Page 26

I raise a slight brow in her direction."I'm improving his reputation."

"Robin." She sat back on her heels, and the firelight caught the worry she was pretending was exasperation. "He's going to hang you."

I smiled at her over the top of the parchment. "He has to catch me first."

The sun was high, bright and glinting two mornings later when we intercepted wagons on the King’s Road. Our bows were slung across our back, and our quivers strapped shut.

I rode out of the trees with my hood up and Little John at my shoulder, and the escort reached for their swords exactly as you would expect, and I handed the wagon master a piece of parchment instead of an arrow. He was a thin, careful man with ink stains on his fingers and twenty years of Crown service in the set of his mouth, and he read the order twice before he ever looked at the seal.

Then he looked at the seal for a long time.

"Sheriff Bisbane authorized this," he said. It wasn’t quite a question, because the wax in his hand was answering it for him.

I smiled beneath my hood. "Would I lie to you?"

Little John coughed and he did it enormously, with his whole chest. I put my elbow into his ribs without turning my head.

The wagon master looked from the parchment to the road ahead, weighing the thing all careful men weigh, which is whether the trouble of asking questions exceeds the trouble of not asking them. A man who turned a wagon around on suspicion and proved to be wrong would answer for it to the sheriff himself.

"Thornby first," he decided, and began shouting at his drivers to turn the teams.

Not one arrow was fired.

Nobody bled and nobody fled, and nobody would wake tomorrow with a story about the Ghost of Sherwood. As far as those carters knew, they had been given new orders by a quiet hooded clerk on the forest road.

I rode back into the trees feeling rather pleased with myself.

Possibly, in hindsight, a touch too pleased.

I followed the wagons all the way to Thornby from the cover of the ridge, because an order was only paper until the grain came off the boards.

By midafternoon the square below me had filled, and it was one of the best sights I have been given. Children went past the fountain with loaves against their chests like they were carrying something alive, and the healer already had a medicine crate open on a trestle, sorting by the light. Along the eastern wall, in a quiet orderly line that made my throat ache, Omegas waited for suppressants with their hands folded and their shoulders down, people who had spent a season rationing their own safety now simply standing in a line like anyone else.

I was watching that line when I heard a horse behind me.

I came around with my bow drawn and an arrow at full nock before the sound finished, and I found the Sheriff of Nottingham sitting his horse at the edge of my ridge, reins loose, hands visible, entirely alone.

Alone.

No trackers in the brush, no detachment on the road below. I checked twice, and the forest told me the truth both times, which was that he had ridden out to find me without a single man to help him do it.

"You forged my signature," he said.

I let the bow come down an inch. "Good afternoon to you too."

"Forty crates."

"Forty-two."

His jaw tightened, and I watched the muscle shift there with deep satisfaction.

"You counted?"

"Of course I counted."

"My name," he said. "You put my name to it."

"Your name has never done so much good in one afternoon."