Nottingham

  “Do I frolic?” William repeated the odd question.

  “Well, William de Wendenal, you’re my newest friend. Friends ought to do friendly things together. We could frolic, you and I.”

  William couldn’t even begin to guess what reaction was expected of him. “Are you serious?”

  “No.”

  The prince turned and walked away, signaling his man to follow. “I’ll be staying here, through the funeral at least. See to it that I have an entire floor in the high keep. Please be warned, that if you are up to anything sinister, your punishment will be very creative. Think of something truly heinous, let me know what it is, and then I’ll make it worse.”

  William was not at all sure if he had made an ally or an enemy, but he knew he was not yet dead, which seemed an improvement over his most recent expectations. Still, he reminded himself to start wearing his boots again.

  “Wait,” William called out. “If you didn’t even know Gisbourne well enough to know he had wedded a Longchamp, why did you appoint him as sheriff?”

  “I just wanted somebody who would be terrible,” Prince John called back, brushing some dirt from his trousers. “I think you’ll do fine.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  ARABLE DE BUREL

  NOTTINGHAM CASTLE

  ARABLE COULDN’T HELP BUT laugh at what Lady Margery said. They lounged on a small balcony in the middle bailey’s wall, looking out over a cold clouded morning, having just finished a brief conversation and a bowl of dates. Arable picked up her dress and excused herself, eager to find William and share the joke with him.

  “Perhaps it’s only a rumor,” Margery shrugged, waving her fingers in dismissal. “After all, you of anyone in the castle would know such a thing, wouldn’t you?”

  Her meetings with the lady of Warwick were less frequent than she had first hoped, but her need for the relationship had similarly dwindled. Arable no longer sought escape from Nottingham, thanks to William’s new position. She had removed herself from the girls’ quarters entirely, leaving Mistress Roana scratching her head, and lived now in the chambers attached to William’s room. Her “lessons” with Lady Margery had transformed into tea-side chats and philosophical musings. They were a welcome relief from her days closeted away, helping William deal with his mountains of administrative distractions. As for Lady Margery, she had no one to call friend amongst her husband’s entourage, and loathed the other visiting ladies. Arable’s status as something-more-than-servant was apparently enough for her to be treated with a morsel of decency, so long as nobody witnessed it. Margery seemed eager to share her life’s worth of experiences with anyone willing to learn.

  Which made it all the more queer that she would voice such a preposterous bit of gossip.

  “The Lady Marion Fitzwalter is no common prisoner, I’m told. Is it true that Wendenal intends on a marriage with her?”

  And Arable had laughed, because it was just so ridiculous, and she was off to tell William about it now.

  Not so ridiculous—she hated using the word so. That had been a lesson Roger de Lacy had taught her once, rest his soul. It hurt to think of him. She missed his delight in stories and conversation. How he’d hold his elbow out for her hand, treating her like a true lady. Never like his servant, at least not privately. She used to find him in odd nooks of the castle, enraptured in thought or lost inside a book. And not epic tomes of laws and policy as she would have expected, but old ballads and fantasies, the kinds with gods and giants.

  “I read whatever I choose to read, girl,” he defended himself.

  “Why read stories such as those? You aren’t a child, why waste your time?”

  “My dear,” he cleared his throat, tapping her nose with his forefinger, “reading is the opposite of wasting time. There is no finer way to enjoy a sliver of one’s life than by enjoying the entirety of another’s.”

  She never knew what to say to him. “You’re so interesting.”

  “Never use the word ‘so,’” he announced, clapping his book closed to escort her down the hall. “It’s the worst word in the English language. If you modify any word at all with the word ‘so’, then it should become another word. If I were ‘so interesting,’ well then I would become ‘intriguing.’ And if I were ‘so intriguing,’ I would become ‘fascinating.’ If I were ‘so fascinating,’ well then I must be ‘mesmerizing.’”

  “And what if you were ‘so mesmerizing’?”

  “I’m not.” He laughed, squinting until his skin all wrinkled up around his eyes. “Go the other direction, pass ‘boring,’ and you’ll find me at the end.”

  So no, she thought, pushing outside the barracks hall. Lady Margery’s comment was not so ridiculous, it was … unthinkable. But then again, it wasn’t really unthinkable, as Lady Margery had clearly thought it. There were a great number of lords and ladies in the castle of late, come to pay their respects to poor Roger, but not one of them had come to marry William. Wherever Lady Margery had heard such a thing, she must have misheard it.

  Outside, Arable bunched up her dress and pushed up to the great keep in the upper bailey, hesitating for a moment at the sight of the double-lion banners. The bailey teemed with strangers, as Prince John’s attendants had practically claimed the entire thing for themselves. Arable could come and go as she wished of course, but the prince’s presence was more than alarming.

  She rushed through the yard with her head down, relieved to slip into the tall stone keep. But the moment she was inside, she felt a punch in her heart, as she always did. The stairs led to Roger’s office. The room where he had been killed. It was William’s office now, but she hated meeting him there. She couldn’t overcome the memory of Roger’s body on the ground, and the way his blood crawled across the stone floor. For a moment she forgot why she was heading there. Why she would ever want to be in that room again.

  She suddenly doubted whether she ought to disturb William at all. He could become so irritated at times when he was interrupted, and had little time for anything besides critical business. Sharing a laugh over the day’s gossip hardly counted as important.

  Her foot trembled as she started up the staircase. If she closed her eyes, she could just as easily be climbing the stairs in the stables again, fifteen years ago. The stables she and William had always run off to, where there was nothing but the two of them and the stars through the hole in the roof. But the last time she climbed those stairs at her family’s estate, it was to wait for him. He never came. Not the first night, nor the second, or the third. On the fourth, men loyal to William’s father Lord Beneger found her there, and told her their orders, and gave her one chance to flee.

  She took it.

  As she started the second set of stairs up to Roger’s office, she saw herself fleeing down in the other direction, as she had back then. She and William had been so young and so naïve to think their love was a match for that amount of hate. No, not so young, not so naïve. They had been ignorant.

  No, not they. Because William had figured it out.

  She was the one who waited in a stable loft for three days, concocting increasingly elaborate tales for his delay. It was a girlish sort of hope—the same one she felt all this week. That same young and stupid ignorant feeling that had blinded her years before.

  At the top of the third stair, she glanced down the hallway. Two Guardsmen now always stood outside the room halfway down, what was once an empty salon for the widow Murdac. If they’d let her pass, Arable could knock on that door and get whatever answers she needed from its sole inhabitant.

  Lady Margery passed this room every day. The Earl of Warwick was still housed in the solar at the end of the hall.

  Arable knew exactly where Margery had heard the rumor.

  She didn’t want to climb further. But her legs kept moving. At the top of the fourth stair she felt as if tears might come, but they didn’t. And by the top of the fifth stair, she realized why. She had cried it all out already. The months of feeling worthless that had tu
rned into years, years of hating the sound of her own name. Years of seeing his face when she closed her eyes and wanting to drown herself to stop it. Until eventually it died. William could still make her happy, yes, but she had cut out that part of herself long ago that allowed him to hurt her.

  And by the time she opened the crooked little door that led to Roger’s office, the rumor had ceased to be funny. After all, William had proven to Arable fifteen years ago exactly where she lay in his priorities.

  William was at Roger’s desk, his back was to her, and something closed inside of her.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  He heard her, but he didn’t turn to smile at her, and he didn’t stand and take her in his arms. He didn’t brush her hair or put his fingers on the back of her neck. Instead he sat motionless.

  “I heard about it from Lady d’Oily, and I laughed. It was so ridiculous an idea I actually laughed out loud. I came here to tell you about it, so you could laugh, too.” She caught herself and laughed now, a different laugh. The only thing that was funny was that she had fallen for it. “Not so ridiculous, actually. So ridiculous that it was real.”

  Still he didn’t move. If he stood up now and told her it was a lie, she would believe him. If he just smiled and brushed it off, it would be that easy. Even if he was angry and didn’t have the time for her, it would be fine, it really would be.

  Instead, the back of his head.

  “It’s not a joke, is it?”

  The back of his head didn’t have a mouth but still it said, “It’s not.”

  “You’re getting married.”

  “Yes.” Nobody else was in the room, but he didn’t say it to her.

  “What did I do?” she asked. She should have asked, What more could I have done?

  “This has nothing to do with you.” That punch should have hurt, but instead she laughed again. His shoulders clenched, as if this were some torture to have to deal with her.

  Again, to nobody, “This is for strictly political reasons.”

  “Why didn’t I know?” she screamed it, because it needed to be screamed. “When did this happen? Where is this even coming from?”

  “Lady Marion is cousin to King Richard—”

  She cut him off. “Don’t you even say her name to me.”

  But he kept talking, he kept saying things that didn’t matter. “Her family is above reproach.”

  “Her family? I didn’t realize that was what you cared about. I’m sorry my family isn’t good enough for you, but your father chased them out of England. You remember that, don’t you?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  And finally he turned around. His face was wrought with grief and his eyes were red. Even furious as she was, it was hard to see. “Arable, I love you, you don’t understand. My position here…” no, he was trying to explain it again, when that was the only thing she didn’t want to hear, “… it’s resting on a knife’s edge. Prince John is watching me like a hawk. Convincing him to keep me as sheriff was probably the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done.”

  She shook her head, she didn’t want to hear this, she didn’t care at all about the politics of it, she just wanted him to tell her he was going to fix it. “Allying myself with Lady Marion secures my position. Her family is his family, it was the only way. You remember the alternative right? Sheriff Gisbourne?” He just kept talking, talking at her, not to her. “Do you want to see him in power?”

  “William!”

  “Do you?”

  “No, of course not!”

  “We made this choice, Arable. We cannot back down from it now, not when our very lives may hinge on its success. Not when there’s so much at stake. We knew we would have to make sacrifices.”

  He had thought it all out, it seemed. He had been practicing his excuses. He knew it was going to come to this.

  “We did make a choice,” she kept her voice cold and even, “together. But you made this one on your own. You know it’s wrong. The fact that you didn’t tell me about it is all the proof I need.”

  “I didn’t know how!” He slammed into the table as he stood. “I haven’t slept! I haven’t eaten! I didn’t want to hurt you … I haven’t had the time, I’ve been sick. I’ve been sick to my stomach, I thought I would vomit. I’m trying to fix things here, but I can’t do it alone, and I have mutiny in the prisons and Gisbourne breathing down my neck and suddenly I’m in charge of protecting everyone.”

  “So of course,” Arable almost lost control of her voice, she had to grind it to a crawl, “of course you would get rid of the one person on your side. That makes a lot of sense.”

  William shook his head, brushing her off. As if her concerns were meaningless. It lit her skin on fire. “It’s not like that. I promise you, I’ll find a way—”

  “Your promises,” it was probably the only word he shouldn’t be allowed to use, “break to your politics.”

  Those words seemed to hurt him.

  “You promised to look after me. Did you ever write to your father, to find out if any of my family is alive in France? I’ve been writing all your letters, and I don’t recall that one in my list.”

  His hand raised and dropped. “It was too dangerous…”

  “So you’ve done nothing, then.”

  He took a step forward and whispered her name, and she could feel the warmth of his body, his smell, and part of her could still forget it all and melt into him. When he reached out, she had to choose to stop him. Not just like that. He wanted the side of his hand to brush against her hair, and she found herself pushing him away.

  Not until he answered the important question. “What about us, William?”

  He tried to touch her again, and this time she stopped him more forcefully. He thought he was apologizing, but he wasn’t. “You don’t need to go to France. We can still…” and he waved his hand ambiguously about. That. That was the entirety of their relationship to him, a vague sexual gesture he couldn’t even put into words.

  “We can still … what? No, we can’t still…” she repeated his little hand flail back at him, “I can’t still … with a man whose wife has the ear of the King. Are you insane?”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, stepping away from her. So sorry.

  “Don’t be so sorry. Be something better than sorry. By proving it. Put a stop to this now.”

  His shoulders slumped, his face sagged. He wasn’t handsome anymore. He looked old, and defeated, unwilling to fight for himself, much less fight for her.

  “I am so sorry,” he repeated, the same empty words, and he sat back in his chair, in Roger’s chair. With his back to her. Roger was there, on the wall, judging him, too. Whatever was left of William said, “But I stand by my decision.”

  She wouldn’t be waiting three days this time. There was no point in wasting even another minute on him. She had nowhere to go, but nowhere alone was better than anywhere with him.

  “You’re worthless,” she told the back of his head. “You could marry the King himself, and you’d still be worthless.”

  FORTY-NINE

  GUY OF GISBOURNE

  SHERWOOD FOREST

  “DON’T KNOW THAT ANYONE here can help you,” a craven husk of a man whined, in some little armpit farm near Carleton. “Where did you say you was from now?”

  They had started in the smaller villages, and instantly noticed the stark difference in how they were treated. Without their colors they were disguised as nobodies, entering a world in which they were only as valuable as their valuables. At least within a city, there was always the mutual agreement that civilization had merit. Even the filth at the bottom still loved that city as much as anyone. Rabble such as the Red Lions and the other wharfside gangs had fought side by side with the Nottingham blue when war came to their streets fifteen years ago, because there was recognition, within a city, that all their fates were irreparably bound together. But as Guy and the men of the Black Guard strayed away from that safety, they entered the gre
at perilous experiment of lawlessness.

  “We have information we need to get to Robin Hood.” Guy drawled out his words to hide his education. “It’s a matter of grave importance.”

  They were greeted with suspicion, and a group of derelict men nearby were sizing up their chances to attack. Not one of them had the build or the tan of a proper farmer, and they fanned out to protect their storehouse in a manner that suggested they had stolen it themselves. Without his uniform, Guy was only too aware he must seem an easy target, the salt and pepper of his beard betraying his age. He was thankful Marshall Sutton was an imposing thick wall no matter what he wore, since the needling Ferrers at his other side was as intimidating as warm porridge.

  “I appreciate your discretion, friend,” Guy soothed the skeptic stranger, “but Robin himself told me he’d been to this village. I just need to get him a message is all. All I need is to be pointed in the right direction.”

  “Can’t help you,” was the solemn reply, but the stranger tilted his head to the east. “But I hear they may have seen him in Godling night before last.”

  “Thank you,” Guy winked, “I’ll let Robin know he has a friend here.”

  “See that you do.”

  Guy tried to hide his discomfort. If they projected weakness, they would be eaten alive. Being pointed toward Godling was better information than they had received in weeks as honest Guardsmen, and it gave Guy the bittersweet hope this would work.

  It had to work. For Guy, it was the only option. If Wendenal successfully deposed him and humiliated him, the only natural conclusion would be to quietly kill him as well. After a month or so, once the drama of his departure was settled, Guy predicted he would undoubtedly meet his end by an anonymous blade in the night. If left alive, he would put all his efforts into revealing this corruption, and Wendenal knew it. His men would likely be safe, suffering on under the orders of the young new captain from Warwick, but Guy’s only alternative would be to flee. And frankly, he would probably prefer the blade than to leave Nottingham.