On the third floor the remaining four serjeants burst into a room—and found a man standing by the window.

He had his bow levelled at them, an arrow nocked. “If you kill me,” he cried, sweating and fearful, “you will never know anything!”

“Why would we need to kill you right now?” asked Medor Colle, returned to Orane from duties to the west and leading the serjeants again. A brisk nod of his head and two men loosed their own arrows, each into an upper arm of the assassin. They were highly skilled at this. The man cried out, dropped his bow. He turned to leap from the window, but Medor was on him by then and clubbed him to the floor with the hilt of his sword.

The man, they saw, was not especially young, no identifying livery. A good archer; it had been a long arrow across the square.

“Careful of his arrowheads,” Medor said. “Gloves on to claim them. Then burn the gloves.” He hadn’t seen the wounded horse fall and die, they had been galloping this way already, but he had an instinct. A family trait.

They were not gentle in the cellars of the Châtelet that morning. There were those who said you could not trust what a man said under extreme interrogation, but in the Châtelet they acted as if they could, until information suggested otherwise. The archer was unknown to them. The name he surrendered, the man who had hired and paid him, was not.

Aubrey, the other of the two senior serjeants, had already sent word for the city gates to be closed, without exception. It was an extreme measure, would not be popular on a market day with carts and wagons and foot traffic going in and out, but this was an extreme moment.

Once the name was learned—and it didn’t take long—the serjeants added to those instructions, advising the guards at the city gates as to what man they were now looking for.

Corbez Barthelmy, whom they’d thought dead at his noble employer’s order, being too much of a risk to the Duke de Barratin, was seized while trying to pick the lock of a doorway in the wall by South Gate.

He was distinctive: very tall, tonsured like a cleric, and for some reason (arrogance? folly?) wearing again the red, hooded cloak he’d worn when he’d led the assassination of the Duke de Montereau in the dead of the winter past.

Intelligent caution was not always a trait of dangerous men, the serjeants of Orane had noted many times. And Barthelmy proved to be no master criminal, though he’d accomplished something that had thrown Ferrieres into chaos, and was still doing so. Foolish men could do great damage, the provost had been known to say. You did not pity them their folly, you took advantage of it when you could.