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Knotted in Sherwood Forest

Page 124

by Amaya Black

I'd spent six years carrying her oils in my kit and making remedies the way she'd taught me.

I thought I remembered everything.

But standing in that garden, surrounded by the smell of her lavender, brought back things I hadn't thought about in years.

"Robin?"

"It's the lavender."

I opened my eyes and made myself keep walking.

"She'd be furious about this."

Guy glanced around.

"The garden?"

"Especially the garden. She'd take one look at those bushes and have quite a few things to say about Edmund Fitzwalter."

"Such as?"

"Nothing I'm willing to repeat."

"Now I'm curious."

"I'll tell you later."

The old yew tree stood where the garden wall met the burial ground.

It’d been enormous when I was a child, and it was even bigger now. Its lowest branches nearly touched the ground, providing enough cover for us to crouch beneath them.

Beyond the wall, perhaps forty feet away, I could hear the clerk calling measurements and the steady sound of spades striking earth.

Guy took out the compass and held it where a narrow strip of sunlight passed through the branches.

"Show me the mark again."

I turned it until the hinge caught the light.

There it was.

A tiny four-pointed compass rose, no bigger than a grain of barley. One point had been cut deeper and slightly longer than the others.

"The mark on the inventory looked the same," Guy said. "Although I didn't copy it, so I'm relying on memory."

"Then we're both relying on memory."

I leaned against the yew and tried to think.

My grandfather had always taught me to study the ground carefully before deciding what I was looking at. He used to say that people missed half of what was in front of them because they were too impatient to look properly.

I needed to remember what my father had told me.

"He used to walk me along that wall every autumn," I said. "We'd start at the nearest grave, and he'd make me recite all nine generations in order. If I forgot a name, we'd go back to the beginning."

I smiled faintly.

"I hated it."