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And then he said the thing that changed the shape of my entire afternoon.

"There's something else, and I don't understand it. Fitzwalter's men aren't only searching villages. They've been all over the old Locksley ground. They dug out the cellar under the dairy, Robin. They pulled up the chapel floor."

I went cold in a way that had nothing to do with October.

"That estate has been his for six years," I said. "Why would a man tear up a floor he owns?"

"That's what I'm asking you."

"Because he's looking for something." The words came out slowly, because I was building the thought while I said it. "Six years he's held those four thousand acres and never touched the house, and now he's pulling up the chapel. He isn't hunting treasure, John. He's hunting a document. Something my father had, that he has only just realized still exists."

Which meant the Crown had not killed my father for treason, and it had not killed him for his land either, not entirely. It had killed him for something he knew.

That was when Little John's eyes went past my shoulder, and his hand went to his axe, and everything about him changed.

"That's Guy Bisbane."

"I know who he is."

"Robin, that's the sheriff."

"I'm aware."

"He's spent three years hunting you." He had gone forward a full step, and I put my hand flat on his chest. "That's Bisbane, standing in Sherwood, forty yards off, and you tell me you're aware?"

I glanced toward the trees. Guy stood exactly where I had left him, perfectly still, both hands visible and empty at his sides, letting a man with an axe look at him without giving him one single reason.

"Eight dead men in that clearing," I said. "Fitzwalter's, with no livery and good steel, and they put an arrow through the air where my chest had been. Guy Bisbane rode in here alone in the dark to warn me they were coming, and when one of them came at my blind side he put himself in front of it. The blood in that clearing was his. I have twelve stitches in his ribs."

Little John did not move his hand off the axe.

"He saved your life."

"Yes."

"And now?"

I swallowed.

"Now things are complicated."

"Complicated." He said it the way you would say the name of a disease. "Robin, I have known you since you were nine and I will say this once. A man like that cannot choose you, not forever. He can choose you this week, up here, where it costs him nothing but a wound. But the day comes when he has to hand you over or lose his commission and his house and twenty years of being the Crown's good dog, and he will hand you over, and he will be sorry about it, and you will still be on the gallows."

"I know what it looks like."

"Then tell me I'm wrong."

"You're not wrong about men like that," I said. "You're wrong about him. And I am not asking you to believe me, John. I am telling you what I am doing, and you have known me long enough to know the difference."

He let out a breath through his nose. Then he took his hand off the axe, which from Little John is practically a vow.

"The camp holds another week on what we have," he said. "After that we need medicine badly, and you need it worse than any of them, and don't you dare tell me you don't. I can smell it on you from here."

Guy didn' ask what had passed at the crossing. He waited until we were through the door, and then he said, "Tell me."

I told him. The villages, Aldous, Wyn in the thatch, and then the chapel floor.

He went very still by the end of it, and I watched him assemble something behind his eyes.