“With respect, your king disagrees. If you are indeed loyal, then you are apparently incapable of securing your trade routes. Or if you are capable, you must be complicit in their disappearance. I don’t see a third option.”

“Oh, your simplicity is impressive.” De Lacy wet his lips. “Very well, I’m either impertinent or incompetent. Let him appoint someone else as Sheriff. I never wanted this post in the first place. You can have it, if you think obedience is its only requirement. However, in six months’ time Richard will send a replacement for you as well, because it’s not my intelligence that starves his army.”

“I’m not here to replace you—”

“The people are hurting.” Roger de Lacy had a ferocity to him now, which raised the hair on the back of William’s neck. “Richard raised the taxes, you know. He sold everything he could and some things he couldn’t, all to fund his precious Crusade. The Saladin tithe he called it, to a country of hard-working people who can’t even comprehend who a Saladin is. What is the result? Some of them pay, yes. They pay, starve, die, and then stop paying. Others don’t pay at all. So we don’t actually increase our coffers because it more or less balances itself out. To which Richard brilliantly replies, ‘Well … raise the taxes again!’”

William swallowed. “Baron, I respect the difficulties of your office, I do, and I did not come here to insult them. I have nothing to say as to taxes. But I crossed your county line this morning, and I already know more about Richard’s missing supplies than you do. I don’t know if you are aware of this, or if you even heard what I said earlier, but there is a gang of outlaws in the Sherwood Forest operating with, apparently, wanton freedom.”

De Lacy emptied his cup and his countenance changed, the anger gone as if never there. All his harsh features shifted into a grandfatherly smile, sharing some secret between them. “Have you looked at my face, William?”

William tried not to sigh. “What am I looking for?”

“Do you see all the scars, all the little broken chunks of wood embedded in my flesh?” He leaned in close that William could see him better, but there was nothing but wrinkles and veins. “No? That’s interesting. So William, do you know why my face remains unscarred and unembedded with little broken chunks of wood?”

“No.”

“It is because I do not regularly make a habit of ramming my own face into this table here,” he cleared away a small section of papers to show its thick, craggy surface, lowering his face so that they almost touched, “even when it otherwise sounds like an excellent idea. And do you know why I do not regularly ram my face into this table?”

“Do tell.”