The chair slid across the cobbled floor, caught a stone, and tumbled over, which was perfectly fine. Robin had neither the time nor the desire to sit.

“I’ve been talking to your dog, Lord Gisbourne. He brought me this.” Robin withdrew the edict, stamped equally now in both wax and blood. He threw it onto the table for William to deny. “Are you going to tell me that’s not your signature?”

There was only a low, selfish sort of laughter from William, as he poked the paper with two fingers. “Do you think I’m insane? I’m not going to burn down a forest. This was just a ruse, it was Gisbourne’s idea, he insisted upon it. He thought it might lure you out into the open.” He chuckled a bit more, tapping the table in delight. “Apparently it worked!”

“It bears your signature!”

“If I thought you’d actually fall for it, I wouldn’t have signed it. Robin, this is a delicate position, I think you could appreciate that. Anything I could do to keep Gisbourne off my back was worth it. I’m barely keeping things from unraveling here.” He traced his fingers through the papers on his desk, as if his menial administrative tasks could in any way compare to what Robin’s men had experienced. “What about you, how are things going on your end?”

“How are they going?” There was a pile of bodies in the forest outside Bernesdale that answered the question. Many of them were good men who had come to defend Robin in the middle of the night. One of them died by Robin’s own hand, his mind lost to the bloodlust. Once this was over he would deal with those ramifications, but for now he forced it to a corner of his mind. And William wanted to know how things were going. He answered. “You’re killing people!”

“Robin, where are you?” William clapped his hands. “You’re not talking to an enemy, this is me, your friend, you remember that, don’t you? I know we had … heated words when last we saw each other, but that doesn’t change who we are. I know where your heart lies, I know you wanted to protect those people. But you’re not safe here. You come in here, waving a sword around … don’t you think you’ve taken this too far?”

The casual razing of a forest, the destruction of thousands of people’s homes, and William thought that trying to save lives was taking it too far. Robin could barely recognize his old friend. “I’m not the one who declared myself Sheriff.”

“I didn’t declare myself Sheriff.”

“That’s not what Arable says.”

“Arable—what?” William’s calm demeanor instantly gave way to a shocked panic. “What did she say to you?”