The news comes out of the clear blue sky, carried by a pigeon into the waiting hands of one unprepared to receive the weight of the words. When Djaq—Saffiya, now, to all but Will, and even to him in public—returns from the marketplace, she is met at the door by Bassam.

"Something," he says grimly, taking her purchases from her, "has made that pale husband of yours even paler."

She finds Will sitting on a bench with a piece of paper gripped in his fingers, has to pry it out as though he were only a statue of a man.

"No easy telling: Allan & Robin died for cause. Thought you should hear it from me.—Much"

Her knees buckle and she collapses beside Will.

"No," she hears herself saying. "No. It can't be." She latches on to the thread of hope. "Much can't even read."

"From the look of it, he copied from Tuck's handwriting," he responds, his voice even and rational. Over the past year, Robin and Tuck had taken turns sending updates to the Holy Land. "And neither of them would lie about something like that."

She had been prepared for rage—the flash of the eyes and the barely-contained energy, ready to burst out in some not-too-carefully-thought-out plan. She had been prepared for silence—a silence lasting days in which only she could hear the violence of his mourning. The rationality breaks her, makes her believe what she had been prepared to resist.

Her head begins shaking from side to side, and Will's hand strokes her hair, softly and automatically.

"It's not our fault," he says, in that same calm tone, so she knows he had been hit with the same guilt she felt, the same thought that if they had been there, maybe it would have been different. "It was always dangerous. Robin knew that. We cheated death so many times. It was bound to catch up with us. And Robin knew…."

He knew we had work to do here, Djaq finished in her mind. They were fighting a war on more than one front, Robin's gang, and that had necessitated a redeployment of troops. There were those in the Holy Land even this week who had eaten because of what Robin had taught Djaq, and who had been challenged in their hatred, as she had been, by meeting a pale-faced man who refused to hate them back. She knew this was where they were supposed to be. It didn't make the loss easier.

"They died together," he continues, and Djaq looks again at the scrap of paper and sees no hint of such comfort. "They were in the same fight. Allan would have wanted to go that way."

"Robin would have wanted to go alone," Djaq interjects.

"We don't always get what we want."

"If we had…."

"But we weren't. So that's no good." He plucks at his shirt where it hangs loose over his chest. "I wonder when…. How long do you think it's been since…." His mouth tightens around the unspoken words.

She puts her hand against his heart, takes his other to hold against hers. They close their eyes and push against each other, towards each other.

Holding each other together until the storm passes.