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We would have to strike again, but I knew now, the Sheriff would be waiting. If we took another shipment from the Crown, Guy Brisbane would be waiting with unlimited authority and I might finally have to pay for my sins.

"Find Little John," I said. "We ride scout at dawn."

4

GUY

The portraits arrived from the Crown's storehouses in three flat crates. Each one of the heavy, brown crates had been stamped with the seal of confiscated property. Carefully, I had them unpacked in my office because a hunter who wished to catch a ghost first needed to learn her face.

Everything seized from House Locksley after the execution had been catalogued and buried in a royal warehouse. There it had sat, gathering dust alongside the plundered histories of a dozen other fallen houses.

It had taken my new authority and exactly one letter to unearth it. Now the paintings leaned in rows against my map wall, and I moved down the line of them slowly in the candlelight, studying the faces of a family the Crown had erased from the land.

Most were formal portraits.

There stood the old general, Idris al-Locksley, his darkened skin rendered in oils with his hand on a sword hilt and a king's favor around his neck. His gaze so intense and direct it seemed to peer across the time. I almost felt as if the painter had feared him a little.

There hung the successive lords of the house in their ceremonial dress, each portrait stiff with dignity.

Finally, there was Lord William of Locksley himself, the executed traitor, painted with kind eyes that sat strangely on a man condemned for treason. Beside him hung a gray-haired woman, her loss threaded into a heavy braid, holding a sprig of lavender, and something about the lavender snagged in my mind and held there like a burr.

Slowly, I lifted away a formal portrait of the family assembled on their front steps, and behind it I found the sketch.

It was small and unframed, charcoal on paper gone soft with age, clearly never meant for a gallery wall. Someone had drawn a young woman climbing an ancient oak in a fine gown, her skirts hiked scandalously, her locs escaping whatever arrangement a maid had spent the morning building. Her head had been thrown back mid laugh at someone below her on the ground. The artist had loved her and I could see it I every line and curve. There was a wild childlike joy etched upon her face.

I stood for far too long, admiring the sketch because I remembered her.

"Lady Robin," I said to the empty office, and the name surfaced from a place I had not visited in years.

I had been a young officer back then, newly made and stiff with ambition. Forced to stand at the edges of noble banquets I attended only because refusing invitations was a kind of insubordination.

She would have been perhaps sixteen, the Locksley daughter, and I remembered her because she had been impossible not to remember.

While the other noble children performed their manners, Lady Robin had debated a visiting magistrate about grain tariffs until the man went red. It was later that same evening I had watched her slip sweetmeats from the high table into her sleeves and deliver them to the servants' children waiting by the kitchen door.

I hadn't thought of her since the her house had fallen. I’d been on the northern border when Lord William was executed, and by the time I returned, House Locksley was a closed ledger and its daughter a footnote presumed dead or fled.

I looked from the sketch to my map wall, at three years of thread connecting raided convoys to fed villages. The two images settled over each other like a cipher finding its key.

The girl who had stolen sweetmeats for servants' children had grown into a woman who stole medicine for a shire.

The journals surfaced from the bottom of the third crate, wrapped in oilcloth that had preserved them better than the Crown deserved.

They were Lord William's administrative records, years of them, written in a steady careful hand, and I read through the night because I could not stop. I had expected the self-serving accounts of a schemer or at least the ordinary ledgers of an ordinary lord, and instead I found brilliance on every page.

His military assessments of the shire's defenses were sharper than anything produced by the Crown's own commanders. His economic reforms had doubled his tenants' yields while cutting their rents, and his marginalia read like a philosophy of rule assembled one harvest at a time, equal parts strategy and conscience.

He had forgiven debts in famine years and recorded the interest lost without a word of complaint. He had drilled his tenants in archery himself, noting with a father's pride which of them showed promise. In one entry he had described teaching his young daughter to read wind through the treetops, writing that she learned faster than any soldier he had ever trained.

Near the end of the final journal, one line stopped me entirely.

A ruler who lets his people starve has already declared war on them.

I read it more than a few times, and then I sat back in my chair while the candle burned slowly downward. I let his words rearrange my feelings like furniture in my chamber. I had built my life on the belief that law separated civilization from chaos, and here was a condemned traitor articulating the very principle beneath that belief more clearly than any man I had ever served.

This was the mind the Crown had put to the block.

These were the values it had called treason.