Page 1 of Gilded Locks

Prologue

Something was wrong with Grace Robbins.

He’d watched her that first week after her eighteenth birthday, his excitement nearly bursting through the reserve that allowed him to survive.

Finally,he’d thought,she’ll take up the mantle and save us all.

When Grace visited the Lehto family in the hazy cover of dusk, he’d hidden in the shadows of the shops on the ridge, eyes secured to the weathered door. He’d relished the heady tickle of anticipation—any moment now, she would dash across the north pasture into Sherwood Forest.

Half an hour later, she stepped out of the Lehtos’ front door and strolled toward her home, away from the forest.

A few days later, when Grace entered the general store while he was shopping, he’d shrunk into the corner, trying to hide behind empty shelves. Giddy anticipation had faded, but hope persisted in the form of hesitant eyeing of the full basket shecarried. He knew her to have sleight-of-hand stealth that could be used to slide gold coins from beneath her wares to the tradeswoman running the store.

Instead, Grace had exchanged a bundle of candles for a leather strop for sharpening her farming tools.

And when night fell on the last day of that week and Grace yet again failed to slip out of her home into the relative safety of darkness deepened by a cloud-shielded moon, his last sliver of hope shattered.

A full month had passed, and fearless, defiant Grace Robbins still had not become the hooded Rogue.

What could possibly keep her from claiming the birthright she revered? Nothing he could think of.

Something was definitely wrong.

A whimsical laugh escaped the cacophony of the town-hall-turned-ballroom, pulling him from his thoughts. His eyes flitted to Grace instantly, and he breathed through the resulting tightness in his chest. Her eyes crinkled in humor, the loose tendrils of fiery orange hair shaking with her mirth. The blue of her cotton dress amplified the brightness of her sapphire eyes and accentuated her gentle curves. Heavens, she was beautiful.

“I’d love to see you demonstrate,” Grace was saying to Elizabeth Stanton.

Without hesitation, Elizabeth sprang into the posture typical of a waltz. Bowing to a nonexistent partner, she began dancing, bobbing, and stepping with elegance until her back was to Grace. Then she grinned, lifted her foot, and stepped backward, into her friend.

Laughter erupted as Elizabeth enacted a dramatic stumble and Grace hopped out of the way while trying to steady the both of them.

“You’re ridiculous, Lizzy,” Grace said between laughs. “That can’t possibly pass as unintended.”

Lizzy had regained her footing and smiled broadly at Grace as she fluffed her pink skirt. “Well, they don’t know you’re flirting if they think it’s unintended.”

Grace shook her head. “Flirting? Try attacking. Sun above, Lizzy, that heel of yours is sharp.”

He frowned as the familiar sensation of soured happiness expanded inside him. Plotting how to flirt. Laughing and chatting. These were not the actions of a rebel one month into an uprising.

Countless times in the three years since he’d learned of Jonathan and Grace’s planned revival of the Rogue, he’d yearned for the moment when Grace would don the mystic green cloak, relieve the mayor of gold coins demanded without justified cause, and remind the people that they weren’t weak.

Knowing the moment was close had kept him moving forward while the town and hope decayed around him.

The departure of Jonathan Ferrer and his family from Fidara after being taxed to near starvation two years ago had left him a morose shell of a man. He’d believed the mayor had won.

Then Grace had planted herself on the Ferrers’ front porch, back to the door, so Mayor Nautin and the sheriff couldn’t retrieve whatever had been left behind. He remembered how her eyes had blazed azure above her upturned nose, how new hope had ignited within him as she’d declared that the mayor “had no claim on what the people have worked to build.”

It didn’t matter that, in the end, her parents and the threat of jailing had sent her marching away, because he’d known then that Grace Robbins was strong enough to rebel without Jonathan.

So why hadn’t she become the Rogue she’d intended to be?

The long case clock against the wall let out a dull, hollow gong. Instantly, the joy fell from Grace’s face. In its place he saw determination. Grace moved toward the usual corner where herparents already sat amidst a small cluster of empty hardwood chairs.

A sigh of relief escaped his mouth unbidden. Grace hadn’t given up if she still abstained from half of the event.

These soirées were bribery, plain and simple.—The voting gentry may be taxed as much as the craftsmen and farmers, but they benefited from the spoils. Thus, to boycott even half of the monthly party was to snub the mayor’s “gift.” If not for the need to maintain a bond strong enough to encourage the gentry to rise up when the time was right, he expected Grace wouldn’t have come at all.

But the real statement would come in an hour, when he expected Grace’s family to refuse, as they’d done for years, to join the other gentry in toasting the mayor and his soirées as a gracious and necessary support to their lives.

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