Page 9

The word came through the market gossips of Nottingham like honey dripping from a comb, warm and sweet.

That bothered me more than I wanted anyone to know.

Merry brought the news at dusk and she was breathless from the ride. As she set before the fire with all of us, she laid it out. A convoy would move along the forest road at the dark of the moon. It was carrying suppressants and winter grain bound for the garrison at Blyth. It would travel light, with only a handful of guards, because the Crown apparently believed that speed served better than steel.

I listened to all of it with my arms crossed, and the more she talked, the less I liked it. My bones ached with alarm.

Too easy, I thought.

We scouted the road ourselves two nights later. Everything I saw from the trees confirmed what my gut had been muttering since Merry first spoke. The wagons rolled through the lowest stretch of the King's Road with their canvas thrown back just enough. From where I was, I could see the crates, stamped and gleaming, arranged as if for a portrait. I counted a handful of gaurds in the dim light, around eight men when it should’ve been more.

The timing, the route, the careless leak through the markets, all of it fit together too sweetly, like a song written for exactly the ears that were listening.

Beside me on the branch, Little John shifted his weight and waited, because he had learned to read my silences the way I could read a breeze on a foggy day.

"It's a trap," I murmured.

He nodded slowly, unsurprised. "Then we walk away."

I sighed. “No."

His head turned toward me with the long suffering expression of a man who had buried a great many of my worst ideas. He’d also watched me dig up said ideas. Every single one of them.

I smiled and pulled an arrow from my quiver, checking the fletching out of habit. The convoy crawled below us like bait on a hook. Somewhere out in that darkness, hidden with more skill than the Crown usually managed, the new sheriff was waiting for me to take it.

The thought didn’t frighten me half as much as it should have.

"We change the plan,” I said.

Because here was what the clever sheriff had not accounted for. A trap only worked if I wanted what sat in the pretty little cage. I had spent three years teaching the Crown to misunderstand what I wanted. He had built me a beautiful lie out of grain and medicine, and I intended to answer it with a truth of my own, which was that Sherwood belonged to me, and everything that entered it moved at my pleasure.

I gave my orders in whispers, and the Merry Band melted into the dark to carry them out.

We didn’t touch the convoy.

Instead, half a mile ahead of it, Alana and Much slipped down among the picketed horses of the hidden soldiers and cut the lines with the tenderness of thieves stealing sleep itself, sending forty mounts drifting loose into the forest before a single man knew they were gone. Behind the convoy, Tuck and the Miller brothers levered three felled logs across the narrowest bend of the road, sealing it like a cork in a bottle. And farther down the King's Road, in the direction of Blyth, Little John set our smoke pots burning in a staggered line so that great gray columns rose against the night sky, painting the perfect picture of an ambush that did not exist.

Then I climbed to my perch above the road and watched the sheriff's trap devour itself.

The smoke did its work first. A horn sounded from the hidden positions, and soldiers burst from cover in numbers that confirmed everything I had suspected, forty men at least, all of them surging down the road toward an attack that was only burning herbs and pig fat. Half of them discovered their horses missing in the same breath. Riders collided with runners, sergeants bellowed contradicting orders, and the beautiful invisible net that had been woven around that convoy tore itself apart chasing shadows through the dark.

Merry settled onto the branch beside me, and her grin caught the faint light. "You didn't rob him."

"Didn't need to." I watched the chaos bloom and spread, and I let myself enjoy it, because the Crown had given me precious few gifts over the years and I refused to waste one. "Every soldier down there will tell the story by morning. The sheriff built a perfect trap, and the Ghost turned it into a mummer's farce without loosing a single arrow. That story will cost him more than the grain ever would."

And then, below us, something happened that dried the smile on my mouth.

A rider moved through the chaos, unhurried. He did not bellow and he did not chase, and even at that distance, even in the dark, I knew him by his stillness alone, because stillness like that was a language I spoke. The sheriff turned his mount in a slow circle at the center of the madness, and I watched him read the night exactly the way I would have read it. His arm rose and cut toward the smoke, and a measured detachment split away to investigate rather than swarm. His voice carried, low and even, and the collisions around him began to resolve into order. He posted men at the logs. He strung a picket line for the recovered horses. Within minutes, what should have been an hour of delicious chaos was becoming a disciplined perimeter, and it was becoming one because a single calm man refused to panic.

"He's learning," I said, and the words came out quieter than I intended.

Merry glanced at me, but I did not explain, because I could not have explained it in any way she would have liked. Every sheriff and garrison commander before him had met my tricks with rage, and rage made men stupid, and their stupidity had kept my people fed. This man met my tricks like a player studying an opening he intended to punish next game, and something in my chest that should have felt dread felt something else entirely.

I told the others to fall back to the ridge, and then, because I have never once in my life left well enough alone, I went down for a closer look.

I moved through the understory the way my grandfather taught me, reading the currents of the search parties and sliding between them, until I found him dismounted at the tree line with a torch burning somewhere behind him, studying the forest as if it might be persuaded to confess.

I misjudged exactly one step. A dry branch, buried under leaf fall where no dry branch should have been, cracked beneath my boot like a shot.