Page 3

"Maybe he'll finally be fast enough to make this interesting."

2

GUY BISBANE

The caravan sat abandoned on the King's Road like the carcass of a cow, picked clean by someone who knew not to waste any parts of an animal.

I had arrived hours after the outlaws vanished, which meant I had already arrived too late.

Captain Aldric made certain the entire road knew how he felt about that as he paced between the hollow wagons. He ranted about incompetent soldiers and forest devils while his men stood in miserable rows, nursing their bruises and avoiding my eyes.

I let him rant, because his noise cost me nothing, and I walked the scene in silence.

Everything about it felt wrong in a way I had learned to trust. Wrongness was its own kind of evidence, and this road was thick with it.

There were no bodies in the mud and no blood soaking the ruts. Even the injuries that I had counted on the soldiers amounted to little more than bruised jaws and wounded pride.

There was even one nobleman who refused to leave his carriage and kept touching the ruby brooch at his chest as if reassuring himself it still existed.

That brooch troubled me more than anything else on the road. Why? Because while the coin chests were gone and the suppressant crates had been emptied down to the straw packing, a ruby that was worth more than all of that still remained intact and on the nobleman that it belonged to…

When thieves stole, they usually took what they could se. This thief had taken what mattered. That distinction alone, told me more than a hundred witness statements ever would.

I knelt beside the arrow buried in the lead wagon and studied the angle of it, and admired how deeply it had embedded itself in to wood.

A very steady hand, I thought.

"How many guards?" I asked without turning.

Aldric stopped pacing, pausing before answering. "Twelve, Sheriff."

I glanced back at him. “How many dead?"

The silence stretched long enough to become its own answer. "None," he admitted.

I glanced up at him. "Interesting."

Twelve armed men had been overrun in under a quarter hour by outlaws. Those very same outlaws had left every single one of them breathing. The captain thought he was describing a failure but I could see that I was looking at pure restraint.

This was what one would call discipline because it was never just about banditry. Whoever was in charge had a near military mind, a commander of sorts.

I worked the folded note free from beneath the arrow's fletching. Carefully I opened it and found myself staring at the words on the damp paper.

Still too slow, Bisbane.

My jaw tightened, but it wasn’t because of anger.

Anger would have been simpler, but what moved through me instead was recognition. It was a grim acknowledgment that passed between two players who had studied the same board for years.

This was the ninth such fucking note the Ghost of Sherwood had left pinned for me, and every one of them had been earned.

I drew the arrow from the wood and turned it slowly in the gray light.

The craftsmanship always caught my eye first.

The fletching had been trimmed and set by hand with a precision no fletcher in Nottingham could match. It seemed that each feather seated at an identical angle, the whole of it balanced so finely that it might have been made by a jeweler rather than an outlaw.

This was not stolen equipment or even scavenged from army stock. No, I thought. Someone had made this arrow with patience and pride, and someone had been taught to make it by a master.