Free The Serpent's Tale by Ariana Franklin

least see to his horse.”
    Adelia insisted on going first, slowly leading the way past Walt and the crippled animal and down the other side of the bridge, Mansur beside her holding the lantern so that light fell on the ground at each step.
    Everything that was not white was black; boot marks, hoof-prints, too jumbled to be distinguished from one another. There’d been a lot of activity where the bridge rejoined the road near the great gatehouse of the convent. A lot of blood.
    Mansur pointed.
    “Oh, well done, my dear,” she said. Under the shadow of heavy oak branches lolling over the convent wall, clear prints led to others—writing a story for those who could read it. “ Hmm. Interesting.”
    Behind her, the bishop and groom soothed the jerkily limping horse as they led it, discussing where it should be put down. Would the nuns want the carcass? Good eating on a horse. But butchery and skinning would be arduous in this weather; better to cut its throat among the trees where the convent wall bent into a forest. “They can get it later if they want it.”
    “Doubt there’ll be much left by then, my lord.” It wasn’t only humans that appreciated the eating on a horse.
    Walt relieved the animal of its tack. There was a roll attached to the saddle protected by oilcloth. “Oo-op now, my beauty, oo-op.” Murmuring gentle equine things, he led it toward the trees.
    “Could we hide the body there as well?” Adelia wanted to know.
    “If we do, there will be not much left of that, either,” Mansur said.
    Rowley joined them. “Will you hurry up , you two. We’ll all be bloody icicles in a minute.”
    Adelia, who had shivered from cold all the way from Cambridge, was no longer aware of it. “We don’t want the body discovered, my lord.”
    The bishop tried for patience. “It is discovered, mistress. We discovered it.”
    “We don’t want the killer to find it.”
    Rowley cleared his throat. “You mean, let’s not tell him? He knows, Adelia. He shot a bolt into the lad’s chest. He’s not coming back to make sure.”
    “Yes, he is. You’d have seen it yourself if you hadn’t been in such a rush.” She nudged Mansur. “Look as if you’re instructing.”
    With Rowley between them, Mansur speaking of their findings in Arabic, and Adelia, on the other side, appearing to translate, they told him the story of a killing as the marks in the snow had told it to them.
    “We can’t be sure of the time. After it stopped snowing is all we can guess. Anyway, late enough this night for nobody to be about. They waited for him here, near the gates.”
    “They?”
    “Two men.” Rowley was pulled into the shadow of the oak. Footprints were just visible in the snow. “See? One wears hobnails, the other’s boots have bars across the soles, maybe clogs bound with strips. They arrived here on horseback and took their horses into those trees, where Walt has gone. They came back on foot and stood here. They ate as they waited.” Adelia retrieved a crumb of something from the ground, and then another. “Cheese.” She held them to the bishop’s nose.
    He recoiled. “As you say, mistress.”
    Vigils over, the convent was silent again. From deeper in among the trees of the forest came Walt’s prayer, “And the Lord have mercy on thy poor soul, if thee have one.”
    A long scream like a whistle, a heavy crash. Silence.
    Walt emerged, simultaneously wiping his dagger on his cloak with one hand and his eyes with the other. “Goddamn, I hates a’doing that.”
    The bishop patted him on the shoulder and sent him to join the others on the far side of the bridge. To Adelia and Mansur, he said, “They knew he was coming, then?”
    “Yes. They were waiting for him.” Even the most desperate robber didn’t loiter in the hope of a passerby in the early hours of a freezing night.
    They must have thought themselves lucky that the blizzard had passed, she thought, not knowing they were imprinting their guilt in the resultant