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