The world held its breath. Every one of them replayed the last few minutes in their heads, from the moment Tuck opened the cask. John couldn’t remember, his brain hurt to even try, there had been too much happening at once. Robin, on the other hand, had a queer calm to him now, and he looked up and breathed heavily.

“She wasn’t.”

Step by curious step, all eyes watched Robin as he picked a careful path that circled around them. “You know, Will,” he asked, casually but precisely, matching his movements, “when you showed up here, you said hello to me. As if you expected to find me here. But the last you knew, I had left to go back to the war.”

He finished the circle, side by side with John, in front of Arable. Then, with sudden violence, “Why weren’t you surprised to see me, Will?”

He couldn’t be right, John thought. There was another solution. Those Bernesdale boys, Geoffrey and Thomas. They had been there when the beer was poured, and then run off. That was it.

But Will hadn’t moved.

Nor had he let go of the sword.

No.

John couldn’t believe it, but not because it wasn’t true.

He couldn’t believe it—he knew—because he simply didn’t think like that.

Not like that. Not like Will Scarlet.

Will wet his lips, and let his eyelids drag down. Every bit of the fury he had a moment ago seemed to drain from his body. He no longer looked the boy John knew, his face had aged a decade in only a few moments. Quite carefully he knelt, placing the sword on the ground, as if he were afraid to damage the grass that pierced through the gathering frost. When he stood again, there were tears in his eyes.

“Lord Gisbourne came to me in my cell.”

No.

They’d chosen to risk everything, even after everything Will had done, to dive into danger to save their tortured little souls, all while Will had been planning this.

John didn’t want to hear any more, it was too terrible.

Will spoke deliberately, but his voice strained at the effort. “He told me you had returned.” Every sentence was an eternity. “He offered me my freedom, both mine and Elena’s. If I came back and poisoned you.”

John stopped breathing.

Will looked up at John, a desperation within him, then over to Robin. “But I told him no, Robin.”

Just as slowly, he turned around, perhaps the hardest thing he’d ever done.

He repeated, “I told him no.”

And across from him, in the same moment that John realized it himself, came Elena’s response, choking on her own tears. “I told him yes.”

My Elena.