Page 49

"I carried another man's boots for two years before I ever owned a pair worth carrying."

That stopped her and she turned around to stare at me.

"My father kept horses for a knight in Lincolnshire," I said. "I was a stablehand until I was fifteen and a soldier until I was twenty-six. I earned the shrievalty the way a man earns anything in this country without a name behind him. I did it slowly and by being more useful than the men who have one. There is no House Bisbane. There is a stable, a border war, and twenty years of refusing to be worth dismissing."

She sat down again, slowly. "I assumed."

I grinned, before taking a sip of the water. “I know you did."

"That was unfair of me."

"It was accurate about the office. It simply wasn't accurate about the man." I met her eyes. "Most people never trouble themselves with the difference."

She studied me over her bowl, as if she could peel the uniform away from the man even when the uniform was nowhere in sight.

"And which one am I looking at now?" she asked.

"The man, I hope."

"Hmm. The man is considerably more troublesome."

"Why?"

"The sheriff is easier to hate."

I put my spoon down. She looked away first, but not before I saw the small, startled pleasure in her eyes at having told me the truth.

Later she knelt at the old chest by the wall, hunting linen for a fresh bandage among folded cloth that had been packed away before her father died.

That was when I noticed the compass again.

It had swung free of her collar and hung on its cord, brass gone dark with handling, and I had watched her touch that thing a dozen times by then. In the clearing before the arrows came. On the ridge above Thornby. Last night when she asked me why hearing the truth hurt.

"What is that?” I asked.

She closed her hand around it on reflex. "It's nothing."

"It isn't."

For a moment I thought she would refuse me. Then she sat back on her heels, lifted the cord over her head, and held it out across the room. It was heavier than it looked, old and good, the needle still swinging true, and around the rim, worn soft by six years of a thumb passing over the letters, ran the engraving.

Roots hold when kingdoms fall.

"My grandmother's," she said. "Eleanor. She gave it to me the night I ran."

"What does it mean?"

"That nothing the Crown can grant you is worth anything." She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. "She used to say titles are weather, and royal favor is the worst weather of all, because it feels like sunshine right up until it isn't. The only things that hold are the ones that grow down instead of up. Family. Loyalty. Knowing who you are when every other name has been taken off you." A small shrug. "My father believed it his whole life. He died believing it, as far as I know."

"He brought you here," I said.

"Every autumn." She looked around the little room, and something in her face opened. "We were terrible hunters. Truly dreadful. We'd come back with one rabbit between us and he'd describe it to my grandmother like we'd brought down a stag." She smiled at the floor. "He taught me the stars from that doorway. Said a Locksley should never need another person's directions."

"And did you learn them?"

"All of them. I can still find my way home from anywhere in this forest in the dark." The smile faded by degrees. "Do you know what I remember most about him?"

"What?"