John swallowed down the urge to comment on the many sexual obstacles of impregnating a castle.
“Which one of us should remind you?” asked Hadrian the Insolent. John trusted his surly swordarm exactly as far as he could pay him, which was fortunately quite far. That enormous amount of money also meant he could change Hadrian the Extortionist’s title at the slightest whim.
“You have no authority over any castles in England,” the man recited, because John had instructed them to do exactly that whenever it seemed even remotely possible he’d forgotten. “Your brother the king has forbidden it. Lest you do something like whatever it is you’re lesting to do.”
“I’m lesting to do little more than enjoy this archery tournament,” John lied. “Didn’t you know? I’m quite the enthusiast.”
There was a great deal of commotion below, the makings of a tournament that was starting shortly. The Captain of the Guard—whose name, Fulcher de Grendon, was fantastic—had already explained that the tournament was largely a ruse to capture a gang of thieves led by Robin Hood. John had met that very man last year, and was surprised to hear how far events had escalated. The timing of the tournament and his own curiosity were a perfect alibi—everyone assumed he had arrived merely to be a spectator, which they were very welcome to continue assuming.
“Do me a favor, Wally,” he said. “And be clever.”
“In any specific manner?”
“As Hadrian reminds me, I can’t claim military right over any castles. Find a way around that.”
He could practically hear the boy blink.
FORTY-TWO
CAITLIN FITZSIMON
NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
CAITLIN SLIPPED HER ARM through the bend of Alfred Fawkes’s elbow, both of them raising their longbows in the air with their free hands, welcoming the audience’s roar.
And by God’s almighty tits, did it ever feel good.
It was the opposite of their cave. It was the opposite of hiding. It was the opposite of pilfering in the goddamned shadows and slinking away. She made a full revolution, pivoting Alfie as she went, to take in the spectacle of the moment. From where they stood at the archers’ line, there were spectators in nearly every direction—on their feet and waving a blizzard of colors, a dazzling sight like nothing she’d seen before. Noise and triumph, excitement and anticipation for the next round.
The stands for onlookers stretched down both sides of the archery range, which ended in the high battlement wall behind the row of straw targets, now riddled with painted arrows. At regular distances down the length of the range were heralds to make announcements—while off to the edges, entertainers made light with sideshows between bouts. Up on the wall high to their right, a group of actors spied the proceedings and shouted to their troupe outside the castle walls, who were reenacting the spectacle with added satire for those who weren’t lucky enough to find space within the bailey. And even higher on the left, where the walls to the middle keep loomed, a box with several rows of seating had been built atop the battlement for the most “distinguished” viewers. Her father was unfortunately up there, and the Sheriff, too, but they weren’t the important ones.
At the center of the front row, a surprise guest. An ignorant little thing called Prince John stood and applauded for Caitlin, Queen of the Lions.
“Watch this,” she said at her full voice to Alfie, knowing that nobody could hear them while the crowd roared. “Fuck on you, Prince John!”
She bowed to the man up above as she said it, and the audience loved her for it.
Gentleman that he was, Alfie splayed his arms out to present his better half, urging the crowd to chant her colors. Red and Red! Red and Red! went the cry ’round the bailey, for Caitlin had just won her final qualifying round with an arrow that had not been a perfect shot, but carried enough strength to knock the wooden target onto its back.
“Welcome to the final ten.” Alfie gave her arm a gentle squeeze.
“As if you had any doubt.”
Ten archers remained from a hundred, and four of those were Red Lions. Counting the darling David of Doncaster as a fifth, a full half of them under Alfie’s demesne. Ginger Twain and Ricard the Ruby had surprised everyone by lasting this long, but would be the first to admit they’d found more luck than talent. The other five was a pickleshot of nobodies that spanned the spectrum—from an old man with a grudge as sharp as his aim to an adolescent stableboy who screeched with elation every time his shot found its mark. But Alfred was undeniably the best of them, and his showmanship had earned the crowd’s adoration from the very beginning.
However—best of the final ten did not mean he was best of the original hundred. After being eliminated in the first round, Dawn Dog brought a couple of his thickest-skulled seconds to “congratulate” each winner, with an emphasis on how easily the day’s victor might find himself dead in an alley by morning. Those early standouts followed with mysteriously poor showings on their second rounds, clearing the path for more Lions to take the lead. And of course, there were dozens of others in Nottingham nursing broken fingers and sprained wrists who didn’t show at all.
Even still, Cait was proud of their performance so far. It was almost—almost—like they actually deserved it.
“The final round now begins!” came the cry from on high, echoed every few seconds by the heralds down the line, and then by the actors on the wall in an outrageous falsetto. “Each archer will have only five arrows!”
Out on the range, new hay targets were being rearranged, and two bales had been lowered from the battlement above, suspended halfway up the wall by long stretches of rope. Five targets in total—three at varying distances on the field and the two smaller circular ones on the wall.
“These rules are ludicrous,” the old man in their group complained. “I’ve been a part of many tournaments, and this is as poorly organized as they come. And no class…” he sneered at the eliminated competitors. How Cait failed to meet that criteria, she wasn’t sure. “I mean, who are these people?”
The future Lord and Lady Fawkes, she wanted to tell him. They had tilted the scales in their favor as underhandedly as possible, but from this point forward, Alfie was going to be the legitimate winner.
“The sum of each mark…” came the announcements, “… will be compounded by the number of targets hit…”
Cait turned into Alfred’s chest. “What does that mean?”
“That, I am not sure,” he half chuckled.
The directions continued on, “… With consideration toward the difficulty of the target…”
She touched her nose to his sternum and took a deep breath. “You smell good.”
“Liar.” He smiled wide. “I smell like sweat.”
“Like I said, then.” She bit his arm. “You’re going to win this, you know. Have you thought about how you’d like to celebrate?”
“Did you catch all that?” David of Doncaster interrupted, sidling up to them.
“I’m sorry?”
“The rules, that is.”
She shrugged. “Sounded like a lot of counting.”
“I had a hard time following it,” David admitted. “But seems there’s a bit of strategy to it all now. You could put your five arrows into the crowseye of the closest target, and have twenty-five points. Or you only put four there, and your fifth in the outer circle of a different target. Twenty-one points … but since you hit two different targets, your points count twice. So forty … forty-two points there.”
Cait took a guess. “And if you spread your shots out to all five targets, then they count five times each?”
“Right, but the far targets are worth more, I think. I couldn’t quite tell.” He craned his neck around. “I’m glad I’m not in charge of adding it all up. Not sure what the best way to tackle this ought to be.”
“Figure it out, then,” she brayed, only half-joking. They’d put too much work into this to lose on account of snobby mathematics aimed at confusing them.
W
hile David and Alfie discussed it, Cait took a moment to glance to the rows of eliminated competitors at the edges. Twelve more Lions were there, that her father had added to the lists. All fared better than they should have, but still hadn’t lasted this far—including the whore Clorinda Rose. As much as Cait hated bitter little victories, that one tasted good. You may be gorgeous, she stared Clorinda down, but that’s all you’ll ever have. You’re a pair of lips and a loose hole, and nothing else.
That wasn’t the day’s only victory so far, either. Cait had been busy at the range all morning, but Skinny Pink had brought the details on Will Scarlet. As planned, Rob o’the Fire had informed the Nottingham Guard, who stopped Scarlet from attacking Gerome Artaud just in time. The dockmaster knew his life was on the line now, so he’d finally be open to striking a deal. First pick of all the incoming mead in Nottingham meant the greenbeard would let the Lions have as much access to his back rooms as they wanted—and Zinn’s old crew of children were already at work clearing them out. And then of course the side bonus, that Will Scarlet was in irons where he belonged. That spread a smile clear across Cait’s face.
This day, this St. Valentine’s Day, was for the lionhearts.
“Violet and Grey!” came the call, summoning the first archer to the line. Throughout the crowd, little flags with those colors sprung up, waving about furiously in the hands of their owners. There were ten colors in all, and every archer was assigned a combination of two. Their arrows were painted with a ring of each color halfway down the shaft—one wide, one thin—to keep track of their shots. Caitlin had claimed Red for both her colors, as she’d been lucky enough to pick early. Most of the Lions had claimed Red for at least one of theirs.
The Violet and Grey archer was a frumpy farmhand sort of man, quiet and unimposing, and round as the targets they were aiming at. He’d ignored Dawn Dog’s first suggestion to lose gracefully, but Cait could see he was sweating far thicker than he ought to now. He took his time and sent one arrow at each of the five targets, though he missed the two high ones on the wall and fared poorly on two of the field targets. “Violet and Grey, fifteen points!”
The Amber and White archer followed, an old man who landed arrows into four of the targets, with a second ring shot in two of them. Forty points, apparently, and the crowd erupted with little amber-and-white flags. Most didn’t know who they were rooting for, they’d simply purchased their favorite colors from the vendor stalls and were happy to scream for whoever bore them. To the masses, each archer was known solely by their colors. That was what the Red Lions were counting on—Alfred was as invisible as anybody here.
“Green and White, twenty-one points!”
The skinny waif who’d claimed green and white scowled, pointing at the single target he’d peppered with near-center marks, loudly complaining that he should’ve been ranked higher. He had opted to only take a single target. Cait recognized him from earlier, he was consistent at short distances and lousy from afar. Even after they’d thinned the herd, this waif didn’t belong in the final ten. Half of the original hundred archers could have outshot this fellow beyond the closest target.
“Gold and Black, thirty points!”
They had gotten fairly lucky in that regard. Cait had watched scores of better archers eliminated in the early rounds, long before Dawn Dog or the others had a chance to scare them off. But the random selection had pitted the best marksmen against each other too early, weeding most of them out rather quickly. Twenty rounds of five archers each had taken most of the afternoon, with the highest scorers advancing from each bout. Cait’s first group of five had all been amateurs, almost embarrassingly so. Those lucky pairings were further proof of the event’s poor planning, and that fortune was theirs this day.
“Amber and Amber, six points!”
The eager stableboy had choked, he’d wasted his first three shots on the smallest target on the wall, missing each time. Cait could hear a growing round of complaints from those archers who’d been sidelined already. Grumbling that the stableboy should never have made it to the top ten, that he barely deserved to be in the tournament at all.
They weren’t wrong, she had to admit.
Cait felt it in her stomach first.
They weren’t wrong.
“Violet and Blue, twenty-five points!”
Alfred had dismissed the idea of any trap, because nobody knew their faces. Those with shorter hair wore caps that hid their trimmed ears, which the Guardsmen never questioned. None of them were notorious. Nobody could identify Alfred Fawkes as Robin Hood, or as Red Fox, or as anyone at all amongst a group of random archers.
But now that she thought on it, the groupings of the archers seemed unusually skewed to help them. As if they weren’t the only ones who had stacked the deck for them to win.
Cait chewed on that. Wondered where it would lead.
There were honest contestants here, but no one important enough to complain when the odds were unnaturally against them. No one intelligent enough to argue the math. The colors for each group had been called from the nobles’ box above. If someone had indeed orchestrated this, intentionally putting each of the Red Lions in a position where they were most likely to succeed, it could only happen if someone up there knew what each and every one of them looked like.
Coincidence, she argued against herself. Things were going well because they’d planned it this way. And they’d been practicing at archery all week—they weren’t half bad.
That was vanity speaking. A flattered mark doesn’t know he’s being taken.
The Guardsmen hadn’t bothered to check their ears.
“Alfred!” she whispered at him, but he shook her off. He was watching Ginger Twain make his shots, red-and-blue arrows. “Alfred, what if they know our faces?”
“What?”
He wasn’t paying attention. Ginger’s first arrow went wide, causing a brief panic amongst the crowd, then laughter at their own fear.
“What if someone gave us up?” she asked, her words demanding his attention.
“What? Who?” he tisked her away. Ginger’s next arrow shot high down the range, hitting one of the far marks, but the arrow didn’t stick, it tumbled down to the ground.
Her mind raced. “Clorinda, maybe. You know how she is, twelve ways of jealous. What if this was her play? What if she wanted revenge for being nothing but side trim?”
“You’re being ridiculous,” he said, and turned his head around in time to watch Ginger miss again.
She pulled him back. “Don’t tell me I’m being ridiculous. Look at me, and think about it. Just think about it. Is it possible?”
He thought. The world kept moving behind him. Ginger settled for two easy shots on the nearby targets to the crowd’s disappointment as Alfred Fawkes breathed out his preconceptions and considered the possibility that they’d already been betrayed.
“Scarlet’s boys, maybe? No, David’s here, and Arthur wouldn’t send his friend up like that.”
“Red and Blue…” came the announcement, down the line, six sets of heralds, and an epic pause before the second half.
“… forty-one points!”
The ground tipped forward toward whatever was coming. Ginger Twain celebrated, oblivious to the fact that he hadn’t earned his high score. Cait reeled to see if anyone else was alarmed. Alfie’s face was clueless, but he leaned in so she could explain it to him.
“They made the math confusing, so they could group us together, regardless of our showing,” she said. “Unless you honestly think Ginger was the best one so far.”
The gallery of eliminated contestants showed signs of an uproar, but half of them were blindly cheering Ginger on while the rest were only barely confused or entirely uninterested. There was a murmur in the spectator stands, but those who waved red-and-blue pendants drowned them out with excitement. “Red and Green!” came the next call, summoning David of Doncaster to the firing line.
“Fresh arrows, mum,” came a heavy voice behind her, and C
ait turned directly into the face of a tall guard in Nottingham blue. He placed a handful of five arrows into her palm, two red rings painted around their shafts, and his other hand gripped the rim of a tall barrel of arrows. Only a lifetime of instincts kept her from buckling to fear.
He was wearing mail under his tabard.
He wasn’t alone. Now that she knew to look for them, she spied them throughout the archers, collecting any extra arrows. The five in Cait’s hand and the five placed in Alfred’s would shortly be the entirety of their arsenal. David was nearly done already, he’d wasted no time in driving one arrow into each of the five targets, barely pausing between each pull.
“Red and Green,” the heralds announced. “Sixty-one points!”
They called her colors next, and Cait stepped forward in a daze. Alfie whispered something to her, but it was lost. She no longer felt the shroud of anonymity, now it was as if every face in the castle saw exactly what she was. She stood naked in the middle of the archery range—naked, fat, and defenseless. Her bow’s weight was unfamiliar, the arrows uncomfortable to her fingers. She pulled one to make her first shot but flinched, her eyes darting to the sidelines, unable to find Clorinda Rose.
She didn’t even notice where her arrows landed, loosing one by one through the murk of a dream, her attention scattered everywhere else. On the guards in the crowd, on any commotion in the stalls, on the blinding sun that blocked her view of the spectators above. She searched for strangers, for blades, for anything out of place. Any reason to run now, any reason to hold onto her final arrow, but it was already gone. It eased from her fingertips, gone forever as easily as a secret. The crowd made noise, but she was still holding her breath.
“Red and Red, seventy-one points!”
One particular gord in the crowd drew her focus a third time, and finally she realized why. He’d been in the tournament earlier. He’d won his first round against four legitimate archers, and then choked in his second bout and lost to Ginger Twain. Now he was back, wearing Nottingham blue. Dawn Dog hadn’t intimidated him, no. He was a plant. Probably one of many. To help eliminate the real competitors early, then fail.
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