Low the swan flies, ever lower,

Dancing, singing overhead,

Slow the song plays, ever slower,

Oh, too late—now they’re all dead.

“That’s… not good,” Tom said.

“No,” I said, especially because I thought I understood what it was trying to tell me. Not the code, this time. The riddle. And if I was right, we were in terrible trouble.

“What is it?” Tom said.

I folded the note back in my pocket. “We have to get to Isaac’s. Now.”

CHAPTER 30

WE BARRELED THROUGH THE DOOR into Isaac’s shop.

“Isaac? Sally?”

“Up here,” Sally called.

Upstairs, we found Isaac wrapped in a blanket in front of the fire, sipping a half-finished cup of coffee. Sally had one, too, but hers was mostly untouched. Her face was flushed, and she was huffing, from climbing up and down those hundred-plus steps to the secret library, collecting the books Isaac had asked for.

She’d stacked them beside him. I recognized the binding of the larger pile of books. It was a sepia-toned leather: Master Benedict’s journals. There were more books as well, on the floor and the table, where Bridget marched about, happily pecking at some seeds Isaac had scattered for her.

Sally noticed our expressions. “What’s wrong?”

“We were attacked,” I said.

“He was attacked,” Tom said—and clearly I was still rattled by what had happened, because it was only then that it really struck me what should have been obvious from the start.

The assassin couldn’t have cared less about Tom. It was me he’d wanted to kill.

And again that question: Why?

I was hoping Isaac might have an answer. When Tom told them everything that had happened, they were as shocked as we were.

“The brazenness of it,” Isaac said, troubled. “It bodes ill.”

“Did you find anything?” Sally said.

“There was another riddle on Saint Erkenwald’s tomb,” I said, distracted. I was still mulling over what I’d first thought about in the church: being in the middle of two warring factions. “Did you find that confession about the Templars?”

“It’s there.” Isaac nodded toward a paper on the desk beside Sally. She held it out to him, but he waved it away. “You went to the trouble of getting it, dear. You can read it.”

Sally shifted in her chair as Tom and I took seats at the table. “This is from… What year was it again?”

“1624,” Isaac said. “The last year of the reign of James I. The confession comes from a silk merchant, Jonathan Egerton, who was accused of plotting against the king.”

Bridget flapped up to my shoulder as Sally read the note to us, a report from spy to spymaster.

The prisoner Egerton refuses to admit sedition. Instead, he insists he was working on behalf of His Majesty’s well-being. In particular, he claims to be a member of the ancient order of the Knights Templar, despite all knowing the order was disbanded three hundred years ago. This imagining could not be dissuaded, even under considerable encouragement.