Page 17 of Knotted in Sherwood Forest

He laughed, honestly laughed, a great creaking sound like a door enjoying itself, and he patted my arm with a familiarity he had certainly not earned. "Nothing, girl. Sheriff said the stores were filled with our taxes to begin with, so the Crown was only returning what it borrowed."

I went quiet.

Around me, Thornby celebrated, and I stood in the middle of the joy trying to make sense. There were no soldiers seeded among the carters this time. I’d checked, walking two slow circuits of the square with my hood up, reading hands and boots and the set of shoulders the way my grandfather taught me, and they were hired men with hired men's calluses, nothing more. There was no ambush sleeping in the tree line, no clerk recording the names of grateful families for later use, and no hook inside this bread.

Little John leaned down toward my ear. "You look disappointed."

A snort escaped me. “I’m suspicious."

"Because he fed hungry people?"

"Because men who work for the Crown don't suddenly grow consciences." I watched a mother press a suppressant vial to her chest with both hands, and my own words sat wrong in my mouth even as I said them.

He made the low rumbling sound that served him for disagreement and let it go, and we took the long path home, and the whole way, the arithmetic kept refusing to resolve. He hadn’t arrested anyone. He hadn’t used the villagers as bait, and I knew what his bait looked like now, and this was not it.

He had simply helped them, quietly and thoroughly, with a line about taxes that could have come out of my own father's journals.

For the first time in three years, I had to contend with the thoughts I was having.

Fuck.

Maybe Guy Bisbane was not the man I’d decided he was. I really hated how I’d built him up in my head only to have something like this crack away at the image.

We were an hour from camp, on a trail so faint that only my own people and the deer knew it existed, when I saw the arrow.

It stood in the trunk of an oak at the bend of the path, driven in at the exact height of my eye.

I knew its fletching before I was close enough to touch it, because I’d trimmed those feathers myself on a log by my own fire. It was one of my own arrows, left behind on the King's Road months ago, collected and kept and now returned to me on a trail he should never have been able to find.

A folded piece of parchment was tied beneath the feathers with waxed thread.

I pulled it free and opened it, and read it, and read it again.

You're becoming predictable. G.B.

I stared at the words while my pulse did something undignified. The audacity of it. The sheer towering nerve of this man, walking his evidence into my forest, onto my trail, to hang my own arrow at my eye level with a critique attached.

Merry had caught up by then, and she peered over my shoulder, and I heard the smile arrive in her voice before the word did.