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"No."

He blinked. "No?"

"No point."

I slid my signet ring fully into place and looked down at the faint impression it had left against my skin after being gone so long.

She’d brought it back.

And stolen something considerably more dangerous. My lieutenant muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like a prayer.

I almost laughed again. "Double the watch tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?"

"Yes."

He looked at the open window. "Sheriff, with respect, shouldn't we double it tonight?"

I glanced toward the darkness beyond the glass. "No."

Because the Ghost was already gone. And somewhere between Nottingham and Sherwood, Robin of Locksley was carrying the authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham in her pocket.

God help me.

I wanted to see what she did with it.

11

ROBIN

"Please tell me you didn't," Merry had said, the night I came out of Nottingham with the seal warm in my fist.

"Didn't what?"

She stared at me. "Break into Nottingham Castle."

"Technically," I had told her, "I climbed."

She had not spoken to me for the length of two whole miles, which for Merry constituted mourning. When she did finally gather her strength to speak it was to inform me that I had stolen the Sheriff's seal and would shortly be decorating a gibbet.

I let her finish, and then I explained the part she had not yet understood. Which was that the next time a village needed medicine, we wouldn’t have to steal a shipment.

We would order one…

It took four days to make good on that promise, and most of them belonged to Merry's hand rather than mine.

She had a clerk's training from her years in a merchant house and a forger's soul.Though she’d never been given proper occasion to use. She practiced the chancery script on scraps until her letters matched the stiff formality of real orders we’d lifted off real wagons. Then she set the final parchment on a board across her knees and wrote out an authorization directing grain, medicine, and Omega suppressants from the Nottingham stores to Thornby and Edwinstowe.

Carefully, she then she handed it to me, and I melted the wax. I pressed Sheriff Guy Bisbane's seal into it with my own thumb.

The impression came up clean. A hawk stooping over a tower, crisp enough to satisfy any quartermaster in England.

"That's forgery," Merry said.

I lifted the parchment and blew gently across the wax. "That's paperwork."

"You're impersonating the Sheriff of Nottingham."