Page 69
I looked at his mouth. "An even greater inconvenience."
He laughed, which pulled at his stitches and made him swear, and then he dragged me in against his good side and kissed my forehead as though he had been doing it for years.
I had faced down twelve armed men on the King's Road without my pulse changing. That frightened me considerably more.
By late morning I’d run out of ways to be useful indoors, so I took the axe out to the woodpile, and I was halfway through a round of ash when I heard it.
The whistle of a loosed arrow carries about half a second of warning, and the sound of one going into dry timber is unmistakable. It struck the post beside the cabin door at the height of my shoulder. I had the axe up and my body behind the woodpile before the shaft stopped humming.
Nothing followed.
The forest went on about its business.
I came out slowly, and the breath went out of me, because tied beneath the fletching was a length of green thread.
Green. This is Merry's.
I unwound the parchment from the shaft and read it standing in the cold with my hands going steadily colder.
Fitzwalter had doubled the hunt. Not for the Ghost of Sherwood this time, because the Crown had stopped pretending it wanted me in a courtroom. A warrant had gone out through the shire, and it didn’t say capture.
Soldiers had begun searching the villages, Thornby and Papplewick and Edwinstowe and the whole northern skirt of the forest, every parish that had received so much as a sack of grain with the sheriff's seal on the order. They were taking the food back. They were taking the medicine back out of the hands of Omegas who had been halving doses since summer, and a cooper in Papplewick named Aldous had been arrested for a crate of it in his cellar.
And at the bottom, underlined twice, the thing that stopped my heart entirely.
Bisbane has been missing six days. His men are searching. Half of Nottingham says the outlaws killed him. The other half says worse.
I heard the cabin door behind me.
"Robin?"
I folded the parchment and put it in my fist. I turned around with my face arranged, and he was not fooled for one half of one second.
"They've issued another warrant," I said.
His jaw tightened. "For your arrest?"
I shook my head. "For my execution."
Everything went out of his expression at once. Not the way a man goes pale, but the way a door closes. What stood in the gap where Guy had been a moment earlier was now the Sheriff of Nottingham. He was cold and entirely still, and it took me a breath to understand that for the first time in three years, none of that was aimed at me.
"Show me."
"It's a note from Merry. There's nothing in it you"
"Robin. Please…”
I handed him the parchment. He read it once, then again more slowly, and I watched his thumb go white where it pressed into the edge of the paper.
"Aldous the cooper has a daughter of about nine," he said. "I signed the order that put those suppressants in his cellar with my own hand, and they have arrested him for holding them. They are using my seal to prove his guilt." He looked up. "Fitzwalter is unwinding every relief order in this shire and calling it the recovery of stolen Crown property, which makes every family who took bread off those wagons a family that aided the Ghost of Sherwood."
"I know. I counted it on the way through the list." I took the note back out of his hand. "And then I got to the last line."
He did not pretend not to know which one.
"Six days," I said. "Half of Nottingham thinks I killed you. The other half thinks you went over to me." I folded my arms because my hands would not stay still otherwise. "Which half is Fitzwalter encouraging?"
"Both, and in that order." He said it with the flatness of a man reading his own ledger. "A murdered sheriff gives him a martyr and a reason to burn the forest. A traitorous one gives him my office and the naming of the next man to hold it. He will have been working both since the second day, and he has not had to lie about any of it, because I am in fact missing, and I am in fact lying in an outlaw's bed."
