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Her breath caught.

“Robin, listen to me, because I will only be insufferable about this once. Nothing happened in this bed that takes anything from you. You are not less free than you were this morning. You will still lead those people, and rob my wagons, and leave notes pinned to my carts, and I will still spend my life being outmaneuvered by you in front of my own soldiers.” I turned my head so she had to look at me. “Loving someone is not the same as being owned by them. Whoever taught you otherwise was teaching you about this kingdom, not about love.”

She did not answer that.

She did, however, press her face hard into my shoulder and stayed there for rather a long time. I had the sense to say nothing at all and let her pretend it was because she was tired.

She was asleep within the hour, but sleep wouldn’t find me.

The rain kept up on the thatch and the fire burned down to a red seam in the grate. I lay there with her hand over my heart and looked at the brass compass where she had set it on the chest beside the bed. The firelight caught the worn letters around the rim.

Roots hold when kingdoms fall.

I went through the evidence again in my mind. I had done it every night since the archive, and it never comes out differently. The charge said Lincoln on the eleventh of October. The Mansfield watch commander’s dispatch put William of Locksley fifty miles from Lincoln on the same night, in floodwater, pulling two hamlets out of the Maun with his own horses and his own tenants, with six soldiers named as having worked under him until dawn. A clerk’s notation on the reverse recorded the document withdrawn from the trial materials, and the authority for that withdrawal was Edmund Fitzwalter, who filed to administer the Locksley estate three days before anyone thought to arrest its lord.

Powerful men in the Crown’s own service hanged an innocent man for four thousand acres. The paper that would’ve saved him had sat in a royal archive for years and then disappeared out of my hands in a quarter of an hour.

I couldn’t be neutral about that. I had been pretending to be for a fortnight.

I can no longer pretend, I thought dropping a kiss on Robin’s loss.

The woman sleeping beside me had spent years surviving a kingdom that stolen everything she had. I had spent three of those years helping it hunt her through her own forest. I couldn’t undo her father’s death. I couldn’t give her back the house or the name or the girl who’d climbed oak trees in a good gown before any of it happened.

But I could make the men responsible answer for it. I could do it with every scrap of authority the King was careless enough to hand me.

Robin shifted in her sleep, and her hand slid down and settled over my heart again.

I covered it with mine.

For the first time in twenty years, I knew exactly where my loyalty belonged, and it was not with the Crown.

18

ROBIN

Iwoke warm, but felt no cause to reach for my dagger.

That was the part I wanted noted, because I had slept with a blade under my shoulder for a very long time. I had even come up out of sleep with it in my hand more times than I can count.

Merry stopped waking me for watch years ago and started throwing pebbles at me from a safe distance instead.

That morning I came up slowly, the way ordinary people do. Guy Bisbain’s warm arm, heavy across my waist and the quilt pulled over both of us, and my hand never moved.

His scent was in everything by then, in the straw and the wool and my own skin. My body was not merely calm. My body was pleased with itself, deeply and shamelessly, in a way I had no previous experience of.

Then I remembered the night before in some detail, and I was grateful he could not see my face.

Slowly, I turned over to look at him. The wound was knitting itself together properly. It was pink and tight at the edges rather than hot, which was more than that fool deserved after the hill he had walked down to the spring. Asleep he looked fifteen years younger than the man who had been hunting me since spring.

"You're staring, Little Ghost."

"I was checking whether you were still breathing."

"How thoughtful."

"Don't flatter yourself. A dead sheriff in my bed would be terribly inconvenient."

He smiled without opening his eyes. "And a living one?"