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"He has men in your own castle," I said. "Somebody took that dispatch out of your archive in a quarter of an hour."

"Yes."

"Then he'll know you have something before you're through the gate."

"Probably."

"And if he moves first, you'll be in a cell, and the one piece of paper my father died for will be in his hand, and that is the end of all of it."

"Also probably." He said it evenly, and then he turned my hand over in his. "Robin, there is no version of this where we both stay on this ridge and nothing comes for us. There are soldiers in the villages, a cooper in my cells, and a warrant out for your execution. The only question left is which of us moves first, and the only one of us with keys is me."

I looked at the fire for a long while.

"I don't want you to go," I finally admitted.

He gave a soft smirk. ‘I don't want to go."

"Then don't say anything comforting about it."

"I had no intention of it."

I kissed him and it wasn’t like the night before. It was slow, and it had something underneath it I did not want to look at directly, which was the clean arithmetic of a woman who has already watched one man she loves ride off to tell the truth to powerful people.

When I pulled back I picked up my father's letter, folded it along his own creases, and put it into Guy's hands.

I watched the weight of what I had done arrive on him.

"Robin."

“For years, I’ve had nothing of him but a compass and an unmarked stone." I closed his fingers around it. "Don't lose it."

He licked at his lips. “I would sooner lose the hand."

"Three years," I whispered.

He frowned. "What?"

"Three years I’ve spent trying to get away from you."

His mouth curved, faintly. "And?"

I rested my forehead against his.

"Now I don't want you to go."

His arms came around me and tightened.

"Then I'll give you something to look forward to."

"What?"

"Me coming back."

We didn’t get the chance.

His horse had stood in the lean-to behind the cabin for six days. A big Crown gelding, shod in Nottingham, eating hay I’d cut for it, and it had carried a wounded man up the north ridge from a clearing full of corpses and left a trail a child could read.

Six days was a long while for a man like Fitzwalter to have good trackers in a forest.