Chapter 91: The Rider in the Livery of Lions

The green shoots stood in their furrows like the first line of a letter written to a king who would never read it.

Tom Ashwick stood at the edge of the field with his hands deep in his coat pockets, watching the wind move across the young turnip leaves. The thaw had done its work. The lime had done its work. Somewhere beneath the soil, roots were thickening in the dark, drawing sweetness from the earth. In a month they would be fit to pull. In two, the village might eat through the spring without burying its children.

He had learned to count in harvests and graves. The arithmetic had become a kind of prayer.

“You are staring at dirt again,” Joan said behind him.

He turned. She came up the furrow with a basket on her hip, the hood of her cloak thrown back, her hair dark with damp. Her cheeks were flushed from the walk. She had been at the stillroom since before dawn, boiling willow bark, grinding dried feverfew, doing the work that had saved thirty lives since the first frost.

“I’m counting,” Tom said.

“Counting what?”

“Leaves. Plants. Days until we can pull.” He looked past her, toward the manor road, where the mud had dried to a pale rind under a sky the color of old pewter. “And riders.”

Joan set the basket down and followed his gaze. She did not ask what he meant. She knew. They had both heard the hoofbeats in the night, though the sound had come from far off, a single horse on the south road, moving fast.

“Baldric sent Wat to the crossroads at first light,” she said. “He has not come back.”

“That was three hours ago.”

“Wat is not a boy who hurries,” Joan said, but her voice had gone thin at the edges.

Tom bent and pinched a turnip leaf between his fingers, crushing it, letting the green scent rise. It smelled of pepper and iron. It smelled like the inside of the warehouse, in the first week, when the shelves had still been full and the lights had still burned steady and he had believed, for a little while, that he might simply wait out the strangeness and go home.

He dropped the crushed leaf. “Come to the barn.”

They walked together, not touching, but close enough that her shoulder brushed his sleeve when the path narrowed. The barn stood where it had always stood, but the great doors were closed now and barred, and the interior was dark. The warehouse was gone. The battery had failed three nights ago, and with it the last soft hum of the fluorescent strips, the last green glow of the exit sign, the last faint whir of the refrigerated units. What remained was what they had carried out: sacks of seed, steel ploughshares, boxes of tinctures, the veterinary books with their laminated covers that the villagers crossed themselves before touching.

Tom had spent the first day of darkness in a kind of grief he had no words for. He had spent the second day making an inventory, because inventory was what he knew. On the third day, he had begun teaching Wat to read the books.

“The kiln is still burning,” Joan said, as they reached the barn door. “Baldric has two men feeding it day and night. If Hugh comes with soldiers, we have lime enough to blind an army.”

“Lime and a prayer,” Tom said.

“And a king’s seal.”

“A seal on a piece of parchment. Hugh has a sword and a dozen men who owe him their bread.”

Joan looked at him steadily. “You have more than that.”

He knew what she meant. He had the village. He had the furrows. He had the woman who had stood beside him at the ford and lied to a bishop’s man with a face like stone. He had a reeve who had survived Crécy and knew, better than any man living, how a small force could break a larger one if it chose its ground and held its nerve.

He had, in other words, exactly what he had never had in his old life: people who trusted him.

The weight of it was heavier than any pallet he had ever moved.

Wat came running up the road at midday, his boots caked to the knee, his face pale under the dirt. He had run the last mile. He bent double at the barn door, gasping, and Baldric appeared from the smithy with a hammer still in his hand.

“Speak,” Baldric said.

“He’s coming,” Wat said. “Sir Hugh. I saw the banner on the ridge—two lions, black and gold. But—” He straightened, still gasping. “There’s another rider. Ahead of him. One man, on a gray horse. He’s coming fast. He’s not de Lacy’s.”

Baldric’s knuckles went white on the hammer haft. “Colors?”

“None I know. Black cloak. Black hood. He rode past the ford like the devil was behind him.”

Tom felt the cold settle in his chest. The man in black robes on the London road. The one who had stopped their barge and demanded their business until Tom had shown the King’s seal. He had not been a bishop’s man. He had not been a king’s man. He had been something else, something Tom had not been able to name.

“Bar the doors,” Tom said. “Not the barn. The village gate. And get everyone inside the palisade.”

“And the fields?” Wat asked. “The shoots?”

“Leave them. They’re not worth a man’s life.” He looked at the green rows stretching toward the horizon, the first promise of a season that might yet feed them all. “Not yet.”

They went to the gate. The village had no wall, only a ditch and a palisade of sharpened stakes that Baldric had raised after the first raid, and the gate was a thing of planks and iron nails, more symbol than defense. But symbols mattered. Tom had learned that in the weeks since the King’s seal had come into his hands. Men fought harder for a line in the dirt than for a kingdom.

The gray horse came over the rise at a gallop, mud flying from its hooves. The rider was hooded, cloaked in black, and he rode with the easy seat of a man who had spent his life in the saddle. He reined in at the gate and sat there, breathing hard, his face hidden.

“I would speak with the steward,” he said. His voice was low, cultured, with an accent Tom could not place—not English, not French, but something between.

“You are speaking with him,” Tom said.

The rider pushed back his hood.

He was young, younger than Tom had expected, with a face that might have been handsome if it had not been so tired. His eyes were gray, and there was a scar across his jaw that had healed badly. He wore no livery, no badge, no sign of allegiance. But his cloak was good wool, and his boots were good leather, and the sword at his hip was not the sword of a common man.

“My name is not important,” he said. “What is important is that Sir Hugh de Lacy will be here by nightfall with twenty men, not twelve. He has been reinforced. He has also been promised the support of the Bishop of Winchester, who has taken an interest in your… methods.”

Tom said nothing.

“I have ridden ahead to warn you,” the young man said. “Not out of friendship. Out of interest. I have heard what you have done here. The turnips. The lime. The tinctures. I have heard that you saved a village from the pestilence when every physician in England was bleeding their patients to death.” He paused. “I have also heard that you carry books. Books that no man has seen before.”

The wind moved across the fields, stirring the green shoots. Somewhere behind Tom, Joan had come to the gate, and he could feel her presence at his shoulder, steady as a hand on his back.

“What do you want?” Tom asked.

The rider smiled. It was not a warm smile. “I want to see the books,” he said. “And then I want to make you an offer. Because Sir Hugh is not the only man in England who knows the value of what you carry. And the King’s seal will not protect you from what is coming.”

He looked past Tom, toward the barn, toward the dark interior where the last of the warehouse’s gifts lay stacked in crates and boxes.

“The plague is coming back,” he said. “This summer. Worse than before. And when it does, every lord in England will want what you have. The question is not whether you will share it. The question is who you will choose.”

He gathered his reins.

“I will return at dusk,” he said. “With Sir Hugh. You would do well to decide before then.”

He turned the gray horse and rode back down the road, toward the south, toward the banner of the two lions that was already visible on the ridge, black and gold against the gray sky.

Tom watched him go. The green shoots trembled in the wind. Behind him, Joan’s hand found his, and her fingers were cold.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “But he knew about the books. He knew about the plague. And he knew about Hugh.”

He turned to Baldric, who stood with the hammer still in his hand, his scarred face unreadable.

“Get the lime,” Tom said. “Get the torches. And get everyone who can hold a stake to the gate.”

“And the books?” Baldric asked.

Tom looked at the barn, at the dark doorway where the last light of the warehouse had died.

“The books stay where they are,” he said. “For now.”

But even as he said it, he knew the choice was already made. The rider had not come to warn them. He had come to measure them. And at dusk, when the lions came over the ridge and the man in black returned with his offer, Tom would have to decide not just what to save, but who to become.

The green blade stood in the furrow. The thaw had broken. And the reckoning was riding toward them at a gallop.