NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
MONDAY, 13TH DAY OF JANUARY
THE STANDARD DUTIES OF a Common Guardsman were to stand, grunt, or occasionally—but only under the strictest supervision—do both simultaneously. Socially they were miles beneath knights, well beneath those placed in a specific regiment, and even potentially just beneath river slime.
But within the Guard there existed one tier lower than Common Guardsman. The most useless of men were reserved for those who stood the walls at night and squinted out into the black sky. Theirs was a critical role; the castle, it turned out, was actually lighter than air, and required people to stand on top of it at all hours to keep it from floating away.
The butt of many a joke, the nightwalkers of the Common Guard now had one more in their number: Quillen Peveril. It was his punishment for standing idly by while Lord Beneger attacked the Sheriff. His options had been between two different demotions: either to become a nightwalker, or a corpse.
He should have chosen death. At least hell was warm. All the furs in the world couldn’t protect his skinny body from the cold. Most of the other nightwalkers had accumulated a lifetime of fat to help them survive their shift. Little instruction had been provided in his new role, because none was required. He was a scarecrow. To call his duty a watch was disingenuous, for there was nothing for him to watch. The fires they kept at each corner of the ramparts blinded his vision against the possibility of spotting any theoretical trouble scaling the walls. He might be able to notice something the size of an army, he guessed, but—wait!
There! Approaching from the north! An enemy army!
Quillen Peveril alone saw the danger, alerted the castellan, and saved Nottingham.
Ah, wait. He squinted. No, he’d been mistaken. It was just the horizon. Again.
Next time.
Ironically, no army had marched on Nottingham since the current Sheriff’s father. The late elder Ferrers had lost the favor of half his county when he pledged his banner to the traitor king Henry the Younger, and had never recovered. By sitting now in the seat of Nottingham’s power, the young Ferrers had thematically finished the siege his father had failed at years earlier.
Still, judging Ferrers’s competence was moot. A new Sheriff would be appointed soon, if logic could be bothered to get up anytime soon and do its job.
“You could leave now, of course,” Quill told himself, while unsuccessfully convincing his muscles to stay active. He did not say this aloud, of course, because opening his mouth would cause his tongue to freeze and break off, and he wasn’t yet familiar with the protocols for requesting a new one. But leaving would be, arguably, even more embarrassing than walking the midnight wall. Greetings, Father, I’m back, he could say. No no, I didn’t do as you asked at all. It was too cold, see?
His thoughts were arrested by a silhouette on the battlements. On the far end of the ramparts, the unmistakable skulk of the White Hand.
Just a glimpse of the ghost man, and Quill was reminded that his body could always become a little colder. He’d given little thought to what had become of Gilbert in the past few months. Both of them had survived the ambush outside Bernesdale, where half of Gisbourne’s Black Guard were cut to ribbons. Quill still awoke to fever dreams of that night; there were times when the images invaded his waking hours, too, and his heart would race as if it were happening again. Gilbert had left the Black Guard immediately afterward, opting for the obscurity of the nightwalkers. Some thought the role was fitting for him, while others thought he’d turned coward. Either way, he had vanished from everyone’s minds—and now here he was, hovering over the castle’s walls like a grim spectre.
Quill reminded himself there was nothing unnatural about the man. Gilbert was tall and gaunt, but not nearly as ghoulish as some claimed. His lean, stern face invited nothing, but nor did it hide the paranormal. He had probably grown up in a street gang earlier in life—as he’d always had good instincts with how to deal with them. There was no great mystery as to why he never talked about his past. He was just another slack-jawed thug with a sad story and a boring ending. The same path Quill might find himself on: a cautionary tale, but not a supernatural one.
Still, he felt relief when the White Hand disappeared down a flight of stairs to haunt elsewhere.
None of this was what Quill had spent his life studying for. Some day he vowed to take over as Lord of the Peak at Peveril Castle, if he could only prove himself clever enough. The role would legally pass to his elder brother, Stephen, who was better at smashing skulls together than using those spongy things within them. Somehow his father treated his brother’s manliness as a measure of his worth, as if the two had any correlation. Quill had nothing but diplomacy and problem-solving skills, correctly relegated to the bottom of the family trash heap. He was still seen as the little boy who’d gotten lost in the caves beneath the castle one year, not strong enough to climb his own way out.
“Nottingham and Derby are sisters,” his father had said. Odd that he’d import such a familial term, when Quill was his literal family and received none of his father’s concern.
He’d prove himself, he would. But this—standing on a wall in the frozen night a county away from home—was not helping. He knew there would be frustrations, playing the long game as a second son, but he did not think they would involve this. At least in the Black Guard he’d been above such menial work as wall walking, but now his work felt … well, it felt like work.
“You could leave the Guard,” he considered. “And volunteer to ride with Lord Beneger’s team.” But that presupposed that the ghost of Robin Hood was Nottingham’s greatest danger, and Quill was anything but agreed on that.
“Or you could join a traveling troubadour group.” Songs were good for people, weren’t they?
“Or you could go on a murderous rampage.”
“Or you could do what you’re told, living in comfortable obscurity.”
“Or you could make the most of this position, and try to help people.”
He hated that last one, mostly for the fact that it was the “right” choice.
At least the nightwalkers weren’t out in the city collecting ransom dues from people who were starving, to send to Chancellor Longchamp. At least he was still in the castle, where he could keep his ears open for opportunities to help. And the thing that nobody else seemed to understand was that Robin Hood—regardless of who wore the name—was not the cause of the city’s troubles. He was a side effect. Locksley’s legacy could only flourish because the people needed him to.
Quill just had to fix the entire world, is all.
So he pulled his furs closer and trained his eyes on the city, leaning against the wall and waiting for time to pass. His forebearers had stood in this same place, no doubt, as stewards of the High Sheriff’s seat for generations.
While this particular Peveril would make his mark yet.
—“You’re asleep.”—
The words hit like a dagger in the heart. Quill jolted awake, gasping, shocked to realize he had dozed off. He instantly pulled his fingertips into his armpits, burning from the cold. He choked on his own breath, and then a chill worse than the air overtook him. He was not alone.
“And now you’re awake.”
Gilbert with the White Hand’s voice was a smooth stream over rounded stones. He stood with a captivating stillness, while Quill’s entire body shook. Gilbert’s impossibly relaxed stance was not the idle permanence of a statue, but rather the tense beat before a leap. A cat in the instant before its pounce.
“I can’t believe I fell asleep,” Quill stammered, trying to sort out each of his limbs. He blinked away layers of confusion.
“I’ve been watching you for ten minutes.”
This registered as the most alarming thing Quill had ever heard.
“Ten minutes I’ve been watching you,” Gilbert tilted his head, “but you can’t even believe it happened? Do you think I’m a liar?”
“I mean, I can believe it, of course, I’m not saying—”
“I know what you mean.”
“Gerp,” Quill said, his brain busy elsewhere.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m being punished.” Quill tried to laugh. He’d forgotten all the creative stories he’d concocted to explain his new assignment. “I’m not here because I want to be.”
“Clearly,” Gilbert said after a long pause. “You were sleeping.”
“Gerp,” Quill, against all odds, said again.
The White Hand scrutinized him for a while, then smiled, his thin lips reaching all the way back to his spine. “How do you want to die?”
Yes, Quill urinated at this moment, but that wasn’t the reason he was no longer cold. His body lost feeling everywhere, his muscles slacked, he felt as if his hands were falling down past the ground, through the earth. His head clouded and the only thing in the world that was clear was Gilbert’s half-lit face and an encroaching black fog.
When Gilbert grabbed him, he screamed.
“I’ve got you,” he said, calmly, kindly. “You can barely stand. Why don’t you get inside, Peveril? You don’t want to die like this, nobody does.”
“Like this? Like how?” Quill asked, his head flopping about as his legs became increasingly useless. He felt a good deal of his body weight slump away as Gilbert shifted to help him toward the nearest doorway.
“By the cold. Alone, without a fight. That’s no way to die, is it?” His silken voice was next to Quill’s ear. “Stay awake now, tell me how’d you rather die. What’s a better way?”
“Old age,” Quill’s mouth answered. He couldn’t see anymore. It was like a drunken stupor. “Old age, surrounded by very young women. Not very young. Not, like, children. You know.”
“I know what you mean.” The world swooned until he was propped up against a wall. “You don’t get to die of old age if you die of cold first. Sleep, Peveril. You’re not made for this sort of thing, are you?”
There was something about that question that was unbearably true.
“No,” Quill answered quietly, succumbing to his body’s need to not exist. “I’m not.”
“Sleep.”
Somehow he was being lowered into his own bed, in the Guard’s barracks, and its warmth made the world disappear.
Gilbert was no slack-jawed thug, his mind wondered, just as sleep consumed him.
Why would he volunteer for the midnight’s walk?