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I threw aside the flap of Robin’s tent. “Thorn!”
She jolted up, gasping with fear, and my heart simmered with relief when I saw her silhouette.
Then I noticed how wrong everything looked. How wrong she looked in the darkness. She never wore a heavy shift like that. It was always thin, or nothing at all.
I darted into the dark room to get a better look at her in the moonless night—
And stared at Emma’s sister, Grace. Looking as ghastly and scared as Ada had in the woods.
“Where did she go?” I demanded in a seething voice that brooked no argument. It was a threatening voice I used to scare the most ironclad men.
When Grace threw up her arms and squealed, “I don’t know, sir!” I believed her.
I turned and stormed out of the tent.
“Well?” John asked, rubbing sleepiness from his eyes.
“We certainly have a problem. She’s gone.”
“Fuck.”
Another commotion whiplashed our necks to another tent as Friar Tuck stumbled out of his shelter limping and wincing, throwing on his habit as he moved. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he grumbled, shaking his head. When he glanced up and saw me, John, and Alan standing in front of Robin’s tent, his face slackened and he paused his hurried movements. “Fuck,” he said, echoing John and the rest of us.
John said, “You’re too weak to be up, Tuck. You—”
“Don’t tell me how I feel, Little John. If something’s amiss with our little heathen, I don’t care if all my bones are broken. I’ll be there.”
I had to admit my failure. Robin had outsmarted me—outsmarted all of us.
To what end?
A slow smile spread across my face as I realized the hunt was on. In truth this time—not as some game to win a prize.
A sense of pride welled inside me, knowing Robin had fooled us all. She was trying to accomplish something. I just didn’t know what.
I stared off into the dark forest.
Just where the fuck did you run off to this time, my clever little thorn?
Chapter 41
Robin
Istood in the field of barleygrass. Staring out to the road ahead, and the manor standing atop the slope beyond it. Listening to the gentle rhythm of the high grass as it blew around me.
The Merry Men would have never let me go.
. . . Well, the Merry Men as a whole might not have given a shit—many of them would be happy to get rid of me.
Not my men.
Did I feel guilty for tricking them? It was hard to say. In time, I thought that question would be answered for me.
I hoped they would understand. If I didn’t live through this, I prayed they’d understand that I had tried. I couldn’t stand to see anymore death of the people I loved and called my family. And in order to make a difference, I needed to take drastic measures.
It hurt my heart more than anything.
I still had a chance to turn around. No one had seen me. I could chalk it up to cowardice, return to camp with my tail between my legs, and accept the chastising I knew was to come. The lecturing. The apologies. The red-hot tension that I knew would boil over into a climactic affair.
