Page 24 of The Wicked Prince

She needed a journal. Didn’t all truly terrible leaders keep some kind of record close by of all their plans for how to gain power and inflict pain on people?

There was a trunk at the foot of his absolutely ostentatious canopy bed. Robin paused.

If this was a trap, that trunk had to be it. But if he was going to keep a record of his wicked schemes, it had to be the locked trunk. Robin dismantled her tripwire so she could take the curtain rod again.

She took the metal rod and with great concern, wedged it in the ‘u’ of the padlock and started working the rod back and forth to bend the metal bar of the lock. This method had served her well before when she and Alan had to rescue Will and Little Jon after Guy and the Sheriff had arrested them a couple years back. She didn’t have any lockpicks, and even if she did, she was terrible with them.

Lockpicking had been Will’s job.

Robin doubled over, huffing from the effort it was taking to manipulate the metal through brute force. And it hit her.

It had been a month and a half since she’d last seen them.

Robin had known she was completely, utterly alone. However, the realization hadn’t hit her until that moment as she was sweating, huffing, and cursing everything that she didn’t have Will picking the lock while Little Jon gave Alan a boost onto a roof to act as the lookout while Robin held her bow and an arrow at the ready for the first sign of trouble, hood pulled over her face.

They didn’t really speak during missions because they didn’t need to. Also, it could give them away. They worked in signals and codes, but it was still communication. And when they’d make it back to their camp, they’d laughed and cheered as Robin came up with their next plan. When they brought the people’s money and food back to them, Robin would chatter away with the friends and allies they’d made. She didn’t worry about disguising her voice or hiding her face among friends. She trusted them. They wouldn’t rat her out, and they hadn’t. It’d just been bad luck that Prince John had seen her face.

Now the only person she spoke towasPrince John.

And only because he was trying to—she didn’t know what he was trying to do by asking about her day, but he was the only person she spoke to. She didn’t count the three brutes who followed her around. If she did exchange words with them, it was only about the most basic of things. Even then, she went through most days not saying a word to them, letting them figure out where she was going in silence. They didn’t follow her into the private training ground, so she couldn’t even do something like discuss technique with them.

Maybe that was Prince John’s plan. Isolate her until she lost her mind. Then he could declare her insane and a danger to him and society so he could kill her without increasing the civil unrest.

Well, it wasn’t going to work. Robin was completely sane as she continued to abuse her own muscles wrenching the curtain rod back and forth in the padlock. As Prince Regent, he really should have a higher quality lock.

Finally, she worked it enough to break the soft, dented metal, and she wasted no time ripping the padlock off and throwing open the chest. Whatever John had in there had better be worth—

Robin stared down at the open trunk.

It was… It was…

It was full of what appeared to be sketchbooks, given the loose parchments sticking out of the sides with charcoal marks. But that wasn’t what had Robin completely frozen as she gaped at the sight before her. The loose sheets of parchment scattered throughout the rest of the trunk in haphazard piles were the problem.

Because on those sheets, she could figure out what the drawing was supposed to be.

It was her. Her face.

Robin reached for the first stack and pulled it out of the trunk. She started flipping through them and the subject didn’t change. The whole stack was sketches of her face. Robin stared at them for a moment. The angle, the blank space left at the top and the bottom were familiar…

These were for wanted posters.

Why did Prince John have a stack of unfinished wanted posters of her?

Robin tossed the stack to the ground and reached for the next one. If the others had left no question as to the fact that they were her face, these… were questionable. They were similar in that the size and placement left were also obviously the template for a wanted poster, but these had writing on them.

The first one had an arrow drawn, pointing to the eyes and the note read:Eyes too small.

And there was another arrow pointing to the curve of the jaw and said:Too soft; she’s a criminal, not a flower.

Critiques for the artist of the wanted poster.

Robin kept flipping through the stack and attempt after attempt to capture her face, quite a few of them undeniably her, but the writer was never satisfied. Something was wrong with every single one. Most often, it was her eyes. The strangest complaint, often repeated, was the claim her eyes weren’t tired enough.

Rude.

But there was something about this stack of rejections. Robin glanced down at the stack of perfect recreations and she held the final version of the wanted poster next to the reject. There was something different about the artist’s style. Robin wasn’t certain whoever had drawn the rejects had drawn the final version.

Given the amount of rejects, she could imagine whoever it was simply deciding they’d do it themselves since the artist couldn’t get Robin’s eyes right.

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