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He walked slowly toward us, leaning slightly on a stick.

I recognized him almost immediately.

"Wat?"

He stopped several feet away. Old Wat had worked as my father's hedger for thirty years. He was eighty-one now and had remained on the estate throughout Fitzwalter's occupation.

Apparently, Fitzwalter's stewards had never bothered assigning him work.

Wat removed his cap. "You've your father's walk."

I looked down at the cobblestones. He stepped closer.

"He always meant this place to come to you."

I swallowed. "He did?"

Wat nodded. "Told me himself, right here in this yard." He smiled faintly. "Said he had a daughter who could read the land better than his steward, and when he was gone, she'd have the estate and wouldn't sell a single acre."

I laughed softly. "I was fifteen."

"You were." He put his cap back on. "He said it anyway."

Then he turned toward the fields.

"Now, the bottom acre needs a drainage cut from the beech corner down to the ditch. Wanted it four years ago. If we don't get it done this winter, we'll lose the whole lower field to rushes."

I stared at him and then I laughed. I'd spent so long imagining my return to Locksley. I hadn't expected it to begin with an eighty-one-year-old man explaining drainage. Somehow, that made it feel more like home.

The family burial ground had been restored. The Crown had arranged for the soldiers' excavations to be filled and the disturbed earth leveled.

The overturned headstones stood upright again. My great-grandfather's marker, the one with the hunting horn carved into the corner, had been returned to its place. It had stood there for a hundred and forty years.

The brambles had been cleared from the oldest row, revealing what remained of the lettering on Idris al-Locksley's stone.

There wasn't much left to read.

The block in the chapel foundation had also been mortared back into place.

I'd requested that personally.

Perhaps someone would discover the hidden cavity again in another two hundred years and wonder what had once been kept inside.

A new memorial stone stood in the nearer row.

It bore my father's name.

William of Locksley.

Faithful servant of the Crown.

His honor restored.

But my father wasn't buried beneath it.

The commissioners had offered to move his remains into the family burial ground. It would've been the proper thing to do, according to everyone who advised me.

I spent three days considering it.