Chapter 92: The Lions at the Gate

The rider came at dusk, as Tom knew he would.

He watched from the reeve’s oak at the edge of the manor road, where the thaw had turned the ruts to brown soup and the last light bled gold across the western field. The man rode a grey palfrey, mud-flecked to the barrel, and he carried no sword that Tom could see. That alone told him something. Sir Hugh de Lacy did not send unarmed men to parley unless he meant the parley to be remembered.

Behind the rider, strung out along the ridge like beads on a wet cord, came the lions. Two banners, black field and gold, snapping in the raw March wind. A dozen mounted men, then a score more on foot, spears shouldered, moving with the unhurried tread of men who had done this before. They had done it at Crécy, some of them. They had done it in the villages of Normandy. Now they came to Wykeham.

“He brings more than a dozen this time,” Baldric said, low. The reeve had climbed the oak beside Tom, his scarred face grey in the dying light. “I count five-and-thirty, maybe more in the trees.”

“He’s not here to arrest me,” Tom said. “He’s here to be seen arresting me.”

“Or to burn the barn and call it justice.”

Tom said nothing. Below them, in the village, the lanterns were lit. Joan had seen to that. She had walked from door to door with the last of the lamp oil, telling every household to light a flame and set it in the window. “Let them see we are not afraid,” she had said. “Even if we are.” Wat had wanted to meet the riders at the ford with pitchforks. Baldric had talked him down. Now the village waited, and the small yellow eyes of its windows stared out across the mud like the eyes of a thing that had decided not to run.

Tom climbed down from the oak. His knees ached from the cold, and his hands, which had once moved pallets and inventory sheets, were cracked and raw from the furrows. He walked back along the road to the barn, where the last of the warehouse’s light had died two days past. The steel ploughshares were there, stacked against the wall. The turnip seed was in the ground. The books—the veterinary books, the King’s commission, the ledger of Hugh’s treason—were in the iron-bound chest beneath the floorboards, where Joan had insisted they go.

He had not wanted to hide them. He had wanted to carry them to the gate and lay them at Hugh’s feet like a challenge. But Joan had been right. A man who shows his hand before the cards are dealt is a man who loses.

The rider reached the gate as the first star showed. He did not dismount. He sat his horse and looked down at Tom and Baldric and the villagers gathered behind them, and he smiled with the easy courtesy of a man who had never in his life been refused anything he truly wanted.

“Master Ashwick,” he said. His voice was smooth, courtly, the voice of a man who had learned to speak in the antechambers of great lords. “I am sent by Sir Hugh de Lacy, lord of this manor, to bid you welcome home.”

“I’ve been home a fortnight,” Tom said. “Your master is late.”

The smile did not waver. “My master has been in France, attending to the King’s business. He returns now with the King’s peace in his hand.” He drew a folded parchment from his glove and held it up. “He has been granted a hearing at the Tower. He wishes no quarrel with you, Master Ashwick. He wishes only to speak. He will come at nightfall tomorrow, with his household, and he asks that you receive him as a guest.”

“A guest,” Baldric said. “With five-and-thirty spears at his back.”

“A lord does not travel alone in these times,” the rider said. “The roads are full of masterless men. Surely a soldier of Crécy knows that.”

Baldric’s hand went to the hilt of his knife. Tom put a hand on his arm.

“Tell your master I will receive him,” Tom said. “At the gate. At dusk. He may bring his household. But the men with spears stay on the ridge.”

The rider’s eyes flicked to the barn, to the dark doorway, to the windows of the village where the lanterns burned. “My master will not be pleased to be kept at a distance on his own land.”

“Then he can turn around and ride back to France,” Tom said.

For a moment, the courtesy slipped. Something cold and appraising looked out of the rider’s face, the way a man looks at a horse he is thinking of buying. Then the smile returned, and the rider bowed from the saddle.

“At dusk, then,” he said. He wheeled his palfrey and rode back up the road, and the lions on the ridge began to move, turning away, vanishing one by one into the dark of the wood.

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Joan was waiting in the barn when Tom came in. She had lit a single candle and set it on the chest, and she was grinding something in a mortar—willow bark, by the smell, bitter and sharp. She did not look up when he entered.

“He’ll come with more than spears,” she said. “He’ll come with a priest.”

“I know.”

“And the priest will ask you questions. Where you come from. What you believe. Whether you are a man or a devil.” She poured the powder into a small clay pot and sealed it with wax. “Hugh will not arrest you himself. He will let the Church do it. Then he will take your barn and your seed and your books, and he will call it piety.”

Tom sat down on the chest. The candle flame bent in the draft from the door. “What would you have me do?”

She looked at him then, and her face in the candlelight was tired and fierce and very young. “I would have you stop pretending you can save everyone,” she said. “You saved the village from the pestilence. You saved the crop. You bargained with the King himself. But you cannot save us from Hugh by being clever. He is not clever. He is cruel. Cruel men do not care about cleverness.”

“Then what do they care about?”

“Power,” she said. “And fear.” She set the pot down and came to him, and her hand found his in the dark, as it had found his before. “You have the King’s seal. You have the proof of his treason. Tomorrow, when he comes, you must show him both. Not at the gate. Not in the barn. In front of his own men. Let them see that their lord is a traitor and a debtor, and that the King’s shadow falls on this manor now. Let them decide whether to follow a doomed man.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then we fight,” she said simply. “But we fight with our eyes open.”

Outside, the wind had turned. It carried the smell of rain and thaw and the first green things pushing up through the mud. Somewhere in the village, a dog barked, and another answered. The lanterns burned in every window, small and stubborn and bright.

Tom thought of the warehouse, dark and dead in the barn. He thought of the books beneath the floorboards, the King’s commission, the ledger that could hang a lord. He thought of the green blade in the furrow, the frost breaking, the reckoning riding toward them at a gallop.

“Tomorrow at dusk,” he said. “We’ll be ready.”

But he did not know, as he said it, that the man in black robes had already crossed the ford two hours past, and was even now kneeling in the chapel at the edge of the wood, praying for the soul of a warlock, and waiting for the dawn.