Chapter 54: The King's Gaze

The door had barely closed before Tom felt the weight of the silence press against him. The hall stretched vast and cold, its rafters lost in shadow, its tapestries stirring faintly as though the walls themselves breathed. Joan stood at his side, her hand still warm where it had found his in the firelight, but now she drew it away, and the absence felt like a wound.

“He knows,” she whispered. “He knew before we came.”

Tom nodded slowly. Robert’s words on the road came back to him—Margery had already told the King everything. Hugh’s treason, the French gold, the grain ships slipping down the river under cover of night. Edward III had been waiting, patient as a spider, for proof he could hold before the Privy Council without seeming to move against a baron on rumor alone.

“Then why the test?” Tom asked the empty hall. “Why summon me here to show him what I can do, if he already knows what I carry?”

Joan moved to the table where a ewer of wine sat untouched, its silver surface catching the candlelight. She poured two cups with hands that did not tremble, though her face was pale.

“Because knowing and proving are different things,” she said. “A king who moves on whispers becomes a tyrant. A king who moves on evidence becomes a judge. He needs you to be the evidence—alive, credible, and grateful.”

Tom took the cup she offered. The wine was dark and faintly spiced, better than anything he had tasted since the warehouse had torn itself from its foundations and deposited him in a world that did not believe in steel ploughshares or willow-bark tinctures. He drank, and the warmth spread through his chest, but it did not loosen the knot beneath his ribs.

“And if I fail his test?”

Joan’s eyes met his over the rim of her cup. “Then the bishop’s men will have their way, and the King will have deniability. A dead steward is a small thing. A dead heretic is smaller still.”

The bells of London tolled again, distant and mournful, and Tom counted the strokes. Compline. The city was settling into its nightly rhythm, the gates barred, the watch set, the alleys given over to thieves and the desperate. Somewhere out there, the man in the black cloak was reporting to his masters, and the bishop’s men were sharpening their patience.

“I need to see the warehouse,” Tom said suddenly.

Joan set down her cup. “Tom, we are in the King’s palace. You cannot simply walk out and—“

“Not the warehouse itself. The contents.” He crossed to the hearth, where the fire had burned low, and picked up a length of charcoal from the basket. The floor was stone, swept clean, and he crouched and began to draw. Lines appeared beneath his fingers—rectangles, circles, arrows—a diagram of the barn’s hidden room as he remembered it.

“The turnip seed is here,” he said, tapping a square. “Steel ploughshares against the north wall. The veterinary books in the iron-bound chest. But the willow-bark tinctures—those are here, in the far corner, packed in straw against the frost.” He looked up at Joan. “The King asked me to show him what I can do. He expects miracles. But every miracle I perform is a risk—each one a thread that ties me to the warehouse, and the warehouse to a place that should not exist.”

Joan knelt beside him, her kirtle pooling on the cold stone. She studied the diagram, her brow furrowed. “Then show him something that cannot be traced. Something that has no obvious source.”

“Like what?”

She was silent for a long moment, and when she spoke, her voice was low. “The fever. The one that took the children in Wykeham last autumn. You treated them with something I had never seen—a powder that brought their fevers down within a day. You told me it came from the bark of a tree that grows across the sea.”

Tom’s hand tightened on the charcoal. Willow-bark tincture. Acetylsalicylic acid, in the world he had left behind. In this world, it was a miracle that could save a king’s son or a king himself—and a heresy that could burn him.

“The King has four sons,” Tom said slowly. “Two of them have survived childhood fevers. But the youngest, Thomas—he was born in 1355, and there are whispers he is frail.”

Joan nodded. “A king who has lost sons to fever will value a man who can cure them. But you must not present it as magic. Present it as knowledge—knowledge you are willing to share, to teach, to give away.”

Tom stared at the diagram, then at the woman beside him. She had seen through him from the beginning, had known he was not what he claimed to be, and had chosen to stand beside him anyway. The firelight caught the silver threads in her dark hair, and he thought, not for the first time, that she was the most dangerous person he had ever met—not because she wished him harm, but because she made him want to be worthy of her trust.

“If I give the King the tincture,” he said, “I give him proof that I possess knowledge no man in England can match. That makes me valuable. But it also makes me a prisoner—a resource to be guarded, not a man to be freed.”

Joan’s smile was thin. “You were always going to be a prisoner, Tom. The question is only whether your cell has a window.”

The door opened, and a servant in the royal livery stepped inside, bowing low. “Steward Ashwick. His Grace requests your presence in the solar. He wishes to show you something.”

Tom rose, brushing the charcoal from his hands. He looked at Joan, and she nodded once—a gesture that said go, and also be careful, and also I will be here when you return, if you return.

He followed the servant through corridors hung with tapestries depicting the victories of Crécy and Calais, past guards who did not meet his eyes, up a narrow spiral stair to a chamber that smelled of beeswax and old parchment. Edward III stood at a table covered with maps, his back to the door. Beside him, a clerk was rolling up a scroll, and the King gestured for the man to leave.

The door closed. Tom was alone with the King of England.

Edward turned. His face was weathered from decades of campaigning, his beard streaked with grey, but his eyes were sharp and calculating. He pointed to the map spread before him—a map of France, marked with the positions of armies and the lines of supply.

“The war is ending,” the King said. “Poitiers was a triumph, but triumphs do not feed armies, and armies do not fight forever. I will need to make peace, and peace will require money, and money will require my barons to pay their taxes without rebellion.”

He looked at Tom, and his gaze was like a blade.

“My lord of de Lacy owes me twelve thousand pounds in back taxes. He has been selling grain to the French for two years. You know this. You have proof.”

Tom swallowed. “I do, Your Grace.”

“Then you will give it to me,” the King said. “And in return, I will give you something you want far more than a lordship.”

He paused, letting the silence stretch.

“I will give you the right to go home.”