Chapter 29 #3
The household stood as one around him. Not speaking.
Not moving. Walter with his roll crushed in one hand.
Edith with both hands fisted in her apron.
Huck murmuring something that didn’t sound like prayer.
Wat held Alyson against his side, the little girl’s face buried in his tunic as she sobbed.
Hob stood near Thomas with one hand on his axe and murder in every line of him.
At the gate, Amelia looked back. Only once.
Thomas felt that look strike and lodge.
Then Belmaine’s men closed around her, murrey and gold swallowing brown wool and red hair and every foolish, bright thing Ashcombe had dared to love.
The gatehouse shadow took her. Hooves struck the road beyond and Amelia was gone.
Thomas stared at the empty gate. The law had taken her because Belmaine had made a stage of it, and Thomas, God rot him, had stood upon that stage and played the only part that wouldn’t doom Ashcombe with her. His sword had been in his hand.
That was the worst of it. He had always believed, in the secret brutal chamber of himself, that if all else failed he could become what he’d been made to be. A blade. A shield. A man standing between harm and those under his protection.
But Belmaine hadn’t attacked with steel, he’d attacked with parchment.
Thomas slid his sword back into the scabbard.
Walter came forward. “My lord, we must act with care.”
Thomas turned as the old steward stopped. Whatever he saw in Thomas’s face made the man’s mouth close with a click.
“Care,” Thomas said, and the word tasted of ash. “Aye. We’ve been careful.”
Hob’s jaw worked. “Say the word.”
“No.”
“My lord.”
“No,” Thomas said again, louder. “We don’t ride after them like brigands. We don’t give Belmaine what he wants.”
“What he wants,” Hob said, “is her.”
Thomas looked toward the gate. “No. He wants me to break the law in front of a royal clerk and prove Ashcombe should be taken apart stone by stone.”
Hob spat into the mud. “Then we use the law to break him.”
Friar Huck’s round face lifted. For the first time since Belmaine had arrived, something like grim approval lit his eyes.
Walter drew himself straighter, the roll still crushed in his fist.
“The attestation must be tested. Seals can be forged. Priests can lie. Witnesses can be bought. And Saint Alphege’s near Alcester…” He frowned. “I know the name, but not the priest.”
“You’ll know him by dusk,” Thomas said.
Walter nodded once. “Aye.”
Huck tucked the honey pot beneath one arm as if it were a weapon. “Churchmen talk to churchmen. Especially when honey is involved.”
“Hob,” Thomas said.
“Aye, my lord.”
“Find out who Crale is. Where he slept last night. Who fed him. Who paid for his horse. Whether that bruise came from a fist or a gaoler’s hand.”
Hob’s grin held no humor. “With pleasure.”
Thomas looked at Walter. “The seal, the parish, the words. Tear them apart.”
Walter’s eyes gleamed with the terrible joy of a man given permission to murder a document. “Aye, my lord.”
Edith came down the last step. “You’ll bring her back.”
It wasn’t a question.
Thomas met her eyes. Edith had seen him as a boy with scraped knees, a youth too full of temper, a soldier riding away beneath banners, a man returning with dead boys in his memory and two orphans wrapped in his cloak. She had never softened the truth for him, didn’t soften it now.
“You let her go,” Edith said.
The words hit harder than any fist ever had. Thomas didn’t defend himself. There was no defense worth speaking.
“Aye.”
“She was looking for you to stop it.”
“I know.”
“And you didn’t.”
“I know.”
Edith stepped closer until she had to tip her head back to glare at him properly.
“Then you’d best be the man she believed you were before this day, because if Belmaine harms that girl, I’ll carve your heart out with my best kitchen knife and use it to bait rat traps.”
Hob nodded thoughtfully. “It would work.”
Wat looked up. “Could I help?”
“No,” Thomas and Edith said at once.
Alyson sniffed. “I’d help.”
“Saints defend me from bloodthirsty children,” Huck murmured.
Thomas should have laughed. Amelia would have laughed, even through her tears. She would have said something about customer service, or spreadsheets, or the legal liability of children with knives, and half the yard would have understood not a word and loved her for it anyway.
But she wasn’t there, because that bloody bastard Belmaine had her.
Thomas turned toward the gate, every part of him narrowing to a point.
At Evesham, he had learned the day was lost when the sky turned red.
He had learned courage did not stop a mounted charge, and loyalty did not keep boys from dying in the mud.
He had learned that a man could hold a sword and still fail everyone who had trusted him. Today had taught him something worse.
A man could love a woman, know her to be innocent, and still watch her ride away because ink and wax stood between them.
He could not ride after Amelia, not yet, but he could tear the earth open beneath the men who had taken her.
His hand closed around the hilt of his sword, not drawing it this time. Holding. Remembering. Promising.
“I’ll bring her home,” he said.
No one answered. They were wise enough, or kind enough, not to tell him that home was the thing he had just let leave.
Above Ashcombe, the autumn sky lowered, thick with cloud, and the wind moved over the bailey with the smell of storms on the air.