Page 11

She had stood ten paces from the most feared Alpha in the King's service, unarmed against my drawn authority, and she’d laughed at me with her whole chest.

It was an easy and bright and entirely unafraid laught, and my instincts had answered that sound in a way no discipline in my body was prepared for.

And underneath her cloak and the forest and the smoke, faint but unmistakable, had been wild lavender and pine and coming rain.

The Ghost. The Omega from the arrow.

One and the same, standing close enough to touch, and then I had touched her, and the memory of her pulse jumping against my fingers had ridden behind my saddle the whole way home like a second passenger.

I was pulling off my gloves in the castle yard, still arguing with my own blood, when I finally noticed my hand.

My signet ring was gone.

I stood very still in the torchlight, staring at the pale band of skin where it had sat for eleven years, and I reconstructed the encounter heartbeat by heartbeat, the lunge, the catch, the strange suspended moment, the twist of her escape. Her free hand. I had been so consumed by the feel of her wrist in my grip that I had never once felt her fingers at mine.

My lieutenant crossed the yard toward me, took one look at my bare hand, and went pale in a way that would have been funny on any other night.

"Sheriff." He swallowed. "She robbed you?"

"No," I said quietly.

I flexed my empty hand, and the pale band of skin looked back at me like a verdict, and I let the truth of it settle where it would do the most instructive damage.

"She embarrassed me."

I didn’t sleep.

Instead, an hour before dawn, I went back to the crates from the Locksley archive, because if I could not close my hand around the woman, I could at least close my mind around her. I had begun to suspect that everything I needed to understand about her had been sitting in a royal warehouse for six years.

The sketch of the girl in the oak tree still sat propped on the corner of my desk. I found myself looking at it differently now that I had seen the woman up close. The artist had caught the exact tilt of her head.

I had watched that same tilt in the torchlight, insolent and curious all at once. This had been right before she compared me to every other man who ever disappointed her.

"Some things never change," I said to the sketch, and I got to work.

This time I went past the portraits and the estate journals, down into the bundled documents at the bottom of the last crate, the ones tied with the black ribbon of the royal courts. The trial of Lord William of Locksley, complete and official, transcribed by Crown clerks and sealed by Crown judges. I had read a hundred treason proceedings across my career, and I spread this one across my desk expecting the familiar architecture of them, testimony and correspondence and confession, the slow closing of evidentiary walls around a guilty man.

What I found instead was a hollow shell wearing the costume of a trial.

The charge rested on letters, supposedly written in William's hand to agents of a foreign court, and the transcripts recorded that the letters were presented, but the letters themselves were absent from the file, which was irregular.

The witnesses numbered exactly two, both household servants dismissed by William in the year before his arrest.

Both of whom recited testimony so similar in phrasing that they might have memorized the same page, which was worse than irregular. There had been no defense heard, because the trial had lasted a single morning, and a lord of an ancient house had gone from arrest to execution in eleven days, a pace I had never seen the Crown's courts manage for anything, least of all for treason, where confiscations demanded careful accounting.

And there, in the confiscation orders, I found the detail that stopped my breath.

The petition to seize and administer the Locksley lands had been filed with the courts three days before Lord William was arrested.

Someone had begun dividing the estate of a man who had not yet been accused, and the signature at the bottom of that petition, elegant and unhurried, belonged to Lord Edmund Fitzwalter.

I sat back slowly, and the candle flames bent in the draft, and pieces I had been carrying for weeks began to lock together with a sound I could almost hear. Fitzwalter attending private councils about a common outlaw. Fitzwalter urging fire, urging death, urging anything that ended with the last Locksley in the ground. Fitzwalter saying her before the Crown knew the Ghost was a woman.

He had not slipped at all that day in my office. He’d simply known, perhaps for years, exactly who ran Sherwood, because who’d destroyed another would watch for the heir.

"This isn't treason," I said into the empty office, and my voice came out low and strange. "This is a bill of sale."

I was still at my desk when the morning brought him to me, as if my suspicion had summoned the man himself.