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I could’ve ended it there. One sentence would have done it, that the Ghost of Sherwood had lifted my seal out of this room four nights ago, and every road in the shire would have closed around her by morning.

The words were accurate and they were my duty. I have never in my life been so aware of a sentence I was choosing not to say.

"The villages needed supplies," I said.

His eyes narrowed. "That wasn't my question."

"It was my answer."

The silence went on for a little while. He was good at silences, but so was I.

"Your sympathies have become noticeable," he said at last, "which is a gentler word than the one being used in the council chamber. You refused the King fire. You opened the Crown's stores on your own authority. Now the Crown property walks into Sherwood's doorstep and you cannot say who sent it." He set the cup down. "You were sent to capture an outlaw, Bisbane."

I stared at him. “I’m aware."

"Then perhaps you should stop behaving like her accomplice."

I let my face do nothing at all, which was a skill I’d spent twenty years acquiring. It had never once served me better.

"If feeding hungry subjects makes a man an outlaw," I said, "then England has a larger problem than the Ghost of Sherwood."

Something happened behind his eyes. It was brief, and it was not courtly. I watched a man who’d spent thirty years at court decide whether to show me what he actually was.

He chose not to, and the decision cost him something. I would count that decision as information.

He rose then and smoothed his sleeve, before crossing to the door. Then he stopped with his hand on the latch.

"Remember which side you're on, Bisbane."

I waited until his footsteps had faded entirely from the corridor, until the castle had closed back over the sound of him.

"I'm trying," I said to the empty room.

The archive beneath the east tower was cold in any season. It smelled of mold and iron and the particular dust that only accumulates on things nobody wanted found.

I went down after midnight with a lantern, because I’d exhausted the trial record and begun working outward into material that had never been part of the case at all. The Crown kept its military correspondence separately from its judicial proceedings, filed by garrison rather than by subject. I’d spent four nights crawling through the dispatches of the year William of Locksley died.

The accusation against him rested on a single meeting. Every version of the charge said the same thing. That on the night of the eleventh of October he met with agents of the rebel forces at a manor near Lincoln, and that this meeting was the treason for which he lost his head.

I found the garrison dispatch from the Mansfield watch commander at the bottom of a bundle tied the following spring.

It was an ordinary thing, four paragraphs of soldier's prose reporting the flooding of the Maun after three days of rain. It described the evacuation of two hamlets and the requisition of carts, it named the man who directed that evacuation through the night with his own tenants and his own horses, and it listed the six soldiers who worked under him until dawn.

Lord William of Locksley, nearly fifty miles from Lincoln, standing in floodwater and pulling families out of their homes, on the night of the eleventh of October.

I read it twice.

Then I set the lantern down and read it a third time, slowly. Because a man like me, needed to be certain once the floor dropped from under him.

My lieutenant came down the stairs with a candle sometime after, having clearly been told by someone that the sheriff had gone into the archives again and not come out.

"Find something?"

I handed him the dispatch. "Read the date."

He read it. "The eleventh of October."

"Now tell me the date of Locksley's supposed meeting at Lincoln."