“ROGER DE LACY WAS leaving anyway. He was tired, tired of everything. But he was surrounded by lackeys. When he met me, he wanted to groom me for the position. I refused, of course, but apparently he made it official. They found the assignment in his office the night he died. Signed and sealed. His last official act was to name me his successor.”

The lie came out easily, he had already told it so many times in the last two days. But it tasted sour when he told it to Robin.

“That’s insane,” Robin cut in. “You’ll have to turn it down. We can’t stay. You can’t take over as sheriff. We have our orders.”

“That’s just it, Robin, we have our orders. And, whether I asked for this or not, I have the opportunity here to really…” he searched for the word, but he was too afraid Robin hadn’t believed him, “… to really do them. I could fix a lot of things that led to this supply problem in the first place.”

“You can’t be the sheriff.” Robin laughed at him, but his eyes were serious. “We’re glorified bodyguards. You think they’ll let you run the county? This isn’t like putting on the crown for a day.”

Actually, the similarities were haunting. In Acre, William had taken on the warcrown when Richard couldn’t, and that leadership had saved countless lives. Here he could do the same. “Don’t sell us short, Robin. My father is well known in Derbyshire, of no small title, and we are personal advisors to the King himself.”

Robin was clearly jealous, in light of his time with the rebels. Going from soldier to sheriff was a hell of a leap. If their roles had been reversed, William would have argued against it as well. But jealousy was just an emotional pettiness, and Robin was better than that.

“As I said,” William continued, “I can’t leave. I brought you a horse, I only came to say goodbye, I’m afraid. I didn’t want you to wait around for me. And I needed your help.”

He tapped the map, the one that Robin still had not marked. He was being unusually evasive on that point. William knew this wasn’t what Robin wanted to hear. He wouldn’t want to travel alone, or to return to Richard as a failure.

“What are you going to do with that?” Robin jabbed his finger at the map.

“As I said, we’ll round them up. For their own good, Robin.”

“You’ll throw them in a dungeon. For their own good?”

“Are we talking about the same people? If they hadn’t killed the Sheriff, there would have been a peace. I was working on a peace. But as it is, I’ll have to play this through.”

“Play this through? By hunting down women and children?”

“Thieves and murderers.”