We stood awkwardly for a bit. No one wanted to break the fragile silence as we watched Robbie process.

  Robbie stood in the cottage's doorway, the note crumpled in her fist. The fury on her face occasionally let slip the fear lurking underneath. I recognised that combination — I am sure it is what the people and creatures I fight saw. Apparently, this was a thing for strong women holding themselves together with their teeth and their pride and not much else.

  Dekka pressed against my shin. I don’t think she was that sympathetic to Mary’s abduction; I think my dog was tired as she flopped down on my foot.

  “Who sent this?” Jack asked from behind me. His voice was carefully neutral in the way that people who are very good at violence and deciding if that was a possible solution to the current situation.

  “Who do you think?” Scarlock said.

  I looked to their faces. I had no idea who they were thinking of.

  No one seemed to be forthcoming."The dagger is noble made," I offered. Everyone looked at me. “I noticed it on the table. And the handwriting, very consistent. I bet whoever wrote that had expensive tutors.” I paused. Or they were programmed to write like they had spent years practicing their cursive. “I read it over her shoulder,” I added, unrepentant. Being tall was useful for more than just a long reach when hitting things.

  Robbie crossed to the table and smoothed the note out with her palm, pressing it flat with limited success. She read it again. Her jaw was very tight.

  “They want the gold returned,” Jack said carefully, looking at Robbie. It was clear this was an option he was considering.

  “They want me,” Robbie said. “The gold would be a bonus.”

  The room absorbed that. This turn of events wasn’t a surprise to me. This is pretty much how the classic Robin Hood tales went. Robin robbed; the king and his men tried to capture him.

  “Then we go and get her.” Scarlock said it like it was the only obvious option, as if all we had to do was work out the details. “Tonight. We know these woods better than any royal guard ever will. We hit them fast before they can move her. We hit them hard. We’re back before dawn with Mary and a few less soldiers in the world to worry about.”

  A few of the men near the door straightened slightly, responding to the pull of it. It was a good, albeit short, speech. Direct. It stirred the bandits. I gave the man in red a second glance. Scarlock was the man who could inspire others to do the stupid but honourable thing.

  Dekka started to snore softly on my foot. The foot was falling asleep, but I couldn’t move it now.

  John gave a derisive snort, but his expression didn’t change at all. Though I wasn’t sure if his face did that very often, regardless of what was going on. He leaned against the far wall with his arms crossed, and that was a sort of answer in itself. His posture gave the look of a man who had survived long enough to know what a trap felt like from the outside.

  “And walk straight into a trap,” he said. Quietly. An almost pleasant lilt to his voice. “Think about it. They took Mary while we were fighting. While all of us were at the gates, occupied, looking outward. This wasn’t an accident. They planned this. The attack on the gate was a distraction, and it worked perfectly.”

  Scarlock’s jaw tightened. “So we just do nothing? We leave her?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You’re saying it’s a trap—”

  “It is a trap,” John said, still with that maddening patience. “The crossroads at dawn. Picture it. Every soldier they have will be waiting in those trees. We ride in, and every archer they’ve got opens up on us before we can count to three. We don’t ride out.” He looked at Scarlock steadily. “I want to get her back too. I’m not saying we don’t do anything; I am saying we don’t walk into a trap.”

  I looked around as the two were talking. Robbie was re-crumpling the paper without seeing it. She seemed to be unaware of the rest of us.

  Scarlock stared belligerently at John. Something moved behind his eyes: frustration and a reluctance to back down. Stubborn as a terrier. I was about to smile when he turned away and drove his fist into the wall, leaving a dent in the plaster.

  Several people found somewhere else to look.

  Robbie never flinched or looked up.

  I looked over at the note. Robbie had spread it out again. It was bothering me, had been bothering me since I’d read it, like a splinter I couldn’t quite locate. You have items that belong to the Crown. We have something of value to you. Make things right and bring what you’ve stolen.

  I read it twice more. Then I had it.

  “Can I just point something out?” I said.

  Robbie looked up. So did most of the room.

  “They’re not actually offering anything.” I gestured at the note. “They might not know it, but they haven’t really offered a trade.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  The faces around me looked blank or scrunched in puzzlement. I sighed. I didn’t want to be the person to point this out. But someone had to. “If Robbie surrenders herself to trial, she goes to prison. Or worse. But what happens to Mary? They’ve offered to take everything — the gold, Robbie — and in exchange they’ll release a woman who will then have no reason to be out here without her partner. She will likely end up going back to the capital. In any event, there is no scenario where Mary is reunited with Robbie,” I paused. “Whoever wrote this is an idiot, or they don’t know who Mary is.”

  A brief silence fell over us.

  “...They don’t know who they have,” Jack said slowly.

  “They took the outlaw’s woman,” I said. “As leverage. They think she’s a villager, maybe. Robbie’s wife. They have no idea they’ve kidnapped the crown princess.”

  The silence that followed was longer and considerably more significant.

  Scarlock made a sound that in different circumstances might have been a laugh.

  Robbie looked up from the note for the first time since she’d walked into this room. Something had shifted. The paralysis was breaking apart, replaced by something sharper and more like herself. She was thinking. I could almost see it happening in real time. “When they realise who she is—”

  “They’ll send her back to the palace,” John finished. He was nodding now, slow and thoughtful. “They can hardly keep her in some field camp. They can’t ransom the crown princess to an outlaw. And they certainly can’t—” he paused delicately.

  “No,” Robbie agreed. Just the one word.

  “She’ll be kept well,” Jack said. “Better than well. They’ll be terrified of what happens if they don’t.”

  “She’s the crown princess,” Scarlock said, and the flatness had left his voice entirely. He sounded almost relieved, which on Scarlock’s face looked like mild indigestion. “She’s safer being kidnapped by the royal guard than she is out here with us, half the time.”

  I wondered if everyone knew she was the prince’s sister. The most open secret of all time.

  Robbie let out a breath that was almost a laugh. Not quite. But almost. “Don’t tell her that. She’d be furious.” She seemed to be returning to her normal, assured self.

  “She’d be furious regardless,” Jack said. “You know how she is.”

  “I know exactly how she is,” Robbie said, and the love in her voice was so unguarded and so unashamed that I looked at the floor, wishing someone would speak of me so.

  My eyes caught my dog, now on her back, her eyes closed in blissful repose. I smiled. I had the love of the best dog.

  Robbie straightened. “We can’t give the gold back,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but the iron in it was unmistakable. “I won’t. The stores from that estate are already committed. Grain for the eastern settlements before the passes close. Medicines for the valley. A new well for the Harwick families who’ve been walking two miles to water all summer. It’s already gone. It was never really ours to begin with — it was always theirs, and we’re just returning it.”

  “Robbie,” Scarlock started.

  “I won’t.” She said it without heat, which made it more final than anger would have. “That’s not a discussion.” She crumpled the note a final time and threw it in the fire.

  Scarlock closed his mouth. He didn’t look happy about it.

  “And I can’t give myself up.” She looked around the room, meeting eyes. “Not because I’m afraid of what trial would mean for me. But because locked in a cell or hanging from a gibbet, I am no use to anyone. Not to the people here who are depending on what we do. Not to—” she stopped. The word she didn’t say sat in the room with us anyway. Her. “Mary wouldn’t want that. You all know her. You know she’d be absolutely furious if she found out I’d surrendered myself on her behalf.”

  A ripple went through the room. Nods. A few people exchanged glances that contained entire conversations. Mary was clearly someone with strong opinions on the subject of Robbie’s self-sacrifice, and those opinions were well known to everyone present. Open secrets.

  “So,” Robbie pressed her palms flat on the table. “We let them take her to the palace. We let them realise what they have. And then we figure out how to get her back.”

  The room was quiet for a moment.

  Then John said, very carefully: “The palace.”

  “The palace,” Robbie confirmed.

  Another silence. Longer. The specific silence of people doing mathematics in their heads and not enjoying the results.

  “Right,” said Scarlock, in a tone that suggested he was imagining various ways to assault a fortified royal palace and finding all of them ending with the Merry Men all in jail or in the aforementioned gibbets.

  “The capitol alone,” Jack said, still looking at the ceiling. “We’d never get past the city gates. Half of us have our descriptions posted. The other half look like the bandits we are.” He lowered his eyes. “And that’s before we even get to the palace itself. Guards on every entrance. The corridors will be—”

  “I know,” Robbie said.

  “The princess’s chambers will be at the centre of the—”

  “I know, Jack.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I know.” She said it gently. She wasn’t dismissing him. “I know it’s not straightforward. I know the odds. But she is there, and we are here, and so we find a way. We always find a way.” She looked down. “We have to find a way.”

  Nobody argued with that. Which said something.

  I thought about fighting with the prince. The weta. The fact that he would owe me.

  “I could,” I said.

  Everyone looked at me. Dekka even stirred on my foot, sending pins and needles up my leg. I tried hard to ignore the sensation and continued. “Get into the city. Get close to the palace.” I paused, working through it. “I’m not in any ledger of outlaws. My face isn’t on any notice board. And I have an in. The prince owes me a favour. I saved him and his army.”

  Nobody spoke for a moment.

  Robbie looked at me speculatively. A faint light of hope in her honey brown eyes. The others were looking at me skeptically.

  “She fought alongside the prince,” Robbie said. She was still looking at me. “That’s not nothing.” She eyed me. “A foreign adventurer. Passing through the capital. Paying her respects to the royal family she’d fought alongside.” She paused. “It’s not impossible.”

  “Why would she risk herself for Mary?” John asked.

  “That isn’t actually a bad question,” Robbie said.

  “It might surprise you, but I believe in your cause, if not your methods.” I said to John.

  “It will be dangerous,” Robbie said.

  Dekka chose this moment to stand up, shake herself thoroughly, and sit back down on my feet. Everyone watched her do it.

  “She’d have a hellhound with her,” Scarlock said, with a look at Dekka that was approximately fifty percent suspicion and fifty percent reluctant respect. They’d developed a complicated relationship over the past few days. “That’s either a problem or a solution.”

  “Oh, she is often both,” I said, looking down at Dekka. She looked back at me with her bright dark eyes and a grin on her little terrier face. “Eccentric adventurers are expected to have unusual animals. It’s practically a requirement.”

  “This is insane,” Jack said. But he said it in the tone of a man who was already thinking about how to make insane work.

  “It is,” Robbie agreed. She looked at me for a long moment, then nodded.

  “Right then,” John said, in the tone of a man who had just watched the odds shift into something that was not quite favourable but was at least worth attempting. “Someone had better find her club.”