The Theft of the Sealed Scroll

At midnight the Arlanza fog crept into the palace of the Chancery in Burgos through the cracks in the windows and smelled of mud and coal. In the wing of the reserved archives, by the light of a pewter candlestick, Don Íñigo de Vivar was going through the files the regency council had sealed that afternoon. He had been an auditor of accounts for twelve winters. He knew how much every decision of the crown weighed in bushels of wheat and in seized head of cattle, and he knew how to read an order without his face moving.

That night it moved.

The document was folded in four, tied with green silk and closed with three seals of vermilion wax. It was no requisition, no seizure. It was reserved orders for the southern generals: taking advantage of the thaw and the truce of Oakhaven, four regiments of cuirassiers and two companies of Swiss were to cross the Gorge of Souls before the new treaty could be ratified, cut the throats of the shepherds who guarded the passes and bombard the ducal stronghold. At the foot, a flourish Íñigo had known since childhood, the same one that signed the letters congratulating him on his saint's day: Don Beltrán de Vivar, grand chancellor. His uncle.

Íñigo sat very still for a while. His cousin Beatriz had spent months writing him letters full of half-words about what went on in her father's study, and he had spent months answering that she was exaggerating. He looked at the ring on his finger: two rampant greyhounds on azure, the seal of his branch of the family, the poor one, the one that had always served the law instead of writing it. His grandfather had died defending the charters of the Castilian councils. His uncle had made his career by forgetting them.

He remembered, without wanting to, an afternoon from his childhood in a study of that very palace: his uncle sitting him on his knee and teaching him to tell real sealing wax from false by its smell, beeswax against pine resin. An auditor has to be able to smell a lie, little Íñigo, he had told him. That night the wax smelled of beeswax. It was genuine.

He folded the document, slipped it into his doublet and blew out the candle.

In the pocket on the other side he carried his auditor's safe-conduct: a small parchment with the council's seal and the chancellor's signature that opened every door, every post station, every bridge in the kingdom. With that paper a man could cross Castile from end to end without anyone asking what he carried. With that paper, too, a man could come back. Íñigo pressed it with his fingers through the cloth and kept walking.

He crossed the parade ground keeping close to the arcades. In the post stables his chestnut was waiting with its hooves wrapped in rags. The guard at the lower postern, a veteran Íñigo had saved from prison by reviewing a badly collected debt, opened the grille without asking.

"Mind the north, Master Auditor," he said in his ear as he drew the bolt. "The Black Guard has men posted on the Arlanza bridges. They won't even let barefoot friars through."

"Not friars." Íñigo showed him the safe-conduct in the lantern light. "Me, yes."

He crossed the first bridge at a trot, the paper held high. The Black Guard sergeant posted there looked at the chancellor's seal, looked at the soaked auditor and bowed. The second bridge too. At the third, at dawn, the sergeant took a little longer to hand back the parchment, and Íñigo saw him glance behind, down the road to Burgos, as if waiting for someone.

"At this hour, Master Auditor?" asked the sergeant, without much interest.

"The crown's accounts never sleep," said Íñigo, and the sergeant laughed the way a subordinate laughs at a superior's joke, and raised the barrier.

He spurred his horse without waiting to have it fully back in his hand.

The sergeant didn't call after him. But when Íñigo turned at the first bend, he saw him standing in the middle of the bridge, watching him go, his arm raised toward someone coming up behind.

By mid-morning he had left the last roadside inns behind and taken the drovers' tracks that climbed toward the range. Mud spattered the chestnut's flanks and rain lashed his face, but he didn't slacken the rein. At midday the dark wall of the pine forest of the Mist rose before him: the border where seals stopped counting.

Behind him, carried on the damp wind, came the first call of a light cavalry trumpet. They had found the gap in the archive. And from that moment on, his safe-conduct was the most precise arrest warrant in the kingdom: it bore his name, his office and his uncle's signature.