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“Him,” I said, nudging my chin to his right, to the babbling creek and the ancient oak.
He pivoted, bow flying off his back in a heartbeat—
And lurched when he saw my brother.
“Fucking hell, man!” he yelled, and then stared aghast at me.
My smile widened, as sinister as I could muster.
“Fuck this,” he said, new understanding dawning on his lovely features. Confusion and . . . fear?
He turned tail back the way he’d come, disappearing into the trees and foliage.
I sighed, rose to my feet, and dusted myself off. Then I gathered my spilled arrows and went to my brother.
I patted the human skull sitting on the stump next to the babbling creek and the ancient oak.
“Now look what you’ve done, brother. Scared off another one.”
My brother said nothing.
Because Robert wasn’t here.
He was dead.
Chapter 3
Robin
It was a recent development, which I believed instigated my mother’s illness. She wasn’t dying from something curable like scabies or the sweating sickness. Her heart and body were failing from the intractable pain and grief of losing her son in King Richard’s Crusade.
We’d learned about my elder brother’s awful fate just last season. While summer erupted with flowers in bloom and rich life, I imagined my brother wallowed in a trench, broken, bloodied, dying.
The death of a firstborn did something to your soul. It implanted leprous warts on your insides, tearing you down until you broke.
That’s what I imagined in the case of Mama Joan.
For me, losing Robert meant losing my one advocate in this world. My guiding star and single light. The only man whose shoulder I could cry on after taking a walloping from Father.
It was a sick twist of fate Robert had to die and not Sir Thomas, my father. Not to mention he’d been the heir to the Wilford estate, which meant my father had lost his legacy—all for glory and the perceived righteous retribution in the name of God, with which Robert went to war alongside King Richard in some far-off place called Jerusalem.
It was fucking awful. It made me despise the nobility and the warmongers and makers of this world.
Call me naïve and ignorant, but losing Robert to war begged the question: What was the point? Would I ever lay eyes on Jerusalem? See the spoils of his exploits? I doubted it. Would King Richard’s idea of claiming the Holy Land ever be realized? Likely not, if the reported fierceness of Jerusalem’s defenders was anything to go by.
The skull sitting on the tree stump in Sherwood Forest was not my brother’s skull. It was simply a gruesome ornament I’d found in the woods a couple months ago. The head of a stranger.
The skull spoke to me. Who was I to ignore him? Especially with Robert gone and no one to talk to who could help me alleviate and understand my problems.
I felt abandoned. My one champion was gone. So I tried to keep a piece of him with me, always.
The skull had entered my life before I learned of Robert’s death. Once the soldiers came knocking with the news, its grim bleached bone and vacant dead eye sockets added a new poignancy to Robert’s death. The skull came alive—spoke to me more frequently.
Even now, I thought while leaving the clearing, letting the dead boar gather flies, Robert protects me from threats.
He saved me from that villainous hunter, didn’t he? Perhaps he really was still with me, looking over my shoulder like a guardian angel.
Just who was that hunter, anyway? I’d never seen him in town, and Nottingham wasn’t some grand metropolis. Wilford was even smaller. Why was he creeping through the woods so close to my home?
