April 17, 1298
“Out with ye, crow bait,” the pale, sweating guard snarled as he dragged him across the moldering straw of the prison cart’s cage. “Yer necklace awaits.”
The torn, bloody condition of Liam’s back and his battered limbs kept him from walking upright, but still the peasants lining each side of the dirt road leading to the town gibbet pelted him with rotten vegetables, clumps of manure, and their spit. Most of them looked as sickly as the king’s guards, which explained their rage. He had given up trying to fathom why they had blamed him, a common poacher, for the plague that had swept through Sherwood. The jailer’s whip and cudgel had beaten the caring out of him.
The gibbet, made of four old, toppled druids’ stones around a lightning-struck dead oak, stood empty for once. A stained length of rope hung from the thickest of the blackened, twisted branches, and had been knotted into a noose at the very end. Liam had seen bodies of the condemned left to hang for months; they didn’t fall until the local crows literally picked them to pieces.
Compared to his fate, that now seemed almost merciful.
Two more guards, armed with short swords, waited on either side of the stones. The horses they held by their bridles were big, bulky shire mares he had seen plowing a field to the north. He had hoped for a pair of swift hunters, but no, they meant to make him suffer until his last breath. Then, when it was finished, they would drop what was left of him in tar before hanging him from the gates of town.
The sun burned his eyes, as he had been imprisoned away from it for three months or better, and no one had given him so much as a candle stub to light his dark cell. They had stopped bringing him food when he had begun coughing, and he had thought the starvation would have finished him off, but no, ’twas just his bitter luck to have survived the sickness so that they might execute him. He didn’t feel hungry anymore, not since his last beating, but he would have traded his soul for a drink of cool water.
“Let me through.” A thin, dirty girl in a stained over shift and threadbare under gown pushed past the jeering villeins and threw herself to the ground in front of the guard. “Please, marster, I beg you, give me leave to say a prayer wi’ Red.”
The guard kicked at her. “Away with ye, wench.”
“Please.” She looked up, tears making her pale eyes huge. “He were kind to my ma before she passed. He brought soup and chopped wood for her.”
Liam swore under his breath. He’d told Clary to keep her distance, but she never listened. At least she hadn’t called him by his real name—that would have made everything he’d suffered for naught.
“Let the slut bid her lover farewell,” someone yelled, setting off dozens of shouted agreements.
“Pray you fast, wench.” The guard picked up Clary by the back of her shift and tossed her toward Liam.
Liam brought up his hands too late to catch her, and his manacles became caught between their faces as she knocked him flat on his back. He almost bit through his tongue, and saw bright red blood streak down her chin.
“Clary, why are you here?” He pressed the shreds of his sleeve against the split in her lower lip. “You promised.”
She bent as if to kiss his cheek, and whispered, “Your master is coming for you.”
He almost laughed. “The Prince of Trees, rescue me? He cannot even save himself.” He glanced down at her overtunic, smelled soot and rot, and his amusement vanished. “My God, girl. What have you done?”
“He needed the silver. The cottage was not mine, nor the mill. I had nothing else to sell.” She tried to smile. “’Twill not be forever. You will come back.”
She had sold herself into service to pay a madman to save a fool. Were he not so dry, Liam would have wept. “Aye, love. I will come for you.” If not in this life, then in the next.
She yanked the cord from around her neck and pressed the small wooden cross hanging from it into his hand. “I will be waiting.” She pulled him to his feet. “God bless and keep you, Red.”
Liam gripped the tiny cross. At least there was one soul in all the world who didn’t despise him—at least, not yet. When she would have drawn back, he held on to her hands and kissed her mouth, and for a long moment the world went away. When he lifted his head, he was almost glad he was about to die, for the look in her wide eyes would have haunted him forever.
The guard took hold of her and shoved her back into the crowd. A moment later she was gone.
“Attend me, all ye here,” the bailiff shouted before he read from the scroll in his hands.
“The man known as Mad Red has been found guilty of plotting and devising an uprising against his majesty the king, in a felonious and treasonable effort to overthrow the monarchy. In full knowledge of his own wickedness, he arranged for men of mercenary persuasion to act as accomplices, the very same men who came into England sick with the pestilence that has now stricken our land. Therefore, being devoted to the cause of justice, wishing to maintain and defend his gracious majesty, to tear out by the roots such heresies in his kingdom, to the best of our ability, and to inflict a fitting punishment on the convict according to both human and divine law, and to canon law customarily observed in such cases, the aforesaid traitor Mad Red will be hanged, drawn, and quartered within the liberty of the town as a clear example to his majesty’s other subjects of how abhorrent is this kind of crime. So ordered by the Sherriff of Nottingham on this day, the seventeenth of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand twelve hundred ninety-eight.” He rolled up the scroll and turned to face Liam. “Mad Red, have you any last words before sentence is passed?”
A fist-size stone struck Liam’s temple, and his vision blurred as blood streaked down his face. “I’m no traitor or killer. Ask your wife.”
The bailiff spit on the ground. “God have mercy on your black soul.”
The hooded executioner, a tall, lean, grinning fellow with scarred hands, slipped the noose over Liam’s bloodied head. “Red, if you are not too mad,” he said in a low, husky voice, “I would beg your forgiveness.”
He scowled up at the shadowed face. “Break my neck on the first draw, and you’ll have it.”
“What, and cheat these fine folk of this spectacle of justice?” The hangman cuffed the back of his head. “Do that and I’ll be the next one to dangle.” He produced a black hood. “Not to worry. It’ll be quick, lad.”
Liam closed his eyes. “Be done with it, then.”
The black wool hood felt suffocating, especially when the hangman jerked the slipknot tight around his throat. He felt the screams he had fought for three months boiling up inside him, but he would not let them loose, not even if he had to bite through his own tongue to silence them.
The rope bit into his neck as he was yanked off his feet and dangled helplessly. He expected the choking, but not the roar of fury inside his head. Bright spots of eerie light danced on the insides of his eyelids as he felt his heartbeat slow. Just as the thick wool of the hood seemed to swallow his mind, something hissed near his ear and the rope snapped. He fell, landing with a brutal thud face down in the cold dirt, his wrist snapping under the weight of his body.
The little wooden cross fell from his limp fingers into the dirt.
Next they will slice me open, Liam thought, gasping in precious air and trying to brace himself as rough hands jerked him up. He hoped that Clary had gone, prayed that she had, for she did not have to know this day that she had sold her freedom for nothing. He heard steel sliding from a sheath and went still, but he didn’t fear the blades as much as the horses. He realized that his last moments on this earth would be spent in unimaginable agony. Any moment now they would hack into his body, tie it to the horses, and then drive them to pull it apart. His bones would crack and his flesh would tear—slowly—before it was done, and at last he could sleep. As the tip of a blade pressed against his belly, Liam realized something else, something that bewildered him.
He could no longer hear any voices at all.
CHAPTER ONE
APRIL 17, 2008
“Know what the three greatest pleasures in life are, buddy?”
Will Scarlet glanced at the inebriated mortal and the sweaty, beefy hand he had dropped on his shoulder. “Sobriety, courtesy, and daily attention to one’s personal hygiene?”
“Wrong.” The drunk grinned. “Blondes, brunettes, and redheads.” He leaned over and dropped his voice to a liquor-scented whisper as he pointed past Will. “See that one down there, the one in the pink? I’ve had my eye on her all night. She’s been acting real particular and standoffish, but you know it’s an act. She didn’t come here to leave alone. She only wants a real man.”
Will didn’t have to look at the slim, stylish woman on the other side of the bar; he’d been watching her since following her and his master into this place. “Perhaps she’s waiting for someone.”
“Damn straight she is. Me.” The mortal straightened and used his belt to hitch up his trousers. “Now watch and learn something, buddy.” He staggered off toward the redhead.
Will followed his progress by watching the mirror behind the bar. During his mortal life, he, too, had pursued his pleasures—wine, women, and song—with the same dogged, oblivious determination. Had he not, he would not be sitting in this noisy, crowded nightclub, surrounded by bountiful measures of all three. He would certainly not be wishing for silence, solitude, and a cup of tea. He would be long gone and forgotten, a layer of dust in an ancient unmarked grave.
The glass of red wine he was neglecting, while of pitifully infantile vintage, was far superior to the thick, sour stuff he had drunk too much of as a youth. For all its clarity and sophistication, however, it had no spine to it. Perfumed water had more character.
Then there were the ladies, in which he generally had a considerable interest. No woman from his village would have dared display as much beauty or skin as the innumerable females milling about this place. Certainly women of this era were prettier and smelled infinitely cleaner, but like the wine, they, too, had little substance.