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It was still dark when I heard them.

I was awake before I knew why, with my hand already finding the bow. Then it came again through the shutter slats, the sound that didn’t belong to Sherwood at any hour: iron on stone, and the creak of harness, and the particular wet rhythm of a great many horses walking slowly uphill in the dark because they do not wish to be heard.

I was at the window in three steps.

Down through the black trunks, perhaps two hundred yards below us on the ridge path, the torches were coming up in a line.

I knew the colors on the nearest riders, because I ad robbed them for three years. Nottingham. The sheriff's own garrison, forty men at the least.

And riding in the middle of that column, under their own standard, in livery I had last seen on the boots of a man climbing the stairs out of an archive, came Lord Edmund Fitzwalter's personal guard.

The Crown had found us at last.

And this time, the Sheriff of Nottingham was standing on the wrong side of the door.

19

ROBIN

Guy was out of that bed and dressed faster than a man with twelve stitches in him had any business managing.

"How many?" he said.

"Forty at least. Nottingham colors on the front riders and Fitzwalter's livery in the middle of the column." I already had my bow in my hand. "They're two hundred yards down the ridge path and they're walking the horses, which means they know what they're coming to."

"The gelding."

"The gelding." I did not look at him while I said it. "Six days of hay and a trail off that clearing a blind child could follow."

He didn’t waste a breath on blaming either of us for it, which I have thought about since.

"Your father's letter is in the lining of my coat," he said, pulling the coat on. "Take your bow, your quiver, the compass, and the pouch with the seal in it, and go out through the north shutter."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"Robin."

"Don't Robin me."

His mouth twitched, even then, which I will never understand about that man. "Is that an order?"

"Yes."

"Unfortunately, Little Ghost, you have no authority whatsoever over the Sheriff of Nottingham."

I caught a fistful of his shirt and stopped him with it.

"Then consider it a request from the woman who shared your bed."

His expression changed, and for a moment something underneath all that discipline came up to the surface and looked at me.

"That," he murmured, "is considerably harder to refuse."

Then he put his hand over mine and took it off his shirt, gently.

"Listen to me, because we have less than a minute. Half those men are my garrison and they still believe I’m their sheriff. If I walk out alone and injured, I am a man they have been searching for and found. If they come through that door and find you, there is no story left that saves either of us, and there is no version of a fight where forty men lose." He held my eyes. "I am not surrendering to anyone. I’m going to stand in my own clearing and give an order, which I have done every day for three years. But I cannot do it with you behind me."

"And Fitzwalter's men?"