Page 53 of Sherwood
She saluted them and then jerked her head at me. “You’re with me, spy boy. Let’s go.”
* * *
It was embarrassinghow easily we left Sherwood, and then the peninsula itself. Lox and I argued—constantly—about the best way to keep ourselves hidden, about who would drive and who would navigate…and then periodically fucking in the back seat when the arguing turned us on, which was always. (Just like the old days.)
But in the end, it wasn’t even a contest. Lox and I had once moved through war zones, burgeoning revolutions, failed states—escaping Sherwood was almost a game, and a child’s one at that.
After a meandering route that took us east before we looped back west, we came to a small dock, left the car in the lot, and boarded a fishing boat crewed by men who looked like they’d spent too many years getting splashed by cold ocean water. From there, it was a wave-tossed eighteen hours until we came ashore in a narrow inlet guarded by spruces, firs, and hemlock. The water was clear as the air, and the air was the cleanest thing I’d ever breathed in my life. The boat crew helped us onto the rocky shore with our bags, and then they pushed off the rocks and sailed back out to the open sea.
We were alone.
“Alaska?” I asked as Lox started walking. Just behind the treeline, there was a narrow dirt road, and on that road was parked a sturdy-looking truck.
“Yes,” she said, and nothing else. And then we threw our things in the truck, found the keys tucked into the driver’s side visor, and continued our journey.
The way to Lox’s new hideout—and therefore the beginning of my new life—was long and winding. Wonderful. Recursive where for so long I’d been linear, oblique where I’d been direct. After I’d taken care of my life in D.C. via a burner phone supplied by Lox, there was nothing left for me to do but watch the trees move past the window and think about what would come next, about seeing Marian again. About what it might mean for the three of us to be together, and even the possibility of it was breathtaking. That somehow, Marian, Lox, and I made a closed circuit, a wreath of need and power, that we couldn’t forge any other way. Not with any two of us together, not with any other versions of ourselves, but with the three of us as we were now.
I wanted what I’d felt that night at The Knot: the three of us twisted into one tangle, dominant, dominant, sub. And this time I wanted it forever.
After several hours of driving, we stopped at a small roadside hotel, and Lox checked us in as a Mr. and Mrs. Errol Flynn, which amused me greatly, and clearly gave the judgmental innkeeper the impression that we were having an affair. An impression I was sure we didn’t help that night when I made Lox scream herself hoarse after I fucked her against the door to our room.
And then it was the next morning, and Lox told me we were getting close to the new compound. I used the time to scroll through some of the folders of Ys data she had—or at least the most damning—and tried to imagine what Lackland would do next. Lox also filled me in on how they’d been building this place over the last year, on how they’d chosen it because they could make the entire compound off-grid, and the cooler weather meant it would take far less energy to cool down the rigs—and mostly because it was remote as hell.
“You’ve needed help,” I observed. Money and hacking only got a person so far—boats slipping through borders, construction on American soil (even if it was remote American soil), sourcing all the equipment for a backup computer farm—all of that required a person with connections.
“There’s a woman called Nimue,” Lox finally said. “She’s been helping us.”
“Merlin Rhys’s wife?”
Lox looked surprised. “You know her?”
“Merlin Rhys used to be the single most important man in the world when it came to geopolitical events, Lox,” I said. “I have an idea of what he’s up to now.”
Lox wasn’t impressed with my sarcasm. “Okay, spy boy. So Nimue approached me soon after I left, and said she’d been friends with my parents before they’d died. She and Merlin offered to help with anything I needed, and while I had my father’s castle in Sherwood, I knew we should have a backup location, both for the data and for us. And she’s been like magic, honestly. Anything we’ve wanted, any problems we couldn’t solve…” Lox lifted a shoulder. “She’s some kind of wizard, I swear.”
“That’s what they used to say about Merlin,” I said, settling back into the seat and watching the landscape pass by. Trees and mountains and meadows of sweet pink fireweed. In all my travels, in my entire career, I’d never been here, and it was strange, but it almost felt like this had been my destination all along. Like every deployment, every mission, and every sleepless night had been leading me right to this place, right to this woman and her ferocious, uncompromising heart.
Right to Marian and the rest of our lives.
“What will I do?” I murmured, more to myself than to Lox, and she looked over at me.
“What do you want to do?”
I thought about this. I thought about the day I walked into the recruiter’s office and stood in an hours-long line to fill out my DD Form 4, my father’s watch on my wrist and my hands shaking as I picked the pen off the cheap laminate table. They hadn’t been shaking with nervousness, but withrelief, because there it had been, finally, the thing I’d craved since my father had died and my mother had brought me to a country that felt like a waiting place, an airlock to the rest of my life. My hands had shaken as I’d picked up the pen to write in my name because I was finally choosing, finally sayingthis is my home,and this is so much my home that I’ll give my life to it and for it.
I felt that same shakiness now as Lox slowed the truck and we turned onto a narrow road which unspooled through the trees like so much dirt ribbon. My hands trembled, my breath shivered in and out.
Not fear, but relief, relief, relief. I hadn’t lefthomebehind, because instead of a country, home was Lox and Marian. Home was us and whatever mischief we got up to together.
“I don’t know,” I finally answered.
“There will be plenty for an ex-spy to do,” Lox said. “If you want.”
“You of all people should know thatspyis hardly the right word for what I was.”
She waved a hand off the truck’s steering wheel. She didn’t care. “I just want you to know that I’m not planning on keeping you locked up in a tower like Rapunzel. If we want to learn more about Ys—if we want to stop them one day—we’ll need someone who knows how to do what you do.”
“And Marian?” I asked. “Is she planning on playing Rapunzel?” It was hard to imagine Marian without Fitzwalter Green, without herForbesspreads and tailored pantsuits and quests for familial atonement.
