THE KENNELS, NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
In one hand, the key. The other, the knife.
Arthur didn’t struggle, didn’t kick back. He couldn’t make any distance between himself and Charley Dancer. He was pinned, bound, defenseless. His heart hammered in his chest like it never had during the war. With a sword, a mace, even a fucking bow—well then it would be his own fault if he lost. But like this he had only one weapon, and though he’d rarely used it before, it kept him calm. Charley had every advantage, but Arthur had something better—the truth.
“I don’t think I killed your friend.”
Charley laughed. “You think I didn’t make certain? I talked to everyone. John Little confirmed it was you.” He made a point of that with the knife, looking down its length with one eye. “You know, only two Guardsmen died at Bernesdale. Elena put an arrow through one of them. All I needed was to find the one person in your group who also killed someone that day. I know everyone who was there, I’ve pieced the whole thing back together, what happened after I was knocked out. Nobody else killed anyone. And you’re the only one I never got to talk to.”
“I didn’t kill anyone that day, either,” Arthur said, shaking his head. He tried to recall the details of that day, searching for another explanation. He remembered wishing he’d killed someone, but he’d never even come close. They’d arrived in Bernesdale from the Sherwood Road, come across a couple of Guardsmen blocking the way … “I remember it. I remember you, too, now, actually. Much distracted you, then Will knocked you on the back of the head with the butt of his knives. I do remember that.” Arthur had even helped drag Charley off the road. “But I didn’t go off to take care of your friend. John Little did that.”
“Horseshit!” Charley coughed. “I talked to John. He didn’t kill anyone. He had no reason to lie to me about that, like you do now.”
“He might believe he didn’t kill anyone,” Arthur answered. “But nor does he know his own strength. I swear, Charley, I swear on whatever you want to find holy, it wasn’t me. John followed the other man into the woods. Said he gave him a lovetap with his staff. Maybe he thought he just knocked your friend out, but … but maybe he hit too hard. I don’t think he knew, Charley. I don’t think he meant to kill him.”
“You liar,” Charley said, his grip around the knife tightened, his face lilted away. “John Little has been nothing but kind to me. He wouldn’t…”
“As I said,” Arthur kept his tone low, “he didn’t know.”
A long, slow second passed, and a thousand heartbeats.
“You liar,” he said again.
Arthur’s thoughts spiraled into the previous month, of hiding in the Nottingham Guard and the perpetual edge on his nerves—the daily fear that they’d be discovered. Arthur had borne it terribly, he’d felt his temper shorten, his wits wither. Charley had been through all that, for four times as long. And where Arthur had David there to calm him, Charley had the opposite. The absence of his friend, to enrage him further, every day. In Charley’s skulk, Arthur saw the wicked screw that his own life might still shrivel into.
All for one death, which refused to let go of those who mourned it.
“My God, Charley,” Arthur could hardly even say it, “for months? For one person? Through all this, all this madness … how many more people have died since then? Holy fuck, how many have died just here at the castle in the last few days? How much has changed since then? And you’ve done all this … just for something we don’t even remember?”
“I remember.” Charley’s neck clenched. “I do.”
“I see that.” Arthur’s head dropped. “I see that you remember. I’m just saying … think about all the people whose lives have been destroyed. Should every one of them seek their vengeance, every one go to the lengths you’ve gone through, just for a little payback? What kind of world is that? For an accident, Charley? For something John didn’t even mean to do?”
Charley’s head turned again, his back to the lantern, his features vanished into shadow. “Reginold was my best friend.”
Those words hit home. Because Arthur knew, he knew the hell that had shaped Charley’s every choice.
“You understand, don’t you?” Charley asked. “You and David.”
A stone sank in Arthur’s gut.
“That was an accident, too, right?”
Arthur’s vision dipped, all he could see was David’s body again, black, unmoving, as the oil casks fell.
“Arable told me,” Charley continued. “An accident. Defenders from the second bailey, throwing oil casks, to start a fire. To slow the attackers down. To get more people out.”
“One landed on David,” Arthur finished. “And that’s it. That’s fucking it.”
“Someone threw it.” Charley clearly hoped the words would claw at him. “Some person was responsible. Threw too early. He knew there were people down there, he didn’t care. Cared about himself. What if he was here? What if we talked to every man we could, found the one who threw that exact oil cask? The one who killed your best friend. What would you do to him?”
An urge rose in Arthur, too dark to ignore, intimate but unnamable. He had killed so many in the fight for the bailey, over and over, but nobody since David’s death. He’d had no chance to punish the world for what it had done to him. As long as his target was a nobody—a faceless thing that had done him wrong—then yes, he could see himself killing it. But if he put any face on that thing, the story changed. Whoever it was, like John Little, had not meant to do it.
But delivered, tied up, on a platter? Like Arthur was now? When nobody would know, with no god to judge him, and no consequences?
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I’d like to think I wouldn’t do this.”
“Then you’re lying to yourself.” Charley leaned forward and readied his knife.
“But wait!” Arthur flinched back this time. He could see the pain twitching beneath Charley’s face, worming beneath his skin. He knew what bargain Charley was making with himself, and failing at. “Don’t. I didn’t kill your friend.”
Charley hesitated. “I shouldn’t have told you.”
And that, that wasn’t fucking fair at all. If Charley meant to continue forward, meant to return to the group and seek his vengeance upon John Little, then Arthur had to die. “You think I’ll warn him.”
And of course he would.
“I get it,” Arthur continued. “If you really want to go forward, kill John … then yeah, you have to kill me now. I can’t make any promises you could believe, I get it. But Charley. Charley, you can choose not to. Marion’s Men and the Nottingham Guard, chasing each other, over and over, for what? How’d it start? An accident? What does that roll into? How many people die just because … just because we can’t let things go?”
David’s body, burning.
“There’s no letting this go,” Charley said.
“There has to be,” Arthur pleaded, pushing away his own thoughts. “Someone, at some point, has to back down. Has to say, this is bullshit. Put an end to it. Who better than us? Who better than we, who’ve seen both sides? I honestly—I’m not lying now, I know you think I am—I honestly came to care for some of the men in the Guard. A month ago I thought you were all pissant whores, would’ve killed any of you on the spot, until I spent time here. I put the tabard on as a disguise at first, yes—but only at first. When the war came, I defended this city, and its people, for the same reason you do. We’re no different, Charley.”
David, holding the ladder.
Charley closed his eyes, shook his head.
Arthur swallowed. “Honestly, I close my eyes, I still think David’s alive. Think he’s going to come around that corner and whistle at me. I don’t know what it’s going to do to me. But I see what it’s done to you, and I don’t want that. I don’t want it, and David wouldn’t have wanted it for me none neither. He was always quick to help people, he died doing it. Maybe I can help you, then, Charley. Maybe we can help each other.”
David, laughing with Zinn.
Fuck, Arthur struggled against his pain. He, too, wanted to break the world in half. But then he considered what David would’ve wanted for him. If this was the person David would’ve wanted him to become.
“Maybe we can make a peace,” Arthur said. “Listen, you’ve spent time with us. You’ve changed. Me and David, here in the Guard, we changed, too. When David died…” his stomach seized, he almost had to stop, “when David died, everything he’d gone through was for nothing. Nothing. At least I can carry forward, where he couldn’t. Make sure our time here amounts to something. I can’t lose what we gained here. Nobody would ever know the things we did, the people we helped. The people we didn’t. How fucking unfair would that be?”
He thought of the messages they’d passed over the Nottingham walls, connecting loved ones. And of the stories that had ended in the middle, with no end. That couldn’t happen with him. It was too unfair, too unfair by far, to think that everything they’d gone through would vanish like that. It had to be for some reason.
“I’ve got more amends to make, Charley. I’ve got to, for David’s sake. The people I killed in the last few days, thinking they were the French…” a boulder now, his guts, one he would always carry, “I don’t know how to even begin to fix that. It would take me a thousand years. I’m glad David never found out we were killing Englishmen, it would have destroyed him. All this fucking madness, there’s got to be an end to it, Charley! We have a chance to end this cycle. If you kill me, then it goes back to how it was, and we learn nothing. But stopping it all, finding peace, wouldn’t that be better than revenge? For your friend, and for mine?”
The world was blurry, but for Charley’s uncertain face.
“I need to think,” Charley gasped, and dropped to the ground and crossed his legs.
One hand, the key. One hand, the knife.
Charley stared, into the dirty straw on the floor. He was emotionless, as if waiting for any whim to take him in one direction or another. Arthur had no more words, he’d used them all. He was certain they weren’t good enough, he’d never been good at those damned things. But it was all he had, all he had left in the entire fucking world.
For some time, there was nothing, just a quiet emptiness between them that was, at least, better than the rage that had held Arthur for the last few days.
He didn’t know what he saw in Charley. An outlaw, a Guardsman. A victim, a murderer.
The key, the knife.
They stared at each other until the lantern’s oil gave out, as the sounds of war outside swelled and settled, as the air turned cold and colder. So long that Arthur’s eyelids eventually became heavy.
“I’m going to trust you,” Arthur said at last, his throat raw and pained, and he let his eyes close.
That was something he could thank David for. In the face of the worst, David had always chosen to trust.
Bound before a man who wanted to kill him, Arthur chose to do the same.