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Two men.

I didn’t know their voices, which told me they were not castle garrison. I knew the livery of the boots that came into the light at the top of the stairs, because I had been looking at that livery across my own desk earlier the same evening.

"He wants the forest searched tonight," the first one said.

"For the Ghost?"

"Who else?"

The second man shifted his weight, uneasy, and when he spoke again he had dropped his voice.

"Bisbane's supposed to bring her in. That's the King's own order, straight from the council. Are we not to"

"Fitzwalter isn't interested in bringing her anywhere."

Everything in me went perfectly still.

"Alive?" the second man asked.

"He didn't specify."

They moved on down the corridor, and their voices went out of hearing. I stood in the dark of the archive with the transcript under my arm and understood the whole shape of it at once.

Fitzwalter had not stolen that dispatch because he feared a trial. He feared one thing only, which was Robin learning what had been done to her father.

Because an outlaw stealing grain was a nuisance the Crown could hang, while the last heir of House Locksley holding six soldiers' sworn testimony was a woman who could take his head. My digging had told him the evidence still existed, and its existence made her lethal to him. His one and only solution was the same one it’d been six years ago.

He wasn’t hunting her for arrest.

He was hunting her for execution, and he’d started tonight.

I went up the stairs two at a time.

In my chambers I pulled my sword belt off the hook and strapped it on, and I was pulling my coat over it when my lieutenant appeared in the doorway with the muster roll still in his hand.

"Sheriff? Where are you going?"

I shrugged. “Sherwood."

"Now? It's past two in the morning…”

“I’m aware.”

He hesitated, and then he asked it, because it was the only question that made sense of a sheriff arming himself in the middle of the night to ride into that forest.

"To arrest her?"

I stopped with my hand on the door.

A fortnight ago that question would have had an easy answer. I thought about the dispatch in a dead man's defense and the name on the back of it. I thought about a woman on a ridge telling me that one day they were going to make me choose.

"No," I said.

I pulled the coat closed.

"To get to her before Fitzwalter does."

I rode out through the west gate alone, and the night swallowed the walls behind me.