During that week of recovery, Robin and Richard spoke of many things—including the oddity of commanding a war without being able to see it. The opulence of the tower room was at odds with the poverty outside. It was hard to marry the stories of death with the luxury of their makeshift hospital. Every so often, the barons said, another pocket of insurgents would strike somewhere in the city. Richard listened to the casualties with little reaction. “They say a king is responsible for everyone in his kingdom. The care for every man, every woman, every child, should weigh on the king as if they were his kin. Have you heard this?”

“I have,” Robin coughed.

“They say it. Who is they? Which great king said this? Which of the mighty Roman philosophers passed along this truth down through the centuries to me? How many generations of men have carried it on their tongues in the hope of it someday reaching my ears, that I would be made a better man and king for knowing it? And do you suppose it changed at all in that time? Perhaps women were not included until a mother added it. Has it changed languages, do you suppose? I would think it must have. Some languages have a hundred different words for family, and half of them are insults. And I am to treat all my people as my own family. My kin. What is kin? Which word was this bastardized from?”

“Does it matter?” Robin answered.

The king’s eyes sharpened with alarming precision. “I’ll tell you why it matters, because it was never spoken by a king. It came from men who would never rule, and never could. To be truly responsible for every last person, it would drive a man mad. It’s not a possible thing. How many men died here today? In the last month? Would I send my own family to their death in such a way? Of course not.”

“You’d send John,” Robin smiled, knowing the caustic relationship the king had with his youngest brother.

“Yes!” Richard laughed sharply, fighting through a cough to stand. “I would send John. But only because it would do him some good.”

Robin considered Richard’s words, and the difference between a king’s family and anyone else’s. It was no wonder he took offense to the phrase. Richard and his brothers—Geoffrey, Henry, and John—had all loved their dear father so much they tried to kill him. Their father eventually died without any help at all from his children, and Geoffrey and Henry had also been killed off in one creative manner or another. In a royal family, kin meant threat. If Richard were to treat every one of his vassals as family, then … well, then that would actually explain quite a bit of his behavior.