Chapter 41: The Road Through the Snow

The snow came down in a slow, deliberate curtain, as if the sky itself were weighing each flake before letting it fall. Tom pulled his hood tighter and watched Joan’s back sway with the rhythm of her mare, her shoulders set against the cold. They had ridden in silence for an hour after the tollgate, the guard’s words still hanging between them like a frost that would not lift.

“He said the war is ending,” Tom said finally. His breath clouded in the air. “That could mean anything. A truce for winter. A parley.”

Joan turned in her saddle. Her face was pinched with cold, but her eyes held that sharp, measuring look he had come to know—the look she wore when she was about to tell him something he did not want to hear.

“It could mean the King has made peace because he is desperate,” she said. “Or because he has won. Either way, he will be looking at France, not at grain merchants. Your information is worth less than it was a week ago.”

Tom said nothing. She was right, and he hated her for it the way he hated all truths that arrived too late to be useful.

The road wound through a stretch of open country, bare fields under a white shroud, the skeletal arms of oaks reaching toward a sky the colour of old iron. They passed a wayside cross, its stone face worn smooth by centuries of rain, and Tom saw Joan make the sign over her chest out of habit. He wondered what she prayed for. He wondered if she prayed for him.

“We could still turn back,” he said, though he did not believe it.

“To what?” Joan’s voice was flat. “To Hugh’s gallows? To the bishop’s pyre? No, Tom. We ride on. We ride on because the only thing worse than a King who does not listen is a King who never hears your name at all.”

They stopped at midday at a crossroads hamlet—three cottages, a smithy, and a tavern that looked as though it had been built from the bones of older buildings. The tavern keeper was a thin man with a face like a shut door, but he served them hot pottage and dark bread without asking questions, and for that Tom was grateful. He paid with silver from the cart’s hidden cache, watching the man’s eyes flick to the steel beneath the sacking and then away.

“You’re carrying a heavy load for winter travel,” the tavern keeper said, not quite a question.

“Salt,” Tom said. “And seed.”

The man nodded, as if he had heard many such lies in his life and did not care to count them.

They ate in silence. Joan’s hand rested on the table near his, not quite touching, and Tom felt the weight of the bishop’s seal against his chest like a second heartbeat. He had stolen it, or bargained for it, or both—he was no longer certain which. The dead woman’s face kept rising in his mind, the rope marks around her throat, the way her eyes had looked when she told him about Hugh’s treason.

“What will you say to him?” Joan asked, breaking the quiet. “To the King.”

Tom stared into his pottage. “I don’t know. The truth, I suppose.”

“The truth is a weapon the Church knows how to use,” she said, echoing Margery’s words. “You told me that. You told me she said it. You’ll need more than truth. You’ll need something he wants.”

“I have steel. I have seed. I have methods that could feed his kingdom.”

“And if he doesn’t believe you?”

Tom set down his spoon. “Then I’ll show him. I’ll make him believe.”

Joan’s lips curved in something that was not quite a smile. “You are either the bravest man I have ever met or the most foolish.”

“I’m both,” Tom said. “Ask anyone.”

They left the hamlet as the light began to fail, the snow picking up again, driven now by a wind that cut through wool and leather like a blade. The road climbed through a belt of woodland, the trees pressing close on either side, their branches heavy with white. Tom’s horse stumbled on a hidden root, and he steadied it with a hand on its neck, murmuring the kind of nonsense words he had used to calm frightened forklift drivers in another life.

It was dark by the time they reached the next settlement—a walled town whose gates were already shut for the night. Tom hammered on the wood with the flat of his hand until a hatch slid open and a face peered out, lit by the orange glow of a torch.

“The gates are closed,” the voice said. “Come back at dawn.”

Tom reached into his purse and held up a silver coin. The hatch closed, and for a moment he thought they would be left to freeze. Then the gate creaked open, just wide enough for a horse to pass, and they rode into a courtyard thick with mud and the smell of wet straw.

The inn was crowded with travellers who had been caught by the same weather—a merchant with a wagon of cloth, a priest with a face like a squeezed lemon, a pair of men-at-arms drinking ale and speaking in low voices of the truce. Tom and Joan took a corner table, and Tom ordered mulled wine, more for warmth than for pleasure.

The priest was watching him.

Tom felt the weight of that gaze like a hand on his shoulder, and he kept his own eyes on his cup, listening to the men-at-arms.

“They say the King is coming home,” one of them said. “Leaving the army at Calais.”

“Then he’ll be in London by Christmas,” the other replied. “If the roads hold.”

Tom’s pulse quickened. Edward was coming home. That meant London. That meant the court would be gathering, that the King would be accessible, that the petition might reach him before the snows closed the roads entirely.

The priest rose from his table and walked toward them, slow and deliberate, his black robes brushing the rushes. He stopped before Tom and inclined his head.

“You travel late, friend,” the priest said. “And you carry a heavy burden.”

Tom met his eyes. “We all do, father.”

The priest smiled, thin and bloodless. “Indeed. The road to London is long, and the winter is merciless. It would be a pity for a man to die on such a road, with so much left undone.”

He turned and walked away, and Tom felt the cold of the night press against his back like a blade.

Joan leaned close, her voice a whisper. “That was a warning.”

“I know.”

“The bishop’s men have found us.”

Tom said nothing. He reached into his coat and touched the seal, the cold metal grounding him.

“Then we ride at dawn,” he said. “Before the snow rises.”

The fire crackled, and the priest’s voice drifted from across the room, low and certain, as if he were praying for souls already lost.