Chapter 87: The Summons of the Green Blade

The thaw came hard that year, as if the earth itself had been holding its breath and could not bear to hold it longer. The river swelled against its banks, and the roads turned to rivers of their own, and the fields of Wykeham steamed under a pale sun that seemed to have forgotten its strength.

Tom Ashwick stood at the edge of the long furlong and watched the water run in the furrows. The seed had gone in three days past—turnip, rye, and a hard winter wheat he had never expected to plant in English soil. Wat had driven the plough with the steel share Tom had brought from the warehouse, and the blade had cut the clay like a knife through cheese. The villagers had stood in silence, watching the black earth turn, and Tom had heard one of them whisper that it was a wonder the share had not blunted on the stones.

It had not blunted. It would not, for many years yet.

"You are brooding," Joan said.

She came up the furrow toward him, her skirts darkened to the knee with mud, a basket of willow bark under one arm. Her hair had come loose from its braid, and there was a smear of earth across her cheek that she had not noticed. Tom had noticed it. He had noticed everything about her for weeks now, in the way a man notices the shape of a room he has come to know in the dark.

"I am counting," he said.

"Counting what?"

"Days. Bushels. The distance to London." He turned from the field. "The King's summons said the Feast of the Annunciation. That was two weeks past."

Joan set the basket down. "You have been counting wrong, then. The feast was the twenty-fifth of March. It is now the eighth of April. You have been counting the days since you received the letter, not since the feast."

Tom looked at her. "That is the same thing."

"It is not. You received the letter on the road, before the thaw. The feast came and went while you were in the barn with your books, teaching Wat to read the marks on a seed packet." She wiped her hands on her apron. "The King's men will have noted your absence. But they will also have noted the snow."

"Snow does not excuse a summons."

"No," she agreed. "But it explains a delay. You are not the first man to be late to Westminster because the roads were mud. You are merely the first to be late because you were planting turnips."

Tom laughed, though it came out with an edge. "I am a traitor to my own errand."

"You are a steward," she said. "That is what you told the King you would be. And a steward does not leave his fields in the planting season. He sends word ahead, and he follows when the work permits."

He looked at her for a long moment. The wind moved through the bare hedgerows, and somewhere beyond the village a dog barked, and the smell of the turned earth rose up around them like a promise. He thought of the warehouse, hidden behind its false wall, its lights still burning low, its battery fading. He thought of the books on the shelf—the veterinary science, the crop rotation, the diagrams of drainage ditches. He had promised the King a legacy. He had not promised him a miracle.

"You are right," he said. "I will send word ahead. Wat can take the horses and ride to the ford by nightfall."

"And you will follow?"

"And I will follow." He looked at the furrows. "When the seed is in."

Joan picked up her basket. "Then you had best finish your counting, Master Ashwick. The green blade does not wait for kings."

---

The messenger arrived three days later, and he did not come on horseback.

He came on foot, alone, a young man in a patched cloak with a satchel over one shoulder and a limp that favored his left leg. Tom met him at the gate of the manor yard, where the reeve's oak still stood, its branches bare and black against the sky.

"Master Ashwick?" The messenger's voice was hoarse. "I am sent from Westminster. The King's clerk, Master John de Thoresby."

"Thoresby," Tom repeated. He knew the name. The King's clerk had been present at the audience in London, a thin man with ink-stained fingers who had written down every word Tom had said about turnips and drainage and the rotation of crops. "What does he want?"

The messenger looked around the yard—at the village, at the fields, at the smoke rising from the cottages. He looked at Tom with an expression that was not quite fear and not quite wonder.

"He wants to know if you have done it," the messenger said. "The King has heard reports. From the north. From the bishop's men. They say you have raised a crop in the dead of winter. They say you have fed a village that should have starved."

Tom said nothing.

"The King's clerk bids me ask you plainly," the messenger went on. "Is it true? Have you worked a miracle?"

Tom looked past the messenger, at the long furlong where the seed had gone in, where the thaw was running in the furrows, where the first green blades were pushing up through the black earth. He thought of the warehouse, and the seed packets, and the books. He thought of the woman who had died in the bishop's custody, and the man who had bargained with him in London, and the King's cold eyes.

"Tell Master Thoresby," Tom said, "that I have planted a field. Tell him that the field is growing. Tell him that I will come to London when the planting is done, and I will bring the accounts with me."

The messenger frowned. "Accounts?"

"Bushels. Yields. The cost of seed and labor. The King asked for a steward, and a steward keeps records." Tom reached into his belt and drew out a folded paper. "This is a copy of my planting schedule. Give it to Thoresby. Tell him I will bring the rest when I come."

The messenger took the paper, tucked it into his satchel, and looked at Tom with an expression that had shifted into something like respect. "They said you were a warlock," he said. "But you talk like a reeve."

"I have been called worse," Tom said. "Will you eat before you go?"

The messenger hesitated. Then he nodded.

---

That night, Tom sat in the barn with the warehouse behind him, its false wall closed, its lights dim. Joan sat across from him, mending a shirt by the light of a tallow candle. Wat was in the village, spreading word that the King's man had come and gone, and that Master Ashwick was no warlock but a steward, and that the green blade in the field was proof.

"The bishop will hear of this," Joan said, without looking up from her stitching.

"The bishop already knows. His men have been watching the ford for weeks."

"Then he will send more men."

"Let him." Tom leaned back against a sack of turnip seed. "The King has given me a commission. The bishop cannot touch me without touching the King's business. And the King's business is grain."

Joan looked up. "You are learning."

"I had a good teacher."

She smiled, and the candlelight caught the curve of her mouth, and Tom felt the old ache in his chest—the one he had carried from another world, from another life, from a marriage that had failed before he had ever set foot in Plantagenet England.

"Joan," he said.

She set down the shirt. "Yes."

"I have been thinking about the warehouse. About the battery."

"It is dying."

"Yes. And when it dies, the lights go out. The books remain. The seed remains. The tools remain. But the thing that brought me here—the thing that makes me strange—it will be gone."

Joan was silent for a moment. Then she reached across the space between them and took his hand. Her fingers were cold, and calloused from work, and steady.

"Then you will be a man," she said. "Not a warlock. Not a miracle. A man with a field and a plough and a village that trusts him." She squeezed his hand. "That is enough, Tom. That is more than most men are given."

He looked at her. The candle flickered. Somewhere beyond the barn, an owl called, and the wind moved through the bare branches of the reeve's oak.

"There is one more thing," he said. "The King's clerk. Thoresby. He asked for the accounts."

"And you will give them to him."

"I will give him more than accounts." Tom let go of her hand and stood. He walked to the false wall, pressed the hidden latch, and stepped into the warehouse. The lights flickered overhead—pale, steady, impossibly bright. He crossed to the shelf where the books lay, and he pulled down the one he had not yet opened—the one that was not about veterinary science or crop rotation or drainage ditches.

It was a book of maps. Maps of England. Maps of France. Maps of the roads between London and Wykeham, and the rivers, and the fords, and the tollgates.

He carried it back into the barn and set it on the table between them.

"There is a war coming," he said. "The King does not know it yet. But the French will not stay beaten. And when they come, they will come up the rivers, and they will burn the fields, and they will starve the villages." He opened the book. "I have been thinking about the ford. About the road. About the mill."

Joan leaned forward. "What about them?"

"I have been thinking that a steward does not just plant fields. A steward builds walls." He tapped the map. "And I have been thinking that the King's commission is not just about grain. It is about defense."

Joan looked at him for a long moment. The candle guttered. The owl called again.

"Then you had best send word to the King," she said. "Because if you are right, we have less time than we thought."

Tom closed the book. "I will send word in the morning. But first—" He looked at her. "First, I need you to teach me the names of the plants. The ones that grow here. The ones that heal. The ones that kill."

Joan's eyes widened. "Why?"

"Because if the French come up the river," Tom said, "I do not intend to meet them with turnips."

The candle flickered, and the shadows moved across the walls of the barn, and somewhere in the dark the warehouse hummed its dying hum. Tom reached for her hand again, and this time she did not let go.

"Do you remember what the King said?" he asked. "Do not think this makes you safe. It only makes you useful."

"I remember."

"Then we will be useful," Tom said. "And we will be ready."

Outside, the wind turned, and the first green blades of the new crop stirred in the dark, and the river ran on toward London, carrying the thaw and the mud and the first faint promise of spring.