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"Retainers. They have no authority over a Crown officer, and I intend to be extremely tedious about reminding them." He picked up his sword belt. "If it goes wrong, you’re already in the trees with the letter, and you go to Little John and take it to the King yourself."

"Guy…”

"Say it back to me."

"I go to Little John," I said. "I hate you."

"I know." He caught my face in one hand and kissed me, hard and fast and not at all carefully. "Go."

The north shutter had hung wrong in its frame since the year I was nine. I had been getting out through it since I was small enough to do so, without thinking. I took the bow and the quiver and the pouch, went through it sideways, and had my feet under the pines before the first torch came around the bend.

Then I climbed, because I was always better in a tree. I put an arrow on the string and watched the Sheriff of Nottingham walk out into the open to meet forty armed men by himself.

He did it well.

He came out through the front door with his coat on and his hand nowhere near his sword, and he stopped in the middle of that clearing and waited for them to come to him. Nothing in the way he stood suggested a man who had been hiding. Captain Aldric came off his horse so fast he nearly went down in the mud.

"Sheriff. God be praised. Six days, we had men on every road, we thought"

"Yes. Lower your voice, Captain, you'll frighten the horses." Guy's voice carried exactly as far as it needed to and no further. "I was ambushed on the Mansfield side by eight men in no livery. I put most of them down and took a knife under the ribs for the privilege. I’ve spent six days in that cabin failing to die of it. Somebody find me a horse that isn't lame."

I watched the relief go through those men like heat through a room. They had come up that ridge expecting a body and found their sheriff standing, bleeding, and giving orders. Half of them would’ve followed him into a river on the strength of it.

Fitzwalter's men didn’t dismount.

Their leader was a narrow man with a clipped gray beard, and he brought his horse forward two steps and looked down from the saddle in a way that told me everything about him.

"Eight men, Sheriff."

"That was my count."

"In no livery…”

Guy never gave pause. “Which is what makes them interesting."

"And you survived them, alone? With a knife in your side."

"I did." Guy let the silence sit there. "Was there a question inside that, or were you simply admiring me?"

"We have orders to search this cabin."

"Whose orders?"

"Lord Fitzwalter's."

"Then you have an instruction from a private gentleman, not an order." Guy's voice went pleasant, which from him is considerably worse than anger. "I hold the King's commission in this shire. That cabin is Crown property under seizure. I have lived in it for six days, and I have cleared it."

"Nevertheless."

"Nevertheless, you may go back to your master and tell him his retainers attempted to search the lodging of the Sheriff of Nottingham over the sheriff's own refusal, and let us both find out how that sentence sounds in front of the King's council."

One of his riders had gone to the cabin door regardless.

I had him. I had the shot the whole time, from above and behind, and I want it written down that my fingers were steady on the string.

He came back out with my spare cloak over his arm.

"Sir. There's two bowls on the table and a woman's cloak on the peg." He lifted it. "And it stinks of Omega in there. Fresh."