THE SIEGE WAS OVER, the city was taken. While the losses had been fewer than Robin’s prediction, they were still profound. Now they were faced with regrouping and securing an angry city, before they could continue the war forward to Jerusalem. But worse than any of that, Robin’s muscles were simply furious with him.

He’d been in the mix of it, by William’s side in the thick of the fight, but now that recent memory was almost a dream. War was like that, too impossible to believe afterward. From a purely logical point of view, it didn’t make sense that such carnage could actually happen, so instead Robin focused on today’s tasks. The procedural things that had to happen next. So, as ludicrous as it was in the wake of days of brutal bloodshed, climbing this staircase was the hardest thing Robin had ever done.

Some backward mason probably thought the staircase was well-crafted. The only thing that distinguished it as a staircase and not a curiosity of landscape was that it led somewhere useful. It was a cliffsedge, really, wrapping around the outer defensive wall of Acre up to a stronghold overlooking the sea. Each step angled slightly down in a way that invited a man to take a casual tumble and die in the ocean below. It was probably designed for a king’s desperate escape, but Robin was using it to haul the massive bundle of swords on his back into the fortress, for a bunch of soldiers who apparently couldn’t be bothered to do it themselves.

The cool relief of shade devoured him at the top of the climb, where an unnatural opening in the stone wall brought a chance to drop pack and stretch his arms. The ceiling of the storeroom was rotted and weathered by the sea air, letting in shafts of light from the wooden ramparts above. It was a welcome break from the merciless sun. Robin’s pack clattered angrily to the ground, practically all steel. Swords, knives, a few of the curved Saracens blades, anything he had been able to carry. It was a drop in the bucket, a tiny bandage on the disorganized war effort.

Robin lowered himself to the ground to massage his calves. Though the hostilities in the city had ended, the aches in his body were still very much at war.

Three days earlier, a lucky trebuchet shot had shocked them all. A single weak point had cascaded into a massive collapse of a section of the city’s wall, and the English army surged eagerly toward the hole. But King Richard had caught a sickness one day prior, and was in no condition to manage the assault. So even though neither of them had doubled for Richard since the day of the messenger’s visit, William claimed the king’s warcrown—to Robin’s shock and admiration—in order to command the troops.