OK, guys, so the thing is I have four possible endings to work towards and I don't have to decide which one I'm going for until the last few chapters. So once I get closer, I'm going to have you vote on ending one, ending two, ending three or ending four without knowing what the options are. But be warned, for one of them you will hate me. You will hate me so much.
Oh gods.
SO much.
On a different one, you will hate me marginally less.
On yet another one, you will hate me somewhere between so much and marginally less. Well, really, I suppose it depends on who your favorite character is (mwahahahaa).
The last one won't make you hate me, but it's a little cheesy. It'll be a little longer, too.
I suppose there's actually a fifth option, that I publish all four endings and let you guys choose your favorite, kind of like Clue. But I don't know if I want to be that nice... it depends on you guys, I guess.
They got through the entire street, and Will counted how many coins they had: Three hundred and thirty-five, enough to give to 167 house holds and keep one coin for themselves, to stock up on more food.
The street and the two streets beside it were probably the poorest, although there was another ghetto on the other side of town that they would never have enough coins to get through and so they just dealt in that part of town. When they ran out of coins half way down the third street, Robin looked just slightly crushed to not have had enough for every family to get enough coins.
"Maybe we should have just given them one, maybe -" Robin said, but Halt cut her off.
"No, Robin." He shook his head. "One wouldn't have meant as much and we can pick up here with the next round of coins, can't we? We did all we could and this was an awesome start, don't feel upset that it wasn't a god-like start."
Robin still looked somewhat upset.
"I suppose," she conceded, then nodded briskly, "Yeah, you're right. Right. We're fine. It was good."
She still hesitated when she returned to her horse, as though she still wanted to do more but she wasn't sure how. She climbed up on Nudge anyway and they returned back down the street, listening to the happy whispers of families leaking out through their doors and into the street.
"I don't think we can stay in town," Gilan observed. "We'd be recognized and probably arrested."
"Good point," Mauch said, nodding his head a little too vigorously for Will's taste. "We'll need to make a camp."
"Well... if we can't take the bastard down -" Robin began, but Will cut her off.
"Language," Will reminded her, and she just scowled at him.
"- until King Duncan returns, then we might be here a while," Robin continued. "Maybe we should make a more permanent camp?"
"I will send him a letter, asking after his return. We should arrest him around his return so that by the time Duncan is back in the castle, he's had time to unpack and get caught up on the affairs of his kingdom," Halt said, his voice calm and level.
"Sounds like a plan," Little John said, nodding to himself as his horse made small grunting noises with each step.
"We can make a real camp," Robin repeated, as though that sealed the deal.
And that was what they prepared for that evening before sitting down to a flame-cooked dinner and laughing together, congratulating themselves for a job well done, as they should have been. They didn't know how close they came to being undone that night, which was probably for the best.
Two miles away, high up in a tower sat a very portly man who was also a very angry man, and a very tired man and not an altogether intelligent man, who was about to make a mistake that would ruin the next two years of his life.
The Baron sat at his desk, rifling through reams of paper and making sure all his taxes were in. A soft rain pelted the window and the a crackled in the fire place, but rather than being soothing things as they would have been to most everyone else, they were annoying to him and just made him more frustrated. He threw his ream of papers at the wall as he lost count for the fifth time that evening, finally surrendering to the fact that he could not do basic arithmetic.
He got up from his seat and began stalking back and forth along his office, scowling at the place where the Rangers had been not too long ago. If they hadn't come, he wouldn't be having any of these problems. If they hadn't come, then he wouldn't be second-guessing his taxes. If they hadn't come, he wouldn't be worrying about King Duncan returning. If they hadn't come... Oh, but if.
The door to his study creaked open and a little scribe peeked around the edge of the door at him.
"My lordship, there is a Lady here to see you, says she's been attacked..." the little man began, but the Baron was in no such mood for this. "Says something about a red cloak, she's a bit hysterical... says they took all her money, she does..."
The Baron roared his anger. The Lady was, of course, supposed to be bringing in the most recent set of taxes. And it had been stolen! He had no time to listen to her excuses, all he knew was he was now three hundred and thirty-five coins short, and he had feasts to fund, jails to fill and gallows to multiply.
"I DON'T CARE WHO TOOK IT!" the Baron was beyond furious now. This was enough to push him from his earlier irritation into a blind rage. "JUST FIX IT, FIX IT, FIX IT NOW!"
"Says it was Robin Ho-" the scribe began, but was cut off by the Baron throwing his shoe at where the man's head was. The man closed the door just in time, making the shoe thump against the hard wood and then fall to the floor. The Baron never did hear how the scribe was going to finish that sentence, of course. And so he never connected the attack on the Lady back to the little girl who had been in that very office not very long before.
If he had, his life would have been so much easier because he could have just had the Rangers arrested and tell all the other nobles about it and King Duncan would have had to take care of it for him. But as it was, the next time he would hear about Robin Hood, he'd hear about a young man with a bow and a merry band of thieves.
He'd never think of that dainty little girl with the fiery temper. No, sir; he'd just think of a man, and his passionate desire to see that man hanging in the gallows outside his window.
