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No soldiers, because I didn’t know which of them answered to Fitzwalter.

No warrant, because there was no longer any crime I wished to charge her with.

No order from the King, because the King had given his authority to a sheriff who was about to spend it in a direction His Majesty never intended.

The paper was gone.

Instead, I carried the evidence in my memory, every word of it, along with my sword and a fast horse and perhaps two hours' head start that I was not at all certain was real.

For three years, Sheriff Guy Bisbane had entered Sherwood for exactly one reason, which was to hunt the Ghost.

Tonight, I rode into the trees to save Robin of Locksley.

13

ROBIN

Much came into camp an hour before dawn to tell me a single rider had crossed the Mansfield ford into Sherwood. I’d gone out expecting one of Fitzwalter's scouts.

They’d been thick in the forest for a week, men in no livery asking careful questions in villages that knew better than to answer them. One more scout would have been a simple problem. I would have followed him to his camp, counted his friends, and gone home to breakfast.

Then I got up into the oaks above the deer path and saw who it actually was.

My stomach did something funny and heat bloomed low in my body.

Guy Bisbane rode through my forest in the gray light with his hood down and his sword at his hip. He was going at a pace that wasn’t so much hunting or even patrolling. There was no one behind him either.

And damn him, he looked good doing it.

That was an observation, not an appreciation.

At least, that was what I told myself while watching the easy roll of his shoulders beneath his coat and the way his thighs held the saddle.

I shifted on the branch.

Traitorous body.

Apparently it had forgotten that this was the man who had spent the better part of three years trying to put me in chains. Or perhaps that was precisely the part it liked.

I refused to examine that possibility.

I waited for the detachment. I circled ahead twice and waited again at the stream crossing, and the forest kept telling me the same impossible thing, which was that the Sheriff of Nottingham had ridden into Sherwood in the dark, by himself, with his hands in plain view.

An army would have frightened me less. An army I understood.

I tracked him for half a mile through the thickest part of the wood, close enough to put an arrow through his throat the entire way, and then he reined up in the clearing below the ridge and spoke to the trees without turning around.

"You can come down."

I stayed exactly where I was. "You've been following me for half a mile."

"Only half?" I said.

"I'm disappointed." He turned his head toward my voice, and his mouth did the thing it did. "I expected to be found at the ford."

"I saw you at the ford."

That wiped some of the smugness from his face. "Then why follow me?"