The man with the broken mouth groaned from the mud. Hob nudged him with one boot.
Thomas walked over and crouched. The man tried to shrink backward, which was difficult with both wrists bound and half his face swelling.
“The rest,” Thomas said.
The man’s eyes watered. “We gave one on.”
“To whom?”
No answer. Thomas set one hand on the man’s broken wrist. The answer came at once, high and panicked.
“Belmaine’s man. Osric. He said Sir Roger would know how to use it.”
Aymon closed his eyes briefly, then opened them again.
“If Sir Roger Belmaine has the other packet, he holds letters naming payments made to men who have been troubling the king’s roads and intercepting royal messages. One letter concerns Pickering. One concerns Ashcombe.”
Thomas looked down at the man in the mud. “Against me?”
“Aye,” the man whimpered. “Against you. Against Pickering. Against anyone Sir Roger needed pushed.”
Thomas stood. There it was. Not rumor. Not suspicion. Proof. Belmaine had not merely tried to take advantage of royal suspicion. He had fed it, bought it, dressed it, and sent it walking through Thomas’s gate in the shape of Edmund Crale.
Thomas looked toward the road. The track bent south through dripping trees, toward Belmaine’s fresh limewash, tidy gate, and whatever room held the woman who had turned his home into something perilously close to hope.
Aymon struggled to rise. “The packet must reach Master Pickering.”
“It will.”
“Now.”
Thomas rounded on him. “A woman has been taken to Belmaine’s house.”
Aymon’s expression shifted, sharpening through the pain. “The red-haired one?”
The world seemed to pause.
Thomas took one step closer. “You know her?”
“I know of her.” Aymon winced as he tried to brace one hand against the road. “A message reached the queen’s lady. A strange woman at Ashcombe. A false husband. A lord under suspicion who did not yield her. Lady Eleanor thought it either scandal, treason, romance, or all three. She dislikes dull correspondence.”
Hob muttered, “I like her already.”
Thomas’s heart kicked hard against his ribs. Amelia’s plan. Of course. Quiet messages, roads, royal ladies, proof gathered like beads on a string. He had thought her merely sorting rolls, smiling at children, making Walter grind his teeth, and asking too many questions about why men drank small beer when the well ran sweet.
All the while, she had been building a bridge over the pit in front of them.
Aymon reached for the packet.
“If Belmaine holds her and the other letters, then you need Pickering and witnesses more than you need speed.”
Thomas hated him a little for being right.
“I go with you,” Hob said.
“You take Aymon to Pickering.”
“Nay.”
