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"Especially because he's waiting," I gave a slow grin.

They both stared at me, and I gave them the half of my reasoning I could afford to share, that a waiting man watches the door he expects you to use, and expectation was a weakness like any other.

I’d been picking the Crown's expectations like locks for three years.

The other half I kept, and it walked back to camp with me like a shadow. My people needed medicine, and now, quietly, invisibly, so did their Ghost, and the sand in my glass had begun to fall.

Winter was coming to Sherwood.

And so is my heat…

8

GUY

Ihad my lieutenants pull every patrol out of Sherwood Forrest. Murmurs were going around that I’d lost my mind. So, I let them think it, because explaining myself would have taken longer than being right.

The failure on the forest road had taught me a lesson I should’ve learned from three years of reports.

I simply couldn’t out-trick a woman who had been raised on strategy and weaned on Sherwood.

Trickery was her mother tongue and I spoke it with an accent.

My beautiful false convoy had failed for one simple reason. It had been a lie, and she had smelled that lie before she ever counted the guards. Everything about that shipment had been arranged for her eyes rather than grown from a seed of truth.

Stop lying, I’d thought.

I spread my maps and my reports across the office and I studied her the way I should have from the beginning, not as a criminal whose next crime I needed to predict, but as a commander whose next duty I needed to find. She did not go where the wealth was greatest. She went where the suffering was worst.

Every thread on my wall proved it, three years of raids falling like rain on exactly the parishes where the harvest failed. Or the areas where the taxes bit deepest, and if I wanted to know where the Ghost of Sherwood would appear, I didn’t need spies in the forest. I needed to know where it hurt.

I found it in the tithe rolls and the market reports, a small farming village on the forest's northern skirt called Papplewick. It was taxed to the beams in the autumn assessment, and now, according to the garrison's weekly summary, sealed tight in heat lockdown with four Omegas burning up with no medicine to hold them.

The report gave it two lines. I read those two lines and saw a village one week from catastrophe. Carefully, I marked it on my map with a single pin, sure that this would draw out the Ghost.

"This is where she'll come," I said.

My captain leaned over the map, frowning at the pin as if it might explain itself. "Why there? There's nothing in Papplewick worth stealing, Sheriff. No stores, no coin, no garrison shipments within a day's ride."

"Because if I were the Ghose," I said, and her name left my mouth before I could stop it, easy as breath, "I couldn't ignore them."

I folded the map before he could ask more questions, gave my orders.

They were not the orders anyone expected.

I did not send soldiers to Papplewick. I sent grain. I bought it myself, through factors who did not know my name, good milled flour and root stores and salted pork, and alongside the food went suppressants drawn from the garrison's own medical stores at Blyth, a full course for every Omega in that village, signed out under my seal against an authority no quartermaster dared question. Two plain wagons, no livery, driven by carters hired at market rates, rolling into Papplewick on a gray afternoon like charity from an anonymous saint.

And seeded among the carters and the escort walked my six best trackers, men I had brought from the northern border, who could follow a hawk's shadow across running water, dressed in homespun with their bows broken down inside grain sacks.

Their orders were precise and narrow. Watch the tree line. When the Ghost came, and she would come, they were not to take her in the village, because I would not turn a starving hamlet into a battlefield or teach Sherwood that the sheriff's mercy was a fishhook. They were to mark her, follow her, and map the path she used, nothing more. I wanted her roads, not her wrists.

Not yet.

My lieutenant read the provisioning orders twice, and then he looked up at me with an expression balanced carefully between respect and concern for my sanity.

"You're feeding the village she's coming to save." He set the orders down. "You're making this easier for her."

"I'm making it impossible for her to stay away."