Page 15

Because that was the truth at the bottom of all of it, the truth I had learned holding her wrist in the torchlight and reading her father's journals in the dark. Greed could be starved and fear could be waited out, but what drove Robin of Locksley was neither, and a woman who robbed the Crown to feed strangers would never, as long as blood moved in her, let an unexplained kindness enter her forest unexamined. Charity in her territory was a mystery, and mystery was a threat, and she would come to look at it with her own eyes.

I rode north the next evening and waited at the edge of the trees, and on the second night, she came.

I felt her before I saw her, which should have troubled me more than it did. The forest changed its breathing somewhere off to my left, like a hush moving through the dark. Like a ripple through water that was , and then she stepped out of the tree line into the great moonlit clearing north of the village, and stopped, and looked directly at where I stood.

Neither of us looked surprised, and that, more than anything, told me what we had become to each other.

The clearing stretched between us, silver and frost crisped, and she stayed just outside bow range with the easy precision of a woman who had measured such distances her whole life. She wore the hood back off her locs, moonlight full on her face, which I understood was not carelessness. It was an answer to the wagons. I had shown her my face by feeding her village, and now she was showing me hers.

"You planned all this," she called across the frost, and her voice carried an accusation with laughter buried alive inside it. "The grain. The medicine. Wagons with no crest rolling in like a miracle. You baited a trap with mercy, Sheriff."

I nodded, because I had never intended to deny it. "You walked into it anyway."

"Not yet."

Her chin lifted on the words, and even across sixty yards of moonlight I saw the smile, bright and untamed, the same smile that had been costing me sleep for a fortnight, and I catalogued every detail my trackers would need and discovered I had no intention of giving them a single one.

Then a twig cracked somewhere behind me, one of my own men shifting for a better angle, and the clearing emptied.

There was no other way to describe it. Between one heartbeat and the next she folded backward into the dark, no rustle and no shadow and no direction, and my trackers spent an hour proving what I already knew, that following the Ghost through Sherwood was like tracking smoke through fog. They found her path in the morning, or rather they found where her path had been, false trails braided through stream beds and stone shelves and one place where, as near as any of them could reconstruct, she had walked forty feet along a fallen trunk and simply left the earth entirely.

I stood at the tree line while they reported their failure, watching the empty forest breathe under the setting moon, and instead of frustration, I felt my mouth curve.

She had tested me, and I had tested her, and the score at the end of it was nothing to nothing, with the whole board still to play. Neither of us had won.

Yet.

Back in Nottingham, alone with the candles, I closed the ledger on Act One of our war and made my accounting like the disciplined man I had once believed myself to be.

Her arrow from the King's Road hung pinned beside my map wall, oilcloth folded back, the fletching throwing a thin shadow across three years of threaded raids. Beside it I had fixed her note, the ninth of its kind, creased from the road and from my own pocket. Still too slow, Bisbane. And below them both, resting on the corner of my desk where the sketch of a laughing girl watched over it, lay my right hand with its pale band of skin where a signet ring had sat for eleven years and sat no longer.

Evidence, all of it, though no longer of any crime I was prepared to name.

"I'm going to catch you, Little Ghost" I said quietly, and it did not sound like a sheriff swearing an oath to the Crown. It sounded like something else entirely, and I let it.

Far away in the dark heart of Sherwood, though I could not know it then, an outlaw sat on a ridge above her sleeping camp, turning a gold signet ring in her fingers before slipping it into the pocket where a brass compass rode, letting the two of them settle together, her history and her enemy, keeping each other warm.

She looked north, toward the distant lights of Nottingham burning small against the night, and she smiled.

"Come and try."

9

ROBIN

Chapter Nine: The Sheriff's Ring

Robin's POV

Three days after the moonlit clearing, I sat by the campfire with my repair kit across my knees and a fletching knife in my hand. I wasn’t repairing anything at all.

I’d been turning his ring between my fingers.

The gold caught the firelight as it moved, and the seal rolled past my thumb again and again.

A hawk stooping over a tower, worn soft at the edges by eleven years of another person's skin.

I had told myself a dozen sensible stories about why I kept it, that it might reveal something useful about his house, that it might be worth good coin melted down, and every story was a lie, and I knew it the way you know a floorboard will creak even as you step on it.