Page 8

I closed the journal quietly and sat for a long time in the dark, because something in the record did not fit, and I had spent my entire career learning to trust exactly that feeling. Traitors schemed for thrones or gold, and there was no scheming anywhere in these pages.

There was only a man who loved his people and a daughter who had clearly inherited it. A conviction began to bloom in my chest, cold and steady, that I had been sent to hunt the daughter of an innocent man.

I would deal with that conviction in time. First though, I intended to meet her.

Little Ghost, I thought….I’m coming for you.

My lieutenants expected me to flood Sherwood with soldiers but I disappointed them at the morning briefing with my words and plan.

"No sweeps," I said, standing before the map wall. "No burned tree lines and no village searches. Every soldier we march into that forest feeds her legend and starves our cause. The bandits will hear them coming a day before they arrive. We are not going to chase the Ghost of Sherwood." I laid my hand flat on the cluster of villages threaded to her raids. "We are going to invite her."

I had studied her for three years without understanding what I was seeing. But I understood now, her pattern had become her one vulnerability.

She didn’t strike for wealth, which made her unpredictable to men hunting a thief, but she struck wherever the people's need was greatest, which made her utterly predictable to a man hunting a protector.

So I would manufacture the need.

The Crown would announce a shipment of suppressants and winter grain bound for the garrison at Blyth, routed carelessly along the forest road, guarded lightly, timed for the dark of the moon. Word of it would be allowed to leak through the market gossips of Nottingham, and every detail would whisper the same promise into Sherwood, that here was medicine meant for soldiers while villages rationed half doses, and that it could be taken.

My lieutenant studied the route I had drawn and shook his head slowly. "She's evaded every trap the Crown has ever set, for three years, Sheriff. She'll smell the bait. She'll never come."

I looked at the charcoal sketch, which now sat propped on the corner of my desk.

A smirk danced onto my lips, as I studied it again, it had no business taking up the space.

"She'll come," I said. "She won't be able to help it. Neither of us can."

He was wise enough not to ask what I meant and turned on his heel to go and deliver the news to the others.

Fitzwalter arrived without invitation two days later, sweeping into my office trailed by his own guards.

I marked again how much interest the lord kept spending on a matter of common banditry.

He stood and admired my map wall with the small cold smile of a man appraising a rival's work. He accepted wine that he didn’t drink, and spent a quarter hour circling his true purpose before he finally arrived at it.

"The Ghost is more dangerous than the council understands," he said, turning his cup slowly on my desk. "This creature has made the Crown bleed for three years, Bisbane. Criminals of that stature cannot be caged, because cages become pulpits and trials become theater. Every day this outlaw breathes, the low born grow bolder." He looked up at me, and his eyes held all the warmth of a January river. "When you find the Ghost, kill her."

The word her sat in the air between us, small and damning, because the Crown's proclamations still named the Ghost of Sherwood a man.

I hadn’t shared my discovery on the road with anyone.

I let the silence stretch while I looked at him, long and level.

I watched Fitzwalter realize the second he’d made his mistake and decided, in the flicker of a heartbeat, to pretend it hadn’t happened.

"I'd rather arrest her," I said.

His jaw tightened at the corner, a small tell on a careful man. He set down the untouched wine and rose with his courtesy intact and his eyes gone flat.

"The King granted you authority, Sheriff, not immunity." He paused at my door. "I hope your methods survive your results."

I listened to his boots recede down the corridor, echoing against my castle’s walls. I looked at the sketch again, of the laughing girl in the oak tree and asked her, silently, the question that mattered.

What does Lord Edmund Fitzwalter know about you that frightens him this badly?

5

ROBIN