Another whirl of reactions. “Is that true?” Tuck asked, his face in bunches. “Gilbert, you joined the Nottingham Guard?”
“I did,” his chilling voice whistled, “though my time with them is over. As for your other accusations, your aim is off. The mutilations in the French Ward, the attack at St. Peter’s, the fire at the brothel … those were the work of Sir Robert FitzOdo, not Will Scarlet.”
The name was vaguely familiar to Arable, but it apparently meant something more to Beneger. “Odo?”
“He’d been disguising himself as Robin Hood at night and doing such things, in his name, as it were. To get the people to turn against him.”
Beneger’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think that?”
“I watched him do it.” There was a quality to those words that Arable could not define, almost as if Gilbert had enjoyed doing so. “Maybe you would have seen it, too, if you hadn’t been watching me instead. Wasn’t my business, as it were, until recently. He’s here in the city, and fancies himself something important. So I took his favorite toy and sliced it up as a warning, as a trap.”
“His favorite … toy?”
“Some would call him a man.”
Beneger huffed. “Derrick? Or Ronnell?”
“Probably.”
Beneger shook his head, but his face betrayed his doubt. “If any of that were true, I would have known. He was under my command.”
Gilbert did not seem to care at all if Beneger believed him. “We have another Guardsman with us, he’ll vouch for the truth.”
“Who is that?”
“His name is Quillen.”
Another gasp from Beneger. “Quillen’s with you?”
“Only very recently. FitzOdo tried to kill him, so we rescued him.”
“So are you still … wait,” Tuck stammered, clearly confused. “Whose side are you on, then?”
Gilbert smiled, his pupils utterly black. “Oh, Friar. As uncreative as ever.”
“Alright, wait!” Robert held his hands out wide, begging for a moment of respite. “I don’t know anything about any of you, but it seems pretty clear that none of you know anything about each other, either. There are seemingly sixteen thousand things that all of you need to discuss, and every one of you apparently hates each other, or at least this guy,” he thumbed Beneger, “and I can’t keep up with any of it. But the truth is that it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, not a damned inch. There’s a war out there, and come morning that army is going to storm through the city and smash it to pieces, and we’re the only ones in a position to put a stop to it. We need to get into the castle, and you can all settle everything else once that’s all over with.”
“Zinn,” Arable said, before anyone could contradict Robert. “I hate this man as much as you, probably more so. There’s nothing I’d like to see more than you slam that knife straight into his heart. He ruined my entire life, my entire family. But Lord Robert is right. There’s more at stake than revenge right now, and Lord Beneger is well known amongst the Nottingham Guard. He’ll be instrumental in our ability to get what we need once we’re inside the castle. He’s respected, while the rest of us are … well, we’re Robin Hood’s gang, and that’s how we’ll be treated. So please, put that knife down. I’ve been where you are, I’ve been wronged and threatened and abused, and I can promise you one thing…”
Zinn hesitated, raising a crooked eyebrow at her.
Arable finished, “Payback feels just as good tomorrow as it does today.”
After a bit of hesitation, her knife retreated. Tempers settled, and they all tenuously agreed to tiptoe around any conflicts they’d brought with them. They took a few minutes to catch up Zinn and Gilbert on the happenings outside, and of King Richard’s return. The prospect of stopping the war before it began seemed to make a difference, and Zinn suddenly became a bit more cooperative.
“Alright, there’s only one way into the castle right now,” she said. “There’s a tavern called the Trip to Jerusalem, built into the base of the sandstone the castle stands on. There are some tunnels in the back that worm up into the rock. Not sure if they actually go all the way up to the castle, but that’s the theory. An’ anyone bigger’n me’ll have a hard time squeezing through.”
“You’ve seen these yourself?” Robert asked.
“Sure as shit,” she said, nodding. “My street crew was responsible for clearing them out.”
“Then why don’t you know if they go all the way up?” Lord Beneger asked.
“Not my fault!” Zinn snapped. “We could only get into the Trip when the greenbeard would let us, which wasn’t often. Lions made a deal with him, trading mead and money—his inn gets a little edge, and the Lions got access to his tunnels. But they were small as shit, and needed to be dug out before anyone could use them.”
“Which meant,” Beneger probed, “you needed more and more mead?”
“Right. At first it was small stuff—smashing up other taverns on the days mead came into port so no one else would buy any, things like that. But that wasn’t reliable. Red Fox hated that small shit, he wanted a big fix. Decided to blackmail the city dockmaster to get first access to all imports, and my crew was supposed to get information on him. But we got nothing.”
Beneger smiled. “So you threatened him instead.”
“We tried to,” Zinn sneered, “until you interrupted us, and nabbed Will Scarlet.”
“Don’t blame that on me, girl,” he replied. “One of your own sold you out.”
“Stop it!” Arable interrupted. She was having enough trouble following without them ready to go at each other’s throats again. “What matters is that the tunnels can only probably get us into the castle?”
The group exchanged uneasy looks. “We’ll have to take our chances,” Robert offered.
“Still, not as easy as that.” Zinn’s tone shifted into something smaller. “You got two problems to deal with ’fore you get there. First is that FitzOdo figured it out, too, and took over the Trip a few weeks back. Cunt. Don’t know if he’s tried to use the tunnels or not, big ol’ ox, but he’s guarding them. So if you’re aiming into the castle, you have to go through him. And since FitzOdo was working for the good lord dick fucker here,” she aimed her knife’s tip at Beneger’s chest, “there’s no way we’re letting them get close to each other.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” Beneger said. “If what you said about FitzOdo is true, I’ll be the first one to put that damned dog down.”
Arable had no qualms with any plan that put Beneger into dangerous places with people that wanted to kill him. “What’s the second problem?” she asked.
Gilbert took this one. He smiled again, the lantern light turning the tips of his lips into a twisted devil’s grin. “Why, you were followed.”
* * *
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, GILBERT led them down a series of tunnels they had almost definitely been in before, ending in a large chamber lit with braziers and filled with furniture—practically a full tavern beneath the city’s surface. There were only a few people lingering there, mostly as young as Zinn or younger. On a few of the craggy walls, a large white hand had been hastily painted.
“Used to be the Red Lions’ main den,” Zinn explained when Arable asked, “but they all decided to get dead, or join with someone else.”
“Their leaders, at least,” Beneger confirmed. “Prince John killed them at the archery tournament.”
“Oh, that was all the prince’s idea, was it?” Zinn twisted and gave him a squint of her face. “You didn’t have anything to do with that, didcha?”
She purposefully swung his sword in a clumsy arc and let it bang against the ground. He had surrendered his weapon to her as proof of his good intentions, and she’d opted to use it as a walking cane—taking every opportunity to smash its edges into rocks for the delight of seeing him wince at its abuse.
Gilbert explained that they’d been going in the wrong direction in the tunnels before he’d st
opped them, and might have been lost for a day trying to navigate the tunnels on their own. “We first noticed you crossing the fields,” he explained. “We keep one lookout watching that well from the city, just in case it’s compromised, as it were. It’s the only opening we’ve found outside the city walls. Don’t worry, I don’t think the city guard saw you. We just happen to know where to look. Which is why we thought it odd when we noticed someone following you at a distance.”
Someone had followed them, entering through the well and finding a better path into the city than they had, only to be caught by the “Children of the White Hand” here.
Gilbert climbed to another jagged shelf that split the middle of the curious underground chamber. There was no proper place to cage someone down here, so the captive was left to sit on the floor, his hands and feet both bound together and then to the iron foot of a nearby brazier that was too uncomfortably hot to be near. The man was skinny, had disheveled brown hair and large eyes with bags beneath them …
“Charley Dancer!” Nick Delaney shouted with relief. “What’d you follow us for?”
“He’s with us, you can cut him free,” Robert quickly added.
But Arable was lost, in his features …
“Don’t touch him!” she shouted, before anyone could follow Robert’s command. She crouched down on the balls of her feet to look him in the face, and a resigned look overwhelmed him as he realized his long deception was finally over.
“What is it?” Tuck asked.
She sucked in air. “His name’s not Charley.”
Arable’s mind reeled to figure it out. She had thought it strange that she’d never actually met Charley Dancer during their time in the Sherwood, but John Little had dismissed it as a quirk of them both preferring their own privacy over the group. She’d thought that the frogman hated her—blamed her for their group’s trouble—and she’d been content to let him always skulk away from her presence, dismissing him entirely. Ever since they made it to Huntingdon, she’d spent most of her time in the castle while the group camped by the Cook’s Backwater … but even that wasn’t enough to explain it. No, “Charley” must have put a massive effort into making sure they never interacted—for she surely would have turned him in for who he was, if ever she’d bothered to look past his beard and into the eyes of a man she’d known, when she was still a servant in Nottingham Castle.
The betrayal of it was sharp, sharper than every other reason they all had to kill each other. She felt invaded, lied to—and whether this defensiveness was just part of the changes in her body, she didn’t care. She was one breath away from grabbing the sword from Zinn’s hand and cutting this impostor in two.
The prisoner smiled sheepishly, a wide grin she’d seen a hundred times, mocking her utter ignorance of how long he had deceived her, right under her nose. His emotion made a choking seize in his throat that had always been his version of laughter.
“Hi, Bellara,” he said, recalling their old game together.
She wasn’t interested in playing with the Guardsman. “Hi, Bolt.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
ARTHUR A BLAND
NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
“HOLY, HOLY, HOLY SHIT.” Arthur hugged Will Scarlet close the very instant the tunnel down to the prisons gave them any privacy. He was too exhausted to laugh—it had been damned difficult to keep a straight face for the last day, pretending they didn’t know each other. David’s arms wrapped around them both, he squeaked in celebration.
“‘Holy shit?’” Will choked, his joy muffled by their embrace. “Since when do you believe in holy anything?”
“I believe in holy fucking everything now,” Arthur answered, happy to pray to any god Tuck wanted him to pray to. “There’s no other way to explain any of this.”
If the sky had opened up and rained goats down on them, it wouldn’t have been half as strange as the last day. After discovering Will was the baileyking, Arthur and David became the official envoys between him and the Nottingham Guard. Their insurmountable task was to broker a peace in the lower bailey—which was actually the easy part. Because at the same time, they had to ensure that nobody in the Nottingham Guard discovered that Henry Russell was an invented name, and that Will Scarlet had never made it to his gaol cell. He’d altered his appearance as much as possible—gathered his hair into a tail that sprouted from the top of his head, and covered his face in red streaks from the archery paint buckets—but there were certainly some Guardsmen like the Lace Jackal who might recognize him on closer inspection, as Arthur had. So they’d claimed that Henry Russell refused to deal with anyone besides Arthur and David, turning the two of them into goddamned heroes amongst the Nottingham Guard.
Meanwhile, Arthur and David’s real identities as Will’s old crew had to remain hidden to most of Will’s new crew, or else the truce would hold no water. Some of Will’s rebels had been Red Lions and understood the absolute fucking insanity of their situation—but for the others, Will had to pretend they were indeed insolent gords that he obviously hated and would rather kill than give a damned peace treaty.
The three of them juggled all those secrets with straight faces, pretending to yell at each other in front of the others, keeping up a ruse of hostility to satisfy both sides’ need for aggression. It was a joke beyond anything Arthur had ever kept before. Through it all, they hammered out a truce. Of course, the arrival of the French army outside the city walls made that part easier.
Everyone was on edge, and the preparations for a siege were in full swing. The necessity of the truce—and the Guard’s willingness to do anything to unite the bailey—was the only reason the three of them were allowed here—back into the middle bailey, and down into the catacombs of the gaols beneath the castle. At the entranceway, they stole the first opportunity to finally talk amongst themselves freely.
“Holy holy holy shit…” and so on.
“We thought you were dead!” David exclaimed, shaking Will by the shoulders. “Second time you’ve done that to us, I’ll have you know.”
“I probably should be,” Will admitted with a smile. “They knocked me out cold when they arrested me. Locked me in a cage in the gatehouse so they wouldn’t be late for the archery tournament. If I’d made it down here,” he thumbed the gates that led below, “well … that’d be something else.”
David whistled a sad note.
“Not gonna lie,” Will continued, “wasn’t sure you’d be so happy to see me.”
Arthur opened his mouth to answer, but didn’t. After everything that had gone so fucking wrong in the last month, he’d practically forgotten about the fight he’d had with Will. Over a barmaid’s finger. A finger seemed a damned small thing to worry about now.
“Well,” Will finished, despite their hesitation, “I was damn glad to see you two.”
“My fault, that you got captured,” Arthur said, surprised at how much he needed to get it off his chest. “You were right, Will, I should have done what you asked.”
“Fuck that,” he replied. “I shouldn’t have asked it. Breaking arms for the Red Lions? Look at where it got them.”
“Not just that.” Arthur scratched at his beard, knowing he’d regret it if he didn’t say it. “I found information on that fop with the velvet hat, but I didn’t give it to them. You never would have been set up like you was, if I’d just done as I was told.”
Scarlet’s eyes flicked back and forth, his breath held. Arthur steeled himself for a punch in the jaw—he deserved it. Maybe worse.
“We stayed, for you,” David added, probably trying to help. “When we heard you were captured, we thought … well we didn’t do anything, but we thought about it.”
Eventually, Will touched the tunnel walls beside him, gently. “Listen. Nobody’s fault but mine what happened to me. And we all came out alright, didn’t we?”
Arthur had to laugh. Nothing about their situation could really be called alright, but there was admittedly plenty of room still for it to get worse.
> “So who’s Henry Russell?” David asked.
“Just a name. Needed something generic. You two kept your own names?”
“We did…” Arthur shrugged. “Wasn’t feeling very creative.”
“How the hell’d you sneak in with the gords?”
“Same way you did last year,” he answered, though he was surprised at his new aversion to the word gords. “Stole a tabard and waltzed into the castle.”
“Good on you.” Will seemed impressed. “And you didn’t kill the Sheriff afterward? Not even once?”
“No, that’s how they caught you, remember?” David poked his chest. “We decided to do the opposite of that, and it worked out pretty well.”
“Huh.” Will wobbled his head. “I’ll try that next time.”
Looking down the maw of the prison tunnel, Arthur jangled the key ring in his hand. One of those keys, which the captain of the Guard had placed squarely in his palm, would unlock the gate before them. If he’d known, when choosing sides in the Sherwood Forest months earlier, that he’d end up joining the Nottingham Guard and being trusted with the keys to the fucking city …
“How many are down there?” David asked.
“Most of the Red Lions,” Will answered. “They were picked up pretty quickly in the riots, and moved down to the gaols. With Alfie and Cait gone, they’ll follow me. Especially if I’m the one that sets them free.”
Arthur was uneasy at the thought, but they needed every able-bodied man they could get. The final deal of their fake negotiations was to open the prisons. Captain de Grendon needed every man in Nottingham to fight in her defense, so he conceded that Henry Russell and his men would be forgiven of any crimes if they joined forces against the French. That included everyone who’d been arrested in the riots as well. So here they were, ready to release all the Robin Hoods and sympathizers and the like who’d been held captive this last month, to arm them with swords and shields and stand them before the French army.
It was going to be a hell of a time.
Arthur grasped the key, enjoying its cold edge. “That’s good. We’ll need them.”
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