Page 6

I watched as she was sorting the herbs we had carried back alongside the suppressants. Finally, I settled in across from her without being asked, because this work was as familiar to me as fletching.

My hands moved through the bundles on their own, separating yarrow from feverfew, stripping leaves for drying, grinding what needed grinding in the worn stone mortar she pushed toward me. My grandmother's kitchen lived in my fingers even still. Every fragrant oil she had blended and every remedy she had simmered while I stood on a stool beside her had settled into me deeper than memory, down where the body keeps the things it refuses to lose.

We worked in easy silence while the camp murmured around us, and I felt the tension of the raid finally beginning to leave my shoulders. There was a peace in this that stealing never gave me. Stealing was the wound. This was the healing.

Sefa watched me fold a poultice wrap with a crease my grandmother would have approved of, and a smile deepened the lines of her face. "You have Eleanor's hands."

I froze with the linen half folded.

The name moved through me like cold water, because no one spoke it anymore. My grandmother had died two winters after we lost everything, in a borrowed bed in a village that hid us at the risk of its own children, and I had buried her name along with her because carrying it hurt too much. Hearing it now, spoken so easily and so warmly under the healer's canopy, cracked something open in my chest that I had sealed years ago.

"You knew her," I managed to ask, my voice feeling tight.

"Every healer in three shires knew Eleanor of Locksley." Sefa took the linen gently from my hands and finished the fold herself. "She never let a sick tenant go untended, highborn or low, and she taught half the midwives in this forest their trade. When you grind yarrow, child, you hold the pestle exactly the way she did." Her eyes found mine, old and kind and entirely unafraid of my grief. "The Crown took your lands. It seems it missed the important things."

I couldn't answer her for a long moment, so I didn't try, and she let the silence be what it needed to be while we worked on together, and somewhere in that silence the ache in my chest loosened into something almost sweet.

It was past midday when I passed the water barrels and caught two small girls whispering behind them with the elaborate secrecy of children who believe themselves invisible.

"That's her," the first one breathed.

The second peered around the barrel at me, skeptical. "She doesn't look scary."

The other replied. “Mama says she stole medicine from the King."

I stopped walking, and I let a slow grin spread across my face as I turned toward their hiding place. "Your mother is right."

They gasped in perfect unison and froze like rabbits, caught between terror and delight. The delight won out and they dissolved into a fit of giggles, clutching each other behind the barrel.

I crossed to them and knelt down into their world, bringing my eyes level with theirs. Up close they were maybe six and eight, sisters by the look of them, with their hair braided the same way and their knees scraped from the same adventures.

"Promise me something," I said.

Their two tiny heads nodded with some sort of absolute devotion that I felt I hadn’t truly earned.

"Grow into women who steal from bullies."

They nodded again, harder, their faces blazing with the seriousness of a sacred vow, and I pressed a hand briefly to each small shoulder before I stood. Whatever else the Crown took from me, it had given me this. It had made me into proof that the people they stepped on could step back, and if these girls grew up knowing that in their bones, then every price I had paid was a price worth paying.

I was still smiling when Merry found me, and the smile faded the moment I saw her face.

She drew me away from the fires with a hand on my arm, out past the drying racks to the edge of camp where the trees swallowed sound, and she kept her voice low in the way she reserved for news she wished she didn't carry.

"A runner came in from Edwinstowe an hour ago." She glanced back toward the canopy where Sefa worked. "There's another village, Robin. Omegas in Edwinstowe and two hamlets beyond it, more than we knew about, and some of them have been rationing suppressants since summer by cutting doses in half. What we brought back is already spoken for, and it won't stretch. Sefa did the count twice."

A long sigh left my lips and I stood very still while the arithmetic worked itself out in my head. I couldn’t find a number that I liked and I hated myself for it.

The raid had been clean and this haul had been the largest we had ever taken. I’d watched those crates empty into grateful hands not one full day ago and let myself believe, for one warm morning, that we had bought these people a season of safety.

One raid wasn't enough.

One raid was never going to be enough, because the Crown had manufactured scarcity amongst its people and it didn’t care.

"How long?" I asked.

"Weeks, maybe, if we stretch everything and have Tuck pray every day.” Merry held my eyes. "Less if any of them start their heats early."

Beyond her shoulder, the camp glowed with cookfires and easy laughter, full of people celebrating a victory that had already evaporated, and I felt the weight of every one of them settle across my back where it always lived.