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"Then it was never only the land," he said.

"That's what I thought."

"No, listen. It all makes sense." He placed his hand flat on the table. "The estate records were sealed six years ago, and no one's been allowed to look at them since. I assumed Fitzwalter was covering up the theft of your family's land. But why seal the records of an estate he already owns? And why tear up the chapel floor six years later?" He looked at me. "Your father wasn't killed simply because Fitzwalter wanted Locksley. He wanted the land, and he took it. But he acted within eleven days because your father had discovered something. Whatever your father wrote down, Fitzwalter has spent the last six years searching for it, and he still hasn't found it."

The room went very quiet.

"The cabin," I said.

"What?"

"My father kept things here." My own voice sounded strange to me. "He called it his quiet desk. He used to say nothing in Nottingham was ever private and nothing in Sherwood was ever read." I was already moving. "I have come up here four times in the last few years and I’ve never once searched it. Because being in this room is as much as I can usually manage."

We took the place apart together. The chest down to the boards, the bed frame, the rafters, the hearthstones one at a time with his dagger in the mortar. Nothing, for the better part of an hour, and the light going orange through the shutter slats.

Guy found it, though.

He was working the paneling to the left of the fireplace with the flat of his hand, listening carefully, and one board gave back a sound the others hadn’t.

Behind it was a cavity cut into the wall between the stone and the timber, and inside the cavity, wrapped in waxed cloth gone stiff with age, was a flat leather document pouch.

I could not make my hands take it.

Guy lifted it out, set it on the table. He stepped back, and put his hands behind him, and he waited, and but never uttered a sound.

I unwound the cloth myself. The pouch held a broken wax seal, red, with half the impression crumbled away. It held a single sheet of paper folded in three. And the paper was covered in my father's handwriting.

I had forgotten what it looked like. I had spent years losing the sound of his voice and never once thought about his hand. Yet, there it was, the hard downstroke on the L and the way he never closed his A's, and the whole room went narrow and far away.

It was half a letter. The lower third had been torn off, and what remained was the careful methodical prose of a man building a case, and it did not read like treason. It read like an accounting.

It named a sum of eleven thousand marks levied from four northern shires for the border garrisons in the second year of the war.

It named the three Crown officers through whose hands the money had passed, and it noted that the garrisons had received under four thousand of it. Which my father had established by riding to Mansfield and asking the watch commander how many men he’d been paid to feed.

And in the last line before the tear, he’d written that the warrants authorizing that levy were countersigned by Lord Edmund Fitzwalter. That he intended to lay the whole of it before the King's council at the Michaelmas sitting.

My father was arrested in October.

"He was going to the council." My hands were shaking and I let them. "Fitzwalter and three Crown officers stole seven thousand marks from the border garrisons in the middle of a war. My father was going to stand up at Michaelmas and say so, and they killed him days after they arrested him."

"And they never found this." He came and stood beside me, close enough that his shoulder touched mine, and he did not touch the paper. "Which is why he was still digging. Eleven thousand marks of war levy is a hanging matter for every man named on that page, Robin. And two of the three are still sitting on the King's council."

"It's torn."

"Yes."

"It's half a letter with no proof attached, written by a convicted traitor. I’m still an outlaw under a death warrant." I made myself breathe. "Who in England would read this?"

"The sealed estate records would corroborate every figure on it," he said. "And I am the Sheriff of Nottingham, and sealed records in this shire open on my authority."

That was how we came to the argument we’d been avoiding all day. Except by then it was not an argument.

We sat on the floor by the fire and worked it through twice. He would ride back to Nottingham and arrive injured, which he was…with a story that held because it was true: he’d gone out alone on a tracker's lead, been ambushed by men in no livery, and spent six days getting home with a knife in his side.

A sheriff who had survived an attempt on his life was a considerably harder man to call a traitor. He would use that and the authority he still held to open the Locksley records before Fitzwalter understood what he was looking for.

I hated all of it.