Elena watched the crowd warm to him. They had already forgotten what he represented, and why he was here. She regretted playing along now, if it made even one of them feel somehow safer. Those that weren’t at the attack at Locksley Castle, the families here in the Oak Camp, just saw an injured man. They ate up his words as if he were promising them new peace and freedom. He told them Locksley’s plan would work, the Nottingham Guard would turn a blind eye to their new tactics. That they would no longer be worthy of the Sheriff’s attention. They ate his lies like candy, but the only thing he truly promised them was danger.

“Don’t make yourselves a problem for us,” he lied and he lied and he lied, “and we’ll never know you were there.”

“THEY BELIEVE HIM, BECAUSE he says what they want to hear,” Will complained, later that night in their tent. He was agitated, on his back, but slowly tracing the length of her shin with his finger. She sat beside him, busying herself with his hair, roughing it up and smoothing it out, over and over. “They don’t think. They don’t ask questions.”

“We know better than to trust a gord,” she answered him. Anyone who had lived under the Nottingham Guard’s boot would know better. They had lost friends to such empty promises. Over-zealous guards trying to make a name for themselves, offering leniency to little fish in exchange for bigger ones. The lure of an easy life was attractive to young boys and girls in the streets. The Guard preyed on that vulnerability, their desperation. Close friends in the Red Lions had been betrayed, closer friends had been the ones doing the betraying. None of them received what they were promised. They all ended in irons.

“God’s fucking teeth, how can they think he’ll keep his word?”

“Because they don’t know,” she said, wishing that saying it could fix it. “They’re not us.”

“This’d be a lot simpler if he’d just died like a good boy.”

She stared down into him until he noticed her pause. “Would it?”

After a quiet breath, he shook it off. “You’re right, that’d be worse. But it’s still a shithole, what we’re in.”

“What you’re saying,” she resumed stroking her fingers through his hair, “is that we’re at a disadvantage.”

He closed his eyes and grunted.

“So do what you do. How do we turn this disadvantage into an advantage instead?”

It was a puzzle, really, a game they’d often played with each other on the road. One would concoct an unsalvageable scenario, and the other would invent an ingenious escape. The riddles always eventually devolved into flying away on dragons, which was probably not an option for them now.