Nottingham

  “I’ll give you a minute,” the gord said. “Don’t be here when I come back.”

  * * *

  “YOU DON’T ESCAPE,” MORG said, once they were alone again. “You could have asked me.”

  It was dark, her cell seemed smaller now. “You don’t speak,” Elena mocked him, and he actually gave a gentle laugh.

  “Let me tell you how it works. There’s no way out. It takes two keys, one from the inside, and one from the outside. Every last prisoner could get out of their cell and still never get nowhere. No weapons down here, nothing to fight with, nothing to threaten us with. Do you see, girl? Besides, even if you got out that main gate, you’d be dead. You’d come out right in the middle bailey, and the full force of the Guard would come down on you with steel. You die, you simply die. You mean to kill yourself? Dash your head against the rocks and be done with.”

  “That’s fine advice, coming from a gord.”

  “Girl, I’m looking at a noose, same as you. I know these prisons. If there were a way out, I’d take it myself.” There were some scraping sounds then, nothing she could understand. “There isn’t.”

  Elena closed her eyes and focused on the last moments she’d had with Will before they separated. But already the details slipped away. She didn’t remember how long his hair was, or what he had been wearing, or where the bruises on his face lay. She hadn’t looked at him long enough to watch him smile, or memorize the lines on his forehead. She couldn’t picture his nose quite well enough. She put her hands to her own face, feeling her every curve, imagining it was his.

  At some point later, maybe an hour, maybe a minute, she remembered. “The staircase up, that leads to the cage in the courtyard…”

  “The Rabbit Hole,” Morg answered quickly. “Takes two keys, same as the front.”

  “Never mind that. There are cages at its entrance. There’s an old man named Baynard in the second one. The key is broken in the lock, the door can’t open.”

  Morg’s head nodded. “I’ll tell them Derby boys about it. They’ll see to it.”

  Elena held herself tighter. “Thank you.”

  It was the last thing she could think of to do. Now there was nothing but the wait. It was there, of course, that unspoken nag at the back of her mind, but she put it away.

  There’s no escape from this prison. That’s not how real life works.

  He would come and meet her again. He’d make the offer again, hoping she would be more desperate. She could still make a choice, the choice to say no. She couldn’t give up the camp, not even if Wendenal swore to let the women and children leave safely. She couldn’t be responsible for bringing them here. Not Arthur and David, who’d kept her safe more times than she could remember. Not Alan and his silly crush on her he thought nobody knew about. And certainly not John Little, who had been a father to her, the kindest soul she had ever known. She could protect them, by saying no.

  You brought Much to Bernesdale, it laughed.

  That wasn’t on her.

  You couldn’t save him.

  It was on the Captain, for trapping them. It was on the Sheriff, for ordering it. It was on Robin, for lying to them.

  You can’t save Will, it bled.

  She pushed it down.

  But you can still save yourself.

  She pushed it down, down.

  FORTY-FIVE

  ROBIN OF LOCKSLEY

  THE OAK CAMP

  PRINCE JOHN’S FACE HARDENED around a lunatic’s smile, as if he could not fathom the concept of being denied that which he wanted. “I wonder if you misheard everything I said. You need help. I want to give you help. And as far as help goes, I’m about as spectacular a friend as you could possibly hope for.”

  “Oh, I heard it all,” Robin laughed, stepping down from the carriage’s sideboard as the prince closed the door on himself. A moment later his head popped out its window, begging for a different answer. Robin leaned closer. “I’ll consider your offer, but I’m sure you can understand I need to speak with the group before I can make any promises.”

  “I can understand that, but I willfully choose not to.” John lilted his head dramatically against the window’s intricately whittled frame. “That’s why I became a prince. You’ll find you get your way more often if you ignore everyone else’s feelings. You should try it. I’ve already heard someone refer to you as the prince of thieves.”

  Robin didn’t care for that moniker at all. “Who said that?”

  “A very fat man who hates princes. Of all kinds.”

  A clatter of tortured wood and metal distracted them, as Hadrian’s blade freed the carriage of its tail of broken instruments. So too went the colorful banners and sleigh bells that had draped along the sides.

  “Nobody’s going to believe us,” Alan exclaimed, hopping at the side of the road in excitement. “I wish you would have come back to meet everyone!”

  “Were you counting?” the prince asked him, staring at his own fingers.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Were you counting?”

  Alan paused to look down to the ground. “No, sorry, I wasn’t.”

  Prince John slapped the wooden frame and cackled. “No, no, you’re supposed to ask what?”

  “What?” Alan asked, because he was so perfectly lost.

  “Yes, just so! I ask, Were you counting? Then you say, What? And I say, The number of times I asked you about your friends and family. Then you would, with some difficulty probably, come to the correct answer of Zero. Because I have a staggering lack of interest in meeting your friends and family. Meeting everyone sounds like the least pleasant way I could possibly spend an afternoon.”

  Robin chuckled, hearing a familiar canter in John’s voice. “You remind me of your brother.”

  “One of the dead ones? Or Richard?”

  “Richard.”

  “Ah. Well that’s odd.” The prince smirked. “I was going to say that you remind me of him. I’ll see you soon, I think.”

  At John’s signal, the carriage eased to motion with no further fanfare. Its last remaining ribbon caught in its spokes until Robin stomped his foot down upon it, snapping the tether.

  It was, by and far, the last way he could have possibly expected to spend his afternoon. The sky might have turned red, showered beets and carrots from the clouds, and still Robin would find it less strange than the time he chatted with the prince in the middle of the woods about starting rebellions.

  “So what do we do?” Alan asked.

  “I wasn’t lying. I’ll bring this up with the group.” Robin readjusted his belongings for the hike back to the Oak Camp. “But I’m not interested in his offer.”

  “What’s wrong with it? Gold, powerful friends on our side…”

  “Prince John has his own interests in mind, Alan. Not ours.” John didn’t simply want to help them, he wanted to redirect them. He wanted to finance and franchise them. John wanted to provide his own targets for them to hit, both to burglar and to kill. He wanted Robin to train new groups in neighboring counties, all at John’s discretion. In essence, he wanted to build his own secret army.

  “He’s not allowed any military strength of his own,” Robin explained. “No castles, no armies, such were the stipulations of him being allowed back into England. Richard’s always been a bit paranoid of those closest to him.”

  “Is that why he sent you away?” Alan asked.

  Robin paused, having no answer.

  Alan blew out his lips. “Well, it sounded like a good deal to me.”

  Which was precisely why Robin had been skeptical of it. An unusually good deal was always more suspicious than an unusually bad one. “It’s a question of what we want, Alan, and why we want it. If we just want to give the Nottingham Guard hell for the sake of it, we could sign on with Prince John. But if we want to make our own difference, our own way, then do we really want to be beholden to him? What happens when he asks us to do something we don’t agree with?”

  “I don’t know
,” Alan admitted. “Just seems like a lot to turn down.”

  “It is.” If Prince John was telling the truth, his help could have changed everything. But the odds of that were staggeringly thin. Robin looked up, searching for the nearest colored ribbon in the trees that marked the way home.

  “He said he was going to Nottingham. What if he could help us with the Sheriff’s funeral?”

  “What if he doesn’t want us involved at all?” Robin asked back. “If we told him our plans to rescue Will and Elena, he might have put a stop to it.” He had been careful to avoid giving up any details the prince did not already have, especially in regard to their intentions with Nottingham.

  Marion could get them all the information that John claimed to have and more, and she was a good ways prettier, too.

  “We don’t have the luxury of trusting anyone we don’t know, not until we get this done.”

  Alan shrugged, clearly unconvinced. But Alan was just a farmhand who had been swept into this world, and thought the distinction between friends and enemies was absolute. Robin wondered if he had been teaching them the wrong things. Training to fight was a functional skill, but it reinforced the idea that swordplay was the solution to their problems. Instead, he needed to teach them how to think. He had taken for granted the ease of working with someone like William, who instinctively looked for the deeper motivations behind every opportunity. Robin needed to teach someone as simple as Alan how to anticipate not the next move, but the one that came five moves after that.

  He didn’t have the damnedest idea how to do that.

  And worse, William was on the opposite side looking five moves into Robin’s future, which was four more than Robin knew himself. He had barely figured out his current step, which was a long shot on its own.

  It took them half an hour to return to the camp, moving briskly, saying little. Despite the wet air the forest was dry, there was more brown than orange on the ground and the trees had begun to transform into naked spears that offered little protection. He could spy the Oak Camp from a noticeably farther distance than even a week earlier, which meant that others could, too. He thought on Prince John, staring up at an exposed ribbon in the trees, positioning himself as if he knew precisely what he was looking at.

  “We’ll have to break down the camp,” Robin said, just as he realized it. Alan reacted with appropriate shock. “We can’t stay here. We can’t take any more risks. Prince John found us.”

  Alan struggled with it. “But he was just waiting on the road for us—”

  “But he knew where to wait. Some of our people who left after Much … I’ll bet some of them have been talking.”

  Alan gasped. “Who do you think it was?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Robin said. “If we can be found once, we can be found again.”

  That’s what Robin would do, if he were trying to catch himself. And in so many ways, that’s exactly what was happening.

  When they entered the clearing, Robin intended on gathering the group as quickly as possible, to explain the need for a hasty breakdown. He had no inclinations as to where they would go, but elsewhere was safer than here. If Marion had not returned by the morning, he wouldn’t be able to wait for her. A cold wind moved through him, as he wondered what exceptions he might allow himself in order to send her word of their movement.

  The crowd was already gathered beneath the oak’s boughs, but Robin was too preoccupied to guess as to its cause. “Did you see Amon?” asked John Little.

  “Amon? No,” Robin answered, then startled to look around the camp. If Sir Amon were here, then Marion was already back as well.

  “Fack,” cursed David, nudged forward by the others. “Alright, Robin. I drew the short straw, as to who was going to break the news to you.”

  A chill clamped over him. There was no way those words heralded anything good. “Break what news?”

  Arthur swallowed. “Amon was here,” he said. “Came from Sheffield. Said that the Sheriff’s men … said they came for Marion last night.”

  Robin’s muscles froze. Everyone in the world became a stone for him to shatter.

  “He says they took her to Nottingham. Says we shouldn’t go after her.”

  “They arrested her?”

  “Worse. From what Amon described, sounds like the new sheriff aims to marry her.”

  * * *

  IN THE END, IT was a raging calm that consumed him. Functionally, there was nothing at the moment he could do, and his body sought to hold every slight movement in reserve, to unleash when he needed it. John Little warned the group not to bother him, and they didn’t. Robin found himself at the edge of camp, his feet luring him away from them, trying to trick his body into leaving now. But Robin tempered himself. He slowly made wide large circles around the camp, keeping the clearing just within eyesight. On the edge of the treeline, on the edge of reason, dipping in and out like a man falling asleep. If forced to, he would guess an hour had passed. The air was wetter now, just enough to call rain, and it was dark within and without. Robin was cold and like to get sick from it, and didn’t care in the least.

  When his emotions cooled enough to form sentences, it hurt anew. Every level of it was more painful than the last. Marion being abducted, threatened. William’s decision to use her to get to Robin. The escalation, the attempt to draw Robin out of the woods, to show his hand too early. The coldness of William’s strategy.

  The fact that it would work.

  Someone, of course, eventually came for him. They must have drawn straws again since it was Alan, and he was ever so good at losing. With two steaming cups in his hands, probably the last batch of awful cider Tuck would make for some time, he came aimlessly searching. The cups were decorative, ornamental things taken from someone or other they’d stopped on the road. Back when pretty trinkets were things worth getting excited about. Alan stomped his way through the trees, lost, missing Robin entirely, his head ducked down as if the rain would ignore him that way.

  Robin spoke Alan’s name out of some long-lost pity, before the man wandered too far away and hurt himself. But Robin did not move to retrieve him, keeping his seat on what once was a dry stump. His own hood was over his head to protect him from the wetness, a strategy that had clearly eluded Alan.

  “I brought one for you.” Alan held the cup out.

  Robin didn’t take it. “No thank you. I won’t sleep well.”

  “Two for me, then.” He looked around for something to sit on, but it was all too wet, so he just kept standing.

  “You’d best get some sleep for tomorrow,” Robin said quietly.

  “What’s tomorrow?”

  He almost couldn’t believe the man had forgotten. “We’re packing.”

  “Right.”

  Alan took a long sip from the cup, then another, having nothing else to do or say.

  The idea of lingering in awkward silence with Alan was actually worse than the idea of talking to him long enough for him to leave. “I wish we had known about this before our visit with the prince today,” Robin said.

  “About Marion you mean?”

  Of fucking course about Marion. “The damned timing of it all. With Marion captured, we’re on our own, in the dark. We need information on the Sheriff’s funeral to rescue Will and Elena, and Marion can’t help us anymore. Prince John offered us exactly what we needed, but I didn’t know we needed it.”

  He wanted to keep the conversation on tactics. If Alan opened his mouth to talk about how Marion was his everything again, Robin was likely to break the man’s teeth.

  But Alan just nodded in agreement. “Well, he did tell us how to communicate with him in Nottingham. Guess he was right when he said, ‘See you soon.’”

  Robin tipped his head back to let the rain touch his face. “It was risky enough before. A public funeral, a public hanging. They’re practically inviting us inside.”

  “So the only way to make this work is to trust Prince John’s help?”

  Robin made a l
ong full bow of his head, yes.

  Alan’s morale seemed as soggy as his tunic. The rain went colder, a shudder cracked through Robin’s spine. Little imagination was required to see how the day might unfold against them. Rescuing Will and Elena was one thing. As long as they plotted out an escape route, they could use the advantage of a sympathetic mob, the cover of confusion, theatrics. It was possible. But with Marion as a hostage William could use as leverage, the idea of simultaneously saving her made everything else a thousand times less possible. It was a perfect move for William, and Robin could only blame himself for not anticipating it. It was a trap so clever the only way to avoid it was to let Will and Elena die.

  “You need to consider the reality that you will likely see your two friends with ropes around their necks,” Robin said, no longer interested in tiptoeing around Alan’s softness. “Hell, you might even be standing next to them.”

  “Maybe we don’t need Prince John,” Alan tried. “I’ll bet I could cut both their nooses off the gallows with a single arrow.”

  At this, Robin laughed. It might have been the first funny thing Alan had said all day. Well after the sensation of smiling was gone, Robin finally looked up at Alan, a little surprised that he was a human, and that they were both there.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  The poor man’s face twisted into something painful. “We have to go, Robin. You’re right, we don’t know what will happen if we go. But we know exactly what will happen if we don’t. If we don’t go, they’ll die.”

  “I can’t promise we’ll get them back.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t even promise we’ll get close.”

  “I know.” Alan’s mouth tried very hard to leave his face. “But at least we’ll die trying.”

  It was the sort of thing Robin had heard before, from young soldiers in the war, convinced that a glorious death in the face of overwhelming odds was somehow enviable. Robin leaned back into the tree to give Alan his full attention. “Do you mean that?”