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"Don't get excited."

He paused with his hand on the saddle, waiting. "Why do you work for them?"

"The Crown?"

"Fitzwalter." I watched his face when I said it. "Men like him."

Something moved behind his eyes at that name, quick and cold, shut away almost before I could catch it. When he answered, his voice was very level. "You think they're the same thing?"

I gave him the look that question deserved. "You wear their badge."

"That wasn't my question."

"And that wasn't my answer."

He almost smiled again, properly this time, and I had the unwelcome understanding that I would be thinking him up on his horse smiling down on me later when I should have been asleep.

I let the lightness go out of my voice. "One day they're going to make you choose, Bisbane."

"Between what?"

"What you're ordered to do and what you know is right."

He was quiet for a long moment, looking north, toward Nottingham sitting small and gray on its hill at the edge of the world.

"Perhaps," he said.

I shook my head. "There is no perhaps."

Then I stepped backward off the ridge into the trees, with his seal still in my pocket. I let Sherwood take me and he didn’t follow.

I was half a mile into the deep wood before I understood that this was the part that troubled me, and I slowed, and then I stopped altogether with my hand against the trunk of an oak.

He’d been close enough to touch me, with every right the law could give a man. A forged seal and a confessed forger and Crown property scattered across a village square, and no one would have blamed him for any of it.

And he let me walk away.

I would’ve known what to do with a man who chased me. I’d been running from men who chased me for years, and the running had become as natural as breathing.

I had absolutely no idea what to do with this one.

12

GUY

Lord Edmund Fitzwalter was waiting in my office when I rode in from the ridge. That told me that the man had left his own estate before the wagons ever finished unloading.

He’d made himself comfortable in the chair across from my desk, in my castle, with my candles burning down for his convenience. He didn’t even bother to rise when I entered. Everything about Fitzwalter was deliberate.

"Forty-two crates," he said.

I pulled off my gloves, one finger at a time. "Apparently."

"Grain, blankets, medicine, and a considerable quantity of Omega suppressants, redirected off the King's Road to two villages that contribute almost nothing to the treasury." He turned his cup a slow quarter on my desk. "Bearing your authorization."

"So I've been informed."

"Did you authorize them?"