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Every vial we had stolen was already circulating through villages full of Omegas whose need had been counted and weighed by Sefa's careful hands.

I would sooner have walked into Nottingham Castle and knelt at the King's feet than claw back medicine from a single one of them.

I stared at the vial longer than I would ever admit to anyone.

Carefully, I then slipped it back into the case, and the case into the inner pocket over my heart. I dressed for the day with my jaw set.

No one can know,I thought.

Not Merry, who would fight me, and not Little John, who would mount a raid on the royal stores with six men out of pure fury, and certainly not the people, who slept easier believing their Ghost was made of shadow and legend rather than flesh that could burn.

The forest was still silver with mist when I walked the hidden path to my grandmother's garden.

She had planted it years before the fall of our house, in a fold of land deep in Sherwood where a spring kept the earth soft, because Eleanor of Locksley had never trusted fortune and believed a family should have roots the Crown could not find. Lavender grew there in patient rows gone half wild, alongside yarrow and feverfew and a dozen quieter herbs, all of it thriving in defiance of frost and neglect and history, and every time I stepped into that green pocket of the world, the knot behind my ribs loosened by a degree.

Sefa was already there, moving down the rows with her gathering basket, because of course she was. I had never once managed to arrive anywhere before that woman.

We worked together as the sun climbed and burned the mist away, cutting lavender and stripping yarrow, and if she noticed that I gathered more feverfew than the camp's stores strictly required, or that I lingered over the herbs my grandmother's books listed for cooling the blood, she was too wise to say so. Her hands moved beside mine in the old rhythm, and the garden filled with fragrance, and for a while I was neither outlaw nor legend, only a granddaughter kneeling in soil her grandmother had turned.

"Your grandmother always believed roots remembered," Sefa said at last, laying a bundle of lavender in her basket as gently as a sleeping child. "She told me once that a garden keeps every hand that ever tended it."

I smiled, and the smile ached. "I'm beginning to think she was right."

Sefa looked at me then, truly looked, the way she looked at wounds and fevers and things she intended to heal, and she reached out and touched my cheek with one weathered palm that smelled of lavender and earth.

"You carry House Locksley everywhere you go, child. Its lands were never the important part."

I did not trust my voice, so I pressed her hand with mine and let the garden say the rest.

I went to my father's grave alone.

We had buried him in secret beneath the great oak on the eastern ridge, the tallest tree in that quarter of Sherwood. The Crown had denied him a churchyard and my grandmother had declared, with terrifying calm, that no son of Locksley needed the Crown's permission to rest. The climb took most of an hour, and I made it the way I always did, with fresh lavender from Eleanor's garden bound in thread and the weight in my chest growing heavier with every step.

The oak stood in its full autumn gold, and the light came down through the leaves the color of honey, and I knelt at the low stone we had carved with nothing but a compass rose, because names on graves were for men whose deaths the law acknowledged.

I laid the lavender against the stone.

"I'm trying," I said.

The wind stirred through the branches above me, a long slow breath moving through ten thousand golden leaves, and I closed my hand around the brass compass at my throat until its edges pressed into my palm.

I told him about the medicine and the villages, and about the children who played beneath my repair bench and the girls behind the water barrel who wanted to grow up and rob bullies. I told him about the sheriff, though I discovered partway through that I did not entirely know what to tell him, and so I said only that the Crown had finally sent someone clever, and I kept the memory of a hand around my wrist to myself, because some things a daughter does not lay on her father's grave.

"I'm trying to become the woman you believed I could be," I said finally, and the wind moved again.

I let myself believe for just a moment, the way I always let myself believe on that ridge, that it was an answer.

Merry found me on the path back to camp, and I knew before she spoke, because I had learned the grammar of her bad news the way I had once learned my letters.

"Papplewick has gone into heat lockdown." She fell into step beside me, keeping her voice low. "Four Omegas started within two days of each other, and there's not a full course of suppressants left in the village, so the families have sealed the cottages and posted watches for roaming Alphas. And Robin, the granaries there were taxed to the beams last month. The children were hungry before this happened. Now no one can safely leave to work the fields, and what little food they have is going to run out inside a week."

Each sentence landed like a stone going into a well, and I felt the cold reach of the water where they settled. Hungry children. Sealed cottages. Omegas burning through unprotected heats behind barred doors while their families stood guard with pitchforks, one week from famine, and the heat under my own skin chose that exact moment to flare, as if my body wished to remind me that I understood their sentence better than anyone.

I did not hesitate, because hesitation was a luxury and I had been raised to know the difference.

"We'll raid again…"

Little John had come up the path behind Merry, and I watched the unease move through his big frame before he gave it words. "The royal stores at Blyth are the only source worth the risk… Bisbane will have them watched. Even for you, that's walking into the wolf's own yard." He crossed his arms. "Even with Bisbane waiting?"