NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
SUNDAY, 16TH DAY OF FEBRUARY
MORNING, WHICH MIGHT NORMALLY bring tranquility, was only a promise of another day’s horror. Quill found himself on the lip of the battlements again, vomiting over the edge. A physical pinching pain wound a creative path about his bowels, as though he’d accidentally swallowed some very angry animals who were eager to burrow an escape. Quill wiped his mouth with a rag, ignoring the feisty wind that threatened to carry him off the walkway. One side contained the small courtyard of the upper keep, the other led down to a fresh pile of vomit in the middle bailey. This was the entirety of his world now—the debatable safety of a cage upon a hill, and it promised to remain so until Prince John’s madness exhausted itself.
An ocean of sound roiled over him, it swelled and pushed, the constant commotion of the lowest bailey. The citizens were still trapped there—hungry, cold, and increasingly angry. The management of it all was nearly nonexistent. Quill hastened to the Sheriff’s office in the high keep, where gathered the men who intended on facing the day’s emergencies. As Quill walked there, he kept one eye open for any small closet in which he might stow away for a quick year or two.
The vaulted room boasted thick columns, skinny windows, and a dozen prominent advisors who were already arguing as Quill joined them. A cursory glance confirmed that Prince John was mercifully absent. “He has secluded himself in the uppermost story of this keep,” complained Hamon Glover, the rotund castellan whose eyes seemed desperate to pop out of his skull. “He will not even allow me access to him, he sends messages through his manservant. It is abominable!”
“He saw me,” answered Lord Beneger.
“And no one since!” Glover spurted. “This castle is not his to command. Such were the stipulations of his exile, and now we are like to see why! He cannot deny my access—”
“He is claiming an emergency measure,” Ben explained. “To deal with the domestic threat of Robin Hood. I don’t know if there’s any precedent for it, but it may be within his right.”
The man harrumphed. “It is my privilege to protect this castle from any enemies, including those within its walls.”
Ferrers, skulking by a column, uncurled his fingers. “Master Glover. Please.”
Lord Beneger de Wendenal’s voice carried a dire warning. “You would do well to give your words more consideration.”
“I consider the prince a madman.” Hamon Glover refused to back down. “I hear he goes on and on about French spies. Can you believe it?”
“He’s welcome to stay locked up there.” Captain de Grendon pounded the table twice. “He’s the least of our concerns right now. Once we have peace you can all play prince and paupers, but right now I need help getting control of the castle, and control of the city. My men are a single short word away from tearing each other apart! FitzSimon has practically taken over the barracks, and I can’t stop him if he tries to storm the upper keep.”
“He won’t storm the upper keep, they’re Guardsmen—”
“The prince murdered FitzSimon’s daughter!” De Grendon hit every letter of that statement, rightfully stunned it was a real sentence that could be spoken aloud. “For nothing. Because she missed. Because she refused to kill a man in cold blood. Frankly, I’d join The Simons if he wanted to raise hell. If my boys stay in that barracks with nothing to do, they’re going to boil. And there’s plenty of goddamned work to do, we just need to open the castle gates!”
“Prince John has forbade that,” the Sheriff reminded them.
De Grendon’s jaw locked. “Then let him come down here and defend that idea.”
“There are innocent people trapped in the lower bailey,” Quill tried to interject, “and not enough Guardsmen. It’s probably worse in the city. The only people the prince has allowed to leave the bailey are those that are arrested—and then, only to be taken to a cell. The prisons can’t even fit them all. Some people are turning themselves in now, falsely claiming to be associates of Robin Hood, just to get out of that bailey.”
“I do not disagree with you.” Ferrers scratched the tip of his nose. “But I cannot open the gates until the prince has commanded it.”
De Grendon threw his hands in the air. “Then you’re a fucking idiot.”
William de Ferrers inhaled sharply but did not respond.
“We can’t feed them,” Quill pleaded. It was hardly his station to speak, but there was no propriety anymore. They were more like marooned survivors on an island, where titles were meaningless. “People are starting to go hungry out there. Hundreds of good citizens who came to watch a friendly archery contest, they’ll soon be fighting each other to suck on bones. They will riot, they will kill our men, or our men will be forced to kill them, which is a burden they should not have to bear.”
“Have you seen the chicken launcher?” de Grendon asked.
“Excuse me?” Glover startled.
“You can see it from the south-eastern corner of the bulwark,” Quill explained. “Built on a rooftop across the way, someone’s fashioned a sort of rudimentary catapult. For chickens.”
The castellan’s eyes bulged past credulity. “They’re attacking my castle with poultry?”
“They’re not attacking the castle.” De Grendon dropped his face to his palm. “They’re trying to feed their friends, and their family. The people on the inside are screaming for help, for food, and someone out there at least has the decency to try to feed them.”
“I thought we were feeding them.” The Sheriff directed this toward his castellan.
“We’re trying,” Master Glover puffed, “but there are hundreds of them, and you won’t let us open the gates. The castle has reserves, but we normally bring in fresh food from the city. Without access to the bailey, we’ve resorted to lowering cooking pots down on ropes.”
“One spilt this morning,” Quill said, he’d seen it himself. “Must have burnt a dozen people. I was watching from above the bridge, useless. We have men down there that are trying to help, but it is madness. Surely the prince could understand our need to move supplies and Guardsmen between the baileys.”
“There are no fucking Robin Hoods hiding in the soup!” De Grendon was at his wits’ end.
With an almost unnoticeable calm, Ferrers responded, “I’m not an idiot.”
“This is insanity,” de Grendon roiled. “I won’t let you endanger my men another minute. I’m ordering them to open those gates, and to hell with you and the prince’s orders.”
“I’m not an idiot!” the Sheriff snapped, suddenly standing aright and rigid, every muscle seething. “Don’t you think I recognize the lunacy of this? What Prince John has demanded of us is reckless and ignorant, and I will authorize every possible action to alleviate its consequences, but I will not disobey his order. If you can think of alternatives to establishing peace in the lower bailey, or to feed the discontent, then offer them.”
“We open the gates,” the captain insisted. “That’s the alternative.”
“Think further than that, Fulcher.” The two men locked eyes, but the captain seemed willing to hear the sheriff out. “Prince John can replace me at a moment’s notice. If I upset him, he will no doubt appoint some underling in his entourage. If that happens, those people in the bailey will have no friends at all. Prince John can replace you, too, Captain, and very likely anyone who argues against him. I do not claim to understand why he has a sudden fascination with Nottingham or its gangs, but I know that we can only help this situation if we remain in power.”
A heavy pause passed between them, made all the more painful by the muffled noises of the mob outside.
“If I am to be replaced, that can be on my head,” Captain de Grendon decided. “But I am opening those gates.”
“Captain, please.” Lord Beneger did not shout it, he didn’t need to. What the Sheriff lacked in presence, Lord Beneger had in his every breath. “The Sheriff has the right of this. If you open those gates now, you may help a few people immediately. But you put more people in greater danger in the long run. You would do us all a great disservice if you removed yourself from the board.”
Quill cleared his throat. “If Prince John is the key to this, then why not appease him? He seeks to rid Nottingham of the scourge of Robin Hood? We already captured Will Scarlet, and the impostor Robin Hood was killed at the archery tournament. We have two informants from within the Red Lions—”
“Peveril.” Ben raised his hand. “I tried that already. The prince isn’t interested in results.”
Quill couldn’t even wrap his mind around what that sentence meant, like it was some linguistic riddle. “What do you mean?”
All eyes fell on the dread Lord de Wendenal. “It’s not possible, really, to clean up every last trace of Robin Hood. FitzOdo tried, I tried … all we can do is pull at threads. There can always be a new gang that claims his title when the previous gang has died. There is no way to rout everyone involved. Prince John knows this. It doesn’t matter how many people are arrested in the bailey, or in the city, it doesn’t even matter how many of them are innocent. He’s trying to kill the idea of Robin Hood. And to do that, he must stand by his word—by inflicting a terrifying punishment for anyone working against us, and a commensurate reward for anyone who works with us.
“These last two days have been terrible, yes, but they have only been two days. If he opens the gates now, then every future Robin Hood knows he can escape the prince’s punishment just by waiting it out. But if this lockdown continues … not two days, not a week, but a month … or longer … well. The city will suffer greatly, yes, and they will fear ever suffering like that again. Prince John means to establish a punishment on this city so severe that no one will ever dare go Robin Hooding again. Not for a thousand years.”
Captain de Grendon nodded solemnly. “And it doesn’t matter who gets harmed in the meanwhile.”
“Frankly,” Beneger judged, “no, it doesn’t. And he isn’t wrong, either. It is a solid tactic, one that we disagree with because we find ourselves in the unenviable position of being harmed by it. But it will be effective. Eventually.”
If the room was tense before, it now grew into alarm. The idea that their current predicament had only begun had clearly not occurred to most present. Quill felt his heart race, and wondered if this was what it was like, to look into death’s maw. Surely he could find some way to get a message out of the castle, to finally summon his father … but this had already grown beyond his family’s ability to help.
“But why does he care?” Ferrers asked nobody. “Why all that showmanship in killing Robin Hood on the field? These are not his problems to care about.”
“French spies, apparently,” Hamon Glover muttered.
“Sheriff.” Beneger straightened himself. “We ought to speak privately.”
The room stilled at the words of the only man who had spoken with Prince John since the riots began. Still they obeyed, although Beneger motioned for Quill to stay instead. Glover, the captain, and the dozen advisors who had watched all silently receded. Once they were gone, there was nothing but the grand emptiness of the room, and the ever-present noise of the mob outside, the new normal of the castle’s heartbeat.
Eventually they were alone, the three of them. For the first time since Quill had known the man, Beneger de Wendenal appeared unsure of himself.
“There’s much more to the prince’s motives that I cannot tell the others. This business with eradicating Robin Hoods, the prince is just using it to keep himself safely barricaded in the castle. He believes that a French army is marching for Nottingham, to kill him.”
He rolled out the details, and answered whatever questions he could, and then waited in silence as the Sheriff digested the information. Quill could hardly make sense of it himself.
Eventually, Ferrers spoke, with a startling genuineness in his tone. “It was not so long ago that you came storming into this room, ready to break my neck in half. And Peveril, you stood there, just as you are now, white as bone. I imagine none of us thought the world could get much more mad, could we?”
“I’m rarely wrong,” Quill answered. “And always wish I wasn’t.”
“Hm.” Ferrers spread his fingertips across the surface of his desk, one eye on Lord Beneger. “You’re more adept at the larger political world than I. My ambitions have always been more … humble. Selfish, perhaps you could say, in that I care more about protecting what I have than adding to it. I suppose I learned from my father’s failures.”
Lord Beneger breathed sharply, once. If Quill did not know better, he would’ve thought it a display of emotion. When he did speak, the words came with great effort, made even more cautious by the empty chamber. “When I heard my son had been made Sheriff here, it was the proudest moment of my life. Your father would feel the same. It would be an understatement to say you’ve done well for yourself. You are very likely the youngest High Sheriff in history. This, then, is what you mean to protect?”
It was the Sheriff’s turn to laugh. “No, no. I never pretended this would last.” He stood now, his body more relaxed than before, perhaps free from the performance he normally affected. “Someone needed to step up in the wake of your son’s murder, and my newfound earldom made me a natural fit. But I don’t want this, I assure you. Don’t forget that I’m young for an earl as well. You more than anyone can speak to how little my father was loved by his bannermen. I thought that a brief tenure as Sheriff might give me a bit more authority when I finally return to Derby. More credence.”
“You wouldn’t be wrong,” Ben admitted.
But the Sheriff was somewhat absorbed in his own thoughts. He reached out and touched an ornament on the wall behind his desk, a decorative wreath fashioned out of different metals, intertwined with each other, and shaped into leaves. “I’ve already been here longer than I wanted. But as much as I may wish otherwise, this responsibility is mine. And I recognize that timid choices often spell defeat. If this army is coming, wouldn’t he want to prepare for it?”
“He has summoned his own bannermen for that. I imagine they’ll arrive within the week.”
“And why didn’t you mention this French army in front of the others?”
“The prince made me swear to keep his secret, until the first of his allies arrive. He doesn’t trust anyone else. Until then, he thinks it plays in his favor if we all think him mad.”
“Hm.” Ferrers nodded. “Then why tell me?”
Beneger did not answer.
“Do you believe it’s real?”
When, again, Ben remained silent, Quill raised his voice. “It sounds that Prince John thinks it is. Which makes it just as dangerous.”
Ferrers laughed emptily. “Look at us. Three Derbymen, in charge of Nottingham’s future.” He breathed in deeply, as if he were testing every last muscle in his body. “This world of retribution is your expertise, Wendenal, not mine. If we have to take more drastic actions … what might they be?”
Quill bit his lip.
He was, quite possibly, asking if they needed to kill the prince.
Again, Lord Beneger did not have an answer. “I may need to think on that.”
“Please do,” he said, reaching out to straighten the wreath. “And soon. You can understand that we do not have the luxury of time to decide.”
Wendenal nodded, and that was that. Though he did not move. After some time, he pointed at the wreath with one finger, and curious care. “An heirloom?” he asked.
“Of a sort. It’s supposed to be a reminder, I believe, about mistakes.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing.” Ferrers traced the edges of the metal leaves with his fingers. “Something about the circle. About the mistakes we all make, and keep on making. It’s not mine, I don’t really know.” He let his hand drop and repositioned to peer out the window. “Thank you, that is all.”