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Robin
My brother held out his hand. “Come with me, sister.”
“What?” I said dumbly. I was too awestruck to say anything more. My face was slack, my body rigid.
Everything felt surreal. Dreamlike.
My brother stood in front of me. My dead brother.
Surely a figment of my imagination, like his voice in my head.
“You’re dead,” I said. “I hear you in my mind.”
Confusion rippled across his face.
“We argue, like when we were kids,” I explained. “You try to tell me what is right. To guide me.”
The screams were getting louder past the trees, rising into the air. Panicked spectators, havoc being wreaked. I could hear the faint sounds of steel clashing together. The yelling of injured men, blood soaking a battlefield.
“I’m sorry, Robin.”
That was what he said after years of being gone. He didn’t expand—didn’t tell me anything substantial.
“You aren’t safe here,” he added. Then he nudged his chin past me, to the dead timer-man. “Clearly.”
“Who was he?” I asked.
Robert sighed. “One of my men.”
“One of . . . your men?” My teeth gritted. Robert looked similar: tall, dashing, broad. His hair was darker now, wavy and tipped with amber under his hood. But his face looked different.
I couldn’t reconcile it. Couldn’t understand what was happening.
“There’s no time to explain,” he said.
My whole world came crashing down in a matter of seconds. Yet he was trying to speak to me as if this was normal. As if dead brothers just sprouted up out of the ground. As if my mother hadn’t grown sick from heartbreak because of his death. As if I hadn’t lived the last months in sorrow and heart-wrenching agony, speaking to a fucking skull in the woods to try and process my grief and get on with my life.
To make sense of Robert’s death.
But none of it made sense anymore.
He held out his hand again, urging me. “Come on. I’ll tell you everything when—”
“Robin!” a voice screamed behind me.
Will Scarlet emerged from the thick tree line, his face sweaty. He drew his swords when he saw Robert standing in front of me, arm extended, and he charged toward me. Friar Tuck barreled in next, from a different direction. Alan-a-Dale wasn’t far behind, from the north.
We had Robert quickly surrounded. My men inched closer to me, weapons drawn, staring daggers at him.
“Who the fuck are you?” Will growled, knees bent like a lion ready to pounce on his prey.
Robert didn’t draw his bow. He looked at the faces surrounding me—my saviors—and said, “You have a choice, Robin.”
“What is he talking about?” Alan asked. “We have to get out of here, love. Hell has burst open and let out all its little minions.”
“Love?” Robert said, eyes squinting on me.
Friar Tuck said, “You’re Oliver of Mickley. Winner of the tournament, yes?”
