I forgot about the prince and spun around to make sure that it was indeed Henry Guilbert who just said that, and he was standing close enough to…I didn’t know what. I’d never been that near to him when we weren’t trying to maim each other.
He nodded to the center of the room. “You should have danced with him.”
“I don’t know the steps,” I answered, refusing to be the first one to move back.
“When has that ever stopped you?” he challenged. I was having an awful time judging his mood. His voice was benign, but his gaze less so. “What are you doing here? Are you insane? Or are you here to drive me to madness?”
“Neither. Didn’t James tell you?” I tried searching his face again, but came up short. James must have told him, because Guilbert had opened with a salvo about the assassin.
“He did. And did he not tell you not to come here?” While we talked, his gaze scanned the room, then landed on me, then started over.
“I was already committed to the course,” I said. “How is your leg?”
He maintained his stoic expression and kept his eyes on the revelers. “It aches when it rains. How is your conscience?”
“Clear.” But I blushed anyway. “If you had taken me in to the sheriff, I would be dead by now. You know that. So I’m…well, I’m glad you’re not dead or dying. But I’m not sorry for doing everything I could to escape you.”
I’d kept my voice down, but there was nothing I could do about my intensity. Guilbert’s next glance at me contained a warning. “People are taking notice,” he said, then took my hand and placed it on top of his, catching my fingers between his thumb and palm when I tried to snatch my hand away. “We’ll walk, and people will know from my limp why we aren’t dancing.”
“I don’t want to walk with you,” I said, leaning back when he took a step.
His black eyes flashed, finally, like he’d come to the end of his patience, and he ducked his head close to speak in my ear like before. “Do you want the sheriff to take a closer look at you? Or the bishop of Leeds? Try to look like you’re enjoying my company.”
“Does anyone?” My tone was caustic, but I left my hand in his, and when he started walking, I went with him.
“A few.” He kept at a stately pace. “Tell me if you see this mysterious monk of yours.”
Oh. Right. Eventually, he and I would make a slow circle of the room, like a few other pairs were doing. Maybe he wasn’t doing this just to torment me. “I haven’t seen any sign of him.”
“It’s early afternoon yet.” Guilbert’s hold on my fingers lightened but didn’t disappear. The most uncomfortable part about this was that it didn’t feel uncomfortable. This…asshole had manhandled, threatened, arrested, and sliced me with his sword. And, okay, I’d punched, insulted, escaped from, and shot him with an arrow. But when I slanted a look at him—
“Oh my God,” I said, choking my voice to a whisper. “Are you checking me out?”
“I don’t know what that means. But I expect I was, yes.” He only looked embarrassed at having been caught.
This time I did yank my hand away. “You are…so…” I nearly burst trying to hold my voice down. “Infuriating!”
“Now you see my point.” We’d reached the doors of the hall. Instead of continuing around the room, Guilbert abruptly pulled me out of the hall, into an adjoining stairwell, and up enough steps so we were between floors, hidden from view. He placed his hands on my shoulders and ordered, “Leave. Leave now and go back to your greenwood, or wherever it is you came from. I have men to protect the prince. Sir James is here to protect the royal family, too. No one can protect you if you are discovered.”
“I can’t leave this to someone else, Guilbert.”
“Have you considered that your being recognized might make this more difficult? And more dangerous for your friends?”
No, I hadn’t thought of that. But I set my jaw, unbudging, and with an annoyed sound, Guilbert let go of me. Then he reached up and straightened the circlet that held on the princess veil. “You’ll only look more conspicuous, I suppose, if you hide more of your face.” I froze until he had it all straight. “Go up these stairs to the gallery and keep watch from there. You’ll see better and be seen less.”
“Why are you helping me?” I demanded, feeling stupid for not slapping his hands away.
“I’m not. I’m helping James and doing my duty, guarding England’s ruler in absentia.” Then, when I kept glaring at him, his shoulders dropped in an almost apologetic shrug. “And because I feel bad about how I treated you. I thought if I dealt with you as the boy you pretended to be that you would see sense.”
“You thought you could scare me off, you mean.”
A glimpse of annoyance reassured me this was the same Henry Guilbert. “If you want to quibble. You would disappear, and I would not have a war between my duty and my conscience. But James was right to come after me with his sword of righteousness.”
That…was a lot to absorb. I didn’t know whether to challenge this half-assed apology, accept it, or pretend to accept it so I could get on with the business of halting the revision of history.
I exhaled in frustration and turned to continue upstairs. “Your timing sucks, Guilbert. I’m going to go stop an assassin. I’ll deal with you later.”
Leaving him in the stairwell, I went to the gallery and found a spot to stake out. Across from me were the musicians. They made me think of Alan—I hoped he and Jocasta were safely off to their happily-ever-after, and I made him a small mental apology for blowing off his assassin tale.
Besides the musicians, I shared the gallery with watchful guards, who I avoided, some couples promenading, some baronial types talking.
Downstairs, a new dance had started and Prince John was partnering a new lady. Guilbert had reemerged, and he resumed his watch without looking up at me. Isabel was still among the dancers, and still with James. I watched them for a moment, then got back on task.
Guilbert was right about one thing: I could see a lot better up here. Maybe not faces, but I could see the patterns of people moving around—the dancers in the lines and squares they made, circling each other, then moving to a new position. It was easier to read body language, too. The sheriff stood apart, looking disgruntled. He was like that kid who only gets included in parties because his parents leave their liquor cabinet unlocked.
Something small finally pinged my subconscious. I had to wait for it to ping again before I could figure out what my pattern recognition software was telling me.
There. That man in the dance, two spots away from Prince John. He was moving a little stiffly, just a hair behind the others. Maybe he was just a bad dancer. But the couples shifted and now he was only one space away from the prince.
Was it the monk—Thaddeus—in civilian clothes?
I saw the man move his hand strangely, and I was certain. The messenger monk was the assassin, and he was slipping something down his sleeve and into his palm. A few more bars of music and the dance would bring him right up to the prince.
I looked at Guilbert and then at James, but neither returned my stare. None of the guards could see from ground level what I could from the gallery. If I yelled, the assassin could easily strike in the chaos before the guards could make it through the ranks of dancers.
I needed telepathy, but that wasn’t my superpower. There was an archer, though, posted just a few feet from me. Moving toward him with my eyes still on the dancers, I knew I wasn’t going to have time to point out the target, and that was if he believed me.
Not all my quick-fire decisions are good ones.
I grabbed the bow from the archer and an arrow from his quiver, nocked, drew, and…and hesitated. Just for an instant, until the assassin was clear in front and behind. I left myself room to miss—
And I did.
The arrow whiffed between the prince and the killer and thunked into a table behind them, vibrating where it stuck out from the wood.
Total pandemon
ium. Exactly what I hadn’t wanted. The dancers reeled back and the royal guard pushed forward, and then someone screamed, “The prince is bleeding!”
The mass of people dispersed, the royal guard shoving them back. Prince John lay on the floor, crimson spattered on the blue silk of his tunic. There was no sign of a weapon or of the man who’d wielded it. Only my arrow, stuck in the table and pointing up to me like an accusing finger.
“Fils de putain!” It was a voice I recognized, and its owner had recognized me. De Corsey looked up at me and for just a moment he was speechless. “Fille de putain! That is Robin Hood.”
I should have used the moment to run. But by the time the thought had worked its way through the crackly static of I missed, I missed, I missed it was too late. Soldiers wrenched the bow from my hand and hauled me up by my arms. I didn’t struggle. My mind had frozen over, preserving the image of the once and future king of England lying bloody on the stones of Nottingham Castle’s great hall, and Isabel, James, and Guilbert staring up at me with expressions of disbelief and betrayal.
I had never been totally alone before.
I’d felt alone with Rob missing, but even so, I always had an inkling he was out there. That one person made up of the same DNA as me was in the world somewhere, and that maybe I could tap some quantum spiderweb of atoms and he would feel it a whole world away.
I’d been by myself, but my parents were only either a phone call or text message away. Same with Coach, and my teammates, and my grandparents.
If I were in modern jail, there were a lot of people who would come bail me out. Will and John were off in Sherwood Forest, though, and Much was safe at his father’s house. But Isabel’s shock and James’s expression of betrayal had clipped the strings of our association, and I’d felt them fall away as the soldiers dragged me into this stinking hole under the castle.
There were other prisoners with me in Nottingham’s dungeon, but I was utterly on my own. The smell was foul, the straw on the ground was foul, the slime on the stone walls was foul. But the foulest thing of all was the sheriff.
“The Robin of Sherwood Forest is a girl.” He stood outside the barred door and gloated.
Everything I’d seen of him made him a cruel, petty, and narcissistic despot. I don’t think he enjoyed making people miserable. I think he just enjoyed how powerful that made him feel.
“I’ve known that for a while now.” My voice shook, despite my best efforts. I was cold and terrified, but as scared as I was to be inside the cell, I was happy he was outside of it. He might have looked directly at me two whole times when I’d been a boy, and that included when he was calling for my death. Since he’d ordered the soldiers to carry me down here, he’d been cataloging my features like he was doing an IRS audit.
“This explains why you were able to fool my soldiers, my foresters—even my deputy,” he said. “You think irrationally, like a woman. Erratically, like a woman.”
“Intelligently, like a woman.”
That went straight over his head, but it made me feel better.
I kept thinking someone must have seen what had really happened. That I had tried to save the prince. That I’d be pardoned. But I had been shivering in this dank cell, enduring the sheriff’s sneers and leers long enough that I knew that wasn’t going to happen.
I hated pleading my case with him because it put me at his nonexistent mercy. But he was the law in Nottingham. “I didn’t aim for the prince. There was a man with a knife. An assassin.”
“Was it a magic knife? Could it disappear into the air?” He was a sarcasm amateur. I could endure his mocking. There were worse tortures than trying to reason with someone who knew only his own logic.
The sheriff strode back and forth in front of the cell. “If you can produce this knife from the air, I might believe you.” He waited. Looked around for a knife to appear. Faked disappointment. “Then it’s the executioner’s ax for you.”
Stay focused. Don’t let him into your head.
“Eventually,” the sheriff amended, and left me to imagine what would happen between now and then.
The idea was a worm that burrowed in and ate through my courage. I was going to die here and I might even be happy about it by the time it happened. I had no rights, no money to bribe someone, no one—no man—to speak up for me. I had no guarantee that anyone would protest anything that happened down here in the dungeon, because I literally did not exist right now.
I didn’t even know if my parents existed right now. And if they did, and I died here, I’d doomed them to a life of never knowing what had happened to me.
Don’t get killed. Don’t change history. How had I screwed this up so badly?
As soon as the sheriff had left, Iron Ellie sank like the Titanic. My knees gave up, my nerves gave up…my badass gave up. I knelt on that horrible floor, gathered the skirt of my dress, and sobbed into the balled-up fabric.
All my life, I’d never failed at anything. But that was because I’d never tackled anything I wasn’t good at. I should have been good at the twelfth century, thanks to Mom and Dad, but I’d crashed and burned and soon I’d be taking modern civilization down too.
I cried myself out quickly and then spent an eternity listening to rats scrabble and water drip. Now and then there was the sound of iron on stone.
Maybe I should get some perspective.
What could I actually do something about? If I had some time before I joined Sir Aethelstan over the bridge, I could ask for parchment and ink. Something durable. Would it be possible to leave my parents a letter and somehow direct it to them care of the twenty-first century?
That sounded like a really far-fetched plot twist.
The sound of a key turning in the outer door brought me to my feet. There must be a rule that dungeon doors had to squeal like a tortured soul. I braced for the worst, and then Henry Guilbert stepped into the meager torchlight.
“Thank God,” I breathed, surprising myself. When had I started being glad to see Guilbert?
He wasn’t expecting that reaction, either. “That’s not the usual thing traitors say when they see me.”
I had a pretty good explanation. “Well, you’re not the sheriff.”
“No,” he said grimly, “I’m not. I suppose you might see it as a blessing that you won’t have to deal with him once you’re transferred to the Tower.”
The floor seemed to take another elevator plummet. I only thought I’d been terrified before. “The Tower of London?” I grabbed onto a bar of the cell and used it to slow my drop to the ground. “Is that where people are drawn and quartered for killing a prince?”
“If they’re lucky.”
I was going to throw up. My heart was going to kick its way out of my chest like a horse out of a stall.
“Fortunately, the prince is not dead.”
“What?” I was still screwed, but maybe history had a chance.
“He got a cut on his arm, and he fainted.” Guilbert’s arms were folded as he looked down at me. “The prevailing theory is that your arrow nicked him when you attempted to kill him.”
I got my legs under me and stood again with the help of the cell bars. “I didn’t nick him. That must have been Brother Thaddeus—the monk—with a knife.”
Guilbert nodded slowly. “Isabel spoke up for you. She said she saw a man lunge at His Highness, and that she thought he had something in his hand, like a knife.”
Not daring to hope, I asked, “Does the prince believe her?”
“No one quite believes her.”
I heard the clank of metal as Guilbert chose a key on the giant iron ring in his hand, and unlocked my door. “However, I do,” he said, pulling the cell door open with another clang. “If you wanted Prince John dead, you wouldn’t have missed.”
Don’t be so sure.
I tried to leave that thought behind in the cell. My legs still trembled as I walked out, half expecting the door to slam closed on me. But Guilbert held it open, and when I wobbled, he steadied
me. I hated to look weak in front of him. But I’d look stupid if I shook him off and then face-planted in the dungeon filth.
“You know what this means?” I said, gaining strength and resolve. “The assassin is still out there. And no one will be expecting him because they think the culprit—me—is safely locked up.” I bounced on my toes, and my knees didn’t fail me. “I wouldn’t put it past someone to plan it that way.”
Guilbert almost smiled. “Now you’re starting to think like a Norman noble.”
Some of the buoyancy went out of me as I got up the courage to ask, “Does James think I tried to kill the prince?”
The captain’s air of command settled back around him, and he gestured toward the door. “Let’s discuss it outside of the dungeon, in case anybody comes.”
I wasn’t sure what to expect when we exited the dungeon into a shadowed corner of the castle bailey. Full dark, yes. A phalanx of guards? I hoped not. But it definitely was not James, wearing his friar’s habit and standing in a circle of torchlight with two unconscious guards at his feet. His smile was downright subversive. “No one ever suspects the cleric,” he said.
Somehow I stopped myself from rushing over to him, and restrained myself to a smile. “Especially not a paladin,” I said. Then I gave him a closer look, because he definitely seemed a lot more Friar Tuck than usual. “Have you put on weight?”
He shucked off his brown robe and cowl. Underneath he wore armor, and he was back in his Templar-blazoned surcoat. I’d missed it.
“Good to see you again, Sir James,” I said, choking on too many emotions to sort out.
He took a full quiver from his back, pulling the strap over his head. “I thought we could use God on our side tonight.”
“To save Prince John?” said someone from the shadows. “I think the devil looks after his own.”
Will stepped into the light, wearing the livery of a Nottingham guard. I grinned, my heart lightening despite the dire fix we were in. When Little John appeared as well, I looked up at my two comrades in my short-lived crime spree and my throat tightened on what I wanted to say. “Will, John, I…”
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