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It was a good lie. I’d spent the walk down the corridor building it, and it was entirely consistent with everything he knew about me. He did not believe one word of it.

"How thorough you are." He turned his glass. "Tell me, Sheriff. Have you ever considered what makes Robin of Locksley so difficult to control?"

I smirked. “Her talent for escaping."

Fitzwalter took a sip of his wine. “Her refusal to understand her place."

"She’s an outlaw, my lord. I doubt obedience is among her virtues."

Fitzwalter smiled. "An unmated Omega is a dangerous thing."

I said nothing at all. There were moments when the only safe move on the board was to leave the piece where it stood.

"Although," he continued, "I have recently heard that our little Ghost may no longer be unmated."

The fire cracked nearby. I kept my hands exactly where they’d been on the table. I kept my face exactly as it had been, while my whole body went cold from the inside outward.

"One of my men was at that cabin," he said pleasantly. "You will recall the business of the cloak. A woman's cloak, on a peg, in a Crown property where the Sheriff of Nottingham had been lying alone for six days with a fever. You were so very insistent that it be put back."

He reached into his coat.

"He’s not a clever man, but he is obedient, and he had already torn a piece off it before you gave the order."

He laid it on the table between the candles, and smoothed it flat with two fingers.

A strip of dark green wool, hand hemmed, the color going pale along the fold where it had been worn through by a quiver strap.

I had watched her sew that hem by firelight.

"Forest green," Fitzwalter said. "Country weave. Not a village woman's cloth, Sheriff. And not a village woman's stitching either. And my man tells me the whole of that cabin reeked of Omega." He sat back. "Which is a curious thing, because the cabin is Locksley property, and the only unregistered Omega anywhere near that forest is the one you have been failing to catch for three years."

He let the silence go on for a while.

Then he leaned across the table, into the candlelight, with an expression of genuine pleasure on his face for the first time since I had met him.

"Tell me, Bisbane. Does the Crown know you have taken its most wanted outlaw as your mate?"

For twenty years I’d served the Crown faithfully. And in a single moment, sitting at a closed table with a strip of her cloak between two candles, I understood that the kingdom I’d sworn my life to protect, had finally become my enemy.

22

ROBIN

Ihadn't even made it halfway into camp before Tam spotted me.

"ROBIN!"

His shout carried through the trees, and within seconds, half the camp was running toward me. Children abandoned their games and came racing around my legs. Alana pushed through the crowd and grabbed my shoulder, looking me over as though she expected to find something broken.

Tuck crossed himself with such enthusiasm that I wondered whether he'd been practicing.

"Well, there she is! Alive and in one piece. I told you lot my prayers would bring her home."

"Your prayers had nothing to do with it," Alana muttered.

"How would you know? Have you been speaking with the Almighty?"

Sefa emerged from beneath the healer's canopy, wiping her hands on her apron. She gave me a thorough inspection from head to toe, the same way she examined anyone who came back from a fight.