Page 87

“Stop!” the Rogue from the town hall cried.

Were they not working together?

The Rogue nearest her, the patrolmen, and Grace altered their trajectories to follow the figure. As she passed a still-gawking Frank, Grace shouted, “Don’t touch anything gold!” Grace hoped he’d heard her and that her parents would exit the town hall soon enough to help him.

As Grace raced forward, she saw the gold-stained Rogue enter the woods with the town-hall Rogue close behind, and pumped her legs as fast as she could.

As she entered the shadows of the trees, and the light of the moon vanished. Darkness forced Grace to slow her pursuit to a jog as she waited for her eyes to adjust. Every second of slow progress pounded like a warning in her ears. The men were getting farther from her with every moment. Worse still, soon, more patrolmen would storm into the forest.

Grace stilled and listened. At least one of the Rogues clomped upon fallen leaves. East. She needed to head east.

As her eyes adjusted, she increased her speed. She followed the sounds as best she could, but as she’d predicted, shouts and more movement in the trees started up behind her, making it difficult to keep track of quieter sounds. Her best guess was to keep going.

Her determination pushed her forward, but the longer she went without sighting either of the men, and without a clear sound, the more Grace worried she was just wandering aimlessly in the forest.

She couldn’t make herself stop. What else could she do? Leave the forest and face her parents with the knowledge that she’d let Zerudorn gold and the man in possession of it escape her? That she’d failed as a Protector again?

That wasn’t an option she would consider.

So she plodded eastward. Only when she came upon a wooden fence stretching through a vast portion of the woods, so out of place in this realm of true nature, did she recognize her location.

Her feet finally slowed to a stop.

The mayor’s copse.

The trees on the other side of this fence, which Grace knew to stretch from the edge of the river in the northeast, through the forest, and up to the back wall of the town hall, had been separated in legality so long that she’d stopped thinking of them as part of Sherwood Forest.

Never before had she considered that the Rogue would choose to enter a place so fully Mayor Nautin’s.

Could he be there now?

Two Rogues, one of them the man she’d talked with in the abandoned shed just the night before. That man was enemy to the mayor. Was the other? If it had ever been him in Sherwood Forest, then maybe. But if not…

Grace climbed the fence and landed with a soft thud on the forest floor on the other side and began walking toward the center of the copse. Soon, she heard some sort of scuffle, and she took off toward the sound.

As Grace bounded into an open area created by trees growing farther apart, her eyes locked on to the pair of Rogues, circling each other, arms raised, ready to pounce. Clouds shifted, andmoonlight streamed into the copse. From the corner of her eye, Grace noticed a glint of metal.

She turned to look at the trees, and her heart stopped. Blood drained from her face, her vision blurring. The men were no longer visible to her.

“No!” she whispered. Breath came only with effort.

Gold. So much gold.

Splattered on the ground at the base of an oak, snaking up the trunk and along branches. Vines of the mystic metal crossed from one treetop to the next. On the other side of the oak, across the ground between two other trees, globules the size of a fist, burgeoning from a nearly translucent sheet of gold stretched like a bedsheet across the floor.

Much of the Zerudorn gold was still a protrusion on the surface of whatever it had warped, but Grace saw that the metal had begun to embed itself in the oak, become part of the bark and the wood within.

With a loud cry from one of them, the Rogues reentered Grace’s awareness. “You!”

Grace turned just in time to step out of the way of a charging Rogue. The man skidded to a stop and charged again. Grace tried to dodge again, but felt hesitant to move about without knowing where she’d land. Who knew if the Zerudorn gold was contained to what she’d already seen? The man’s left shoulder collided with her, sending her stumbling back. She grabbed at him, trying to keep from moving any great distance from where she stood.

Her hand found purchase on his right wrist.

A deep cry of pain burst from behind the face cloth. The man’s left hand flew at her, wrapping around her neck.

Pain throbbed where his fingers pressed, and Grace started to splutter as air struggled to pass through her windpipe.

Well, this wasn’t the Rogue she knew.