CHAPTER 54

I SLEPT ALMOST THE ENTIRE day. I kept waking, body throbbing with pain, then falling back for a few more fitful minutes. Tom did the same. Eventually we gave up and just lay there, watching the boats float along the Thames, playing with Bridget, and talking across the room about nothing at all.

“Should we be doing something?” Tom said.

At that moment, I honestly didn’t care. “If they want us, they know where we are.”

I told Tom everything that had happened yesterday. Sally, who’d stayed up all night helping care for the wounded, came by to see us, exhausted, and I told her everything, too. They were horrified at the death of the Templars, and the collapse of the London chapter, and just how close our enemy had come to blaming everything on them, and Lord Ashcombe, too. We didn’t talk about who the enemy was. They already knew.

After a short nap in our chair, Sally returned to the tiltyard, leaving Tom and me once again in idle conversation. Until the evening, when we were roused by a knock on the door.

I answered it, every muscle howling at being asked to move. It was a servant with a folded note. “You’re requested, sir,” he said, and left.

I’d just about opened the note when I saw the name on it. The servant had mistaken me for Tom. “It’s for you.”

Tom was still in bed. When he read the note, he sat up, eyes widening.

“What is it?” I said.

“Oh… I’m supposed to give a report on yesterday. All the fighting. To the captain of the Horse Guards.”

Wincing, he got dressed, stuffing the note in his pocket. My heart sank. I’d have known he was lying, even if he hadn’t made it so obvious. He looked so sad again.

And suddenly I knew. I knew what Lord Ashcombe had offered him. What gift the king had given.

You’ve changed, Dorothy had said when I’d returned to Blackthorn. Maybe she’d been right. But I wasn’t the only one.

Tom had changed, too.

Not in the most important ways. Inside, he was still the kind, gentle, innocent best friend I’d met on Clerkenwell Green, all those years ago. But being out from under his father’s thumb, learning the sword, finding his courage when the people he loved were in danger, it had changed him, the same as it had me.

He was still the nervous sort—I don’t think he’d ever lose that—but he was growing into a great man. When we were smaller—or younger, really; had Tom ever been small?—he’d dreamed of becoming a knight. He was, at least, now a soldier. Of course Lord Ashcombe would see that. And of course he’d tell His Majesty.

It’s hard to say no to a king, Tom had said.

And so I finally understood: He was leaving.

Tom finished buttoning his doublet.

“If there’s something you want to tell me,” I said, “you can. I won’t be cross, or upset.”