The Warrior's Game by Denise Domning

you’d be a much poorer man. Dare I say I think you owe me this? It was a great liberty you took with my repute. But I'm a fair woman. When you have more for me, I shall have more for you.”
    Chagrin twisted the man’s lips. “Forgive me, my lady.”
    “I already have,” Ami assured him.
    Walter knew his craft well. There was no one better to sniggle out Sir Michel’s secrets.

The laundresses failed Ami. An hour after the bells for Sext had rung found Ami yet wearing her third best as she, Maud and their single soldier-escort made their way along the lanes of Winchester town. To compensate for her modest dress Ami had donned every piece of jewelry she owned on the assumption the richer a goldsmith thought a person, the better said person would be treated. A thick gold bangle decorated each wrist, while every shift of her mantle allowed a glimpse of her father’s heavy golden chain where it draped across her breast. Rings decorated three of her fingers. Ami thumbed the one with the large red stone, her wedding ring.
    Her sheerest wimple was held in place with a pearl pin instead of her gold band. That's because she'd bent her band. Since new work was beyond the scope of her purse and she needed a reason for visiting the goldsmith, she'd created something for him to repair.
    “Oh, my lady, I’m so sorry your band is dented,” Maud cried for the hundredth time as they picked their way down mucky High Street. “I don’t know how it happened. Truly, I’m always careful with it.”
    Ami shot Maud a swift, sidelong look. She hadn't expected her maid to be this upset over it. “Sweetling, I know how careful you are and I don't hold you at fault. I think I must have done it this morning when I put away my grooming case.”
    Hurrying a little to avoid yet another plea for forgiveness from her maid, Ami lifted her hems and started down the lane only to look behind her and discover she was alone. Maud had ducked beneath the overhanging second storey of a tailor’s establishment to avoid an oxcart. Beside her stood a housewife and her maid. The servant carried her mistress's shopping basket in which a chicken, its gaudy feathers stirring but its neck limp in death, sprawled atop a loaf of bread. From open shop windows up and down the lane, merchants shouted to them to come inspect my fine wares. Across the way two workmen sang as they applied a new coat of plaster to a cook shop’s front while the scent of stewing lamb wafted out of the shop’s open door.
    Yet standing in the lane torn between his two charges, Ami's escort signaled to her to come back. Ami gave breath to a frustrated sound. At this rate they wouldn't reach the goldsmith's shop until long after None. She started back, rounding the oxcart's end. An apple seller darted around her. Ami gave a cry as his handcart’s wooden wheel spewed mud at her.
    Catching Maud by the arm, Ami shot a look at the soldier. “Keep pace,” she warned them both.
    Robert Atte Cross’s establishment sat where High Street intersected the lane that lead to the cathedral. Like any other merchant his workshop occupied the lower level of his home, but that was its only similarity to the other dwellings on this street. The goldsmith’s house was a monument to his success. At three storeys tall his house towered over its neighbors. No mold or cracks marred its gleaming plaster walls, and, although his roofing was only reeds, the thatch was new and its crest trimmed into fanciful scallops.
    Between his house and each of his neighbors' was an alley wide enough to admit a horse and rider. Ami peered down the nearest alley as they strode past. Just as she expected a fine courtyard opened up behind the house.
    And, just as she expected, men wearing the red of the de Martignys sat or crouched in that courtyard, aiming their dice at the garden wall at the courtyard's back.
    Excitement soared in Ami, only to crash back to earth. Now that she was here, what next? She didn't even know yet