Lionhearts

by Nathan Makaryk

  Beneath her feet was the story of the last six weeks, broken into char and ash. After Sheriff Roger de Lacy’s funeral, fire brigades from the castle traveled the Sherwood Road daily, setting ablaze the trees on either side of it. Arable had worked with the remnants of Robin of Locksley’s men, sending every Guardsman they found limping back to Nottingham. Will Scarlet had claimed the mantle of Robin Hood—and though nobody within the group had yet taken to calling him that, the Nottingham Guard would never forget the name.

  But for every brigade they stopped, there were three more they never even knew about. Mile upon mile met the torch. The brigades only ceased when the weather turned too terrible to bear, but ash rained for a month. Smaller streams became poisoned, killing much of the wildlife they needed to survive, and what little natural food could be found was rendered withered and deadly.

  Still they fought on—even if sometimes that meant no more than spreading the truth of what the Sheriff was doing. The Guard could take resources, but in doing so they made themselves more enemies. Once winter was over, Will Scarlet promised they would regroup, regrow their numbers from sympathetic villages, and flourish again. Until then, the momentum was well against them, and they tried to keep their encounters with the Guard short and safe. They did their best to turn scouting Guardsmen back to the castle by being just nuisance enough to be more hindrance than worth.

  As the earth beneath Arable’s boots turned from snow to slush to burnt bark, the Sherwood Road revealed itself through gaps in the trees, extending off to the north and south. Though it made a serpentine path through the Sherwood, the fires had extended the margins of the road tenfold on either side, where at last she saw the subject of Arthur’s worry.

  A large square patch of dark soil.

  Ten paces long on each side, the area had been leveled and cleared of any offending refuse. At its center were the remains of a makeshift campfire.

  “Keep your eyes open,” Arthur commanded, emerging slowly from the trees, wary of the open space. “Might be gords nearby.”

  If there was indeed some regiment of the Nottingham Guard lying in wait for them—which there wasn’t—she would be in far more danger than Arthur or David. Theirs were just a couple of unknown, bearded faces, and it was no crime for commonfolk to walk the Sherwood Road. But many in the Guard would recognize Arable on sight. Even those that didn’t know her personally could identify her by the two straight scars defining her cheeks.

  In Nottingham, she was famous for stabbing Captain Gisbourne in the back.

  In Nottingham, she was known as the traitor who freed Will Scarlet from prison.

  Thankfully—she exhaled in relief—there were no Guardsmen here to point any fingers.

  “I don’t see any tracks.” David’s voice was singsong. He craned his lean neck about to investigate the area. “Rained some, last night. If anyone’s been here since, it’d be obvious.”

  “Well you can still keep your eyes open,” Arthur growled. “I didn’t say get ready for a fight, I just said keep your eyes open.”

  “Were you worried I was going to wander around with my eyes closed?” David returned. “Good thing you told me to keep my eyes open, that was a strategy I had not considered.”

  “For fuck’s sake!” Arthur spread his hands out wide, but there was a smile behind his scowl.

  “So why do we care about this campsite?” Arable asked.

  Arthur had clearly been dying to answer the question. He raised a finger and outlined its square perimeter. “I don’t think it’s a campsite.”

  “There’s a campfire.” She pointed, rather certain she’d perfectly solved the mystery.

  “True, but nothing else makes sense. It’s too large an area, and why bother flattening it all down like this? Why a square? And who would make camp in the middle of ash, when they could take a few fucking steps into the woods?”

  “Because it’s flatter here.”

  “Nobody camps right next to the road,” Arthur said with finality.

  “And yet…” She splayed her fingers out at the campsite, which was, quite obviously, right next to the road.

  David laughed, but he seemed to understand Arthur’s point. The two of them reminded her sometimes of Reginold and Bolt, two Guardsmen she’d befriended in Nottingham before that life fell apart. It was curious how life worked sometimes, when the same patterns and relationships appeared in completely unconnected people. Their banter, the way they’d both tease her and include her, she’d known it before.

  “I think it’s an outpost.” Arthur’s eyebrows bounced. “The size of this footprint, right next to the road? I think they’re planning to build something, maybe a little tower.”

  “A little tower?” David snorted. “So they can see the trees a little better?”

  “I said maybe a tower. Something, is what it is.”

  “It is certainly something,” Arable confirmed.

  “There were people here when I saw it yesterday,” Arthur defended himself.

  “Guardsmen?” she asked.

  His mouth twisted. “Couldn’t tell. They weren’t in uniform, but could still be workers from the castle.”

  Arable raised her most skeptical eyebrow.

  “Don’t act like this was a complete waste of time! There were tents, horses, too. Thought they might’ve left some food behind.”

  “Admittedly, that happens a lot.” David shared his grin with Arable. “Oh we’ve got too much food, why don’t we just leave it here in the dirt? Better than putting it back in the pack, innit?”

  “Fuck you both.”

  “The Nottingham Guard has never stationed anyone in the Sherwood before,” David said, then turned to Arable for validation. “Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well I’ve never kicked your teeth in before,” Arthur cocked his head, “but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t.”

  “Oh, I am very tall,” David proved it, “and you are not so flexible.”

  “I could bring your head to the ground first—” Arthur moved to tackle his friend, and the two of them slapped at each other and vied for leverage. But Arable was drawn toward the campfire’s pit, and the tiny flecks of trash lingering at its edges. She crouched down to look closer.

  “You might be right,” she said, ceasing the boys’ bickering.

  “What?”

  “Could be coincidence…” She picked through the ash at the side of the fire ring. There was an unnotable piece of twine charred at both sides, barely a finger long. “But string just like this … it’s what we’d use to tie up bundles of food for Guardsmen going out on patrol.”

  David made a face. “A piece of string, that’s proof?”

  “No.” She brushed her hands off. “But it’s plausible.”

  Arthur snapped his fingers. “Which is exactly why I asked her to come.”

  “Thank you.”

  She hated to say that. She shouldn’t have to thank them for considering her expertise valuable. Her history within Nottingham Castle was an asset, not a scandal, and taking advantage of her knowledge should have been an obvious strategy, not a clever one.

  “So they’re building outposts…” David squinted down the road. “What does that mean?”

  Arthur inhaled heavily. “It means Will was right. Gords are moving into the Sherwood, hoping for a permanent presence. We’ve got to make sure they don’t.”

  “But Will thought we had another month at least,” David said, his focus far away. “Didn’t think they’d move until winter was over.”

  “Sneaky little shits.” Arthur crossed his arms. “But we’ll be ready for them.”

  No, they wouldn’t be. It was a death sentence, Arable knew it. They weren’t ready for this. They’d been able to turn most prying Guardsmen away with little acts—stealing their food, loosing their horses, anything that forced them to return to the castle for supplies. But if the Guard fortified an area inside the Sherwood, that was a new set of rules. Scarlet’s group couldn’t stop t
hem—not now, at least.

  They had barely survived thus far. Some of them hadn’t. There were elderly in the group who had passed. Most of their time was spent scavenging to survive, and they were failing at that, too. They simply didn’t have the resources to go on the offensive. Arable had cast her lot in with the group at their worst hour, at the cost of burning every other bridge she had. She did not want to die with them, but she had nowhere else to conveniently do so.

  “Aw, fack,” David said suddenly, his eyes narrowing. Then, just as quickly, “Keep talking, don’t act anything strange now.”

  This proved there was no more certain way to make Arable act like an imbecile than to order her to act normally. She had no idea what to do with her hands, her body somehow made five different poses at once, all while she struggled to understand why it was doing anything at all.

  During her unintelligible display, David knelt down and unslung his longbow, quietly readying an arrow. He raised its tip directly to Arable’s navel, then he drew the string back forcefully and pushed the bow forward, ready to spear a hole right through her stomach.

  Arable’s mouth waggled open, probably trying to escape the rest of her imminently doomed body. She prepared a masterful argument as to why she should not be murdered like this, which escaped her lips in the form of a discreet squeak. She had apparently forgotten how to breathe, too.

  “And … move,” David ordered, so she did.

  The arrow sprang from the bow with sickening strength, missing her by a hairswidth. Her attention snapped to its flight, down the Sherwood Road a good distance to then vanish unimportantly into dense black thicket.

  For more than a few seconds nothing happened, which seemed like such a good idea that nothing went ahead and kept on happening for a good while more. Still David didn’t move, his eyes sharp and piercing down the road. Eventually he relaxed, but only for a breath—a heartbeat later, he nocked another arrow and sent it screaming after the first.

  And as it flew, the tiny distant silhouette of a man’s body rose from the thicket in question and retreated south down the Sherwood Road.

  “Fack indeed.” Arthur shook his head.

  Somebody had been watching.

  David started chasing the intruder, but Arable snatched his arm and turned him around. “Let him go,” she urged. “We need to get away. Now.”

  David allowed himself to be drawn back into the woods from where they’d come, while Arthur let an impressive slurry of expletives fly. If it was a Guardsman, then more were nearby after all. And if not, they would come soon anyway, to start building their outpost.

  This instinct, again, was something of Arable’s expertise.

  She’d spent her life on the run. Ever since Lord Beneger de Wendenal had decimated her father’s home and chased every last Burel from England, Arable had been fleeing. It was ingrained in her soul—only half of her ever able to focus on the present, the rest of her always looking for escape paths, calculating the things that could go wrong.

  So when she said it was time to run, it bloody well was.

  TWO

  QUILLEN PEVERIL

  NOTTINGHAM CASTLE

  BARE CASTLE WALLS DEFINED the corridors through which Quillen Peveril was half dragged by Lord Asshole. Months ago, those walls had been appropriately furnished with all the resplendent tapestries and ornamentation that befit a castle of Nottingham’s notoriety. But such embellishments had been systematically removed by Sheriff William de Ferrers in light of the king’s ransom collections. Whether each adornment had actually been sold for coin or simply moved into storage, Quill did not know. He disliked seeing the castle so naked, but in truth he did not care about decorations at all in this moment. He only focused on the missing tapestries because it was such a favorable alternative to looking at Lord Asshole’s big asshole face.

  “I have a big asshole face,” he growled.

  To be fair, these are not the words he said, but they were certainly the ones Quill heard.

  The man’s bloated and puckered facial features looked as much like an asshole as could be possible before one would have to pity it as a deformity. His nose excreted out and away from the rest of the face—a wise move on the nose’s part—but then drooped down until it nearly touched the man’s lip. The abrasion across the bridge of his nose was still wet and red, and blood crusted at both nostrils. Frankly, the wound was an improvement on the man’s appearance, but there was little Quill could give the man that would improve his personality.

  Lords like this one thought the world was theirs to shit upon.

  They barreled into the captain’s room unannounced. The chamber was well lit by two tall openings to the east, revealing a maelstrom of unsorted parchment on the desk that spoke to Fulcher de Grendon’s disdain for clerical work. The old Sheriff, the old Captain, and half his Black Guard had been slaughtered by the villain Robin Hood. Those that replaced them were all new to their office, or—like Quill—to Nottingham as well. De Grendon had received the dubious promotion to Captain of Nottingham’s Guard a month ago, but his military skills had not yet translated into administrative ones.

  Lord Asshole did not stop, more likely a result of momentum than decision, pounding into the captain’s desk. “Your name Captain Grendon?” he demanded.

  Quill was impressed—here was a man so important he had no use for verbs.

  The new captain, who was seated at his table with a palm over his forehead, blinked exactly once. “Your lordship, my name is Fulcher de Grendon,” he corrected, sliding his hands back to fuss with the leather tie of his ponytail. “And I do happen to be Captain of the Sheriff’s Guard, Nottingham.”

  “That’s what I asked you,” Asshole complained.

  It wasn’t.

  “It wasn’t,” Quill had to say.

  “Guardsman.” De Grendon’s stare lingered into a harsh command for obedience.

  Quill put his hands up in a simple apology. “Very well. I concede there are more immediate problems to be discussed.”

  The captain squinted. “Such as the blood on his nose?”

  Quill nodded. “Such as the blood on his nose.”

  “Such as the blood on my fucking nose!” Asshole was quite pleased with his creative addition to the sentence. “I’ve brought your man here to be reprimanded.”

  “Which I assure your lordship, he shall be.” The captain fidgeted at his doublet, clearly unsure if this meant the conversation was over. “Thank you for bringing him to me.”

  “I showed him the way, actually,” Quill corrected. “As he did not know where your office was.”

  “Quillen.” This time, Quill could see the red in de Grendon’s eyes. He needed no further aggravating, not from Nottingham, not from Quill, and certainly not from his arrogant lordship.

  “Apologies,” Quill said, and the man seemed genuinely thankful for it.

  “Well then, Guardsman.” De Grendon’s beady eyes blinked twice and he summoned one of his more captainly voices. “What exactly am I reprimanding you for?”

  “He tried to arrest me!” Asshole raged, with all the grace of a cow rolling down a hill. “With no cause!”

  “Not without cause.” Quill raised a finger. “Simply without precedent.”

  De Grendon quieted them with a wave of his hand. “I’m sure this was a misunderstanding. I hope you can accept the Nottingham Guard’s sincerest apology.” His tone, however, had shifted from irritation to curiosity. “What did you attempt to arrest this man for, Guardsman?”

  “Public defecation.”

  “Don’t you lie!” Lord Asshole erupted, waggling his arms about uselessly. “Wasn’t anything like that. I was taking a shit, is all.”

  “My mistake.”

  “You need to reprimand him immediately!” Lord Asshole continued his arm waggling. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

  “The odds are staggeringly against it,” Quill pointed out.

  “I’m Lord Asshole of York,” Lord Asshole announced. Again—to
be fair—this wasn’t what he actually said. But Quill had already equated the man’s real name, Lord Brayden, with asshole so completely that he could no longer hear any distinction between the two. “And if I need to shit in your street, then I’ll shit in your street.”

  De Grendon nodded the appropriate number of times for a sensible person to digest such a statement. No doubt these were not the sort of disputes he thought he would have to settle as captain. “And why did you need to shit in my street again?”

  “God’s balls, have you never had to shit before?”

  “I have to shit right now,” Quill told the ceiling. “But you’ll notice I’m not. I suppose not everyone has my self-restraint.”

  “Remarkable,” the captain agreed. “And you’re in some way responsible for bloodying his lordship’s nose?”

  Quill answered with truth equal to pride. “Not just in some way, but in all the ways. I punched him in the face.”

  “Ah.” Fulcher seemed to expect that, the faintest smile tugging the corner of his lips. “You know, you could have waited at least a sentence or two after boasting of your self-restraint to admit that.”

  “Point taken.”

  Lord Asshole caught up and blurted out, “He punched me in the fucking face! He needs to be reprimanded immediately!”

  He blustered and blobbered about, forcing Quill to think of new words to describe his blumbibbery.

  “I must admit,” Quill crossed his arms, “I have acted in a manner most unbecoming of the Guard. I agree, you should reprimand me.”

  The captain nodded. “For punching his lordship in the face.”

  “Oh no. The man worked very hard to deserve that. I ought to be commended for that, not reprimanded. I should be reprimanded because my doublet was unfastened at the time.”

  More billabusting and bollybrustles from Lord Asshole. “What? You’re a fucking idiot.”