NOTTINGHAM
IT WAS A WIDE FLAT barge, a square raft cobbled together from mismatched wooden planks. From their larger skiff in the middle of the Trent, merchants tried to correct the barge’s trajectory toward the docks with long poles, as best they could without coming closer. A stranger might think they kept their distance because Nottingham was afflicted with a contagion—which would not necessarily be wrong.
Quill added his voice to a symphony of meaningless directions shouted at the dockworkers, who were trying to steer the barge and its precious cargo. He stopped screaming when he realized his voice was being drowned out by Sir Robert FitzOdo’s beside him, who was screaming something the opposite.
Quillen Peveril, self-acclaimed genius, was the only person to successfully orchestrate an escape from the castle’s lockdown. His plan had only succeeded with the help of the Sheriff, as the point was to sneak Ferrers out of the city that he could rally the neighboring earls to take Nottingham back. It had required a massive coordination amongst sympathetic Guardsmen. In the silent span of half an hour they’d taken the colossal task of removing the unguarded blockade from the castle’s postern door—just long enough for Ferrers and Wendenal to slip through, along with Quill and a few others. Those that remained behind risked themselves doubly by returning the blockade as it was, hoping the prince’s sentries did not catch them.
But escaping the city walls had proven equally tricky. The entire city was on edge. Fights broke out at the slightest provocation. The only people allowed to pass through the city or castle gates were Prince John’s loyal supporters, of which there were more and more every day. The arms of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire were everywhere; their men-at-arms had taken the duty of patrolling the city’s gates, diligent to the point of ruthlessness. Trade was allowed via the wharfs only, not the city roads, which had given Quill his idea. He’d smuggled Beneger and Ferrers out in two empty wine barrels, which were supposed to be payment for a shipment of incoming food. Had there been a third barrel, Quill would have gone with them.
The river merchants must have discovered the slight, because the Worcester host clamped down on the dock trade the next day. Merchants were not allowed to berth at all now, but instead had to ridiculously remain in the middle of the river and send their wares by unmanned raft. The Worcester Guard sent payment back the same way, inspecting both cargoes, to make sure nobody dared another escape.
Two successful escapes, Quill ought to be congratulated. But he’d left himself behind, which felt like the opposite of a victory. And try as he might, he could not concoct any new reliable plan for a man to get in or out of the city without risking a quarrel in the back.
Which meant that Beneger and Ferrers had to be successful. They had to return with a host to confront John’s coup, and before the French army arrived.
The city’s only hope, riding on Quill’s longshot.
“Unload!” the dockworkers cried, when the barge was finally tethered to the city-side docks. It was laden with nothing exotic—sacks of grain and vegetables—but it would go a long way to keeping the city alive.
“Let’s go,” Sir Robert FitzOdo grunted, at the same time that a hiss sliced the air and ended with a thunk. The hungry crowd recoiled in horror—a single flaming arrow had been shot into the barge’s hold.
“Put it out!” Ronnell cried, while Quill searched for the perpetrator. There were endless claptrap wooden shacks that littered the wharfs, and any of a dozen windows might have hid the bowman. It didn’t matter. Half the city seemed eager for more destruction. After the Red Lions’ leaders were killed in the archery tournament, the other fledgling gangs had all gone to war—desperate to prove themselves the most ambitious, or at least the most brutal. Quill regretted now what they’d done to the Red Lions; that gang had likely been a stronger source of stability in Nottingham than Quill had ever realized. Their absence just added one more layer of chaos on top of an already over-flowing chaos cake.
It didn’t matter. The Nottingham Guard didn’t have the men or resources to stop every act of terrorism, while the men from Gloucester and Worcester cared only about stopping any traffic through the city, and not a thing for its inhabitants. They’d let the city starve before admitting a single stranger.
Because of that other thing. The other half of what kept the city on edge. The French army was coming, and everyone in the city knew that now.
What at first Quill had dismissed as a princely delusion, was now a rumor turned into horror. The only information coming into the city came with Prince John’s new allies—and though none had yet seen this French menace, there was increasingly little doubt that it existed, and that it was headed for them. But directly in between the prince’s stolen castle and the approaching French was the city itself. Nobody knew what the near future held for them, but everyone knew it would be bloody.
Quill no longer had any pride in his ability to predict the future. Frankly, he was too tired to even piece it all together. He could only hope that Beneger and Ferrers could make more sense of it, being on the outside now. Would they bother with their original plan, if reclaiming the castle meant losing it immediately afterward to the French? If they successfully took the castle back, would they then surrender Prince John to the French in exchange for the city’s safety? Perhaps it would be better if the French arrived first and were weakened at the castle walls, that Ferrers and Beneger might attack the remnants from the rear—but at the cost of the city’s sacking. The only thing Quillen Peveril knew for certain was that he should have seen all this coming, and had failed to act. It was Quill’s sole misfortune to be the weather vane that had failed to announce the coming storm.
“Let’s go,” FitzOdo grunted a second time. “This place is fucked.”
He meant the docks, but he’d accidentally described the whole city.
Quill almost protested, but the Worcester Guard had already swarmed the barge, put out the fire, and kept the crowd at bay. As far as they were concerned, everybody else was just part of the rabble. So Quill hastened to catch up with FitzOdo and his half-incompetent lackey Ronnell.
“Where’s Derrick?” Quill asked, not really caring for the answer.
Ronnell answered by widening his eyes and shaking his head numbly, as if he was too overwhelmed to even attempt a guess. “The Trip, maybe?” FitzOdo’s trio slept at the Trip to Jerusalem each night, and were rarely seen apart. The fact that one of FitzOdo’s most loyal dogs might have abandoned him … that said everything.
Left to his own volition, Quill would prefer to lose FitzOdo as well, but they’d somehow become the highest-ranking members of the Nottingham Guard present in the city. Most had been at the tournament, but FitzOdo must have gone drinking before the lockdown started. So the Coward Knight and Quill the Nightwalker were now in charge of the few others that hadn’t been in the castle. He did his best to keep them on their alert, to create repeatable processes, to establish rules they could depend on in the midst of absolute uncertainty. To prevent them from falling victim to their fears.
That, too, was a constant danger. Guardsmen saw threats in every corner. Paranoia turned every terrified citizen into an enemy in disguise, and hesitation could mean death. There was no tolerance for interfering with the Guard now—it didn’t even make sense to “arrest” someone anymore. There was no access to the castle prisons, and the two city gaols were bursting past capacity. Quill had watched normally docile Guardsmen—cowlike boys with friendly temperaments, like Potter—beat citizens halfway to death out of fear. And as much as that haunted him, Quill couldn’t even blame them. That, perhaps, was the third half of what kept the city on edge.
It didn’t even matter that the math of three halves made no sense, because neither did the city. The world was apparently under no obligation to obey the rules of reason.
Quill followed FitzOdo up the Long Stair that led to the south side of Saint Mary’s, watching the continued commotion on the docks below as they climbed. The barge had been besieged by a crowd of commonfolk who must have gotten past the Worcester Guard, but their weight unbalanced it. One corner dipped into the river and then upended the other, dumping every last precious sack of grain to the bottom of the Trent.
Quill had to stop, just for a moment, to digest the devastating loss of what that meant.
The cries from that crowd below carried up, but St. Mary herself could do nothing to get that grain back. There would be another merchant later, a fresh shipment, but it wouldn’t be enough. Fewer boats were braving the journey to the doomed city of Nottingham. Rats knew well enough to flee a sinking ship—but every rat here was trapped inside the hull boards, and Quill was one of them.
The great church of St. Mary’s had become the Guard’s unofficial base, one of the safe shelters along with St. Stephen’s down the west hill, and the Market Square. People flocked inside its courtyard walls for safety. Anywhere else in the city, it was every man for himself, and not enough Guardsmen available to even try to maintain order.
Today, as always, there was commotion billowing about St. Mary’s perimeter walls—lines of commonfolk hoping for a portion of the food that had just sunk to the bottom of the Trent. That news wasn’t going to be well received. Guardsmen were already struggling to keep a secure border at the church’s entrance, while desperate folk tried to sneak their way in or outright rush the front double doors. The moment Quill had the church in sight, he was already at work commanding people to climb down, to settle down, to hunker down.
Down was, after all, the only direction to go anymore.
FitzOdo was less gentle, yanking and pulling people where he saw fit, and Ronnell followed after, snapping at those in FitzOdo’s wake. They were nearly inside when something grabbed Quill’s attention like a slap in the face. He startled and whipped his head around, looking for it again through the throng of churchgoers, without even realizing what he was looking for. It was the same frightening clarity of hearing one’s own name spoken distinctly across a crowded room.
“Get along,” FitzOdo demanded, but Quill grabbed the knight’s arm and held him back, waiting for the crowd to open up just for a moment—there.
“What the fuck is that?” Quill asked. He didn’t care for curse words, but he had to speak the language of FitzOdo.
“The fuck is what?”
“That.”
Past the northwestern entrance to St. Mary’s, a tiny doorway in the first stone building closed shut. It was the same as a thousand other entrances, excepting that this one bore a handprint next to its frame, notable for being painted in white.
A White Hand.
“You’re worried about vandalism now?” FitzOdo laughed, prodding Ronnell to join him in doing so. “Or are you going to start arresting people for shitting in the streets again? Think it’ll take a while!”
It took every bit of Quill’s patience to detail the obvious connection between a painted white hand and Gilbert with the White Hand.
“What does it matter?” the knight balked. “We never found anything on him. And we got an army marching our way now. Past’s about to get wiped clean.”
“If Gilbert’s innocent, then he’s a Guardsman. And we could use every man we can get here. If he’s not … well, half the city still thinks this is all Robin Hood’s fault,” Quill explained. “They think the prince still cares about catching every Robin Hood in the city. Could be the major victory we need to calm people down. Could … do some good.”
“You’re serious?” FitzOdo’s bald head turned into all wrinkles. “’Sides, you think he’s going to announce his hiding place by stamping his name on his front door for everyone to see?”
Quill bit his lip. “Does it hurt to go look?”
“It’ll hurt when I slap some sense into you.”
They might have argued more, but both of their eyes narrowed on a young man in a cloak who approached the door in question, placed his palm on the white hand, and whispered into its hinges.
“I’ll be damned,” FitzOdo breathed. “Good on you, Peveril.”
“Try not to stare,” Quill warned, watching out of the corner of his eye. They had to play this right, or risk spooking the stranger. “Let’s see what happens next.”
But Sir Robert FitzOdo was already three steps away. “Got a better idea.”
Moments later the stranger’s face was smashed into the wooden door, FitzOdo’s meaty fingers wrapped around the man’s skull like a melon. This instantly caused a dervish amongst the surrounding crowd, which Ronnell abated by flipping out a short bludgeon on a rope tether from his tunic, and making it very clear that he knew how to use it.
“What’s in there?” FitzOdo demanded of the cloaked man, his mouth inches from the other’s ear.
The man’s voice was muffled. “Nothing!”
“You get one lie, and that was it. Lie to me again and we break your knees, both of them. What’s in there?”
“The White Hand! The White Hand!” The man squirmed, pinned against the door. He was young, had a pudgy face, and was carrying something underneath his cloak that was apparently more important than trying to defend himself.
Quill edged closer. “What do you mean, the White Hand? Gilbert?”
“I don’t know their names, maybe.”
The use of the plural raised Quill’s eyebrows. “Why are you here?”
“They say they can get you out of the city,” the pudgy man whimpered. “Say they got caves that go all the way out. Say to go … go to St. Mary’s and look for the White Hand, then knock and say the right phrase—oh! And to bring oil.” He shrugged open his cloak to reveal a small but plump wineskin.
“Oil?”
“Dark down there,” the man explained. “Oil’s hard to come by. Say if you don’t have oil, you get lost and never come out.”
Whether Gilbert was truly involved with this, Quill could only guess. But it was no surprise that some gang had found profit in trying to smuggle people out of the city. It probably didn’t even matter if they could actually do it—could be they were just leading the gullible and desperate down into a cistern for a fee, and then leaving them to die.
“We don’t have time for it,” FitzOdo growled. He snatched the wineskin and threw the man away, who recovered and ran furiously down the nearest alley. “This ought to put an end to it.”
FitzOdo splashed the contents of the skin onto the mark of the White Hand, then drew his knife and tore a hole in the bag to empty over the door’s edges. From his belt he produced a rectangle of flint, and a single knife slash summoned a spark that found its home in the oil. The door went up quickly, and Ronnell did not need to threaten anyone else to keep them from approaching the inferno.
THEY SPENT THE AFTERNOON at St. Mary’s, corralling the masses, helping the clergy distribute what small amounts of food it had, and chasing off undesirables. The hours passed were marked only by the occasional toll of the steeple bells. The two o’clock hour sounded, and then some time later came two deep tones, followed by a curious long wait for the third, and then two more. Time itself had become unreliable.
The flaming door outside the courtyard walls had burnt ferociously for some of that time, belching up a vicious black smoke that occasionally swept into the front entrance of St. Mary’s, to nobody’s enjoyment. But only the door itself burnt—the rest of the building being made of stone—and eventually it settled down to a simmering grey stream. The entirety of the church reeked of the wooden char, and FitzOdo alone seemed to remain ignorant of the offense.
Out of that ashen wisp came a very young girl in a torn dress, who came directly for the three of them.
“’Scuse me sir,” she said, trying to get the knight’s attention. “Are you Sir Robert FitzOdo?”
“I am, girl,” he answered with a smile, never one to turn down any amount of respect shown him.
“Are you Sir Robert FitzOdo?” she asked again.
“I said I was, are you looking for me?”
“Are you Sir Robert FitzOdo?”
“Oh, get off then.”
She held out a small piece of fabric. “I have a message for you.”
The moment it was in his hand she vanished, and Quill couldn’t help but notice that she was particularly good at running without making a sound. “What’s it say?” he asked.
“Nothing.” FitzOdo shrugged, though something seemed to pass between him and Ronnell that Quill didn’t understand.
On the fabric was scrawled a single world.
“PITIES.”
If there was one place in Nottingham that was most dangerous now, it was the northwestern slums of the French Ward. It had always been a pit of poverty and desperation, but with everyone terrified of anything French now, the borough had truly become the last option for those that couldn’t survive the rest of the city.
The Pity Stables, or the Pities, were at its heart, and Quill had nothing but rancid memories and the taste of bile to recall his last visit there—prying chunks of desiccated hands from the wall. Despite the clamor of the city, the area around the Pity Stables was disturbingly quiet. As he stood there with FitzOdo and Ronnell, Quill had the unnerving sensation of spiders making their merriest way down his spine.
“No one around,” Ronnell noted. “If someone wanted us to meet them here, they must be inside.”
“We should’ve brought some more men,” Quill complained. But FitzOdo had insisted the three of them could handle themselves, and echoed that notion now by striding down the dirt slope that led to the mouth of the old stablehouse.
“We’ll check the sides,” FitzOdo said with no other fanfare.
“Wait!” Quill gulped. “Do you mean to just … walk in there? We don’t know who wanted us here, shouldn’t we—”
“You wanted to do some good, Peveril?” FitzOdo rounded on him. “That comes with danger. Swallow your shit and act like you deserve half the uniform you’re pissing in.”
With that, he peeled off to the left and Ronnell took the right, leaving the world’s most disappointing human—Quillen Peveril—to walk blindly into the open maw of this most indisputable trap.
As if to recap his entire life, Quill’s mind flailed to understand how he’d arrived at this point, at this time, with this little to call his own. His was the weakest claim in the legendary Peveril family, dwarfed by the enormity of his father and siblings. His fate would be immortalized not by the annals of prestige, but by the shit-covered stables his feet were inexplicably moving him toward.
He wondered where he’d gone wrong. He thought perhaps he should have made some friends in life, rather than revel in criticizing those that might have become them. He wondered if Jacelyn de Lacy knew that he admired her—despite her behavior when they arrested Will Scarlet—and wished she had escaped the Nottingham baileys with him. She’d know what to do in a situation like this.
“Well, this is a stupid way to die,” he announced loudly to the murderers waiting on the other side of the stable entrance. Having failed to come up with any of a thousand obvious alternatives, he marched himself inside.
His eyes needed a moment to adjust, but there was no hiding from the assault on his nose. The acrid stink of metal was in the air—copper—causing his eyes to tear up. There was no one else inside, despite the valuable shelter it offered the poor. Once the glow of the outside world had softened and he could open his eyes against the sting, he made sense of the image before him, knowing immediately that it would haunt him the rest of his days.
Yes, there was another hand nailed to the back wall of the Pities.
And a handswidth away from it, the arm from which it had been taken. This, too, was pinned in place with knives. Two of them. But the arm ended at the elbow.
The upper half of that severed arm was also there, pinned, again separated by a small gap of bare wood.
Beyond that, the torso.
All four limbs were accounted for, but certainly not intact. Each had been cut into pieces, splayed out, and nailed against the wall. Reassembled in this grotesque spectacle.
The head wore a hood, though it did not conceal the face. The long greyhound features were Derrick’s, the third member of FitzOdo’s regular trio.
Derrick had not simply been killed, he’d been segmented.
Quill did not have to count them to know there were exactly eight arrows that pierced the center of Derrick’s chest. Eight arrows had become a slang in the streets after the archery tournament, a sign of the Robin Hood. He deserves eight arrows, one might say. Or one could flash a hand signal of eight to point out someone suspected of working with the traitors.
But these eight arrows had rings of white painted about them, a color that had not been used in the tournament. That same white paint was used for a handprint on Derrick’s left breast, as well as the only thing in the room more prominent than the grisly display.
Spanning Derrick’s arms from fingertip to fingertip—painted in large white letters with the central O making a ring around his decapitated head—was the word IMPOSTOR.
“Holy God Almighty,” came Ronnell’s voice, cracking. He stumbled in from the right entrance, his hands limply out as he took in the entirety of his friend’s brutal murder.
FitzOdo had entered as well but said nothing, a grim alarm on his features. His eyes turned downward and his head cocked, aimed at the ground before Quill’s feet. The straw there had been brushed aside, where in equally large letters was again painted the word IMPOSTOR. Quill was practically standing upon the second white handprint. He stepped to the side, fear finally lancing him through, wondering if they were all about to meet similar fates.
But nothing came, just the eerie sounds of the city outside, and the calm stupor of the Pities.
Ronnell was crying, ugly, heaving gasps that begged for pity.
But Quill’s mind was finally working.
“Why call Derrick an impostor Robin Hood?” he asked at last. “What does that mean?”
“There’s no meaning to it,” FitzOdo said softly. “Gilbert’s a madman.”
Madman, yes. But calculating. This was the very definition of deliberate.
The second word, IMPOSTOR, on the ground before him.
Three times the little girl had asked “Are you Sir Robert FitzOdo?”
FitzOdo was supposed to be standing where Quill was now.
He raised his eyes to find the Coward Knight had already come to the same conclusion. Despite some smarter version of himself begging not to, Quill felt the missing puzzle pieces fall into place and demanded, “Why are they calling you an impostor Robin Hood?”
FitzOdo pulled steel.