NOTTINGHAM
ARABLE WAS REWALKING THE alleys of her own past, in every literal and metaphorical way she could fathom. Before her loomed the city of Nottingham and its castle—a chapter of her life to which she never wanted to return. Four months earlier she’d crossed this exact spot, horseback with John Little and Robin of Locksley, on a similar mission to sneak into the castle and stop the man in charge. They had stolen inside in the middle of the night, for reasons they all thought sickeningly noble at the time. Robin had died that night—she’d led him to his tomb.
Further back, sixteen years ago, her father might have shared this same spot, too. The parallels were nauseating. Then it was her father, Lord Raymond de Burel, leading his bannermen at the side of their earl, William de Ferrers, to siege Nottingham’s Castle and claim it for the king. Now it was the daughter and the son of those same two misguided souls—Arable leading their group into the city, and the younger Ferrers at the charge to siege the castle. And claim it for the king.
Would that she could stand here, and whisper backward.
What went wrong? she might ask herself of four months ago. Had she learned anything from her failures that could keep her friends alive this time?
What went wrong? she might beg of her father, to know what she never would—what his final days had been like. Surging through the city streets, raising ladders over the castle walls. She would never know how he met his end, if it was with bravery or cowardice. Was it a quick blow to the head, or did he suffer? So it might go with his daughter, or any of them, slipping into a city that was ready to eat itself alive.
What was different? Was Arable insane to think any of it would go better this time? Or was she simply doomed to relive her own mistakes—and her father’s—over and over again until one day she awoke to realize she’d been dead for a thousand years, trapped in some terrible purgatory?
No.
She was not the same woman who had fled Nottingham at the top of winter. Arable the servant had been the victim, fleeing. Lady de Burel had finally stopped running, ready to meet her enemies face on.
Or side by side. Lord Beneger de Wendenal crouched beside her by a ruined half wall, a divider between one field and the next. She found it easiest to accept his existence by remembering what had happened when last she was here. Since Arable was so good at bringing ruin to those around her, she could at least leverage that talent upon the one man who most deserved it.
They’d waited for dark, a waxing half-moon giving just enough light to guide their way. The bright fires and incessant clamor of Richard’s armies was behind them, a gripping spectacle that was sure to attract every eye of the city’s watchmen.
They were joined quickly by the two Delaney brothers, then Friar Tuck—eyes wide like a cat on ice. John Little had volunteered to come but their guide, Sarra, insisted he would never fit through the tunnels, and Tuck was the only one left who had ever known Gilbert. He kept his hood over his bald head, and he breathed short, shallow breaths, as if every hustle from hedgerow to hedgerow was the most daring act of his life. At their rear was Lord Robert, loping meaningfully through the barren fields, deep plow lines making obstacles of every step. Again he wore his half cape slung over one shoulder and carried a thin rapier rather than a proper sword, but somehow his intentions now seemed razor sharp rather than frivolous. His comfort actually took a bit of the edge off this wretched endeavor. Just before he reached the wall, he whipped out his blade and stabbed the air, letting loose a soft huff.
“Just in case,” he said, throwing her a wink.
“That’s enough of that.” Lord Beneger made little attempt to lower his voice. “This is serious work.”
“I know,” Robert answered, reaching for something stashed in his belt. “That’s why I brought my serious hat.” The pointed thing went on, giving the silhouette of his head a single, fierce horn, aimed forward.
Nick Delaney snorted. “I hope this goes differently than Grafham.”
“Of course it will,” Robert replied. “For one, Simon de Senlis is that way,” he pointed back to the army, then swiveled toward the city, “while we’re going that way. So there’s no way it can end the same way, is there?”
“Let’s just hurry,” Tuck said, his voice weak. “Sarra, please lead on.”
The girl just stared at them, and for good reason. She was frightened out of her soul—she wanted desperately to be done with this task so she could return to her son. But she said nothing, simply dared a glance over the wall, then scurried sideways.
They followed her, staying low, keeping to the shadows if there were any available. They took every advantage of the low, god-angry clouds that wandered by and obscured the moonlight. There should have been watchmen here and there in the fields, keeping an eye out for raiders or wild dogs, but the farmlands were deserted. Now and then Arable saw abandoned tools, and she could only imagine their owner dropping them and fleeing at the sight of the encroaching army.
Horns sounded off to the north, repeated back to them after echoing against the city walls to the south. Lord Robert had requested as much, that the army make a ridiculous amount of noise this night. Not just to keep the city awake and alarmed, but as a distraction. To Arable, it felt like slipping around the outside of a great manor while a gala was being held within. She was almost embarrassed that she held a few of those memories at heart, that there was a time when her life had stakes smaller than the world.
Her belly lurched, and she had to slow. Her hands went to her side, as if she could calm her daughter inside—who was clearly no fan of her decision to run.
She had to pee, and hoped she would not get killed for something as stupid as that. She’d relieved herself before they’d left, but things like that apparently didn’t matter at all to a pregnant body. She moved anyway, catching up, knowing that soiling herself would matter very little if she ended up dead.
Eventually they came to a cluster of trees that offered them privacy, and in the daylight it would have thrown its shade over a low stone well. Sarra scampered forward and touched the well’s lip with her full palm, then turned back expectantly.
“This is it?” Lord Beneger asked, crouching to look down into its depths. The hole was hardly wide enough for a single person, if that was indeed where they were headed. Sarra had been right that John Little could not have gone any farther than this.
Her voice was a whisper. “There’s a large crack just a bit down. It was hard to squeeze through, because of the angle, but it will open up after a dozen feet or so. Then it’s a single long tunnel, most of the ways at least. I’ve shown you this far, I won’t be much help beyond that.”
“You’ve done more than enough.” Robert reached out to her, but Sarra flinched away from his touch. She left without another word, fleeing back the way they came. She did not even bother to glance back at them.
“Poor soul,” Robert said.
“She’s probably thinking the same of us.” Arable wished she were going that same direction.
“There will be more of her, if we fail at this,” Beneger warned. “Wars only make three things—widows, orphans, and money.”
“Money?” asked Tuck.
Beneger shrugged. “For the right side, at least.”
“We can’t risk a light until we’re down there.” Peetey was squinting into the well’s mouth. “But I can’t see anything. Which one of us is feeling the most nimble?”
At this Lord Beneger laughed, and cast a smug smile upon Robert.
“Alright,” Robert submitted. “Someone hold my hat.”
The going was slow, made even harder by the dark night, but Robert was able to suspend himself within the shaft of the well by sticking his feet out in opposite directions. They’d brought a good length of rope that Peetey anchored with his body, wrapped around Robert’s waist in case he slipped. Eventually, after a good deal of pivoting and cursing, he claimed to find the crack Sarra had mentioned. A flurry of noise later, he found a way to slide himself into its shelf.
“It’s small,” he said, his voice muffled. “There are … boards here? Planks. I need the light.”
After a brief discussion they decided to risk it, hoping the light would be contained in the little cubby he’d found and not spill out to be seen like a beacon by the city watchmen. Nick lowered down one of their two iron lanterns, small things with walls of horn, and a single hinged door. The flint and candle were inside, and a small pouch of kindling, but what followed was a fairly laughable amount of time in which Robert tried, again and again, to get the flame to hold.
“We’ll have a good view of the war, at least,” Nick joked.
“We could just wait until a flaming arrow comes our way,” Peetey followed, “and use that instead.”
Eventually Robert found success and laughed at his failures, and the features of the well become immediately evident. It was not so far down to the water, and the south side indeed had a broken gullet where the stone had crumbled and exposed the bare earth behind it. In that crack was an open scar, curved diagonally, which seemed just wide enough for a human body to lean in—though uncomfortably at that.
“Not much of a tunnel.” Tuck grimaced.
“So now maybe we can stop laughing at my fire-starting skills then,” Robert answered. From his uncomfortable position, Arable was amazed he could do anything at all that required his hands. He pivoted the lantern to the other side of his body with some difficulty. “Looks like it’s more of the same for a bit, then opens up. And I was right, there are some loose planks here…” again he twisted the shaft of light into the well’s abyss, “… there. That’s how they’ve been getting out.”
Across from his opening was a slight ledge where the stones were uneven, marked by obvious scrapes across its lip. Repositioning himself, Robert manhandled the planks at his feet to reach across the gap and rest on that thin outcropping. They only barely held onto the stones by a fingerswidth or so, desperate to slip off and dunk a person into the well water below. Nick gave the first test by lowering himself as far as he possibly could before letting himself drop onto the planks, which bent but mercifully held his weight. Robert shimmied down the crack, and Nick followed, and one by one they crawled into the earth.
This is a nightmare, Arable told herself, letting her feet dangle over the edge. She didn’t have the strength to suspend herself like the Delaneys did. This was no place for a woman in her condition. She eased her weight farther over the stone lip, her toes reaching out, desperate to find the wood before she was in free fall. But then she slid with a start and did not even have time to yelp. Her stomach lurched for a single hellish moment, but her feet touched the planks and Nick Delaney’s arm was around her waist, and she’d never been more thankful.
“Are you alright?” he asked, with genuine concern.
“Oh, no,” she answered, grabbing his arms with both hands. “That won’t be an option for quite a while.”
The crack’s slant played with her senses. Losing all concept of balance, she had to slide on her back and shuffle her feet as if she were on the heavily banked edge of a cliff, excepting another cliff had already smashed into hers and was inches away. The sounds of her own breath and her heart were suddenly extremely close, and she tried not to think about the uncountable amount of earth lying above her, waiting to crush her like a pea. Nick kept his palm open for hers whenever he could, but soon he had to focus on himself instead.
Arable had been in storage caves and cellars before, but never anything like this. She felt like an insect navigating a tiny crevice between stones, and the air around her was suffocating. Her knees wobbled, but she forced herself forward.
Eventually it opened, the lantern was on the ground and played havoc with their shadows, and Arable fought to control her body. To her embarrassment she was shaking uncontrollably, and Nick sat her down to massage her shoulders and arms. Behind, Tuck sounded like he was having an even worse time of it than Arable had, but Peetey helped him through his every complaint. Once all six of them were in the little rock chamber, they caught their collective breath.
“I hope that was the hard part,” Nick tried to laugh.
“We should move,” Robert said, less joyful than he’d been earlier. “Even if they didn’t see the light, we made a hell of a lot of noise. Swords hitting stone walls like that, that kind of sound travels.”
“What if I stayed here?” Tuck suggested.
“Then you’d die here instead of there,” Lord Beneger answered. “And in the dark.”
That was enough for any of them. They lit the second lantern from the first, and made their way down a wormlike tunnel just barely too small for a person to ever stand upright. Again it was painfully slow going, given that there were only two lanterns for six of them, and the passage was unnavigable enough without the sickening sling of shadows tricking Arable’s feet every second or so. The good news was that her daughter had already started reorganizing every one of Arable’s internal organs, so the extra pain from stooping over was hardly even noticeable compared to the normal pain in her lower back. She tried to focus on her breathing, or her heartbeat, on anything she knew to be constant. Anything to avoid thinking of how much distance they actually had to cover in order to get past the city walls, and how little of it they had likely traveled so far.
There were forks now and then, which usually dead-ended quickly. They would send a single person down each one with a lantern for half a minute, crawling to check if it seemed viable. Generally, they decided that if a passage got smaller it was the wrong way, and if it got larger it must be the right one. Whether that was a good strategy or not, they couldn’t tell. They traveled for what felt like forever, but was probably close to a full hour, and Arable ached viciously at all the hunching and squatting. There were times when they seemed doomed to wander the tunnels forever, and they began to question if they had somehow turned around and were backtracking on themselves. But eventually there came a larger chamber where they could at last stand up comfortably, stretch their agonizing muscles, and—apparently—get ambushed.
“Lotta noise yer making,” came a female’s voice. “Don’t move, we’ve got crossbows.”
Arable froze, certain of very little aside from the fact that she did not want to die down here. The proximity of the lanterns blinded them to anything beyond the ground immediately around them. Aside from the shift in echoes, there was no way of knowing how large this new chamber was, nor where the voice had come from. So the six of them stood motionless in their lone pool of light, a very easy target for whomsoever had been waiting in the dark.
“Are you with the White Hand?” Robert asked of the stranger, his hands raising gently in submission.
“Wow, you’re bad at this,” the voice returned with a slight laugh. “You answer the questions, we ask them, or else we shoot you with—”
“Who else is with you?” Beneger interrupted from the back of the group.
“I—what did I just say?”
“Gilbert?” Tuck stepped forward, making sure the light fell on his face. “Gilbert, are you out there?”
From slightly elsewhere a whistle pierced the room, made ever more hollow by the odd acoustics—such that it was almost impossible to tell where the sound ended and when the echoes had taken over. “Friar Tuck,” came a soft, sonorous voice, unmistakably male but surprisingly delicate. “That is a surprise.”
“Gilbert.” The friar seemed relieved, though Arable could not say the same. From everything she had heard about the man, no one rested easier in his company. “Lady Marion sent us. She would have come herself, if she could. We know you’ve been smuggling people out of the city, and we need your help smuggling ourselves … in.”
“What?” came the female’s voice. “Why in God’s crusty taint would anyone want to sneak themselves into Notts right now?”
“You’d have a point, Zinn,” said Gilbert, “were these people anyone else. But I’ll tell you once and once only—whatever they say, trust it as well as if I said it myself. They’re good people.”
“Fine.” She seemed to shrug it off. “Don’t matter much to me. By the way, we don’t have no crossbows, we can’t a-fucking-ford that.”
Arable gasped when she saw him—mostly because he’d made no noise in traveling closer, but also because he chose to reach out with his single gloved hand first. Other than that, Gilbert’s face was utterly normal, if a bit on the long and gaunt side. He exchanged a short shake with Tuck, which seemed a strangely friendly gesture compared to every rumor Arable had heard of the ghost man. He picked up the lantern and stepped back, aiming the light upon them. “I don’t know your friends.”
“I know. A lot has happened since you left,” Tuck answered. “Hopefully there will be time enough for that later.”
“Whacha mean to do in the city?” the girl named Zinn asked. She approached but stayed shy of the light, making it difficult for Arable to make out much more than her small frame. Just a thin little girl in tattered clothes, messing with the flop of her hair. Twelve, she guessed, both by her face and her attitude.
“Nothing,” Robert answered. “But we need to pass through the city to get to the castle.”
“Ooooh,” Zinn shifted her weight side to side, “that’s different. That’s no small favor.”
“I know the way into the castle,” Arable explained. “But we don’t know these caves. All we need is safe passage, and if you can help us get to the path to the postern gate without being seen, that would be helpful.”
“No it wouldn’t,” Zinn returned with a satisfied smile, “because the postern’s locked from the inside. There’s only one way into the castle and we—fucking hell!” The girl suddenly spasmed and shoved Arable to the side, though she was not the target of the girl’s anger. Tuck was elbowed aside just as carelessly, until Zinn stood nose to chest in front of Lord Beneger. A bright snap of the lantern reflected the blade she pulled from her belt—her right hand aimed it squarely at Beneger’s breast, her other controlled a long coil of rope tied to the knife’s handle.
“Steady now,” was all Beneger said, backing into the curved cave wall.
“What’s wrong?” Gilbert asked.
“I know this particular fuckface,” Zinn snarled. “He works with FitzOdo. He’s the one that nabbed Scarlet.”
“Will Scarlet?” Arable gasped. “You know him? The same Will Scarlet?”
“I hope there aren’t two of him,” Zinn replied, but all her focus was on Beneger, who seemed rightfully wary of the knife at his heart. “I was just starting to like him when this royal dick fucker trapped us, nearly got me killed. He threated to let his men gang-rape me if Scarlet didn’t turn himself over. But he did. Will Scarlet traded his life for mine.”
Arable stared at Lord Beneger’s sallow face. She had not previously thought it possible to hate the man any more.
“For what it’s worth,” Beneger said, carefully, “I did not personally make that threat. I was held at knifepoint—as I am now—and one of my men … well, a woman, actually, made that threat.”
Arable didn’t care. “She’s a child.”
“No I’m not!” Zinn snapped. “But if I was, I’d be the child that’s gonna fucking gut you.”
Robert and the Delaney brothers both tensed, as if sensing the need to step in and stop her. Arable’s instincts were more in line to help her push the blade in.
“Is Will Scarlet still alive?” Arable asked. “What about Arthur, and David?”
“I don’t know,” Zinn answered. “Haven’t seen any of them since that day.”
“Nor I. But you made the right choice to walk out of that room.” Beneger paced his words slowly, his eyes locked on Zinn. “I don’t know those other two, but Will Scarlet is as bad as they come. He’s responsible for beating and butchering poorfolk across the city—oh, and killing noblemen in the woods. I saw what was left of Lord Brayden’s wife with my own eyes. He’s a monster. You dare throw the word rape at me, when you work with him?”
This was deeply troubling news, to say the least. Obviously Will was capable of rash acts, but Arable had a hard time believing the rest of it.
Zinn, apparently, was of similar mind. “He’s not like that. The noblefolk in the woods were his, yes,” Zinn said. “Though he said he just killed ’em. Didn’t say anything else.”
“Are you so sure that you know him? And what of Gilbert here, is he a blushing innocent as well?” Beneger addressed the White Hand directly. “Care to explain why you’re away from your post, Guardsman?”
Another whirl of reactions. “Is that true?” Tuck asked, his face in bunches. “Gilbert, you joined the Nottingham Guard?”
“I did,” his chilling voice whistled, “though my time with them is over. As for your other accusations, your aim is off. The mutilations in the French Ward, the attack at St. Peter’s, the fire at the brothel … those were the work of Sir Robert FitzOdo, not Will Scarlet.”
The name was vaguely familiar to Arable, but it apparently meant something more to Beneger. “Odo?”
“He’d been disguising himself as Robin Hood at night and doing such things, in his name, as it were. To get the people to turn against him.”
Beneger’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think that?”
“I watched him do it.” There was a quality to those words that Arable could not define, almost as if Gilbert had enjoyed doing so. “Maybe you would have seen it, too, if you hadn’t been watching me instead. Wasn’t my business, as it were, until recently. He’s here in the city, and fancies himself something important. So I took his favorite toy and sliced it up as a warning, as a trap.”
“His favorite … toy?”
“Some would call him a man.”
Beneger huffed. “Derrick? Or Ronnell?”
“Probably.”
Beneger shook his head, but his face betrayed his doubt. “If any of that were true, I would have known. He was under my command.”
Gilbert did not seem to care at all if Beneger believed him. “We have another Guardsman with us, he’ll vouch for the truth.”
“Who is that?”
“His name is Quillen.”
Another gasp from Beneger. “Quillen’s with you?”
“Only very recently. FitzOdo tried to kill him, so we rescued him.”
“So are you still … wait,” Tuck stammered, clearly confused. “Whose side are you on, then?”
Gilbert smiled, his pupils utterly black. “Oh, Friar. As uncreative as ever.”
“Alright, wait!” Robert held his hands out wide, begging for a moment of respite. “I don’t know anything about any of you, but it seems pretty clear that none of you know anything about each other, either. There are seemingly sixteen thousand things that all of you need to discuss, and every one of you apparently hates each other, or at least this guy,” he thumbed Beneger, “and I can’t keep up with any of it. But the truth is that it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, not a damned inch. There’s a war out there, and come morning that army is going to storm through the city and smash it to pieces, and we’re the only ones in a position to put a stop to it. We need to get into the castle, and you can all settle everything else once that’s all over with.”
“Zinn,” Arable said, before anyone could contradict Robert. “I hate this man as much as you, probably more so. There’s nothing I’d like to see more than you slam that knife straight into his heart. He ruined my entire life, my entire family. But Lord Robert is right. There’s more at stake than revenge right now, and Lord Beneger is well known amongst the Nottingham Guard. He’ll be instrumental in our ability to get what we need once we’re inside the castle. He’s respected, while the rest of us are … well, we’re Robin Hood’s gang, and that’s how we’ll be treated. So please, put that knife down. I’ve been where you are, I’ve been wronged and threatened and abused, and I can promise you one thing…”
Zinn hesitated, raising a crooked eyebrow at her.
Arable finished, “Payback feels just as good tomorrow as it does today.”
After a bit of hesitation, her knife retreated. Tempers settled, and they all tenuously agreed to tiptoe around any conflicts they’d brought with them. They took a few minutes to catch up Zinn and Gilbert on the happenings outside, and of King Richard’s return. The prospect of stopping the war before it began seemed to make a difference, and Zinn suddenly became a bit more cooperative.
“Alright, there’s only one way into the castle right now,” she said. “There’s a tavern called the Trip to Jerusalem, built into the base of the sandstone the castle stands on. There are some tunnels in the back that worm up into the rock. Not sure if they actually go all the way up to the castle, but that’s the theory. An’ anyone bigger’n me’ll have a hard time squeezing through.”
“You’ve seen these yourself?” Robert asked.
“Sure as shit,” she said, nodding. “My street crew was responsible for clearing them out.”
“Then why don’t you know if they go all the way up?” Lord Beneger asked.
“Not my fault!” Zinn snapped. “We could only get into the Trip when the greenbeard would let us, which wasn’t often. Lions made a deal with him, trading mead and money—his inn gets a little edge, and the Lions got access to his tunnels. But they were small as shit, and needed to be dug out before anyone could use them.”
“Which meant,” Beneger probed, “you needed more and more mead?”
“Right. At first it was small stuff—smashing up other taverns on the days mead came into port so no one else would buy any, things like that. But that wasn’t reliable. Red Fox hated that small shit, he wanted a big fix. Decided to blackmail the city dockmaster to get first access to all imports, and my crew was supposed to get information on him. But we got nothing.”
Beneger smiled. “So you threatened him instead.”
“We tried to,” Zinn sneered, “until you interrupted us, and nabbed Will Scarlet.”
“Don’t blame that on me, girl,” he replied. “One of your own sold you out.”
“Stop it!” Arable interrupted. She was having enough trouble following without them ready to go at each other’s throats again. “What matters is that the tunnels can only probably get us into the castle?”
The group exchanged uneasy looks. “We’ll have to take our chances,” Robert offered.
“Still, not as easy as that.” Zinn’s tone shifted into something smaller. “You got two problems to deal with ’fore you get there. First is that FitzOdo figured it out, too, and took over the Trip a few weeks back. Cunt. Don’t know if he’s tried to use the tunnels or not, big ol’ ox, but he’s guarding them. So if you’re aiming into the castle, you have to go through him. And since FitzOdo was working for the good lord dick fucker here,” she aimed her knife’s tip at Beneger’s chest, “there’s no way we’re letting them get close to each other.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that,” Beneger said. “If what you said about FitzOdo is true, I’ll be the first one to put that damned dog down.”
Arable had no qualms with any plan that put Beneger into dangerous places with people that wanted to kill him. “What’s the second problem?” she asked.
Gilbert took this one. He smiled again, the lantern light turning the tips of his lips into a twisted devil’s grin. “Why, you were followed.”
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, GILBERT led them down a series of tunnels they had almost definitely been in before, ending in a large chamber lit with braziers and filled with furniture—practically a full tavern beneath the city’s surface. There were only a few people lingering there, mostly as young as Zinn or younger. On a few of the craggy walls, a large white hand had been hastily painted.
“Used to be the Red Lions’ main den,” Zinn explained when Arable asked, “but they all decided to get dead, or join with someone else.”
“Their leaders, at least,” Beneger confirmed. “Prince John killed them at the archery tournament.”
“Oh, that was all the prince’s idea, was it?” Zinn twisted and gave him a squint of her face. “You didn’t have anything to do with that, didcha?”
She purposefully swung his sword in a clumsy arc and let it bang against the ground. He had surrendered his weapon to her as proof of his good intentions, and she’d opted to use it as a walking cane—taking every opportunity to smash its edges into rocks for the delight of seeing him wince at its abuse.
Gilbert explained that they’d been going in the wrong direction in the tunnels before he’d stopped them, and might have been lost for a day trying to navigate the tunnels on their own. “We first noticed you crossing the fields,” he explained. “We keep one lookout watching that well from the city, just in case it’s compromised, as it were. It’s the only opening we’ve found outside the city walls. Don’t worry, I don’t think the city guard saw you. We just happen to know where to look. Which is why we thought it odd when we noticed someone following you at a distance.”
Someone had followed them, entering through the well and finding a better path into the city than they had, only to be caught by the “Children of the White Hand” here.
Gilbert climbed to another jagged shelf that split the middle of the curious underground chamber. There was no proper place to cage someone down here, so the captive was left to sit on the floor, his hands and feet both bound together and then to the iron foot of a nearby brazier that was too uncomfortably hot to be near. The man was skinny, had disheveled brown hair and large eyes with bags beneath them …
“Charley Dancer!” Nick Delaney shouted with relief. “What’d you follow us for?”
“He’s with us, you can cut him free,” Robert quickly added.
But Arable was lost, in his features …
“Don’t touch him!” she shouted, before anyone could follow Robert’s command. She crouched down on the balls of her feet to look him in the face, and a resigned look overwhelmed him as he realized his long deception was finally over.
“What is it?” Tuck asked.
She sucked in air. “His name’s not Charley.”
Arable’s mind reeled to figure it out. She had thought it strange that she’d never actually met Charley Dancer during their time in the Sherwood, but John Little had dismissed it as a quirk of them both preferring their own privacy over the group. She’d thought that the frogman hated her—blamed her for their group’s trouble—and she’d been content to let him always skulk away from her presence, dismissing him entirely. Ever since they made it to Huntingdon, she’d spent most of her time in the castle while the group camped by the Cook’s Backwater … but even that wasn’t enough to explain it. No, “Charley” must have put a massive effort into making sure they never interacted—for she surely would have turned him in for who he was, if ever she’d bothered to look past his beard and into the eyes of a man she’d known, when she was still a servant in Nottingham Castle.
The betrayal of it was sharp, sharper than every other reason they all had to kill each other. She felt invaded, lied to—and whether this defensiveness was just part of the changes in her body, she didn’t care. She was one breath away from grabbing the sword from Zinn’s hand and cutting this impostor in two.
The prisoner smiled sheepishly, a wide grin she’d seen a hundred times, mocking her utter ignorance of how long he had deceived her, right under her nose. His emotion made a choking seize in his throat that had always been his version of laughter.
“Hi, Bellara,” he said, recalling their old game together.
She wasn’t interested in playing with the Guardsman. “Hi, Bolt.”