The Steward's Discovery at Blackthorn

• Chapter 1 The Dying Hearth of Blackthorn
• Chapter 2 Shadows in the Ledger
• Chapter 3 The Lady’s Burden
• Chapter 4 Whispers in the Great Hall
• Chapter 5 A Vigil on Candlemas Eve
• Chapter 6 The Hidden Parchment
• Chapter 7 A Dangerous Inheritance
• Chapter 8 Between Duty and Desire
• Chapter 9 Wolves at the Gate
• Chapter 10 The Kinship of Secrets
• Chapter 11 Footsteps in the Cloister
• Chapter 12 A Gilded Accusation
• Chapter 13 The Midnight Stables
• Chapter 14 The Broken Seal
• Chapter 15 Cold Ashes, Warm Hands
• Chapter 16 The Bailiff’s Shadow
• Chapter 17 A Treacherous Summons
• Chapter 18 Poisoned Fealty
• Chapter 19 Flight Through the Briars
• Chapter 20 Sanctuary in the Ruin
• Chapter 21 Confessions by Firelight
• Chapter 22 The High Sheriff’s Arrival
• Chapter 23 The Trial at the Dais
• Chapter 24 Truth in the Embers
• Chapter 25 The Reclaiming of Blackthorn
• Chapter 26 A Promise Beyond the Vows

The mortar between the stones of the great hearth had begun to turn to white dust three winters ago, and no one had found the coin to hire a mason since. A sullen drizzle blew down the throat of the chimney, hissing as it met the meager stack of damp birch logs. It did not create flame so much as a stubborn, resentful smudge that crawled along the ceiling beams and stung the eyes of the four hounds curled on the rushes below.

Thomas Finch blew on his fingertips, tucked his quill behind his ear, and watched his breath condense into a pale plume against the damp air of the hall. The chill of Blackthorn Manor was a patient beast. It seeped through wool, through boiled leather, and lodged itself directly into the bone marrow, making a mockery of whatever dignity a man might try to preserve while tallying oats.

Across the high table, seated upon an oak chair whose armrests had been worn smooth by four generations of d’Arcy lords, Lady Genevieve d’Arcy pulled her fox-lined mantle tighter about her shoulders. The fur was worn bare in patches along the hem, revealing the gray, greasy underside of the pelt, but she wore it as if it were miniver freshly bestowed by the King at Westminster. Her spine was straight—too straight, Thomas thought, noting the pale strain around her jawline.

"The carter took three bushels of rye as toll," Thomas said, his voice flat, stripped of the pity he knew she despised. "He claimed the lower bridge was flooded again. It took two teams to haul the cart out of the mire at the ford. He wants half a mark for his trouble, my lady."

"The carter is a thief," Genevieve said. She did not raise her eyes from the iron platter where she was methodically slicing a withered turnip. "The ford has not taken two teams since my grandfather drained the west meadow. Tell him he may have half the rye back if he brings stone to mend the bridge abutment himself. Otherwise, he may whistle for his mark."

"He will not bring stone," Thomas said mildly. "He will simply go to Sir Guy’s mill next Martinmas and leave our grain to rot in the sacks."

Genevieve paused, the small paring knife poised over the turnip. For a brief second, the mask of feudal pride slipped, and Thomas caught the sharp, terrifying vulnerability beneath it. Sir Guy of Morston had three mills, four hundred sheep, and an appetite for his neighbors’ land that seemed to grow keener with every frost.

"Let him try," she said softly, though the edge had bled from her voice. "We have held this ground since the Conqueror’s nephew drew breath. A miller and a sour carter will not undo us."

"The Conqueror’s nephew did not have to pay three shillings in tallow debt to the abbey," Thomas murmured, tapping the dry nib of his pen against his ink-horn. "Nor did he have six tenant cottages standing empty because the roof-poles collapsed under the Christmas snow."

"You are uncommonly cheerful today, Master Finch." Genevieve set the knife down with a soft click. "Has the frost gotten into your ink, or is it merely that the ledger makes you sour?"

"The ink is frozen twice over, my lady, which spares me the trouble of writing the full extent of what we owe to the smith." Thomas rose from his stool, his joints cracking like dry twigs. He was twenty-and-eight, though the damp of the northern fells made him feel fifty when the wind turned easterly. He was tall, lean-faced, with eyes the color of winter river-water and dark hair clipped shorter than fashion dictated. It was the haircut of a clerk, of a man who spent his life bending over vellum rather than tilting at rings, though the broadness of his shoulders hinted at the years he had spent hauling his father’s sheep down from the crags before he ever took the bailiff’s quill.

He stepped toward the hearth, took the iron poker, and jabbed viciously at the birch logs. A cloud of gray smoke belched into the hall, causing one of the deerhounds to thump its tail once and tuck its nose deeper beneath its paws.

"Leave it," Genevieve commanded gently. "Old Barnaby says the wind will veer south by sundown. If it does, the flue will draw again."

"Old Barnaby also said we would have three weeks of mild sun before Michaelmas, and instead we buried two calves in the mud," Thomas countered, leaning the poker against the stones. He turned to face her, resting his hands behind his back. "The roof of the north tower is weeping into the lumber-room again. I put two buckets under the beam, but the oak is softening. If we do not strip the lead and patch the timber before the spring rains, the whole floor will come down into the still-room."

"And what shall we pay the lead-beater with, Thomas? Hopes? Or perhaps the Latin verses you write in the margins of the court rolls?"

A faint flush rose on Thomas's neck. He had thought he had kept those scribbled lines of Ovid well hidden behind the tallies of barley and bean yields. It was unsettling how much she saw from that high chair, wrapped in her threadbare furs, pretending the world was not crumbling about their ears.

"Lead can be salvaged from the old chapel roof," he said, holding her gaze. "The priory down the dale was dissolved by the bishop’s decree twenty years ago. The stone is consecrated, but the lead on the chantry roof serves only the ravens."

"I will not plunder a consecrated roof," she said, her voice dropping into that quiet, stubborn register that made even the manor’s obstinate bailiffs quail. "We are low enough, Finch. We will not become thieves of the dead."

"The dead do not catch the quinsy from drafty floors, my lady."

"No," she said, leaning back and looking past him, through the tall, unglazed lancet window where horn panes had replaced the colored glass sold off during her late father’s illness. "They merely lie quietly and escape the complaints of their stewards."

Thomas felt the familiar, sharp pull behind his ribs. It was an ache compounded of anger, admiration, and something far more dangerous that he kept buried deeper than the chapel lead. Lady Genevieve had buried her mother when she was but twelve, and her father, Lord Ranulf, three years ago. The old man had died in the great four-poster bed upstairs, coughing blood and leaving a tangled nest of debts, half-cleared mortgages, and disputes with the Morston estate that stretched back to the second King Henry. A lesser woman would have taken the veil or accepted the greasy, patronizing suit of Sir Guy, who made no secret of his desire to unite the two manors under his own heavy hand.

Instead, Genevieve had stayed. She had dismissed the falconers, reduced the hall men to two decrepit retainers, sold her silver girdle and the gold chain that had belonged to her grandmother, and learned to eat cabbage broth with the same cool composure she had once displayed at the Bishop of Durham's feast.

"The mutton is salted," Thomas said, retreating to safe ground. "We have enough to carry the hall through until Easter if we are careful with the broth. But the sheep on the high moor are scabbed. We need tar, and the merchant from Newcastle will not give it on credit. Not after what happened at the lambing last year."

"The tar will be bought," Genevieve said. "I have two silver spoons remaining. They are stamped with the three crosses of the d’Arcy crest, but they are heavy enough."

"Not the spoons," Thomas said, his voice tightening. "Your father gave them to you on your sixteenth name-day."

"My father is dead, Thomas, and the sheep are alive. Spoons cannot lamb, nor can they be spun into wool for the London drapers." She stood, and the movement was as graceful as ever, though the draft caught the skirts of her green kirtle, making her sway slightly. She was slight of build, her dark hair woven into two thick braids pinned tightly over her ears, leaving the long, pale line of her throat exposed to the freezing air. "Have Barnaby take the chestnut mare to the smith. If the shoes are loose, he must replace them, not merely wedge them with old nails. I will not have her go lame. Sir Guy comes on Wednesday."

The air in the room suddenly grew colder than the birch smoke.

Thomas straightened. "Sir Guy? He was here a fortnight ago. He inspected the mill leat without your leave."

"I am aware," she said coldly. "And he comes again on Wednesday because he claims to have received a writ from the assize at York concerning our boundary stone at the High Crag. He says my father gave his uncle a deed of release for the upper pasturage thirty years ago, and that we have been trespassing on Morston land since the harvest of forty-two."

"That is impossible," Thomas snapped, his clerkly calm evaporating. "The High Crag has belonged to Blackthorn since the Great Survey. The sheep have run there since the sheep were first driven into this valley. Lord Ranulf would never have given a deed for the pasturage. It is the only high ground we have that stays dry when the lower valley floods."

"He says the deed exists," Genevieve said, looking directly at him. "He claims he has found it among his late uncle’s muniments. He will present it to the under-sheriff if I do not... come to an accommodation."

"What accommodation?" Thomas’s hands clenched into fists at his sides.

Genevieve did not answer immediately. She walked to the small table beneath the window where a single brass candlestick stood, its tallow guttered into hard, yellowish grease. She touched the wick with the tip of her pale finger.

"He believes," she said carefully, "that a marriage between our houses would resolve all questions of boundaries. It would render the search for the original charters unnecessary. He was kind enough to suggest that I might keep my seat in this hall, while he takes the burden of the management from my weak, womanly shoulders."

The silence that followed was broken only by the steady, dreary patter of rain against the horn window.

"He is an illiterate brute," Thomas said between his teeth. "He cannot write his own name. He signs his court rolls with a cross that looks like an overturned harrow."

"Illiterate or not, he has forty men-at-arms in his pay, Finch. He has three stone barns filled with corn, and his brother is a canon at Ripon. And he has a deed. Or says he has one."

"If he had the deed, he would have brought the bailiff and the high sheriff’s men already," Thomas said, taking two strides toward her. The hounds raised their heads at his sudden movement, their yellow eyes tracking him. "Sir Guy bluffs. He has always bluffed. He knows our coffers are empty. He knows we have no lawyer in York to argue our cause before the justices. He intends to starve you into submission, my lady, before you can find the documents to prove him a liar."

Genevieve turned to look at him, her gray eyes dark with a sudden, fierce intensity that made Thomas catch his breath.

"And where are our documents, Thomas?" she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper that cut through the drafty hall. "Where is our deed of enfeoffment? Where is the charter granted by King Edward? My father’s chests in the lower vault are filled with empty skins, old tallies from the wool-staple, and letters from cousins who wanted loans twenty years ago. The great deed—the one that sets the bounds from the Black Tarn to the White Thorn—is gone. It was not in the muniment chest when he died. You know that as well as I."

Thomas looked down. He did know. He had spent three months after Lord Ranulf’s death turning out the moldering, mouse-chewed parchment rolls in the damp stone room behind the kitchen. He had found receipts for salt herring, rolls of manorial courts dating back to the Great Plague, and a half-eaten copy of the Romance of the Rose, but the foundation deed—the legal heart of the manor—had vanished. Without it, Blackthorn was defenseless against any man who could produce an ancient parchment with a cracked wax seal and bribe three jurymen at the county assize.

"It is here," Thomas said stubbornly, looking back up. "Lord Ranulf was many things, my lady—he was reckless with his money, and he loved French wine more than was good for his liver—but he was not a fool with his land. He would not have sold it, and he would not have thrown it away. It is hidden. Or it was mislaid when he was taken with the palsy."

"Then find it," she said. It was not a command given with anger; it was an appeal, soft and heavy with desperation. "Candlemas is a week away, Thomas. Sir Guy brings the under-sheriff on the feast day itself to witness the boundary stone being moved, unless I give him my hand. If that stone is moved, the manor loses three-quarters of its grazing. We will not survive another winter. We will be paupers in our own hall."

"I will search the solar again," Thomas said. "Every coffer. Every floorboard. If it is between these walls, I will find it."

"And if it is not?"

"It has to be," he replied simply.

Genevieve took a step toward him. For a moment, the vast, cold gulf of estate and bloodline seemed to narrow to nothing. She was so close he could smell the faint scent of dried lavender that clung to her woolen sleeves, and the bitter herb-water she used to wash her skin. Her face was pale, shadowed with fatigue, but her eyes held a steady fire that made his pulse hammer against his ribs like a trapped bird.

"You have been very faithful to this house, Thomas," she said softly. "More faithful than many who shared my father's blood."

"I owe my bread to your father," Thomas said, though the words felt thick and clumsy in his mouth. "He took me from the sheepfold and put a pen in my hand. He gave me a roof."

"Bread can be found anywhere," she said, her voice scarcely louder than the wind in the chimney. "Faithfulness is not so easily bought. If Sir Guy takes this hall, there will be no place for a steward who can read Latin. He has no use for men who question his numbers."

"He will not take this hall," Thomas said, and the certainty in his voice surprised even himself.

A gust of wind, stronger than the last, struck the high gable outside. The horn pane in the lancet rattled violently in its lead frame, and a spatter of rain fell through the chimney onto the smoldering logs, kicking up a sudden puff of white ash that drifted across the table, settling upon the open ledger, gray upon white.

Genevieve looked at the ash, then turned away, pulling the ragged fox fur back across her throat as the barrier between lady and servant snapped firmly back into place.

"Tell the cook we will have the salted herrings tonight," she said, her tone brisk once more, though her hand trembled slightly as she took up her paring knife again. "And see to the mare. If the weather breaks, I will ride to the mill myself tomorrow. Sir Guy will find me here, Thomas, and he will find me standing."

"As you command, my lady," Thomas said. He bowed—a low, stiff bow that masked the turmoil in his chest—picked up his ink-horn and quill, and walked toward the archway that led to the cold stone corridor beyond.

Behind him, the great hearth sputtered, hissed, and died down to a circle of sullen, smoking gray, leaving the great hall of Blackthorn to the gathering dusk and the cold that never truly left.

The steward’s room sat beneath the eastern stair, a damp stone cell carved directly into the bedrock of Blackthorn Manor. It was a space that never knew the sun, existing in a perpetual twilight lit only by the grey slit of an arrow-slit window and whatever tallow candles Thomas could justify burning.

Thomas Finch sat at his narrow pine trestle, wrapped in an old woolen cloak that smelled faintly of peat smoke and sheep dip. Before him lay three decades of the manor’s existence, bound in leather and pigskin or stitched together in long, parchment rolls that unrolled with the crackle of dry skin.

While the rest of the manor slept—or lay awake listening to the draft rattle the oak shutters—Thomas worked. The smell of iron-gall ink mixed with the damp reek of moldering hide. He held a small horn lamp close to a long compotus roll from the reign of the previous King, his thumb tracing the faded brown script of his predecessor, Master Stephen, who had died of the sweating sickness when Thomas was still a lad hauling water for the malt-ster.

"Grain, tallow, timber, wool," Thomas muttered to himself, his voice sounding hollow against the curved stone vault of the ceiling. "Every fleece accounted for. Every bushel of oats logged to the half-peck."

He turned the scroll, his fingers catching on a stiff patch where water had dripped from the ceiling years ago, smudging the ink into cloudy stains. He was not looking for the missing deed here—he knew the great charter would never have been stitched into the routine yearly accounts of grain and poultry. He was looking for its footprint. A document as significant as the royal grant of free warren and pasturage at High Crag left shadows across every other record in the estate. It dictated where the bailiff drove the cattle in May, which tenants paid tithes on silver-fir timber, and how much pannage was collected for swine in the oak woods.

Yet, as he worked backward from the present year toward the time of Lord Ranulf’s sudden decline, the shadows began to warp.

Thomas pulled a heavier volume toward him: the ledger of the Manorial Court for the year of the Great Frost, six years back. It was bound in rough calfskin that had been bitten by beetles along the spine. He flipped through the membrane pages, the Latin text flowing in Master Stephen’s neat, clipped legal hand.

Here was the entry for the Michaelmas court: three tenants fined for unchoked chimneys; the smith cited for selling bad iron; a boundary dispute between two cottars settled by the sworn testimony of twelve neighbors.

Then came the entry for Martinmas.

Thomas lowered the horn lamp until the flame danced a mere inch above the parchment. He squinted.

The handwriting on the page had changed. Master Stephen’s crisp, upright letters had been replaced by a sprawling, heavy-handed script that slanted aggressively to the left. The ink was darker, too—less copperas, more soot—and in three distinct places along the margin, the surface of the parchment had been scraped thin with a crescent knife.

He touched the hide with the tip of his finger. The parchment felt rough, fuzzy beneath his touch, stripped of its smooth parchment glaze. Someone had erased something. And where the words had been scraped away, the new, slanting hand had written in a brief, vague entry regarding the grazing rights on the upper moor.

“Item: Concerning the pasture at High Crag, held at the lord’s pleasure by the men of Morston, pending the viewing of the ancient marks...”

Thomas sat back, his chair creaking sharply in the quiet room. "Held at the lord's pleasure?" he whispered.

High Crag had never been held at the lord’s pleasure by Morston. It was demesne land, held directly from the Crown by the d’Arcys since the days of the first King Edward. To write that it was held "at pleasure" by Sir Guy’s family was to turn a ancient right into a temporary lease—a lease that Morston could now claim had expired or been converted into a permanent grant.

He turned the page, his pulse quickening. The following three pages had been neatly cut from the binding with a sharp blade. Only the stub of the parchment remained, tucked into the leather spine like a severed tongue.

"Who let a Morston clerk into this room?" Thomas said aloud, his voice dark with growing fury.

A soft rustle at the doorway made him turn sharply, his hand instantly going to the small iron-handled knife he used for mending pens.

Lady Genevieve stood in the narrow doorway, holding a brass saucer with a short, guttering tallow stub. She had stripped off her fox-lined cloak, wearing only a plain dark wool gown over her linen smock. Without the furs, she looked smaller, almost fragile against the heavy stone arch, but her eyes were alert and dark in the candlelight.

"You speak to the walls, Master Finch," she said quietly, stepping into the scriptorium. The smell of cold air and lavender came with her. "Or do the dead lords of Blackthorn answer you from the hide?"

Thomas immediately stood, pulling his cloak straight and setting his knife down on the desk. "My lady. You should be in your bed. The solar is cold, but this vault is a cellar."

"I could not sleep," she said, setting her brass saucer beside his horn lamp. The double light cast long, dancing shadows across the low ceiling, twisting their silhouettes together against the stone. "The wind is turning south, just as Barnaby promised. It brings the thaw. And with the thaw comes the mud, and with the mud comes Sir Guy."

She looked down at the open ledger resting on the desk. "What have you found? You look as though you have seen a ghost."

"Worse, my lady," Thomas said, pointing with the blunt end of his quill to the scraped hide and the clipped stubs at the book's spine. "I have found a thief within our own walls."

Genevieve leaned over the table, her shoulder brushing against Thomas’s sleeve. He caught his breath, stepping back half a pace out of long-ingrained habit, but she did not seem to notice. Her eyes were fixed on the rough, scraped parchment.

"Master Stephen wrote the court rolls," she said, her voice tight. "He served my father for forty years. He died in the great hall with his beads in his hand."

"Master Stephen wrote the first half of this book," Thomas corrected gently, leaning in to point at the slanting script. "Look at the tail of the g and the loop of the d. This is not Stephen's hand. Nor is it the hand of any clerk trained in this valley. This is a charter-hand from the south—the sort of script they teach in the chancery at Durham or York."

Genevieve reached out, her long, slender fingers hovering over the stub of the cut pages. "When was this done?"

"Six years ago. During the winter your father took to his bed after the fall from his hunter. Master Stephen was old and half-blind by then. A itinerant clerk was brought in to assist him with the winter accounts—do you remember him?"

Genevieve’s brow furrowed in thought. Her lips pressed together into a thin, pale line as she reached back into her memory. "There was a man," she said slowly. "A sour-faced fellow with a red cloak and a squint. He called himself Brother Francis, though he wore secular clothes. My father paid him two shillings and a coat of grey cloth to audit the bailiff's tallies before the King's tax-gatherers arrived."

"And who recommended Brother Francis to Lord Ranulf?" Thomas asked, though he already knew the answer.

Genevieve looked up from the ledger, her gray eyes meeting his in the dim light. "Sir Guy," she breathed. "He sent him from Morston. He told my father the man was a displaced monk from the border country who needed work."

"He was no monk," Thomas said grimly. "He was a fox in the hen-roost. He sat in this very chair, my lady. While your father lay sick upstairs and Master Stephen slept by the hearth, this 'Brother Francis' went through the muniment chests. He scraped out the entries that proved Blackthorn's sole right to High Crag, wrote in his own ambiguous lies, and when he found a page he couldn't alter without ruin, he cut it out entirely."

Genevieve’s hand clenched into a tight fist against the oak table, her knuckles turning stark white. "And the great charter? The royal deed?"

"He took it," Thomas said softly. "Or he hid it where no one would ever look. If Sir Guy claims he has a deed of release signed by your father, it is either a forgery written by this same clerk, or he stole the original and altered the boundaries to suit his own ends."

A heavy silence fell over the scriptorium, broken only by the steady drip-drip-drip of water leaking from the upper floor into the corner barrel. The revelation hung between them like a drawn blade. It was one thing to suffer under the slow ruin of poverty and bad weather; it was another to realize that the ruin had been manufactured by a neighbor’s cold, calculated treachery.

"If I go to the High Sheriff with this," Genevieve said, her voice trembling with a mixture of rage and desperation, "if I show him these scraped pages and cut spines..."

"The High Sheriff is Sir Guy’s second cousin by his mother’s side," Thomas reminded her gently. "And the justices of the peace do not care about scraped parchment unless you have the original charter to prove what was written there before the blade touched the hide. To them, an altered ledger is merely the sign of a careless steward. Without the original deed bearing the royal seal, Sir Guy's parchment—forged or stolen—will stand as the only legal proof before the court."

Genevieve turned away from the desk, walking to the narrow arrow-slit window. She pressed her forehead against the cold stone frame, looking out into the pitch-black night where the warm south wind was beginning to howl through the upper battlements.

"He has planned this for six years," she murmured. "While my father grew weak, while our sheep died, while I sold my mother's silver... he was waiting for this exact moment. He knew we would have no money for lawyers. He knew I would be alone."

Thomas looked at her back—at the straight, slender posture that refused to bend even when her world was being stripped away piece by piece. A fierce, dark heat rose in his chest, burning away the professional distance he had maintained for three long years. He stepped around the desk until he was standing a pace behind her, close enough to hear the soft, ragged sound of her breathing.

"You are not alone, my lady," he said, his voice lower than he intended, thick with a feeling he had no right to express.

Genevieve turned her head slightly, looking at him over her shoulder. "I am a land-poor woman with two old servants and a decaying roof, Thomas. Sir Guy has forty men in mail and the ear of the bishop. What do we have?"

"We have the truth," Thomas said. "And we have six days before Candlemas."

"Truth is a poor shield against forty spears."

"Truth, my lady, is written in ink, and ink leaves traces," Thomas insisted, his eyes dark with determination. "Brother Francis was thorough, but no clerk is perfect. If he took the royal deed, he did so because he could not alter the royal seal without breaking the wax. A broken seal is obvious even to a blind sheriff. Therefore, if the deed exists in Sir Guy's hands, it is either intact and hidden—or it was never removed from this manor at all."

Genevieve turned fully to face him, her grey eyes searching his face in the flickering light. "Why do you say that?"

"Because if Sir Guy had the real deed in his possession six years ago, he would have moved the boundary stone then, while your father was dying and Blackthorn was in chaos," Thomas explained, his mind racing through the logic of court rolls and estate law. "Why wait six years? Why wait until the manor is impoverished and you are defenseless? He waited because he could not find it either. He had his clerk scrape these ledgers to weaken our title, but he never found the royal charter itself. He is bluffing with a forged release, hoping to force you into marriage before you discover where your father truly hid the king's seal."

A small, breathless spark of hope lit in Genevieve’s eyes, softening the sharp despair that had gripped her face. "You think my father hid it?"

"Lord Ranulf was sick, my lady, but he was no fool," Thomas said firmly. "He knew Sir Guy. He knew his neighbor was a wolf. When he realized his own mind and body were failing, he would not have left the most valuable skin of parchment in the manor sitting in an open chest in the lower vault for any itinerant clerk to steal."

Genevieve took a long, slow breath, her chest rising against the dark wool of her gown. "Where would he put it?"

"That," Thomas said, looking around the cold stone room, "is what we must find out before the sun rises on Candlemas."

She looked at him for a long moment, the quiet space between them charged with an intensity that had nothing to do with land or ledgers. The distance between a lady of noble blood and her peasant-born steward was vast—a chasm built by centuries of law, custom, and the iron hierarchy of the realm. But in the drafty, candlelit cellar, surrounded by the shadows of deceit, that chasm felt remarkably thin.

"Thomas," she said, using his Christian name without the formal title for the first time since her father's funeral. "If we fail... if Sir Guy takes High Crag..."

"We will not fail," he said, interrupting her with a bold certainty that shocked them both.

Genevieve’s lips parted slightly, but she did not reprimand him for his insolence. Instead, she reached out and briefly touched his forearm—a light, fleeting gesture that sent a jolt straight through his leather doublet.

"Search the ledgers again," she whispered softly. "Look for every payment, every entry made during my father's last days. If he hid it, he may have left a sign. A tally stick, a margin note, an expense for a mason or a carpenter. Find the shadow he left behind."

"I will search every letter, my lady," Thomas promised, his voice rough.

She nodded once, picked up her brass saucer, and turned toward the dark stone stairs. As she mounted the first step, her shadow stretched long and tall across the stone wall, lingering beside his own before disappearing into the gloom above.

Thomas stood motionless until the soft tap of her slippers faded completely into the cold silence of the hall. Then he turned back to the trestle table, sat down, pulled the ink-horn closer, and took up his quill once more.

The shadows in the ledger were deep, but he had six nights to make them speak.