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dagger. “Here, have this. And you have all the arrows youcould want. Marion will take you to the road. God go with you, Robin.”
    Marion led the way up the ravine, across the clearing, through the black of the cave and out into the forest beyond. She was light on her feet and fast, so fast that she was often far in front of him. Robin would have lost sight of her entirely were it not for her white hair moving through the trees ahead, like the moon dancing over water. Robin was beginning to wonder how much further they would have to go when he saw her stop suddenly and crouch down in the undergrowth. He crouched beside her.
    “Cross the stream ahead and follow the track,” Marion whispered. “You’ll be in Nottingham by dawn.” Robin made to go, but she held him back. “Whatever happens,” she said, “you will come back to the forest, won’t you?” Robin looked into hereyes and could scarcely bring himself to look away. He saw the fierce faith in them. She believed in him, believed in him utterly.
    “I’ll come back,” he said. “And when I do, I’ll bring Father with me.”
    And he left her there without another word and ran off into the night. They were brave words but Robin felt far from brave. The thought of what he now had to do was daunting. He knew Nottingham. He had lived there as a little boy and been there often enough since, driving pigs or sheep to the market with his father. He had often gazed up at the great walls of the castle and seen the barred windows of the dungeons on the far side of the moat, white fingers gripping the bars. He had seen the cages in the marketplace where the prisoners were brought to be mocked and abused all morning long, before they hanged them at noon. The sheriff’smen would be everywhere, lolling on street corners, roaming the streets in gangs, filling the taverns. There were hundreds of them and they would be armed to the teeth. Even now, as Robin came out of Sherwood into the light of morning and saw the walls of the city rising from the mist in the distance, he had no notion of how he would set about finding his father, still less how he would spirit him away out of Nottingham.
    Over the next rise and he would see the gibbet by the bridge. Already he could see a few crows perched on a dead branch in a nearby oak tree, waiting. Here was where his father would be brought afterwards, after they had hanged him in the market square. Then, and only then, a terrible thought came into Robin’s mind. Perhaps they had done it already. Usually they would do it at midday when the market square was crowded. They wouldhaul the prisoner out of the cage and drag him screaming across the square, hang him and leave him there for an hour or two, and then bring him down to the gibbet. But maybe they had done it yesterday. Maybe they had taken him back to Nottingham and hanged him at once. Why else would the crows be there?
    “No!” Robin cried aloud. “No!” And he ran down the hill, his legs pounding, head back, tears streaming down his face, praying and praying he was not too late. The mist lay thick along the riverbanks. There was no river to see, no bridge and no gibbet. He could barely see the road in front of him now.
    The horse loomed suddenly out of the mist. Robin was going so fast he had no hope of stopping. He careered into the animal at full speed. The horse reared up, throwing his rider out of the saddle. Asthe mist lifted, the horse was cropping the grass busily beside the gibbet. Two men lay stretched out and senseless on the road. Robin woke, his head throbbing, and sat up. Above him he saw the gibbet, stark against the morning sky, and below it lay a soldier, still unconscious. He looked to Robin like one of the sheriff’s men.
    “Maybe you were heaven sent,” he breathed. “My size too, and a sword and a horse. All I could want.”
    He left the soldier trussed up and gagged under the bridge, and emerged dressed in the mail and helmet of a sheriff’s man, a