Arthur was familiar with each of those words, but they had no business living in that order. “What?”
“We should build a castle,” his friend repeated. “Rather than move every week, we should just build a castle and stand our ground.”
“I think castles take longer than a week to build.”
“Hm.” David chewed it over. “But you don’t know?”
“If you’re asking if I’ve ever personally—”
David clapped and folded his arms. “I’m gonna build a castle.”
Arthur might have said more, but Will Scarlet made his way closer. His pack was full, and he pushed against his knees with both hands as he ascended the steep ridge. He didn’t stop by them, nor so much as grunt a greeting.
“Gords are building,” Arthur said after he’d passed. “We’ve got to stop them.”
The figure climbed two steps more, and paused. “We can’t.”
“You said we could.”
It was just Will’s back, no more. “I thought we’d have more time, Arthur. Another month, at least. We could’ve recruited some more men from the villages, train them. But … but we’re everyone. We can barely keep them alive, much less fight back. We’re just … we’ve got to move.”
Will Scarlet pushed off again, and Arthur exchanged an uneasy glance with David.
“He’ll think of something,” David urged, as if sensing Arthur’s thoughts. “You’ll see. I’m gonna get that castle.”
Scarlet was first over the edge, and Arthur was halfway up the ravine bank himself when Friar Tuck’s raspy nasal whine caught him. “You can’t leave yet!”
Arthur didn’t turn around to reply. “They’ll catch up.”
“You can’t leave yet,” Tuck repeated. “Lady Marion isn’t back yet.”
A shiver took a little romp through Arthur’s body. It wasn’t the idea of waiting that irritated him, it was the implication that Marion ought to make the call. She hadn’t spent the entirety of winter with them. She’d frequently left for days on end—a week, even—while the rest of them froze. She ate well and did not suffer as they had. This day she’d gone out for a friendly walk as if the morning was made for picnicking instead of survival. Her bodyguard, Sir Amon Swift, also enjoyed a fairer life, rather than lending his desperately needed strength to keeping the group alive.
“She should be back soon enough,” Arthur answered, and heaved up the incline.
“If the Nottingham Guard truly is nearby…”
“She’ll be fine.” He stared at Tuck’s angry little face, his beard shooting out like an animal’s whiskers. “Besides, isn’t your god watching out for her?”
Tuck snorted. “He’s your God, too, whether you like it or not.”
At that, he had to laugh. “Well I wish he wasn’t, then. Seems he hates us of late. Have you tried praying lately? That ought to make life a bit easier.”
“We have to trust in Him.”
“That’s right, he loves us all, doesn’t he? Has a terrible way of showing it.”
It was the same helpless-maiden routine, with a different savior. People waiting for Robin Hood to save them. Waiting for God. Waiting to be saved rather than lifting a finger for themselves.
“He does love us all,” Tuck insisted, because of course he had to. “Despite us, our faults.”
“Well if I had a woman who loved me half the way your god loves us, I think I’d find me another woman.”
“If you’d already found one woman,” David chimed in next to him, “then you wouldn’t have enough coin to find you another one.”
Arthur wagged a finger at his friend. “First order of court, fuck you. Secondly, all I’m saying is that it must give you pause, no?” He threw what he hoped was a piercing gaze down upon Tuck’s ugly little bald head, who answered by way of clenching his jaw. “Maybe your almighty man in the sky isn’t there at all, or that he doesn’t give the first fuck about you? Or maybe the gords in Nottingham prayed harder than we did last night? Or worse, that my grandmother’s pagan gods are up there instead, laughing themselves to shit-all as they listen to you praying to the wrong jackass?”
Tuck didn’t flinch, he just nodded and accepted it. He looked over his shoulder, the entirety of the camp behind him, readying themselves for another day’s miserable march. The friar somehow seemed inspired by it.
“Any halfwit can complain about the hard times,” Tuck said. “There’s no genius in pointing out the very obvious. Our lives are not now what we’d like them to be, and you suppose it takes a brave man like yourself to blame someone else? Well that’s fine. Do it. Complain all you like about how our troubles are proof the Lord hates us, shout it out as loud as you can. I’ll listen to every word, I promise I will, if you make me one promise in return. For every good moment, for every bite you eat, for every night you sleep safely, for every healthy breath you take, for every day your friends laugh at your jokes instead of telling you how intolerable you are … give Him credit for that, too. Every time you want to blame Him for the bad, or say He must not exist since He hasn’t personally attended to your every passing fancy, you must also thank Him for the fact you’re alive enough to have such thoughts. You think the troubles you count outweigh the blessings you don’t?”
Arthur would’ve responded, but he didn’t have the hundred years it would take to get through the friar’s skull. By Tuck’s argument, if Arthur were to lose nine of his fingers, he should be thankful to still have the one. A fine theory for a victim, but a man who thought that way would never be anything else. Tuck couldn’t see the shittiness of their truly shit situation because he’d spent his life blinding himself to reality. Arthur was happily miserable because he was smarter. To know misery is to know exactly what you need to fix.
Tuck continued, not realizing that nobody cared. “Of course I doubt, to answer your question. That’s why we call it faith. And do you? Doubt, that is? Do you look at the arrogant little pile of bitterness you’ve built up in yourself and wonder if maybe there might have been a better path for you? Do you ever watch someone pray, amazed at the solace and comfort they find in the Lord, and realize you’ve never known that kind of peace? You have your laugh at me for keeping faith, and yet you seem so very very sure I’m wrong. What makes your belief better than mine? Tell me, Arthur, do you ever stop to wonder if perhaps you might be wrong, every time you open your damned mouth?”
Beside him, David put a fist to his lips to cover his laughter.
“I’m not intolerable,” Arthur grumbled, but he plopped to the ground and consented to wait.
FOUR
QUILLEN PEVERIL
NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
FROM THE HIGHEST RAMPARTS, the city of Nottingham was too far away. The three-tiered baileys of the castle cascaded down Castle Rock, leaving even the closest structures of the real city well behind several barriers of curtain walls and gates. Good for protection, but terrible for governing. It was too easy up here to forget the troubles on the other side of those walls. Quillen’s grandfather had famously left the castle every day to walk the city streets, something the opportunistic new Sheriff would be terrified to do. Quill leaned over the edge of the battlement as far as possible, loving the streams of white smoke that pulsed up from a hundred chimneys and braziers in the city, but hating the serenity they implied. This soft pleasant cloud of the city’s breath gave no indication it was poisoned and coughing itself to death.
“Hello, city,” he said, mostly confident there was nobody nearby to hear him. “What shall we fix today?”
The city, rudely, did not respond.
Fortunately, Quill didn’t need it to. Like any decent physician, he could divine the source of a problem with or without his patient’s help. Which was—like it or not—why he was here. “Nottingham and Derby are sisters,” his father had explained, “and what ails the one will be caught by the other.” If Nottingham needed it, the Peveril family would reluctantly intervene. It was up to Quill to decide if that was necessary.
Along
the keep wall he chanced upon Jacelyn de Lacy, another member of the Black Guard. Jac was a curious case—a hard woman with a face half-paralyzed by some childhood ailment. Older than him, he guessed, but it was hard to know if her deformity aged with the rest of her. Neither Quill nor Jacelyn had the peacekeeping experience to deserve their position, but such it was with beggars and choosers.
“Still here, then?” he asked, the customary greeting between them.
“You, too?” was always her response. “Help me with this.”
She carried a long roll of burgundy cloth with gold trim, but she set it down and gestured to two chains draped over the front edge of the battlements, fastened to iron mounting rings on their side. They each took one, hoisting in unison the heraldic banner suspended below.
“Confound it, have we been conquered?” he asked.
“Just replacing it. Sheriff’s orders,” she answered, without even the smallest smile. “This one tore itself to shreds in the last storm.”
Indeed, the king’s standard they soon hauled up and over the battlements was in pieces, clinging onto its horizontal pole for dear life. Quill tried to ignore the obvious symbolism. “This is really the best use of the castle’s coin? Pretty new flags for the Sheriff?”
She paused before untying the banner’s knots. “I’m sure you’d rather I not remind you that you owe him fealty.”
“You’d be right. I’d rather you not.” Somewhere in the high keep, the Sheriff William de Ferrers was likely stuffing the soles of his boots. The youngest Sheriff in history by a decade at least, his claim to the title was only an emergency measure. Quill intended on sticking around to see who would replace him—either to influence that choice, or to determine if his father should politick for the seat himself. But Ferrers unfortunately also bore the distinction of being Earl of Derby—which made the Peverils his bannermen, as backward an arrangement as that was. “He can’t keep the seat here for long. I think Chancellor Longchamp would have made a permanent appointment already if not for this distraction of King Richard’s capture.”
Jac just shrugged and concentrated on the banner. Neither of them, strictly speaking, should be doing such menial work. Serving in a guards’ barracks—even the “elite” company of the Black Guard—was an inglorious life and well beneath Quill’s station. But it afforded him the position to watch over Nottingham’s inner workings; and when two Sheriffs are killed in quick succession, those inner workings become suspect.
As for Jacelyn’s part, the first of those two dead Sheriffs had been her uncle.
He shifted toward her. She’d pulled out a knife and was sawing at a particularly troublesome knot. “You hear there was another Robin Hood sighting in Parliament Ward last night?” he asked.
“If I hadn’t heard that,” she glared at him, slashing through the fabric, “you’d be sorry you weren’t the one to tell me.” Her uncle Roger de Lacy had been killed by a simple thief named Will Scarlet, who escaped prison and took the name of Robin Hood, making minor troubles in the forest. “But I already looked into it. Wasn’t him, just a bunch of children. Almost threw radishes at us until they realized they didn’t want to lose their dinner.”
“These sightings in the city, they’re not all children,” Quill said, unsuccessfully prying his fingers into the stubborn ties of the old banner. “Sheriff Ferrers hanged Robin of Locksley, but he only killed the man. The name survived, and is ever more difficult to catch.”
Would that a Robin Hood would show up and do unto this new Sheriff as he had done to his predecessors.
Jac finished with the ties and tore the banner free. “If someone new wants to call himself Robin Hood in the city, then he’s FitzOdo’s problem, not mine.” The Sheriff had tasked Sir Robert FitzOdo and his men with hunting down any Robin Hood rumors, which were usually fruitless. “But Will Scarlet is hiding in the Sherwood, and he’s the one I care about.”
Quill suppressed any reaction. Both of them were only using their positions for their own devices.
She wasn’t one for small talk, but as they went about tying the new banner to the pole, Jac allowed him to recall his morning’s experience with the good Lord Asshole. Exactly half of her seemed to find it amusing. “Going for the little victories today, are we?”
“Any victory is a good victory,” Quill quoted, assuming anyone important had said it before him. “They add up over time, as do the losses. Aim to have victories, then.”
Jacelyn didn’t argue it, she just stood and stretched her back, looking out over the city with him. “The tax certainly doesn’t help.”
“Not a tax,” Quill corrected her. “A ransom.”
“Feels like a tax.”
“Try not to call it that, though. Taxes comes from within England, from the Chancellor. This ransom comes from Austria. The people have every right to be incensed about it. But if you call it a tax, they’ll be incensed at the wrong people.”
“I could call it bullshit,” Jac suggested, “and then I’d be right?”
“That you would.” Quill stared away again. “Bullshit, as we’ve already been bled dry by the war tithes. Bullshit upon Austria for laying hands upon any holy crusader, much less our king. Bullshit to set the ransom at such an irrationally high price, and the greatest bullshit of all that the Chancellor actually chose to pay it! If heaping bullshit upon bullshit could somehow make the former bullshit bullshittier than it was before, only then could it adequately describe the bullshittery of being a proud Englishman in times such as these.
“Or Englishwoman,” he added hastily.
They placed the pole on the battlement ledge and—rather than lower it gently with the chains—simply nudged it to fall over the other side. A second later its tethers went taut and it snapped in place, the fresh new banner unfurling against the wall of the high bailey. A red sea with three lions rampant, the king’s heraldry—no longer torn to shreds. “A waste of coin,” Quill repeated.
“People need to respect it,” Jac replied. “Lest they forget the king is still alive.”
“Hm.” He looked down at the crumpled pile of the old banner. “What should we do with this one, send it to Austria? Let them throw it in a cell?”
At this, finally, Jacelyn cracked a smile. “I heard that King Philip offered Austria half as much just to keep Richard locked up for another year.”
Quill had heard the same. Sixty-five thousand pounds of silver. Higher than any man could fathom—equivalent to three years’ worth of England’s total income. “It’s been a thousand years since France was known as Gaul, but they’ve apparently spent all that time practicing their gall.”
She somehow didn’t appreciate how clever that had been. That was her loss.
“Interesting.” Jac cocked her head. “Derby.”
Quill had no idea how the two were connected. “Excuse me?”
“Derbymen.” She nodded to the east, where a half-dozen bannerettes from Derbyshire, full green with silver trim, were marching unexpectedly through the middle bailey. “Friends of yours?”
“Not likely.” Quill reoriented himself from their idle banter into a tepid alarm. He squinted but could not see any further hint of the visitors’ identities. Ten men, perhaps—enough for a single lord’s retinue. He allowed himself the brief hope that the visitors were from his own family, from Peveril Castle. But he knew better; if his father had any actual desire to be in Nottingham, then Quill wouldn’t be here watching it for him. The contingent below was a question mark … which happened to be one of Quill’s favorite things.
“Shall we investigate?” Quill chirped brightly and started moving, inviting Jacelyn to follow.
* * *
IN THE MODEST TOME that should someday be written about Quillen Peveril’s life, he hoped his intrepid chronicler could capture his skill at preparing for every circumstance. He certainly did not pretend to have any sort of clairvoyant foresight, but he was proud of his ability to anticipate different outcomes so that he might never be caught off guard.
In the rare circumstance where he found himself genuinely surprised, he had learned to hide that reaction. His father had taught him chess at an early age, using an invincible defense of always appearing to expect Quill’s every move. It was a ploy, of course, and one that Quill learned to master.
This is why he was so embarrassed to gasp and sputter for words when he descended the narrow stairwell halfway to the training yard, where he found himself face-to-face with a man he never expected to see there, waving a thick knife wantonly between them.
“I swear to every god, every one there ever was, that I will gut you like a fish if you don’t remove yourself from my path.”
The man was tall, and he had a knife, and those were his only two definitive physical qualities. The rest of him somehow flirted between extremes; his frame was lean but sturdy, his face was deeply weathered but had soft edges. Even his hair was both silver and black, including his tight beard. His eyes might have been gentle if they were not busy being so furious.
“Garble bobble,” Quill’s mouth said.
This is not an accurate account. What’s important is that he did not use any of the greetings he’d crafted as he and Jac descended from the upper keep’s ramparts. He’d prepared a subtle barb disguised as politesse if the visitor was William de Ferrers’s wife, which he had calculated was most likely. He’d whipped up a wonderfully nonchalant greeting for any member of his own family, despite the low odds. He even had an easily adaptable jab he could customize for any notable knight returning home conspicuously early compared to their imprisoned king.
But Quill had no response for the breathtaking rage of a bereaved father.
“I don’t intend on repeating myself,” swore Lord Beneger de Wendenal. This man’s son—his last surviving son, if Quill remembered correctly—had only been Sheriff for a month before Robin of Locksley took his life.
“Put your weapon down,” Jacelyn ordered from behind, revealing a fat dagger of her own. She likely didn’t know the elder Wendenal, nor realize how much she had in common with him. Both of them the surviving kin of dead Sheriffs—and the only real legacy of the name Robin Hood.
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