“Gang members,” Marion scoffed. “Loyal to nobody.”
“You think they’ll follow you?” Arthur asked.
“I know they will. When I led my boys out of Ten Bell Alley into Red Lion Square, we became the strongest gang in Nottingham. They’re still there. They’ll know about Robin Hood—and right now that’s me. They’re sure to follow the man who killed the last two Sheriffs. I get my boys again, we get a useful crew, we get back to making a difference.”
He smiled, and for a moment it reminded Marion of the charismatic man he’d been a year ago. Confident. Cocky, perhaps, but only because he could back it up. It was good to see that drive in him. She honestly wished they could just slip back into their old ways. But even his boldest words didn’t make his idea any less of a disaster.
“And what about everyone else?” Marion asked, searching the crowd. Women and children looked back at her—the very people Will had just labeled useless. “These families, they’re supposed to … what? Wait here until you come back? If you come back? With no protection in the meanwhile?”
“I’ll only need a few days.”
“What if we have to run? How would you find us?”
“We’ll work out the details. God’s tits, I know it’s not perfect, but we need the help. I can get the men, I can bring twenty of them back here, ready to fight!” Will humphed. “Let’s let everyone choose. Those who want to run away and beg for handouts from some rich lord are welcome to do so. Welcome to go back to living like slaves, and wait until this all happens again. But those who have any amount of self-respect can follow me.”
“And by follow me,” she clarified for him, “he means stay here. And hope he comes back.”
“I’ll be back,” he said, with a perfect calm, “before you even get to Huntingdon.”
She hated him in that moment. For offering them easy answers he couldn’t back up. The group murmured with indecision. It was beyond reason that any of them even hesitated. She spat under her breath at Will, “Why do you have to be so stubborn about everything?”
“I’m not being stubborn, goddammit!” he said at full voice, halting the murmur. “I’m being faithful! Faithful to the people who died, that you clearly don’t give the first shit about. I’m the only one trying to make sure they didn’t die for nothing!”
Marion tried to hide her fury. She started one sentence, thought better of it, started, and stopped again. She tried to roll it up, but the ball wouldn’t form, it resisted until she couldn’t hold it back. “I didn’t realize you had a monopoly on grief.”
Stillness. Even the wind silenced itself, leaving nothing but the tall tree-spears around them and tiny Will Scarlet suddenly on the edge of madness. It was Will’s voice, but his lips didn’t move. “Don’t go there.”
She had to bite her lip to keep from breaking. “You’re not the only person who lost someone they loved,” she whispered.
“I didn’t lose anyone!” Will yelled back. “Mine were taken from me. Ripped out of my hands, right out of my fucking hands! At least Robin died doing something he believed in, he died the way we all ought to die. He died fighting for you and you’re just walking away from him.”
She slapped him. Hard.
For a moment Will reeled, and then he slapped her back. Just as hard. Not harder.
It stung, and her ear rang—she must have been knocked backward because she was in Sir Amon’s arms. Once she was on her feet again, Amon positioned himself between them, his sword whispered out of its scabbard. Will kept his eyes on Marion, utterly ignoring the steel point now trained on him.
“You have no idea how lucky you are.” Will’s voice was terrible, and his face even worse. Tears streaked down both cheeks, his skin was nearly purple, and not from bruising. “Robin died a hero. You have that, at least. What do I have?” He pounded his chest. “Elena died a traitor. You really want to compare scars?”
Marion touched Amon’s arm, who obeyed without question. His sword vanished as though it had only been a thought. “Will.” She reached her hand out, palm up, begging for him to join her. “You have to let her go. You can’t do this for her, you can’t. If you go to Nottingham, it will be suicide.”
In retrospect, she should not have used that final word. It found whatever softness he had left within him and dried it to chalk. “You want to run away, then hurry up.” His eyes looked through her, at nothing. “I’m not coming with you. That would be suicide. Because I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”
There were no more words to be said after that. Will picked up his pack and marched himself up the ridge, halfway to forever. Something tugged downward inside Marion, grounding her where she stood, feeling even more helpless than ever. She had neither the words to unite her people, nor the ability to tear herself in half and go with both groups. The others were now loudly making their own decisions.
Arthur a Bland and David of Doncaster spoke in hushed tones, and Marion approached them. “You know we need you.”
David bit his lip.
“I think Will needs us more,” Arthur answered, and would not meet her eye.
She didn’t want to lose them. “It’s a long road. You two are the best hunters we have.”
“But when you get there, it sounds like you’ll be safe. And fed. And then what?” Arthur swallowed hard. “You’re saving these people … that’s good, it is. But the Guard is still coming, still going to look for us here. We’d be abandoning all the people who’ve helped us in the villages. They’ll suffer for it. They’re waiting for us to come back. I don’t know. Leaving for this earl of yours … it seems … I think it seems selfish.”
That hurt. Selfish was the last thing Marion thought she deserved to be called.
But by the end of it, thank God, it seemed there was no real decision to be made at all. Only Arthur and David stood by Will, volunteering to go with him to Nottingham. They tried to instill a sense of adventure and righteousness into some of the other men, but most had never developed the temperament for a criminal life.
“Come on then, Stutely,” David coddled the bloated nomad whose mouth was as large as his belly, but Marion could tell that even he did not want to go. “You’ll finally get a chance to show us how brave you say you are.”
Will Stutely hung his head and followed Scarlet like a dog.
Charley Dancer struggled greatly with his choice, but Arthur took the burden away from him. “You’ll be no good to us, Charley. That leg of yours will slow us down. It’s not fair, I know, but that’s the way of things.”
David slapped John Little’s back, trying to smooth over the tension. “Come off it.” He smiled. “Let’s not make a big deal out of this. We’re splitting up, is all.”
“It’s good strategy, really,” Arthur seconded. “It will make it harder for them to find us.”
“Splitting up?” Marion was hardly able to hide the vile taste of the day. Losing four strong men would be devastating for what lay ahead. “Why don’t you try counting, Arthur? There are three of you following Will, and a hundred of us that are not. This is not splitting up. This is you abandoning us. I don’t care how you want to sell it to yourself.”
David looked genuinely hurt. “We’re not abandoning you, Marion. We’re going to get more men from Nottingham, and we’re going to rebuild. We’ll come back, and anyone here can come back, too. We’ll keep going like before.”
The murmur from the crowd said they did not believe him.
“This isn’t the end,” Arthur insisted.
“It is,” Marion laughed. “Will’s a river rat. He’s going home. And anybody who follows him is going to drown.” She slung a hemp sack over her shoulders and nodded to John Little, steady and somber. “Let’s go, everyone. We have a long way to go, and the work just got harder.”
SIX
ARABLE DE BUREL
SHERWOOD FOREST
ARABLE LISTENED TO HIS words, but her only surprise was in how little they affected her. Will Scarlet was apologizing
, in the same curiously whispered breath he always used with her, his eyebrows praying together for her approval.
“I understand,” she said, because she did.
His eyes begged for more, maybe he wanted her to kick and wail. Maybe he knew what it meant that she didn’t. She couldn’t say, It’s fine, because it wasn’t. Nor could she say, I’m furious, because in truth she didn’t feel anything at all about it, because how could she? She was a sailboat in an endless squall, weathering blow after merciless blow. There was no sense in being angry with any single wave.
“We wouldn’t be more than a day or so, three or four at the most. You could wait for us,” he suggested.
“That’s not … no.” Arable’s vote had been the only one for staying in the Sherwood and waiting on Will’s return. She had no desire to follow Marion’s group to Huntingdon, but waiting alone in the forest would be a deadly price to pay for stubbornness.
“We’ll get more men, then, and come get you in Huntingdon.” Will shifted from looking off in one meaningless direction to another. “Huntingdon’s actually a good idea for most of this group. You drop off the families there, and be free of them. And Marion. Then the rest of us, and the new crew I recruit from Nottingham, we’ll get back to it. You included. First we stop them from building their outposts, then we start hitting noblemen again. But we don’t stop at jewelry this time. We’ll take back what we had, and then we go five steps beyond.”
“I said I understand.”
She understood better than he, how unlikely it was for them to find each other again. If he was delayed in Nottingham. If the Guard built faster than they could fight back. And through all of it, there’d be no way to communicate. The idea that Will would abandon this new fight of his to fetch her in Huntingdon was a fantasy. He would be the one free of Marion, while Arable would be trapped with her now more than ever. Even Arthur and David—the closest things she had to friends in this group—were leaving with Will.
“I wish I could go with you,” she admitted.
His face tensed. “You could.”
But she couldn’t.
Arable de Burel could never return to Nottingham, not under any circumstance. Not for an hour, not a minute, certainly not “a day or so, or three or four at the most.” The city was full of her ghosts. Her father, and her mentor, and her lover—all three murdered in Nottingham. Their memories haunted the land for a dozen miles in every direction. Even if she could bear its sight, she was wanted as a traitor there. And unlike Will, her scarred face was known by every Guardsman and scullery maid in the castle.
She knelt to pack up her bedroll, which was also her rain cloak. The flattened bracken on its downside she brushed away with a bare hand. The rest of her belongings, which hardly counted as plural, were already in her sack. That was all it took to pack her entire life.
Will clearly recognized the depravity of her action, and his face writhed to express some sort of sympathy. She barely recognized the gesture on him. His once youthful features were devoured by his unkempt mourning beard, and months of unwashed dirt stained his skin dark and turned his blond hair to russet. He looked now more like the feral murderer that she’d once wanted to believe he was.
“Thank you,” she said, in case she never had another chance to. Through the bitter days of winter, he’d always looked to her comfort before his own. His care for her was practically religious, and appropriately born of equal parts gratitude and guilt. It might have been the only task that kept him sane. But aside from that penance, he kept his distance from her. Whether he associated Arable with the death of his lover, Elena, or if he simply couldn’t suffer the guilt of spending any time alone with another woman, Arable couldn’t know. His visits lasted only long enough to ensure her survival, and then he’d return to whatever cave of grief he had clawed into his mind.
Without him, there’d be nobody between her and Lady Marion.
Will practically read her thoughts. “I’m sorry to leave you with her.”
She could only laugh. “She sure thinks a lot of herself. And she has a knack for riling sympathy from the masses, I’ll grant her that. But it’s all selfishness. Marion … cares about Marion.”
His mouth tensed into a knowing nod.
“It’s not just her, though. Everyone blames me for what happened to Robin, but if Marion had just been decent enough to tell her own people her plans…” Six weeks earlier—at Robin of Locksley’s request—she’d led him and John Little into Nottingham Castle, from which Robin would never return. Nobody cared that their rescue mission failed because Marion turned them away. That she didn’t want to be rescued. That she was chasing her own ambitions. They just knew that Arable was the one who took Robin there. Half the group saw her as a symbol of their troubles, while the others suspected she’d outright betrayed them. Some avoided her entirely, and she likewise kept to the outskirts and talked to almost nobody.
Even the villages within the forest who had once protected them now refused them sanctuary. Their crops were sick, their fields were burnt, but they did not blame Sheriff Ferrers who had done it, no.
They blamed the death of Robin Hood.
Whose death was really on Marion, not Arable. “But somehow I’m the curse.”
“John Little likes you,” Will tried. “And I’ll ask the Delaney brothers to look after you.”
“I hate you, you know.”
The words caught both of them off guard, and for maybe the first time since autumn, Will looked her full in the eyes. She wasn’t sure why she said it, aside from the ravenous feeling that it might be her last chance to ever speak with him.
So she opened her mouth. “The Sheriff, Roger de Lacy, he was dear to me. You took that.” Will reacted as if he’d been punched in the chest, or harder somehow into his soul, exposed and raw. Tears came to Arable’s eyes, but they did not distract her. “But Will, there’s more than just hate. I can hate you and still be thankful for you. I can hate you and still wish you the peace you deserve. I can hate you and miss you, and I will. Hate doesn’t destroy everything else, not if we don’t let it.”
His eyes were red, his face rifled through every emotion it knew.
“Why tell me that?” he asked.
“Because I think you need to hear it. You and I have a lot in common.”
“Do you think I hate you?”
“No.” She brought her hands up to his cheeks. “I think you hate you.”
She kissed his forehead and stepped away, wiping her eyes. She could tell he wanted to say more, but he wasn’t good at such things. There was no need for any grand farewells, it was better to whimper off. She crossed her arms and winced. Her stomach chose to split the silence, ripping a sickening growl that even Will had to raise his eyebrows at. Her body was not doing well lately, her hunger kept her on edge all the time.
“The Delaneys. I’ll see to it. They’ll make sure you eat, at least.”
That was the only way he could show that he cared, this functional thing. He thought it was made stronger by repeating it. All she could do was shrug her shoulders. She recognized it as a kindness, but she wasn’t in the mood for accepting any. Making sure she ate shouldn’t be a favor. But to those she was left with, she was only a mouth to feed—she’d even overheard Marion once say exactly as much. Arable could hardly pretend she was much use to the group’s survival, but if Lady Marion Fitzwalter alone was left to judge her value, then Arable wouldn’t receive the last scrap of charred fat to suck on.
Whatever lay waiting for them in Huntingdon, Arable doubted greatly that it was safety. This Earl of Huntingdon would offer Marion some new opportunities to rise, to be certain—but Arable and the rest of the group were likely just stepping stones to keep the dear lady’s feet out of the mud.
“Good luck, Arable,” Will managed as he left.
She clicked her tongue, and sighed. “Good luck, Robin Hood.”
His beard twitched, almost as if there were a smile somewhere beneath it.
S
EVEN
QUILLEN PEVERIL
NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
THE DOORS TO THE office of William de Ferrers—Fourth Earl of Derby, High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and the Royal Forests—crumpled like paper as Lord Beneger tore into the room.
The Sheriff’s official chamber was wide enough to encompass much of the upper keep’s second floor, brightly lit by slender windows that looked out over the highest bailey. The previous sheriff, Lord Beneger’s son, had never used the room. Ferrers had reclaimed it for its original purpose, presumably to aggrandize his authority; but it had the opposite effect on Ferrers’s near-skeletal body. Quill had to look twice to even find the Sheriff, who was leaning against one of the room’s thick support pillars and rendered effectively invisible.
To Quill’s delight, the Sheriff made an audible gulp.
The Peverils were Derbymen, and no self-respecting Derbyman cared a stitch for the opportunism of the Ferrers family. Quill had been loath to see this young Ferrers sworn in on his first day of office as High Sheriff, and he was equally thrilled to be the sole witness to the beautiful transition of power that was about to occur.
“I came to see my son.” Beneger’s words had the razor precision of rehearsal. “I received notice he’d been made Sheriff.”
Ferrers’s demeanor normally carried an affected deliberation, a poor facsimile of grace. This made it all the more rewarding to watch the little weasel stumble back in the face of Lord Beneger’s rage.
“This is inappropriate,” was all Ferrers could say.
“Imagine a father’s joy, imagine how proud I was. My son, William, my last living son. My only surviving son.” Indeed, the two elder brothers had died fifteen years earlier as hostages of the now-destroyed Burel family. Lord Beneger’s hatred for the Ferrers family was second only to that for the Burels, whom he had neatly eradicated from England.
Beneger drove forward slowly, hunting Ferrers as he wound backward through the pillars of the room. Quill positioned himself at the room’s entrance, a subtle implication that Ferrers would find no escape there.
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