The voices come clearer now. I still cannot make them out, but one is definitely snapping orders. Then I hear something that has my head shooting up. A word.

Pirate.

He’s addressing Nicolas, which means Nicolas is alive. Alive and well and ignoring the man’s orders? Alive and injured and unable to obey the man’s orders?

It does not matter. He is alive. At least for now.

I crawl as quickly as I can while straining to hear more. There are two voices. Neither is Nicolas’s. The one I thought was barking orders is asking questions. Demanding answers that Nicolas is refusing to give, and the other man is telling his compatriot to shoot Nicolas. That part I hear clearly.

“Shoot the devil and be done with it. He’s a traitor and a thief. They’ll hang him anyway.”

I finally reach the spot. The men are on the other side of the hedgerow. I pull away the brambles until I can see through. There, on the road, kneels Nicolas, with his hands laced behind his head.

“Tell me who you work for,” one man says. “Who is this Robin Hood of the Bay?”

That gives me pause. Is it not Nicolas himself?

“Tell us who you work for, boy, and we might let you go.”

Boy? The men are about our own age.

“I work for no one,” Nicolas says.

“Oh, look, he speaks!” the other man sneers. “The devil has a tongue after all.”

“Tell us who this ‘Robin Hood of the Bay’ fellow is,” the first man says, “whether you work for him or not.”

“Work for him?” Nicolas says. “I am Robin Hood of the Bay.”

The second man bursts out laughing. The first scowls and pokes Nicolas with a flintlock pistol.

“Do not mock us, boy. You are but one arm of the beast. We mean to chop off the head.”

“But, good sir, I am the head.” Nicolas’s voice lilts, light and easy, as if he knows full well the men will not believe him.

He is Robin Hood of the Bay. I have no doubt of that. Yet they see only a pirate. A young man foreign in both his accent and his skin color, and so they presume he cannot be anything but a tool of their true target.

“Tell us—” one begins.

“I have. Do you wish me to lie? Lying is a sin. But I presume you must not know that, being in the employ of a man who lies as easily as he speaks.”

“You call the king a liar?”

When Nicolas laughs, there’s an edge to it, a bitterness he cannot disguise. “Oh, I have many answers to that question. Many answers. But you dissemble. You may wear the uniform of the navy, but you do not work for the king. Not unless the king is now employing former admirals to rob the poor of their livelihoods.”

“We are members of His Majesty’s Royal—”

“Yes, yes, but do you not draw pay from Lord Norrington? Answer carefully, mes frères, lest you be damned for your falsehoods.”