Page 19

It was nothing, really, the faintest shift of weight against stone, the sound a cat might make if a cat weighed nine stone and had business on the third floor. My hand found my sword hilt before I had finished deciding to reach for it, and I held still and listened to a silence that had gone slightly wrong.

Then the air changed, and I caught it.

Wild lavender. Pine. Coming rain.

The scent went through me like a struck bell, and my body answered before my mind had leave to object. Everything in me rising at once toward the knowledge that she was here, in my castle, in my room, close enough to touch. It was richer than it had been on the arrow and richer than it had been in the clearing, warmer somehow, sweeter at the edges in a way I had no name for and no business noticing, and my grip tightened on the hilt until the leather creaked.

I let go of the sword.

I didn’t need it, and more truthfully, I did not want it.

"You can come out now, Little Ghost…" I said to the empty room.

Silence answered me, patient and amused.

"Or we can spend the entire night pretending you're better at this than you are."

"I’m better at this than you are," said a woman's voice, from directly behind me.

I turned and found her finally.

Robin of Locksley sat on the edge of my desk with one boot swinging, hood down, locs loose over her shoulder, entirely at her ease in the heart of the King's authority in Nottinghamshire. There were four gates, sixty men on the night watch, and two guarded stairwells between the outside world and the chair I was sitting in, and she had crossed all of it to perch on my correspondence like a hawk that had decided my desk would do.

I didn’t let a single thing show on my face, which cost me more than I intend to admit.

"You've made an interesting choice," I said. "There are sixty men within a shout of this room."

"Sixty-one." She tilted her head toward the corridor. "You forgot yourself, Sheriff. Most men do."

Then she reached into her pocket and tossed something onto the desk between us, and it rolled a half circle on the wood and settled, gleaming.

My signet ring.

"Returning stolen property?" I asked.

"Don't make it sentimental."

I picked it up.

Warm…

I was aware of exactly why it was warm, and I turned it once between my fingers before sliding it back onto a finger that had felt wrong for a fortnight.

"You carried it for days."

Her eyes narrowed. "I forgot I had it."

"Of course."

"In a pocket. Under other things."

"Naturally."

"You're irritating," she said.

"I've been told."

We looked at each other, and neither of us reached for a weapon. I understood with perfect clarity that this was the longest either of us had held still in the other's presence. In the clearing there had been sixty yards and a bow between us.