NOTTINGHAM
BEN’S RETURN TO THE castle was marked by a queer feeling, a sensation that Nottingham was muted to him. While commotion was everywhere, and every pocket was populated thrice-over more than would have been uncomfortable, Ben viewed it all as if through a tunnel. He’d left the traitor Will Scarlet alive, and in so doing had mentally turned the page on this city. The cobbled streets through which he had so recently led armed charges were now rendered a waste of his time. This city’s people would go on with their lives and heal from this madness, as would Ben. But Ben would do so in Derbyshire, and had every desire to leave as soon as possible.
This city, to his shame, had beaten him for its third and final time.
But there were requirements, of course. Tomorrow was Sunday, and King Richard would spend the day in a public council, meeting with all those who had grievances to bear. There were men who would receive punishments—others, laurels—and it was generally frowned upon to leave the city before the king had sorted it all out. But Ben was drawn to consider it. His only reasons for being here were gone, leaving him a stranger in a place he despised.
He looked down at his arm, confined in the wraps of his sling. His entire hand was numb to sensation, and seemed to be getting worse. Ben had seen too many injuries in his life to hope that this would end with anything short of him losing the limb. The physicker had told him to give it a few days, and wait until it started to stink or turn black to make the decision. By then, Ben would be home, at least. Nottingham wouldn’t claim that piece of him.
Passing through the burnt barbican to the middle bailey, he paused in heavy consideration. His son had died in this castle. Too recently. He’d undoubtedly crossed this gateway dozens of times. But there was no way to feel him. The distance of a few months was as permanent as a thousand years. It was worse than being alone, the sense that these halls had history forever out of his reach.
The training yard—a squarish dirt field at the mouth of the barracks—was now a makeshift hospital. Tents of various plumage had been erected to give cover to a field of bedrolls and cots, where the injured lay indistinguishable from the dead. He walked down the aisles and found his way toward one specific cot in the back, to say his goodbyes. The shifting colors and streaks of sunlight through the canvas canopies were reminiscent of a market or bazaar, as if Ben were here to barter and purchase an injured soldier.
Quillen Peveril was still unconscious, his thin frame hiding little more than his bones. His weak jawline, his sloppy hair—it was hard to believe that Ben owed the man his life.
In the cot adjacent, a fellow soldier gave a nod in welcome.
“Has he awoken?” Ben asked.
The soldier shook his head. His colors were that of the Worcester Guard, and he cradled an arm that now ended in a stump and bloody linen. His hand had been crushed by falling debris from the siege engine attacks, then amputated halfway past the elbow.
Peveril likely could have died as well. The gash across his chest was swollen and bruised, but it was not a hole. Why Sir Robert FitzOdo had left any of them to live, Ben didn’t know. He could have opened Quill’s chest like an oyster, splitting his ribs apart with a single blow, and then finished Ben off, too. Instead the Coward Knight had walked away the moment there was nobody left standing to fight him. He’d shown mercy. Perhaps it was why Ben walked away from Will Scarlet. Perhaps it was why he was walking away from the city, and from Robin Hood, and from his son’s death. Even though Peveril had defended Ben from the knight’s axe—the debt of his life also lay abominably in FitzOdo’s clemency.
Others would continue that fight, maybe. FitzOdo’s crimes were made known; Ben had seen to that, at least. The next captain, the next somebody, would bear that torch.
“If you’re here when he wakes,” Ben asked of the neighboring soldier, “tell him I was here, and that I owe him. Lord Beneger de Wendenal is his man, if he needs it. I’ll be at my estate in Derbyshire.”
“And if he doesn’t wake?” the soldier asked.
Ben looked down on Peveril, skinny and dirty, his lips parted and drooling like a child. Though he wished it didn’t, it reminded him of his sons. All three. “Then the world will be worser for it.”
The world was already worser for it. Every day, worser, the only direction the world had ever known. Life was nothing more than riding that slope down, to see how long you could hold on before it was your turn.
Just outside the colorful canopies, Ben spotted Nottingham’s castellan, Hamon Glover. Glover surveyed the yard with a sincere interest, and was very likely responsible for its existence in the first place. Ben gave the man a curt greeting and farewell, mostly as a courtesy.
“Are you leaving us?” the castellan asked, before Ben could avoid the conversation. “Ahead of Richard’s announcements?”
“I’ll stay, but only just,” he answered. “I’d rather take my leave with haste.”
The thick man fidgeted. “Understandable.”
Ben would have walked on, but curiosity stayed him. “Have you heard any sign of FitzOdo?”
“Sir Robert?” Glover gave a quick scan of the hospital, all while shaking his head. “I’m afraid not. Though my attention has been … pulled in many directions of late.”
“Of course.”
“And what of—if you don’t mind my asking—what of Robin Hood, then?” Glover straightened the ties of his heavy cloak, which threatened to rip at the strain. “Have you completed your investigation?”
“Robin Hood is dead.” Ben looked out toward the horizon, where the sun was already making its way to Derby. “But he’ll only stay that way if we ignore him. He’s only as strong as we make him. I imagine there will always be another Robin Hood now, his idea is too compelling to those with nowhere else to turn. He’ll be remade, in one form or another, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Nor should we. Ignore him, I say, that is the summation of my investigation. Only if you chase him down, can his power grow.”
Glover’s lips pursed in consideration, but seemed to think nothing more of it. “Back to your home, then?”
“Yes.” Ben could smile at last, on that. There was one shining hope that had come of all this. “I’m to be a grandfather! I need to build a crib, and I’ve never been happier to say such a thing.” Whether Arable would accept the gift, he didn’t know. But that was not in his power to control, while building the thing was.
“Then congratulations.” Glover bowed respectfully. “Good to see a bit of God’s smile in the middle of this. Is it … a grandfather, you say?”
Ben answered what the man wouldn’t ask. “My son wasn’t Sheriff for long, but he did at least one thing right while he was here.”
Tears came to his eyes, not from thinking on William, but solely from the act of smiling. It had been a while.
“Sheriff de Wendenal was a good man.” Glover’s face beamed. “I don’t know that I ever said this, but you have my deepest condolences for … for such a terrible loss.”
Ben had closed that door. “Thank you,” was all he could reply.
“It was my privilege to prepare him for the funeral myself. I would have no one else see him in such a state.”
He leaned away, eager to end the conversation. “Thank you,” he repeated. “That could not have been easy.”
“As I said, I considered it an honor.”
Ben laughed at the misunderstanding. “I meant because of his wounds.”
“How do you mean?”
“Just that. I mean it must have been difficult, given his wounds.”
“There were no wounds, your lordship,” Glover answered. “Did the Sheriff not tell you? It was poison that took him—a woman’s weapon. Your son was a handsome man, even in death.”
Oh, if Ben were still looking through a tunnel, that tunnel shred itself to ash and thrust him back to the forefront of rage. The sky boiled and burst. Ben pushed hot iron through his heart and welcomed its old familiar burn.
He reached out and touched Hamon Glover’s shoulder. “Do you have any rope?”
WILLIAM DE FERRERS WAS in the Sheriff’s office on the second story of the high keep. Ben’s every footstep turned the castle stone to molten lead, a scorched path more ruinous than anything the catapults had done.
“Are you still Sheriff, then?” His breath pumped steam.
“Lord Wendenal,” was the answer from this creature, this thing, the son of an earl who had chosen vanity over honor, who had only grown so far as his father’s ankles. “That shall be determined tomorrow. William Brewer has stood aside until Richard—”
Ben’s fist, a glove of gold and grief, split the whelp William de Ferrers’s face in two.
He did not need both hands for this. He could reach through Ferrers’s brittle skeleton and pull out his soul, screaming, with only a single hand. The one in the sling would be jealous, yes, but jealousy passed with time, while vengeance … vengeance was immortal.
“What in—” Ferrers did not utter another word before Ben struck him again. His body careened backward and over the top of his own desk, scuttling away for distance he would never get. It was in this very room that Ben had first confronted him, strangled him, but he had pulled back. This city offered little in the way of second chances, but this one Ben could correct.
“Guardsmen!” Ferrers sputtered, wiping his bloody lips with the back of his hand.
“They’re busy.”
“Lord Wendenal!”
“How did my son die?”
A crystal clarity snapped Ferrers’s face to attention for just a moment, and Ben knew he was right, in his bones, in the darkest pit of him that he thought he could never fill again. “I told you,” Ferrers lied, “Robin of Locksley and Will Scarlet killed him.”
“What you told me,” Ben unshouldered the heavy bag he’d brought along, let it land on the desk, “was that his ‘wounds were grievous.’ That he fought ‘as well as any man ever has.’ But he did not die in a fight, did he? It was poison, was it not?”
Ferrers held one hand up. “I don’t believe I phrased it that way, and if I was misunderstood—”
Ben laughed, from his gut, so sharply that Ferrers’s jaw chomped shut in the middle of his desperate evasion. “You phrased it exactly that way, you worm. You were describing to a father the final moments of his last son. Those words were seared into my mind as surely as if I had burnt them into my flesh.”
“A mistake, I assure you.” Ferrers’s head lilted. “We told that to the people … we wanted the story of your son fighting, to make him … to make him a hero!”
“Will Scarlet was never in the castle that night.” Ben leveled his eyes on the man. “You lied to me, Ferrers. You lied to me so that you could use me.”
He should have trusted his own instincts months ago, when he came here. He knew then that it was this spindly cretin to blame for William’s death. He should have squeezed the boy’s throat longer, harder, he never should have let any morsel of doubt in. It was vanity alone that had stayed his hand, the fear that William had fallen to such a weakling as this. The lure of Robin Hood somehow validated his son’s death, that only some mythical villain could be strong enough to defeat a Wendenal. Ben had chased ghosts through Nottingham, had even helped Ferrers escape from the castle and recruit allies to return to it. He’d trusted the story of William’s death, for exactly the reasons that Ferrers had concocted it—because it was heroic. That lie placed Ben by his side, by his son’s murderer’s side, blind to the truth, the cruelest thing one can do to a grieving parent.
“I meant to protect you, your lordship,” Ferrers capitulated, still maneuvering to keep the desk between them. “I thought it better to give you a good memory of your son’s death, to remember him as brave in his final moments. I was trying to be kind to you—”
No part of Ben could entertain such excuses. Instead he tugged at the buckle of the bag on the desk with his good hand and flung its leather flap open, revealing its contents. Ferrers again stopped midsentence, his throat passed an absurdly large swallow.
“Do you remember what I said I’d do if I discovered you had lied to me?”
Ferrers stopped shifting, his body was likely frozen in terror. His eyes darted around the room, probably hoping to find a weapon. If Ferrers found a knife, it was not unreasonable to think he could overwhelm Ben. Ferrers was just a frail little thing, but Ben was admittedly beyond his best years, and crippled now, too. Despite this, there was not a single seed of doubt in his mind. “I told you I’d throw you out that window,” he swore it now, as a promise fulfilled, “with a rope around your neck.”
He’d already tied the noose in the thick braided rope that Hamon Glover had procured. And anyone who had raised three boys knew exactly how to carry a struggling child with only a single hand. Hell, he could carry three of Ferrers and still not break a sweat.
Ferrers’s body shook, his voice trembled. “I am your Sheriff…”
“You’re not, actually.” Ben pulled the coils of rope out, until he found the iron hook of its other end. “Prince John declared his man Brewer as your replacement. Perhaps Richard will reverse that tomorrow, but for this exact day … no, you’re not.”
“I am still your earl.”
“Yes, but I don’t care.”
He thrust the hook through the heavy breach hinges of the office door and gave it a satisfied tug. Beneger the Revenger, he’d heard that name go around. Lord Death. He was happy to live up to that standard now. It was a fitting circle to close—if it had to happen, it was almost appropriate that this insolent pup had been the one to take William’s life. The elder Ferrers was responsible for the death of his first two sons, and Ben could now settle that score.
“Wait,” the dead man stalled. “It’s true, I lied, I lied about your son. But Lord Wendenal, you must understand. William was a traitor. He conspired with Robin of Locksley to take power in Nottingham, he was involved in de Lacy’s assassination. I have done everything I can to hide these facts, for the sake of stability, so that your son would not be dishonored in death! This much is true, Lord Wendenal, I swear it. I hate to say it, and it brings me no joy to tell it to you, but your son betrayed his country in a coup of power! And you are on the verge of following him, and destroying your family’s name forever.”
Most of it fell on deaf ears, there was no excuse Ferrers could concoct that could pierce the armor of Ben’s lifetime of rage. But that final nugget, it made a tiny crack. His grandson was soon to enter the world, to carry on the name of Wendenal. If it was discovered that Ben murdered Ferrers here, then the new family he’d just gained might suffer for it.
On the other hand, he’d made a promise. On his son’s life.
“Who poisoned him?” Ben demanded.
Because that was the only piece of information that mattered.
Ferrers, after a moment’s deduction, ran.
There was a small servant’s door in the side of the room, but he never made it. Ben met him halfway there, yanking the back of his neck like a dog, then quickly repositioned to reach around under one of Ferrers’s arms and grab his hair. From here he could pull him any direction he wanted, and he dragged him back to the center of the room and pounded his face into the oak table. He released his grip and smashed his fist into the back of Ferrers’s skull, rewarded with a shiver that went through the murderer’s body.
Ben pulled out the loop of rope and slipped it over the top of Ferrers’s head. The boy’s arms were already weak to respond, and flailed now at trying to fight against the noose. Ben snatched the man’s hand and grabbed a finger, any finger, and snapped it with a single violent motion backward. Ferrers screamed, his hand quivered, and Ben walked a few feet to the left to open the large iron casing of the window. A single lever eased it from its locked housing and it swung inward, letting the cool breeze of the world rush in, making havoc of the paper piles on the desk, but filling the office of the Sheriff of Nottingham with much-needed fresh air.
Ferrers was standing, but too dazed to move. His face was black and spattered in blood, he cradled his broken hand with the other, his mouth was dangling open uselessly. Ben didn’t ask him for final words, or to admit his crime, or to prepare himself for God. Instead he bent to fold the man over his back, stood to heft him over his shoulder. It was easy, surprisingly easy, to throw him out the window and watch the rope snap taut a moment later.
And finally, finally, Ben knelt down and cried for his baby boy.