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Robin
Imade it to the pond and the swampy, slick stones encircling it, and toppled onto my hands and knees. A sob ripped from my throat and I clenched my teeth.
I felt weak. I wasn’t crying because of Peter Fisher’s fate, but because I’d had another man do it for me. Little John did what I should have. I felt guilty for an entirely different reason by forcing blood on his hands.
Long minutes passed. The darkness in my vision swam away, replaced by a defeated, sorrowful sensation pulling at my heart.
I sat and scooted against the tallest boulder and put my back against it, facing away from the camp—hiding from the world—with my boots touching the edge of the still pond. A frog croaked nearby and jumped onto a lily pad in the water.
Moments later, heavy footsteps parted the rushes leading to the pond. A huge shadow loomed over me.
“May I sit here?”
I didn’t look up at Little John. I stared at the silver reflection of the moon rippling on the surface of the water from the frog jumping in. I stared past the pond, to the dark trees beyond.
Then I gave a tiny nod.
With a groan, he plopped down next to me against the stone. Both of us hidden from prying eyes beyond.
The silence that dragged through the glade deafened me. I was worried he could hear my heart rattling in my chest. I was fixated on how dangerously close he sat next to me.
Finally, he spoke, in a slow, measured tone. His voice was deep, contemplative, bereft of the anger from minutes ago. “Men like Peter Fisher need to be punished, lass. As a warning to others. If nothing else, so they can’t harm other innocents. If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else, likely years down the road. And how many more people would he have assaulted and hurt between now and then?”
I knew he was right. I was just shocked at the sheer violence of the lives these men lived. So different than my own back home.
I truly didn’t know if I had a home any longer, and that notion doubled my pain. I had been thrust into something unknown with these ruthless men. It was still admittedly better than what I’d had in Wilford.
What did that say about me? Were these men truly corrupting me . . . or saving me?
“Sometimes I wish I had never come to Wilford,” I muttered to myself, shaking my head. “Maybe then I could have avoided all this misery. Though it wasn’t my choice, of course.”
He cocked his head. “You don’t hail from Wilford?”
“No. I was born in a little town called Loxley. There was no future for my family there—not in my mother’s opinion—so we came to Wilford when I was a child.”
He nodded slowly, mulling that over. An awkward silence dragged between us, and I stared down at the ground between my legs, ruffling the grass.
“I wanted to apologize, Robin,” John said, stealing my thoughts back to his baritone voice.
I glanced over.
His beard twitched when he pursed his lips. He sighed, heavy and crestfallen. “I met your father.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Oh.” I tried to act indifferent. “He’s a hard man to love, isn’t he?” I shook my head. “No matter what you learned, I don’t want your pity, John.”
“And you won’t have it.” He sounded stern, forceful. “I don’t pity you, little star, and I’ll never insult you by showering you with it. No. I admire you.”
My face whipped over to him fully. I was caught in the dark ocean of his eyes, the same color as the trees on the other side of the pond. “Admire me? For what?”
“For your resilience, resolve, and courage. For escaping and pushing forward. I take it your father didn’t want you near those carriages when they left Wilford?”
“No.”
A smile creased between his whiskers. “Yet you took matters into your own hands. Had you not, I never would have been graced by your presence.”
An incredulous snort popped out of my mouth. “You make it sound like it was fate that put me in the hands of the Merry Men.”
“Wasn’t it?” Little John asked, completely serious. “What else can you call this?”
