Page 42

Everything light went out of his face. He told it properly then, the way I had not let him tell it in the clearing, with the care of a man who knows the details are the only thing that will survive the telling. The Crown's case against my father rested on one meeting at a manor outside Lincoln on the night of the eleventh of October. The Mansfield garrison dispatch placed him fifty miles from there that same night, directing the evacuation of Edwinstowe and Warsop after the Maun broke its banks, with six soldiers named as having worked under him until dawn.

And on the reverse of that dispatch, in a clerk's hand, a notation that it had been withdrawn from the materials assembled for the trial and filed away with ordinary garrison correspondence, on the authority of Lord Edmund Fitzwalter.

My hands were shaking by the end of it. I set the dagger down on the table so I would not be holding it.

"Where is the dispatch?"

He hesitated, which told me the answer before he said it. "Gone."

I laughed and it came out like a cat hissing. "Convenient."

"It disappeared while I was upstairs fetching the muster roll. A quarter of an hour, and when I came back the bundle had been retied by someone who didn't know how the clerks tie them." His voice stayed level. "That's how I learned Fitzwalter has men inside my own castle."

"So you have nothing."

"I saw it."

"And I'm supposed to trust the word of the Crown's sheriff."

I expected him to be angry. Every man I have ever accused of anything has been angry, and I had my next three sentences already loaded behind my teeth.

"No," he said.

I blinked. "No?"

"You shouldn't trust me because I tell you to." He shifted carefully against the pillow, and his eyes found mine and stayed there. "Trust what you can verify."

And then he gave me everything.

The name of the Mansfield watch commander and the year he was posted there. All six soldiers, their units, where two of them had retired. The date of the flood, the parishes, the sum requisitioned for carts, and the name of the clerk whose hand wrote the withdrawal notation. He gave me enough to go and prove him a liar, which is the single most persuasive thing anyone has ever done to me, and he did it flat on his back with twelve of my stitches in his side.

I wrote none of it down. I didn’t need to. I had carried my father's name through six years of other people's mouths. I was never going to forget one syllable of it. When he finished, the fire popped, and the silence stretched on for a long while.

“Your father wasn't a traitor, Robin," he said.

"I already knew that."

"I know."

And that was when my voice betrayed me, cracking straight down the middle of a sentence I had meant to deliver flat.

"Then why does hearing you say it hurt?"

He did not answer. I think he knew there wasn't one, and I was grateful to him for not reaching for a convenient lie, because any other man in England would have.

Night came down over the ridge, and the cabin got smaller the way rooms do in the dark.

I checked his wound again by candle. The flesh around the stitches had gone hot and tight, but no red crept out from it yet and his fever stayed low. He was so exhausted that he let me handle him without one word of instruction, which frightened me slightly. It also required touching him again.

I told myself that was medical. My fingers pressed carefully around the bandage, testing for swelling.

His abdomen tightened once more under my finger tips.

I ignored it.

Mostly.

"You keep doing that."