Little Bitch leaned into it and let the rope fly, and Will stepped into its circle and grabbed at the tether as it reached him. It tangled in his hands and the knife slapped him across his chest, but its momentum was dead. Scarlet tugged the weapon with both hands, and it flew from the girl’s grasp to flap uselessly against the wall. She stumbled to chase after it, then turned to run in the other direction, but Arthur was already there. He snatched one of her wrists and twisted it to bring her to her knees.
“Let me go!” she whimpered.
“No,” Arthur said, embellishing the word. “No no no! I get to say it as many times as I want now. No no no no!”
“Fourth of all,” Will said as he walked up to them, “your boys deserted you.”
Arthur glanced up, and sure enough both boys were gone, ferreted away once they lost the upper hand.
“Limp dicks,” she muttered at them.
“They weren’t very good anyhow.” Will knelt down in front of her. “But you’re not half-bad.”
Arthur could see a bloody streak across Will’s chest and forearm where the knife had bit. He’d walked right into it. The long cut wasn’t bleeding badly, but there’s no way Will could’ve planned that. He could’ve sliced himself deep and bled out in the mud, all for nothing.
Anybody who follows him is going to drown.
“Will,” Arthur said. “We’d best move on then.”
Will kept his eyes tight on the girl, but there was thankfully no sign of animosity in them. “I want you to take me to whoever’s running the Red Lions.”
The girl laughed. “And what makes you think I’m not running the Red Lions?”
“I think you can run your mouth,” Will smiled, “and that’s about it. So if you can’t arrange this for me, then I don’t have much use for you. Don’t make me get creative with the ways I have to threaten you, just trust that you wouldn’t enjoy them.”
She kept quiet, fidgeted a bit, but didn’t struggle against Arthur’s grip. “It’ll take a little time,” she conceded. “And I can’t promise anything. The Lions aren’t going to listen to me, they don’t even know who I am. But I could get them a message. Why would they want to meet with you?”
“You just have to tell them who he is,” Arthur said. “Tell their leader that Robin Hood wants to talk to him.”
Arthur couldn’t have expected the girl’s reaction, and clearly Will didn’t, either. It started with a choke, then rolled into a ridiculous giddy giggle that made Arthur let her go as she dropped to the ground laughing.
“Alright, I’ll do that, shall I?” She stood up and mimed shaking hands with no one. “How am I? Very well, nice to meet me!”
“What are you going on about?” Arthur asked.
“Nothing!” She shrugged. “I can’t wait to see what’ll happen when I tell Robin Hood that Robin Hood wants to talk to him.”
TWELVE
QUILLEN PEVERIL
SHERWOOD FOREST
FRIDAY, 17TH DAY OF JANUARY
Three little words that meant everything.
Are you important?
ONE WOULD HAVE THOUGHT, in a kinder world, that the unfortunate tale of the great defecator Lord Asshole was over. Caring about any detail of Lord Brayden of York’s life—including his real name—was a torture all its own. Quill didn’t want to know how he attained his title, or anything about his family. But the odds seemed very likely that the man was dead, and Quillen Peveril was regrettably qualified to identify the body.
It was why the six of them had taken to horse and ridden out of Nottingham, following up on stories of an ornate carriage overthrown off the side of the Sherwood Road. A messenger from York had come inquiring about Lord Brayden, who was still expected at home even though he’d left Nottingham four days earlier. Searching for the man should have been procedural work, but the inborn fool that brought news of the abandoned carriage was also foolish enough to mutter the name Robin Hood.
Those two words escalated the matter to the attention of Lord Beneger de Wendenal, and the team of bounty hunters he’d enlisted to hunt for his son’s murderer.
The Grieving Father of Nottingham, some called him, even though he was from Derby. Lord Death, another had whispered, but Quill found that name a bit melodramatic. Someone cleverer had come up with the rhyme Beneger the Revenger, although not to his face. But his loyal Derbymen—a dozen swordarms who had garrisoned in the middle bailey, openly hostile to anyone who showed them attention—simply called the man Ben.
“Still here, then?” Quill asked of Jacelyn de Lacy, who was riding beside him.
“You too?” she responded, as always.
De Grendon had availed the Black Guard to Beneger’s hunt and recommended Quill specifically for this search, given his familiarity with the victim. It was admittedly a nice break from walking the midnight wall, and Quill was happy to share stories with his stony-faced counterpart.
“I’m only here because Lord Beneger thinks we’re friends,” Jac huffed.
Quill hesitated to ask. “Aren’t we?”
She turned enough that her good eye could squint at him, as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re not the bottom of the list.”
That oddly put him at ease. From Jac, it was practically a love letter.
The three others in their group kept the pace methodically slow. Lord Beneger had recruited the Coward Knight and his two minions onto his hunt party, on account of their supposed experience hunting Robin Hood. Sir Robert FitzOdo was an incompetent ox, granted the ability to speak through some sort of magic. He had joined the Nottingham Guard in the winter, on loan from the Baron of Tickhill Castle, along with his impossibly more useless assistants Derrick and Ronnell. Quill dropped his horse to the rear, just in case their brickheadedness was the result of something contagious.
“Are you important?”
* * *
“YOU’VE FACED THESE TRAITORS before,” Lord Beneger said. He had not slowed his horse, but simply motioned for Quillen to hasten and ride beside him.
His words had an oddly accusatory nature. “I did,” Quill answered, “but only once. Jacelyn was there as well, as was FitzOdo.”
“And I’ve spoken with them about it. Now I’m speaking with you. Would you be able to identify Will Scarlet on sight?”
Quill mulled it over. He’d only seen Will Scarlet once, in the mist outside Bernesdale, during the ambush. Panic could do queer things to one’s memories. “Maybe. But if he’s grown a beard out, or his hair, I think he could pass me in the city and I’d never know. But maybe.”
“Very good,” was all Beneger replied, as his eyes sharpened ahead on FitzOdo and his men. Quill could guess what the man was thinking. FitzOdo’s group had been at that fight, too, though most believed they fled as soon as the arrows flew. Since then, they’d been “on the hunt” with literally nothing to show for it. The majority of FitzOdo’s search was probably done in whorehouses and taverns, where they could have crossed paths with Will Scarlet a dozen times and never noticed. “If this mysterious carriage ends up having nothing to do with Robin Hood, I’m not interested in it.”
“Alright.” Quill swallowed. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do with that knowledge.
“And don’t make me fish information out of you. If you see something out of place, anything at all, you let me know.”
“I will.” Again, Quill had no idea what he might notice that would qualify as being out of place. “How will we know? How will we know if it’s the outlaws, or someone else?”
“Don’t call them outlaws,” Beneger said sharply, though not unkindly. Beneath the thin skin of his crow’s-feet, muscles clenched and relaxed. “Outlaw implies they live outside the law, suggesting there’s a place where rules don’t matter. That is an appealing notion to those who endure misfortune. It glorifies the misconception that they have a choice—which they don’t. We have words for people who live without law, words provided to us by the very laws they break. Thieves. Murderers. Widowmakers,
Quillen. Anarchists. Their cause is not so attractive once you identify it as treason.”
Quill nodded and made a note to try to change his own vocabulary around Lord Beneger. He looked at the man, and the deep lines of his face—telling the story of his life like the exposed rings of a tree trunk. Quill had only barely known William de Wendenal before he was killed, but he saw much of the son in the father. Not physically, perhaps, but in the quality of their personalities. Driven, and impressive. In Beneger it was tinged with something cold, slightly hollow perhaps—but then again, the man was still mourning his son.
If somehow he could interest Lord Beneger in claiming the Sheriffcy, Nottingham would do well.
Three little words that meant everything. “Are you important?”
* * *
THEY ALMOST MISSED THE carriage, only a half hour’s walk into the Sherwood. Two heavy trenches carved off road through the ash, then down a short snowy embankment now littered in splinters. Flattened underbrush led to the carriage, which had been dragged over a shallow ridge. Quill wondered how heavy the thing was, and how many men it must have taken to move it. They walked through its aftermath, through charcoal tree husks that would never grow back.
Someone’s life had ended here. Quill didn’t exactly wish the Lord Asshole Brayden of York to be dead, but if the body was indeed his, then that would not be so terrible a thing.
The bulk of the carriage was mostly intact, although both of its exposed wheels had been removed—by a good deal of hatchetwork, from the look of it. There were chunks of wood all about, torn remnants of colorful fabric and paper scraps. Any ironwork and hinges had already been plied off, giving the impression that its frame would collapse if any of them sneezed.
On its far side Quill noticed something he couldn’t quite place, then realized with a lurch that it was a man’s leg. Still attached to the body, fortunately, but it would be wrong to call it intact. The sole of the foot and the calf both looked half-eaten, showing black pulp and bone.
Quill would have turned away in disgust, but a slight shift of his focus put him in a dead stare with two hairy men, hunched behind a fallen oak a bit farther off.
A sudden memory of arrows cutting through the trees in the mist. Of Captain Gisbourne’s throat, torn open.
Dirty, bearded. Barbaric murderers, perhaps, or terrified travelers. Quill rallied his nerves and raised his hand to get Lord Beneger’s attention, but it startled the two strangers.
One stood, frozen; but the other raised a wooden club and ran at them.
Lord Beneger yelled for FitzOdo’s men to advance, and it was over with very little fanfare. Ronnell swung his sword down onto the attacker, knocking the club from his hand and slicing down into the shoulder, by the base of the neck. The man lumbered, reeled, then ran into the woods, clutching at his injury. FitzOdo and his boys pounded after in pursuit, but the going off trail was tricky, and their horses did not seem much faster than the man running.
Jacelyn de Lacy went only so far as the fallen oak before swinging down from her saddle. She pulled her sword out and commanded the other stranger down to the ground, then bound his hands behind his back and to his feet.
Quill realized exactly how useless he was, standing there motionless behind the carriage while everyone else had sprung to action.
Of course he walked the midnight wall. Three months in the Black Guard, and Quill’s instincts were still to freeze in the face of danger.
“Are you important?” Lord Beneger asked.
* * *
BOTH THE LEG AND its body belonged to Lord Brayden of York, but Quill took no joy in it. The stench was ungodly, such that Quill’s stomach rose into his throat and he turned away to keep from retching. Lord Brayden’s eyes were bloody-black holes, chewed out. Half his face was torn to gore—eaten, most likely—and maggots now infested the exposed meat. His clothes had been shredded, revealing great fissures in his belly that leaked pink and yellow clumps of fat. The flesh was rent away, leaving a black discharge that assaulted the sense of sight and smell alike.
And next to him, a second body. A woman’s. A week ago, Quill would have made any number of terrible insults about whatever type of woman would choose to spend her time with Lord Brayden. But nobody deserved to end up like this. Her body was thin—a young woman, probably; she lay on her back with her bodice ripped apart, half her chest devoured by animals. Her face was no better than Lord Brayden’s. She was entirely naked below the waist, her legs spread profanely wide, her pelvis pushed halfway into the earth.
Quill vomited.
She had no name, and no face, and when he vomited again tears came to his eyes.
He looked away, wiping bile from his lips, his guts twisting. He had not thought it would be so horrible. He’d wanted to see Lord Brayden with a stupid look on his asshole face and a sword in his heart. But this … this he wouldn’t wish upon anyone.
“Can you identify them?” Lord Beneger asked. He was still on horseback, as if he could not be troubled to stay any longer than necessary. FitzOdo’s men had not yet returned with the fled assailant, and Jacelyn kept her foot on her bound prisoner, cooing commands at him to stay down. Quill stared at the two carcasses, ignoring the woman and focusing on the man’s face.
There was no doubt.
Lord Beneger simply nodded. “Any sign this was done by Robin Hood or his gang?”
“Why don’t we ask him?” Quillen asked, pointing to Jac’s captive.
Beneger dismissed it. “He’s just a looter. We’ll see what they know when FitzOdo returns with the other one. Any insight, Peveril?”
He could only sigh. “I don’t know that I’d be able to tell. It isn’t as if they left a note telling us who was here.”
“Who is to say? Perhaps we don’t know what to look for.” Beneger pulled his collar up to cover his nose and dismounted to inspect the bodies, eyes wide and poring over their wounds. “I’d say they were stabbed, both of them, in the chest, multiple times. With a wide blade.”
He pulled on the remnants of the woman’s arms and hoisted her to a sitting position, though her body made a series of horrific cracks at the movement.
“Nothing went out her back. So either a knife, or a swordsman with incredible restraint. And see where the blood has run.” He pointed to her naked body as if it had never been a person at all. “Or rather, where it has not. Nothing dried on her front nor her back. The blood all ran down. So she was killed while standing, or sitting perhaps, and was moved prone after she stopped bleeding.”
Jacelyn coldly presumed she’d been raped, to which Lord Beneger agreed—with the addition that it likely happened well after she was dead.
“There’s no bruising around her thighs,” he pointed out. “If her blood was still pumping when she’d been taken, you’d see the bruises.”
Quill retched again, though there was nothing left in him to expel. His stomach muscles seized, and he thought he might choke to death, until at last he forced himself to relax.
“Would you say this is consistent with Robin’s gang, or not?”
“Consistent?” Quill asked. If seeing sights such as this was a consistency in the Nottingham Guard, he would have returned home to Derby long ago. “No. They normally don’t kill anyone.”
Jacelyn hissed in a sharp breath. “Are you fucking serious? My uncle, and Lord Beneger’s son … these are the people they haven’t killed?”
“God, I’m sorry,” Quill stammered. “I didn’t mean—”
“No.” Beneger held out his hand, pointed in earnest at Quill. “You had a point, go on and say it. Don’t be shamed for thinking what you think.”
It felt like a trap, but Quill said what he could. “Yes, they’ve obviously killed before. But that’s not what I meant. When they rob people out here in the woods, they normally don’t kill them. In fact, they normally don’t hurt them at all. They just take what they can and disappear. This … no, it doesn’t seem consistent.”
Lord Beneger nodded, neither
in agreement nor against. His face had once been kind, Quill thought, but had turned hard as the years whittled away at him. Even the stubble of whiskers on his cheeks seemed thicker and harder than a normal man’s. “Thank you.”
The prisoner tried to say something, but Jacelyn simply reached down and twisted the inside of the man’s elbow until he gasped. “You’ll get your turn,” she promised.
“Until then,” Quill added, “I guarantee you’re better off pretending to be a rock or something. Be a rock, friend. Be a rock.”
Lord Beneger went on a bit longer, walking around the corpses, scrutinizing things that Quill would never have imagined would be of any interest. It wasn’t until Beneger stated, “You haven’t been around many bodies,” that Quill even realized he’d been staring into Lord Brayden’s hollowed face for quite some time.
“No.” He turned away, shaking the sensation off.
“What did I say about making me fish for information?”
Quill huffed, but he didn’t know what else to say. “I’m not suited for this. The Guard isn’t exactly the right place for me. I’m better suited as an advisor, but Ferrers wouldn’t have me.” He gestured limply at the horror of the scene. “Clearly not your first body, though.”
Beneger frowned. “No. But I’m still disgusted by it.”
“You don’t look it.”
“Not the body, no. But the injustice.”
“Exactly. Nobody deserves—”
“No,” Lord Beneger cut him off. “We don’t know what this man deserved. Lord Brayden of York probably deserved to die, most people do. Most people have wronged someone else in an unforgivable way, and should be made to pay for it. But he didn’t die for that. He died because some strangers wanted his coin. Someone out there, someone who wanted to see this man dead for very legitimate reasons … that person will never get what they want.”
Quill could only open his eyes wide and hope he never saw the world in such a stark way.
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