Scarlet was alone with Lord Beneger.
“You said he’d be alone!” Quill shook his captive.
“What do we do?” Jacelyn whispered.
His heart smashed the words out before he could even think them. “If we move, she sees us, and she warns Scarlet.” He craned his head to see if FitzOdo or his boys had reacted yet, but couldn’t find them. How many seconds had gone by? How long had Scarlet been in there? “If we don’t move,” he continued, “then Ben’s on his own. If we do move, at least we can get to him as soon as possible.”
“Ben can handle Scarlet,” Jacelyn muttered, though her jealousy was tangible. “But if we’re spotted, he has to handle two of them.”
Time, which had so recently frozen, now hurled past in furious clumps, impossible to track.
“But for how long?” he whispered back. His blood turned to fire. “He thinks we’re coming, we should’ve already been there by now! If he’s biding time, it’s because he thinks we’re coming!”
Good God, he was probably already dead.
“I’m going!” Quill decided, and was already running.
The staircase had seemed so close, and now he was horrified at how many steps it took for it to even draw near. And almost instantly, somehow before he was even truly at a stride, a shriek came from above. The girl who stood watch called out Will Scarlet’s name and threw herself through the door, where Beneger was now outnumbered.
He felt
every footstep,
he took the stairs
two at a time,
but every moment was a moment Lord Beneger was fighting for his life. Every time his boot met the mud or a wooden step, it was a knife in Ben’s gut, a blade in his chest.
They all crashed up the staircase at once, FitzOdo and Derrick and Ronnell arriving from other directions, but Quill vaulted up first. His sword was in his hands though he did not recall pulling it. He didn’t wait to try the handle at the top of the stairs, he greeted the door with the heel of his boot and burst into the room at full speed.
Square, a desk in its middle, tiny slatted windows no body could squeeze through. The girl to the right, clattering to the back wall. Two figures to the left. Quill’s eyes had not adjusted but he knew them by size. Lord Beneger stood tall, his hands behind his back, where Will Scarlet was hiding. One arm reached out from behind, high, where he held a fat dagger in a reverse grip. Its point was directly downward, touching the soft of Ben’s clavicle.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Will Scarlet cursed, pulling Ben back the small amount he could, away from the suddenly crowded entrance. The girl across from him was young. She scampered up onto a large wooden chest to make distance as the room instantly filled beyond capacity.
“Put it down!” screamed FitzOdo, or someone else, or all of them. Jacelyn yelled it as well, she leveled her blade against the girl, who had whipped out a small knife dangling from a thin rope.
“Fuck, I told you not to come!” Scarlet yelled at the girl, who continued to scatter randomly, hoping to find some foothold or posture that would give her an advantage. “Put that away, you’re going to get yourself killed!”
“Kill the girl,” FitzOdo demanded.
“Anybody fucking moves…” Will pierced over the commotion, “… and this man is the first to die.”
Quill locked eyes with Lord Beneger, by far the calmest in the room. His chin was perked slightly up, as if to make it easier, as if to show how little he feared the knife. Quill felt his own neck shrink away, what he imagined would be a natural reaction to the touch of a blade. There was also blood, blood on Ben’s neck, but not his own. It flowed down from Will Scarlet’s hand. Whatever had already transpired before they entered, Lord Beneger had done damage.
“As I was saying,” Lord Beneger’s voice was all gut, “there’s no way out of this.”
“You’d better hope that’s not true,” Scarlet growled back at him, “or you leave this world with me.”
“Go on, then.” FitzOdo pushed forward, lowering his weapon to get dangerously closer to Scarlet. “Kill him. You think it can’t get any worse for you? Best think that one over.” For a moment there was a silence, the chaos of uncertainty had stilled into the edge of his words. “This is it for you either way, Scarlet. But we could end it quick, or we could take a few days.” There was a raw truth in his voice that was black ice, and Quill knew that for the first time he was hearing the real Sir Robert FitzOdo. “I told Red Roger I’d bring him back a Robin Hood, and I mean to. If you’re lucky, he’ll give you the saw. Where we tie you upside down, hanging by your feet, splayed out, an’ we take a saw. A good long saw, as you might use for a tree, and we start at your nethers and we go down, slowly, a few inches every hour—”
“FitzOdo!” Lord Beneger cut him off, nearly startling Scarlet. “That’s enough of that.”
“Oh,” Scarlet said with some surprise, upon seeing FitzOdo’s obedience. “I’ve got the bossman, do I? Things are looking up, Zinn.”
“How’s that?” the girl asked, still fidgeting.
“You want to talk about cutting off body parts?” Scarlet called out. “Let’s start with bossman then. Tell them to leave, bossman.” He shifted. His right arm slid away and came back again with a second knife, this one resting diagonally beneath Lord Beneger’s nostril. “Tell them to leave or I’ll carve off your nose.”
Lord Beneger resisted, air spat from his teeth, but he made no noise.
“Fuck,” Derrick muttered.
“Or maybe the ear.” Scarlet shifted his blade to the side of Ben’s head. “I can make you one of us.”
“You’d have to cut his cock off to do that,” FitzOdo returned. For the briefest of moments Quill met eyes with Jacelyn, reminded of how damned sick she was of men threatening to damage each other’s cocks.
“Scarlet,” Jacelyn said, calmly, with no threat to her voice. “Why is she here?”
“What?” he asked, repositioning slightly to look at her.
“It’s Zinn, right?” she asked, though nobody confirmed. “Why’d you bring her on this?”
He looked at Jacelyn harder, and practically recoiled. “Fuck, your face.”
She closed her eyes and let it pass. “You said you didn’t want her here.”
Scarlet glanced over at his young apprentice. “I told her not to come, but sometimes she’s a stubborn little bitch, isn’t she?”
“She sure is!” Zinn agreed.
“You know you can’t get past us.” Quill picked up Jacelyn’s thread, anticipating where she was going. “Two against five, in close quarters, and one is a knight.”
“Maybe I’d rather go out fighting,” he sneered, “than let you put me on the gallows.”
“I get that.” Quill nodded. “But what about Zinn?”
The moment of hesitation told him they were on the right track.
Jacelyn continued. “If you go out fighting, as you say, then Zinn dies, too. Painfully, I might add. We’re certainly not going to trade your life for his.” She pointed at Ben with the tip of her sword, limply, as if he were entirely expendable. “So this is it for you. No matter what. But we don’t have to kill the girl.”
Scarlet didn’t blink, he didn’t breathe. “Goddammit,” he said at last under his breath to Zinn. “I told you not to come.”
The two of them exchanged a few worried looks at each other. “You can take them,” Zinn whispered.
“No,” he returned, almost pleading. “I can’t.”
It might have even been touching if he wasn’t a monster.
“Fine,” Scarlet said with certainty. “You make a path and let her go. Once she’s good and gone … and I mean gone gone, then I let bossman go. And then we see who walks out of here alive.”
“What?” Quill reacted with genuine shock. “No, that’s not … that’s not how trading works. We don’t want to kill you here,
we want to take you alive. That’s the trade. The little girl goes, and you give yourself up.”
“That’s not the trade,” Will argued. “She goes free, and I let bossman free. One for one. Then we end this like men.”
Like men.
Meaning with violence.
FitzOdo and his boys laughed at Scarlet’s offer, they barked curses and tightened their grips on their weapons. But Jacelyn, apparently, knew better than to let this end in a bloodbath.
“Make a path!” she hollered, and took one step aside to help. Lord Beneger gave his silent agreement, and their bluster died down. Though their bodies were almost shoulder to shoulder, they somehow squeezed to create a channel between them, directly from the door to Zinn. She’d have to brush up against every one of them just to slide through.
“Leave your weapon there,” Quill commanded the young girl.
“I need it,” she breathed back, too stupid to realize the danger she was in.
“Then come back for it later. On the ground.”
She did, she crouched and placed it gingerly down, seemingly terrified of what would happen the moment she was defenseless. For all the spitfire she had thrown, the girl’s face was still that of a child, and it hid her horror poorly. Her eyes went big and wet and looked to Scarlet, but he was biting his lip. He refused to look at her.
The girl moved her foot twice, only to retreat each time. Skittish, like an animal on ice. When she finally consented to move she nearly ran, plunging herself into the gap, fearful of being stopped.
She was right to fear.
Quick as she was, Jacelyn was faster. She reached out with her left hand and grabbed the girl’s hair, wrenching her neck around into submission. She moved her sword up to the girl’s throat. Scarlet screamed bloody murder and made to plunge his knife down into Lord Beneger’s neck, but he didn’t. Quill closed his eyes, too horrified to watch Jacelyn kill the girl, not wanting to keep living in a world where that was possible.
“Let’s try this again!” Jacelyn hissed. “You put your knives on the ground and you come with us willingly, or you watch these men rape her.”
Quill gasped. All the air left the room, even FitzOdo reeled in shock. She couldn’t mean it, it wasn’t possible. How far would she go to get her revenge?
“They’ll take turns with her,” Jacelyn said, never breaking her gaze, “while I hold her down. I’d hate to miss out, so when it’s my turn, I’ll do it with a knife.”
She was just trying to scare him, Quill tried to convince himself. But he knew now that he could never look at her again, without realizing that the dead half of her face was the kinder side.
Will Scarlet’s jaw had dropped, his blade wavered. “… You wouldn’t…”
“I’m sorry, does that shock you?” She gave him her full hate. “Do you think it matters where you stab someone? Would it be kinder if I put it in her belly first? Or her heart? That’s how you butchered my uncle, isn’t it?” At the confusion in his eyes, she curled even harsher. “My name is Jacelyn de Lacy. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to pay you back for what you’ve done. Drop. Your knives.”
He did.
Quill tried to whisper sorry into Zinn’s ear, but she pulled away and vanished out the door. Free from Scarlet’s grasp, Lord Beneger returned to the rest of their group, massaging his neck. But he eyed Jacelyn as if he feared her more than Scarlet. FitzOdo leaned out the door to watch Zinn’s flight, a genuine look of disappointment washing onto his face. As if Jac had gotten his hopes up, with the talk of rape. Bile rose in Quill’s throat, he had to turn away. This room was full of monsters—the ones they had smuggled with them, hiding beneath their skin. It was too much to breathe.
Quill saw it first, but it was too late. Will Scarlet snatched one of his knives off the ground even as Ronnell kicked the other one away. With his free hand up to keep them at bay, Scarlet repositioned the knife up and against his own neck.
“You want me alive?” he asked, face red and purple and wrought in emotion. “If that’s so important to you, then we make another trade. You let me walk out of here, or I kill myself. I won’t go.”
Quill’s heart was no longer racing. Without the mist of the woods and the screams of battle, there was no great villainy in Will Scarlet, no mastermind. He was so clearly a pawn in the game of life; in every sense of the word, the man was a loser. Quill did not pity him that, but he saw now that his failures were his own, a natural conclusion to the pathetic waste that was his life. He wondered what miserable misadventures he’d endured in the last few months, what he had done to deserve the beating his face clearly boasted.
Jacelyn sheathed her sword. She probably didn’t care at all if he cut his own throat out, but Quill did. They needed his answers, to pick up anyone else in his crew. Then, they needed to parade them through the streets, let the people see their faces, before hanging them all together. They had learned the hard way that it did no good to hang a stranger, lest the man’s name live on beyond his years.
But Jacelyn didn’t care about any of that. She wasn’t here to secure Nottingham, or to make their city safer. She was only here because her uncle wasn’t. Somehow, Quillen Peveril was the only one on this hunt who was honestly doing it for the betterment of the city.
“Put the knife down,” he said.
“I won’t go back to those cells.” Scarlet started to push into his skin.
Lord Beneger just walked right up to him. “Yes, you will.”
He slapped the knife from Scarlet’s hand, smashed his knuckles into the thief’s face, and that was that.
FORTY-ONE
JOHN LACKLAND
NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
“MY MOST PROFOUND APOLOGIES,” was a nice change of pace, though the man thought much of himself to describe his prowess at apologies thusly. Most people offered John their “humblest” apologies, which was second only to their “deepest” apologies, but John had never quite understood what exactly they were reaching into. He had little interest in anything that had to be scraped out of a man’s soul. Particularly this man, this pot-bellied caricature, sweating through every one of his increasingly elaborate garments. “We did not know you were coming to Nottingham.”
“Nor did I,” John answered. He was still deciding if it was the right choice. Not even three months had passed since last he’d been here, for the funeral of the most recent Sheriff. He had never expected to return so soon, nor under such immediate circumstances. “We arrived late last night, without sending notice.”
The castellan was flabbergasted. “Even still, you deserve every apology!” Each deeper and more profound than the last, no doubt. “I should have been notified of your arrival, and I promise you I shall punish the man who did not tell me!”
“I insist that you have him beaten,” John said absently.
“Then so I shall, Your Grace.”
“Although if you think on it, every man in the entire castle ‘did not tell you.’ So I suppose you should have every one of them beaten.”
“Ah.” The castellan’s mouth plopped closed. “If that is your wish…”
“Nor did you tell yourself!” John added. “Perhaps you should start there.”
“Ah.” He twitched, not sure if that was a joke or not, until self-preservation clearly decided it must be. “Ah, very good! And you as well, then, Your Grace! You did not tell me, so I suppose I should beat you, as it were!”
John very much enjoyed giving the man his iciest stare.
“My most profound apologies—”
John waved him away, with just his fingertips. “I’m trying to get rid of you.”
“Your Grace.”
The castellan’s exit was, no doubt, the swiftest and silentest run of the man’s life.
Interactions such as these were the reason John preferred not to announce his arrivals, if ever he could avoid it. It was impossible to simply visit a city or a castle or a brothel without an arduous pomp being made of his appearance, full of inescapable convers
ations and niceties. Though for this particular journey, it was not privacy that prompted his secrecy—but necessity.
He was, geographically speaking, surrounded by traitors.
John’s list of allies in northern England had become astonishingly shorter. That was his fault, admittedly, for openly labeling the members of that Huntingdon council as his enemies. He could have played along and spent months destroying them one by one from within, but he’d apparently suffered from a significant lapse of backhanded cunning that day. And now he was relatively alone in a section of the country that openly wanted to rebel against his brother the King. He’d selected Nottingham partially for his familiarity with it, but largely because it had not been represented by anyone at the council. Though that did not necessarily make Nottingham safe, it was at least not hostile to him—and he was in desperate need of gathering his thoughts long enough to figure out what to do next.
“Since I said no, they’ll approach my nephew next,” he said out loud, as if they had not already discussed it to death. Gay Wally stood at his side, on the battlements of the middle bailey, looking down at the defensive walls that segregated Nottingham Castle’s three tiers. “And he’ll say yes. They want someone to seize the throne in Richard’s absence, and my nephew is both dumb and power hungry.”
“He’s five years old.”
“That’s what I just said.”
It was precisely what Austria wanted. They never wanted England’s money, they wanted England to eat herself alive. That’s why John had convinced Longchamp to pay the infernal ransom in the first place, to avoid any of these petty schemings.
He looked out over the cascading baileys of the castle, constructed at increasingly high steppes within each other. A castle within a castle within a castle. “Built with true paranoia in mind,” he said, appreciative. “It has never been taken?”
“It has been sieged several times but never successfully,” Wally said beside him, probably blinking. “The city has burnt, yes, but the castle is impregnable.”
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