into the cold, grey afternoon. The yard was full of people—tenants, labourers, a few armed men with rusted spears. Joan was waiting by the well, her cloak pulled tight against the wind.

“Well?” she asked, her eyes searching his face.

“I am a free tenant now,” Tom said. “Holding my lands in return for service. And I have until spring to teach his smiths how to make steel.”

Joan’s lips thinned. “And if you cannot?”

Tom looked toward the barn, where the false wall hid his warehouse. He thought of the dying battery, the finite candle of his modern knowledge guttering in the dark. He thought of the lime kiln in the wood, and the turnip seed already sown, and the woman Fulke had brought, now recovering in the village.

“Then I am a dead man,” he said. “But so is everyone else in this manor, whether by winter hunger or the bishop’s pyre or the King’s tax-farmers.” He met her gaze. “I did not come here to save myself, Joan. I came here to save what I could. And that is what I will do, for as long as I can.”

Joan was silent for a long moment. Then she reached into her sleeve and pressed a small bundle of dried herbs into his palm.

“Feverfew,” she said. “For the headaches you will get, trying to teach iron-headed men to make miracles. And—” She hesitated. “There is a woman at the edge of the wood. A stranger, like you. She came asking for the man who saved Fulke’s patient. She says she brings word from the bishop’s steward. She says she will wait until nightfall.”

Tom’s blood turned cold. He looked toward the treeline, where the bare branches clawed at the sky.

“Did she give a name?”

Joan shook her head. “She said you would know her by the mark she carries.” She paused. “A scar on her hand, like a brand. She said to tell you it is the mark of the fire that took her village.”

Tom felt the ground shift beneath him. He knew no woman with such a mark. But he knew of a village burned for heresy, three years before the plague came, when he had been a boy in a land that no longer existed.

“I will meet her,” he said.

Joan’s hand closed around his wrist. “Tom. Be careful. The bishop’s steward does not send women to deliver threats. He sends them to deliver traps.”

Tom nodded, but his mind was already racing. Who was she? And what did she want?

He turned toward the wood, the feverfew still clutched in his hand, the winter closing in around him like a fist.