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"Then go back."

"No."

"Guy, the whole of your authority is sitting in Nottingham waiting for a sheriff who has not come home, and every hour you stay up here, Fitzwalter writes another day of that story for you."

"Then they'll be pleased to see me when I return."

"You are being impossible."

"I've been told."

"This is not a joke." My voice came up louder than I intended and I did not care. "They will take the commission and the house and twenty years of a stablehand's boy outworking every titled fool in this county. They’ll hand it to one of Fitzwalter's cousins by Martinmas, and then there will be nobody left in this shire who can even look at my father's trial record without hanging for it."

"Yes."

"Then go."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because you are two days from a heat with no suppressants, there are men in this forest under orders to kill you. I’m not leaving you on this ridge alone." He said it without raising his voice at all, which is infinitely worse. "I make my own decisions, Robin."

"And when it costs you everything?"

He took a moment before replying, “Then it costs me everything."

I turned away and got four steps before I stopped, because the ash round was still sitting there with the axe in it and I had nowhere to go.

"Robin, look at me."

I didn’t. He waited, because he had the patience of weather, and when I finally turned around my eyes were hot and I hated it.

"Everyone who has ever loved me has paid for it," I said. "My father. My grandmother. Every family in this forest that ever put bread in my hand and got a soldier at the door for it. Now Aldous the cooper, who has a daughter of nine. And you. I am a bill that comes due, Guy. That is all I have been since I was sixteen."

He crossed the ground between us, took my face in both hands, and made me hold his eyes.

"You are not something I regret," he said.

Nobody had said anything like that to me in six years. I had not the first idea what to do with it, so I pressed my forehead into his chest and let him put his arms around me, and we stood in the cold beside a woodpile and said nothing else about it.

I wouldn’t stay up there without word from my own people, so by early afternoon we had compromised, which is to say we argued for a quarter of an hour and then arrived at something we both disliked. I went down to the old crossing where two deer paths meet at a fallen beech and left our mark on the trunk, and Guy stayed back in the pines forty yards off with his hand nowhere near his sword, because I had asked him twice.

Little John came within the hour. He came out of the understory like a barn walking, saw me whole and standing, and stopped dead.

"You're alive."

"I'm alive."

"Six days." He got hold of my shoulders and shook me once, hard. "We found your blood all over that clearing and eight dead men who weren't ours, and Tuck has been praying so much that Alana has threatened to drown him."

"It wasn't my blood."

"I had worked that out, since you're standing here." He let go. "Whose?"

"We'll come to it."

He gave me the rest with his arms folded, and it was worse than Merry's note had room for. Grain taken back out of four villages. The healer's cottage at Thornby emptied, and a mother there named Wyn questioned for hiding three vials in her thatch. Aldous in the cells at Nottingham. Two of our own scouts chased off the Mansfield road.