Chapter 20: The Woman from the Burnt Village

The wood swallowed the last of the daylight. Tom moved between the oaks with the feverfew still in his fist, his breath clouding the iron air. Joan walked a half-step behind him, silent as a hare, and he knew she was reading the ground as he read a manifest—every bent twig, every disturbed leaf speaking its own language.

The clearing opened sudden and small, ringed by hazel and thorn. A fire burned low in a stone ring, and beside it stood a woman.

She was older than Joan by a decade, her kirtle patched at the shoulder and hem, her hair bound tight beneath a stained linen veil. But her eyes were what held him—grey as winter water, and just as cold. She did not start at their approach. She had heard them coming, Tom realized, and had chosen to wait.

“You are the warehouse man,” she said. Not a question.

Tom stopped at the edge of the clearing. “I am called Tom Ashwick. And you?”

“You may call me Dame Margery.” She gestured to the fire, where a small pot hung steaming. “Sit. You have walked far. The feverfew in your hand tells me you have been to the churchyard’s edge, where the sick are buried.”

Tom looked down at the herb, then back at her. “You watch closely.”

“I watch everything.” She settled onto a fallen log, her movements spare and deliberate. “It is how I have lived this long. The bishop’s steward burned my village for heresy in ’45. I was the only one who watched the pyre from the treeline instead of the square. Watching saved me.”

Joan moved to Tom’s side, not sitting, her hand resting on the knife at her belt. “What does the steward want with us?”

Margery’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “He wants to know if the warehouse man is a gift of God or a servant of the Adversary. He has sent three men to ask questions in the taverns. Two came back with ale-warm gossip. The third—” She paused. “The third has not come back at all.”

Tom’s stomach tightened. “What happened to him?”

“The plague happened to him,” Margery said flatly. “He took a fever in Winchester and died in a ditch. The steward does not know whether to call that providence or suspicion. He is a man who fears what he cannot explain, and you, Master Ashwick, are a thing he cannot explain.”

Tom sat, the log cold beneath him. “And you? Why did you come?”

Margery studied him a long moment, and in the firelight he saw the scars on her forearms—old burns, white against the weathered skin. “Because I have seen what you do. The turnips in the long field. The iron that does not rust. The sick woman who lived when the sweat had already claimed her.” She leaned forward. “I do not care if you are a warlock or a saint. I care that you are useful. And the steward’s men will be here before the first snow.”

Joan made a sound low in her throat. “You bring us a warning, then. A warning wrapped in riddles.”

“I bring you a choice.” Margery’s eyes did not leave Tom’s face. “Run. Take your strange gifts and vanish into the fens, where the Church’s reach is thin and the lords are too poor to care. Or stay, and let me help you build a story so strong that even the bishop’s steward cannot break it.”

“What story?” Tom asked.

“The story of a pilgrim.” Margery’s voice dropped, low and certain. “A man who walked the holy roads of Compostela and Rome, who studied with the apothecaries of Salerno, who brought back knowledge written in the old tongues. A man of learning, not of magic. The Church cannot burn a pilgrim who carries letters of safe-conduct from a bishop—and I know a scribe in Oxford who can forge such letters for silver.”

Tom’s pulse beat in his throat. The warehouse’s battery was dying. The lime kiln was hidden. Sir Hugh’s steward demanded accounts by Michaelmas, and now this woman offered him a mask that might hold against the Church. But masks had a way of slipping.

“And if I choose to run?”

Margery’s face softened, just for a moment. “Then you will live,” she said. “But you will live knowing that you left them—the reeve, the widow, the boy Wat—to face the winter alone. The steward will find his answers somewhere. He always does.”

The fire cracked. Somewhere in the wood, an owl called, and Tom felt the sound like a needle in his chest.

He thought of the warehouse, of the steel ploughshares stacked in the dark, of the veterinary books he had read by dying lamplight, of Wat’s thin face as he vowed silence. He thought of Joan’s hand on his wrist in the churchyard, warning him of traps.

“What do you want in return?” he asked.

Margery’s smile widened, and for the first time Tom saw something hungry behind her eyes. “The steward’s steward,” she said. “A man named Cuthbert. He holds the lease to my family’s land, land that was stolen when the village burned. I want it back. Help me reclaim it, and I will spend my last breath keeping your secret safe.”

Joan stepped forward, her voice sharp. “You ask him to trade one master for another.”

“No.” Margery shook her head. “I ask him to trade a rope for a leash. A rope hangs you. A leash can be slipped.”

Tom looked between them—Joan’s fierce, protective anger, Margery’s calculating patience. The winter was closing in, and the bishop’s steward was coming. He had saved a village by the skin of his teeth, but the world was larger than one village, and it was hungry.

“I will stay,” he said. “And I will help you with Cuthbert. But I want to see the letters first—the scribe’s work. If they are good, we have a bargain.”

Margery nodded, slow as a cat. “I will bring them by the new moon. And Tom—” She rose, and the firelight caught her face in a way that made her look younger, and older, both at once. “When the steward’s men arrive, do not answer their questions with truth. Truth is a weapon they know how to use.”

She stepped back into the dark, and was gone, leaving only the dying fire and the scent of woodsmoke.

Joan turned to Tom, her voice low. “She is dangerous.”

“Yes,” Tom said, watching the place where Margery had vanished. “But she is right. And I am running out of winters.”

He felt the weight of the feverfew still in his hand, the chill of the coming frost, and the distant, unknowable shape of a story he had not yet decided how to tell.