Lionhearts

by Nathan Makaryk

  The two bruisers were grappling at a third body between them—which of course was Zinn. One man would snatch her ankle just to receive her other foot in his chest a second later. Her neck was trapped in a hold until she sunk her teeth into the man’s forearm, and she fell to the ground as the man cursed in anger. The bruiser smashed his good arm across Zinn’s face, but she was too quick and rolled away with it. The long half of her hair sprayed water in an arc about her as she slipped to her feet.

  “Let’s go!” Scarlet yelled, moving away, waving for them both to follow. But Zinn had something feral in her. Arthur could see she had no intention of leaving this be. One man was distracted with his injured arm, while the other—dark skinned with a ponytail down to his chest—pulled out a knife.

  Zinn moved forward, and Arthur’s heart skipped.

  Behind her, Will Scarlet gasped and reached out, too far away to help. He screamed her name—

  No, not her name.

  He called for Much.

  Once, as a young man, though Arthur hated any story that started that way, he’d watched a dray horse go berserk. It was a godlike thing, the strongest animal Arthur had ever seen—a Brabant, bred to pull a plow through frozen soil. Arthur was little more than a spare horsehand at the stables, earning one coin for every two he stole from the head groom. Something spooked the horse, and whether it was a fire or a snake or an unkind word, Arthur couldn’t remember. But he remembered the stunning power of the horse’s legs when it kicked. If every single sinew in a normal horse had been wound tight as a crossbow wire and compacted, that was the strength of just the Brabant’s thigh. It crushed a stableman’s chest in the blink of an eye and sent him soaring backward. It left young Arthur awestruck, and in another second the beast kicked again, its every muscle perfectly concentrated into a single pinpoint where its hoof cracked a second man’s skull open, dead before he even began to fall.

  That’s what it was like to watch Stutely in full rage.

  It was over before Arthur could blink. Only later would he be able to piece together what he saw. Stutely closed the distance that Scarlet couldn’t, screaming primal, hulking forward and smashing the knifeman across the face with a single fist, all his weight behind it. It was no punch, it was a Brabant-powerful explosion that likely popped the victim’s eyeballs from his head. Arthur felt the impact in his own teeth. Without hesitation, Stutely turned and clamped his hands together, swinging down onto the top of the second bruiser, whose neck all but snapped as he crumpled lifeless to the ground.

  The third punch was for Will Scarlet, square in the face, and then it was over.

  Stutely slung Scarlet over his shoulder as if he were a sack of onions, and grabbed Zinn by the scruff of her neck. He barreled away from the whorehouse, dragging both of them, dripping alleyway filth, not even caring if Arthur had sense enough to follow.

  * * *

  THE REDHEADED COW CAITLIN was making noise, complaining that Will Scarlet ought to be apologizing for the brawl at the Spotted Leopard. Arthur nodded, and he apologized, or at least his mouth did. Scarlet was sleeping off the worst headache he’d ever had, so it didn’t matter how much his “presence was demanded.” Arthur eyed every member of the Red Lions with suspicion now—the whore Clorinda Rose whispered things into Alfred Fawkes’s ear, lounging as was his style on his beggar throne. He caught a glimpse of Ginger Twain and Ricard the Ruby snickering to themselves at the table, not playing any real game of dice.

  These were the people who chopped off hands.

  Who sought to steal the city’s grain.

  Who wanted to waste their time rather than help others.

  David hadn’t believed Arthur’s story at first. “You must have misheard him,” he said. “He wouldn’t have called out for Much.”

  But that didn’t make any of it the less true. Wherever Scarlet’s head was, half of it was in the past.

  So far as Arthur could tell, that wasn’t what had set Will Stutely off. Maybe he just felt protective of Zinn. Maybe they’d had a laugh at him one too many times. Or maybe he saw clearer than Arthur where all this was headed, and hit his breaking point sooner.

  Whatever it was, he left. Just walked away. Arthur doubted he’d be back.

  Which meant that Stutely was the smartest of the four of them.

  The three of them, now.

  Based on Scarlet’s state of mind, the two of them.

  Arthur had helped Zinn recover, too, who’d earned yet another swollen jaw at the hands of the brothel doormen. She had cruel things to say about Stutely’s disappearance, ignoring the fact that he was likely the only reason she was still alive to shit and grin above her age another day.

  The rest of the evening Arthur spent back in the French Ward with David, looking for the strange beggar girl Sarra. He hoped perhaps to find Stutely there as well, but they found no sign of either of them, nor nary a tale of the girl’s name. But in asking for her they found more about her husband, and his hand, and the others that’d been nailed to a wall in a place they called the Pity Stables.

  Arthur and David brought coin, what little they could spare. They brought food, what little they could steal, and they gave it to the desperate in exchange for stories of the villain Robin Hood. Most were wary—fearful, even—for the trade. But some they found, huddled in corners and darkness, thankful for the feast and the company. They told their stories begrudgingly, as though it were their last act on earth. Arthur and David nodded and listened to it all, of the impostor Robin Hood, of the legacy that Alfred Fawkes was destroying. How he took the hands of those that accepted his own charity. How those who spoke well of him, or who were known to have helped him before the winter, were beaten in the night. Or their names stricken from the Common Lists, left to starve. Or chased from the town entirely. Whatever good Robin Hood had once been, Alfred Fawkes and his Red Lions meant to turn his name into a threat, into fear.

  Arthur had been a part of that. Smashing a few horns, breaking a few windows, was just where it started. They were still doing the smallwork. Someday, they’d be asked to wield the axe. He couldn’t even tell if that bothered Will, or if it was all “part of the plan.”

  On their own, Arthur’s fingers flexed.

  “Did you at least find anything new?” Caitlin brayed, bending over as far as her cumbersome body would allow. Anything new meant anything she could use as leverage on the man with the velvet cap. That they could take his grain, that they could control more people. Behind Caitlin, Alfred Fawkes smiled oily and plucked an errant hair from the cuff of his sleeve, his slit eyes focused on the lioness even as Clorinda’s lips breathed into his ear.

  “Saddle Maege is a man,” Sarra had said.

  Gerome Artaud was taken to lying with other men in secret. That more than counted as anything new.

  “No, mum,” replied Arthur a Bland, the last honest gentleman-thief in Nottingham. “Nothing.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  QUILLEN PEVERIL

  NOTTINGHAM CASTLE

  MOSTLY, QUILLEN KEPT HIMSELF awake by playing out scenarios of his own increasingly grisly demise. It required little imagination to think he might freeze to death one night on his midnight walk, but then he started considering the many unnatural things Gilbert with the White Hand could do upon discovering his body.

  Quill had coordinated his watch schedule such that he preceded Gilbert at each station along the bulwark; this was intended to make it less obvious he was studying Gilbert’s movements, but actually made it all the more unsettling that Gilbert was following him instead. So when Quill inevitably succumbed to the night’s cold and collapsed into an icy heap on the parapets, Gilbert with the White Hand was guaranteed to be first to stroll upon his body and the endless options it offered.

  Cut off a hand? He could probably break off Quill’s frozen extremities with a simple snap of his boot.

  Throw him over the edge? There would be pretty pieces of Peveril scattered all the way down to the Trent.

  Thaw him over
a fire, then wear his skin like a glove? Sweet God, Quill hated his own imagination.

  When he grew bored with these creative concoctions, he found his mind trapped in the even less enviable fantasies of how to fix all of England. Because this is what Peverils did with their free time; rather than throw dice or drink or find women to paw at, he took on every problem in the world as his own personal challenge. The frustrating part was the hypocrisy of his answers. Truth be told, his advice to Chancellor Longchamp would be to refuse to pay the first farthing of King Richard’s ransom—for the good of the country—and yet his advice to every struggling commoner was to do anything necessary to pay their share—for the good of the country.

  He didn’t care much for the moral chasm between those two stances, so he returned to the idea of Gilbert lancing him through the heart with a spear and eating it raw.

  The other curious side effect of his position with the nightwalkers was a new skillset—or rather, the absence of one. His was a mind that abhorred being idle, and so he normally found all manner of subjects to study or languages to learn or puzzles to unravel. If Quillen Peveril was not accomplishing something, he grew easily frustrated; this he knew about himself. But upon the Nottingham battlements, he became intimately familiar with the sensation of contributing exactly nothing to the world.

  And that was, surprisingly, a useful feeling. Because he recognized it, too, in Lord Beneger’s hunt for Robin Hood.

  Yesteryear’s Robin Hood was something worth hunting—two separate Sheriffs had died at his hands, after all, not to mention the political and financial upsets he caused across the entire county. But the stories they chased now were scattered and dimensionless. Behandings were terrible, yes—but when coupled with petty thievery and street brawls, they amounted to a withering pile no taller than somebody-else’s-business.

  Footsteps behind him, the White Hand approaching him like an arrow.

  Quill had just enough time for a gasp, and then opted to spare the man his villainous victory by diving over the edge of the wall and plummeting into the rocks below.

  “I’ll be in the privy,” Gilbert said to Quill’s stubbornly stationary body.

  Down in the rocks, Quill’s skull cracked against many things, his brains spilling hot steam into the night air.

  “Ten minutes,” the ghost man added, without slowing.

  Quill’s mind eventually returned to his control, and he stammered for any appropriate answer. “You don’t need to tell me.”

  “Just making it easier on you,” the man slowed, pivoting by the braziers until his face was entirely in shadow, “for your records.”

  Quill ripped his own face off with both hands and shoveled it down his throat, to choke and die as quickly as possible.

  “Yesterday there was a full hour after seventh bell when nobody was watching me,” Gilbert continued, in his atonal lilt. “In which I visited the seamstress in the middle bailey and mended my own tabard. Ask for Wilmot if you need to corroborate it. For your records, as it were.”

  Lightning crashed through the clouds and incinerated Quillen Peveril’s body, his ashes floated away in the wind where Gilbert could never re-collect them.

  Once the ghost man was gone, down the stairs in the legitimate direction of the privy, little pieces of Quill’s corpse recongealed into putty and gave one last stab at this whole living thing. Gilbert knew they were watching him was the first sentence his primordial brain invented, followed shortly by: He doesn’t care that we know.

  How long he stood there digesting that particular meal he could not say, but it seemed shorter than ten minutes. As footsteps grew closer, it occurred to him that he ought to pass this information on to another breathing human before he died again—but that opportunity was now gone. Gilbert returned with a crossbow loaded with a flask of Greek fire, and Quill was very thankful for its warmth as it shattered against his sternum and he blistered into a shriveled black ball of goo.

  “Quill?” came an unexpectedly deep voice.

  His eyes opened, and focused on a larger shape that was not Gilbert.

  “Thought you should know,” Potter grunted, bracing himself against the crosswind, “Lord Beneger has a couple of visitors.”

  “I’m not Lord Beneger,” Quill answered, fairly certain that was true. “Why are you telling me?”

  “Because they didn’t ask for Lord Beneger,” the man huffed. “They asked for Benja Benja Benja.”

  * * *

  THEY MET AT THE narrow table the next morning, a long skinny dining space that was more hallway than hall. Quill had spent the evening with Lord Beneger and his two unlikely visitors in his private quarters, before sending them on their way again. At first light, they summoned his crew.

  The bells from St. Nicholas had long sounded nine when their group was fully met. Captain de Grendon stood by Lord Beneger’s side, his eyes shifting nervously about as if to remind himself that he was supposed to be in charge of things. His entire Black Guard was present, including the brute Kyle Morgan and Ludic of Westerleak from the gaols. Even the armsmaster Simon FitzSimon settled in, raising a particularly scruffy eyebrow at the rest of them. Jacelyn de Lacy stood notably in front of the five men in Derby green tabards that rounded out Wendenal’s task force. Last to join was the Coward Knight FitzOdo and his two lemmings, Derrick and Ronnell.

  “There he is,” Lord Beneger moaned, clad in a flowery grey doublet with tongues of red. “Ever the latecomer, FitzOdo.”

  For most it may have been an innocent jab, but Quill recognized the insult nestled therein. It was an intentional reminder of FitzOdo’s shaming sixteen years ago, and his role in the failed siege on Nottingham during the Kings’ War. Quill wondered how many in the room were knowledgeable enough to even know the details.

  But if FitzOdo took offense, he did not show it. “We had a late night.”

  “At a tavern, no doubt.” Beneger did not hide his disdain. “While you were out drinking, we received our first actionable information in weeks on Scarlet and his crew.”

  “Really.” The knight seemed unimpressed. “What is it?”

  “We’ve learned he frequents a brothel in the French Ward called the Spotted Leopard. Even more so, we know the name of his favorite whore—a man who goes by Saddle Maege.”

  “A man?” FitzOdo recoiled. “Where’d you hear this?”

  Beneger gave a brief account of the late-night visit from the woman Sarra and her son.

  FitzOdo gave an ugly sneer. “She’s playing you.”

  “We’ve considered that,” Quill answered. She had not been shy in asking for compensation for her service. “But we found her story compelling. The circumstances are believable.”

  “Bullshit. I’ve been following Robin Hood for months, since before you showed up. We’ve never seen any evidence that he does any whoring, much less that he’s a fucking pillow-biter.”

  Quill had to laugh. “I don’t think you’re making the argument you think you are. If this information is true, it is indeed surprising that you never uncovered any of it.”

  “Oh fuck on you, Peveril.” The knight dismissed him. “You never heard it none neither until last night. You didn’t uncover fuck all. It came walking up to the castle, wrapped in a bow. All you did was listen. And why do you suppose this girl felt comfortable talking to you in the first place? I’ve—”

  “I met her son last week, helping with another issue.” Quill stood his ground. “That’s why they came to us. The more we actually help people, the more they trust us. Chasing ghosts all day doesn’t do anything for the people we’re supposed to be protecting. They need to see us helping.”

  “I agree,” the captain said, though he added nothing else.

  Eventually Jacelyn inclined her head. “Are we still thinking this is Gilbert?”

  “No,” Beneger answered. Quill had already discussed it with him, that there were no patterns at all in Gilbert’s schedule that matched their sightings of Robin Hood—and absolutely none that ever
put him near a whorehouse. If there was any truth to the rumor that someone in the Guard was working with Robin Hood, it certainly wasn’t with the man who openly welcomed documentation of his trips to the privy. Quill’s embarrassment at being completely wrong about Gilbert was thankfully overshadowed by their new lead. “We’re no longer considering him a threat.”

  “Well he’s still a damned nightmare of a person.” Ronnell’s eyes grew. His brother, Derrick, shook in agreement.

  “You have new orders?” Jac asked Beneger.

  “We move everyone onto this whorehouse. We need to know every soul who comes and goes.”

  One of his Derby host squirmed. “I’ve never been in a wh—… in a house of ill repute.”

  “Ill repute?” Quill smiled. “Why, that’s my favorite type of repute.”

  “Everyone, you say?” asked Morg, glancing to the captain.

  “We’ve discussed it, yes,” de Grendon confirmed. “Lord Beneger needs as many Guardsmen as we can spare. There will be a lot of people to track, and we have to determine which ones are threats. There’s also rumor that Will Scarlet’s in the city—Sherwood’s been quiet for a few weeks, but I’m sure you’ve noticed things are louder here.”

  “Smart money says they’re working with one of the gangs, Red Lions most likely,” Jacelyn said.

  “Agreed.” Beneger tapped a map of the city that had been spread across the table, gesturing vaguely at its scope. “And there’s not enough of us to simply raid a gang that size. They could move their Robin Hood—whoever he really is—beneath our noses all day. We need confirmation of his whereabouts.”

  “I’ve seen no proof they run with the Lions,” FitzOdo growled out.

  “Proof?” Beneger turned on him. “You’ve been responsible for tracking Scarlet for months and this is the first time you’ve braved that word. Are you to tell me now that you have a single valuable morsel of knowledge you’ve obtained from your long search?”

  “Red Lions were the obvious guess,” FitzOdo continued, his teeth ground tight. “But I hear it’s not them. In fact the opposite, I hear that group hates Will Scarlet, blames him for everything sour that’s ever happened to them.”