This may have been his home by birth, but it had been Elena’s by choice. Whatever memories came as his hands brushed the blackened rock archway of the empty main door, they were not what rose in Elena’s mind. She had found Lord Walter at this door once, propped open with a candlestick, sideways, a bitter wind whistling through. Elena had asked what he was looking for and Walter startled, then clutched Elena’s shoulder.

“I know it’s pointless,” Walter had confessed in a weak voice, “but some nights I keep an eye out for them.”

She’d felt dumb to say it out loud, but had nothing else to offer. “Your sons.”

Walter had nodded, after a long pause. “Robin. Edmond.” Both names stung, in different ways. “And Helen.” Elena had left him to the cold and the wind, having nothing else to say, not knowing what she could say. Later in her own bed, she curled up against Will tighter than normal and realized she shouldn’t have left at all. Instead, she should have bundled up in the whistling wind, cracked the door a little further, and said, “I’ll watch with you.”

But she hadn’t. She’d left.

That night, the wind had beat the doors so hard Elena thought they might break off. The image of them gone now made it seem they had, and carried Walter away with them.

“There’s so little left,” Locksley commented, as if his grief were limited to furniture and tapestries. The walls wore black rectangles where once they had hung, scorch marks and stains, piles of unrecognizable debris. Locksley mourned them with the specificity of a tax collector.

It disgusted her. She’d missed one night with Walter and still regretted it. Robin had missed so many more, and apparently didn’t care what his absence cost. He didn’t even have a good reason. No grand cause had dragged him from home—he couldn’t even bother to call the war important.

They kept walking.

“Any number of travelers had their pick of the place,” John explained. “Even the rocks.”

The dining hall was a tomb. Some tables hadn’t completely burned, their brittle wooden timber lying askew, twisted chandeliers on the ground, echoes of movement scurrying underneath the rubble. Rats or rabbits. Part of the roof had collapsed. The tall broken windows here faced westward, letting in red fingers that pierced through and left an empty black between.