Page 16

"You've had three days to throw that thing in the river." Merry dropped onto the log beside me, and I did not startle, because I had heard her coming, and she knew it, which meant she had chosen her moment on purpose. I kept turning the ring and didn’t look at her.

"And deprive myself of the pleasure of knowing Bisbane is walking around without it?" I held it up so the seal flashed. "Eleven years of wear on this band, Merry. That man hasn’t taken it off since before I could draw a war bow, and now every time he signs a warrant, he has to remember me."

"Mm." She stretched her boots toward the fire, and I felt her eyes come to rest on my hand with the particular weight she saved for wounds she intended to press. "You keep your father's compass in that pocket."

I stopped turning the ring while the fire popped between us. Somewhere across the camp a child laughed at something, and I sat very still with the gold going warm against my palm.

"Careful, Merry."

She was quiet for just a moment. “I’m just saying that of all the places on your body and all the pouches on your belt…the sheriff's ring keeps ending up in the one pocket you"

I glanced over. “Don't."

She raised both hands in surrender. However, the surrender lasted exactly as long as it took her grin to arrive. It was her worst grin, the one that had preceded every piece of teasing I had endured since we were children in different trees.

"Oh," she said, with relish, "this is going to be fun."

I shoved the ring back into my pocket and picked up an arrow that did not need fletching and fletched it anyway, and the worst part was that I could not honestly aim my irritation at her. Merry had only said aloud what I had been walking around for three days, the question sitting in my pocket where a compass and a stolen ring pressed together like old friends.

Why haven’t you gotten rid of it?

The answer escaped me, so I sharpened my knife instead, and Merry, mercifully, let me.

Word came the next morning that Thornby's stores had run dry. Grain and suppressants both were nearing their end. By noon Little John and I were on the forest paths to count exactly how bad it was before we committed to another raid that would put us all in danger.

I expected to find what I always found in villages the Crown had chewed on. I looked for thin children and frightened Omegas and a headman doing sums that refused to come out right.

Instead, I stepped out of the forest into a village square full of wagons.

And those wagons were being unloaded…

Grain sacks came down in a chain of hands alongside crates of blankets and baskets of root stores and salted meat, and there, stacked with a care that made my breath go strange, cases of suppressant vials were being carried into the healer's cottage under the direction of a woman who kept touching them as if they might dissolve.

Children ran shrieking between the wheels while their mothers stood in the kind of stunned clusters I had only ever seen after my own raids.

I hadn’t raided anything…

Nobody had.

These wagons had rolled in on the open road in broad daylight, and they’d come from the north, and the north road led to exactly one place.

I found an elderly shopkeeper directing traffic outside his storehouse and pulled him aside. What he told me refused to fit into any shape I recognized.

The Sheriff of Nottingham had ordered the Crown's stores opened for the relief of the villages, grain and medicine and suppressants delivered by the Crown's own carters. He’d expressly forbidden anyone from charging the villagers so much as a clipped penny.

"Bisbane?" I said.

"Aye."

I studied the crates coming down, the royal stamps on their sides sitting in a village square like tame wolves. "Sheriff Guy Bisbane?"

Little John snorted behind me. "Know another one?"

I ignored him, because somebody had to stay serious, and I fixed the shopkeeper with the look I used on merchants who padded their weights. "What's the price?"

The old man frowned at me. "Price?"

"Taxes? Labor? Firstborn child?"