II: The Arrival of Wilmot
Some mornings arrive like a question. Others like a warning.
This morning was neither. It came with the quiet inevitability of duty—gray, sodden, and persistent. Halward stood at the Woodgate, one hand resting on the iron latch, the other wrapped around a tin mug of scorched mulled wine. Steam rose in curling wisps, lost quickly in the low fog that clung to the forest floor like forgotten smoke.
The mist was not yet rain, but it carried the weight of it. It dampened cloaks and lashes, made wood groan softly, and soaked into stone with the memory of countless mornings just like this.
The gate itself stood silent and heavy—ironbound and anchored by an ash frame between flanking buttresses of moss-stained stone, their foundations pressed deep into a slope that had likely once been riverbank. Its surface bore the faint outlines of sigils, some carved and others burned, nearly erased by wind, moss, and time. A long black scar stretched across the lower beam—remnants of a fire that had licked at its base generations ago. Official records, neatly inked and archived in Nottingham’s civic chambers, attributed the structure to the reign of King Henry, built as a symbol of royal consolidation and control—an effort to tame the outlawed edges of Sherwood with masonry and decree. But the locals, and even some among the clergy, whispered differently. They said the Woodgate was older, vastly older—perhaps as ancient as the forest it faced, or even older still. A relic not of conquest, but of warding.
Some believed it had marked the edge of a Roman march; others insisted it had stood when druids still walked the groves, placed there to bind something in—or to keep something out. There were stories that beneath the gate lay stones not of local quarry but unearthed from deeper soil, black-veined and cold to the touch. Halward paid these tales little mind, though he did not dismiss them outright. He knew only this: a gate, no matter how old, had a purpose.
"Gates don't protect," Oswin had once told him. "They judge."
From the chapel loft above, a single bell tolled. Not by schedule—Oswin was indifferent to such things now—but by instinct. The old man, retired yet restless, had a gift for sensing when a threshold would soon be crossed. Once Warden himself, Oswin had stayed on long past his formal duties. He now served as the caretaker of the small chapel nestled just beyond the gate, technically within the boundary of the forest. Though no longer paid by the city, he subsisted modestly on alms—most of them from Halward’s own purse—and seemed content to trade sermons for solitude. His days were spent tending candles, mending prayer cloths, and watching Wilmot with the quiet protectiveness of a grandfather. He claimed boredom as the reason he remained, but it was the boy who rooted him here. To Oswin, Wilmot was a grandson in all but blood.
Halward released the latch. The gate groaned as it gave way a few inches—not enough to open, but enough to signal readiness. Those who passed would do so under his eyes. None unmarked.
It was said that the Woodgate refused no one. But Halward knew better. It refused in subtler ways—through silence, through dread, through the invisible weight of those who approached and turned back.
***
He heard the boy’s footsteps before he saw him.
Wilmot was late.
Again.
The boy came running, cheeks flushed, cloak flapping, his boots haphazardly laced. His hair stuck out at odd angles, and his breath came fast in the cool air.
"I woke before the bell," Wilmot offered, as if that might redeem him.
Halward didn’t turn. "The gate wakes before the bell. You should know that by now."
"I was—"
"I didn’t ask."
The boy faltered, then fell quiet. He moved to the small wooden desk affixed to the gate’s eastern post, where the logbook lay bound in leather. His fingers worked the tie with clumsy urgency, already stiff with cold. The quill slipped from his grip.
Halward did not help him. He watched the road.
"You’re not cruel," Oswin had once remarked. "But you are weighty. He’ll carry that, or it’ll break him."
Perhaps. But the boy had come with no baggage save a sealed letter from the Office of Civic Instruction, and a second note, penned in the unmistakable hand of Lady Aveline:
"The bearer is to be housed, trained, and made of use. He is yours now. I trust, Warden, that you remember your oaths."
Halward remembered.
***
By midmorning, the road began to stir with movement.
First came the hunter—a tall man in a fox-pelt cloak, his bow slung casually over one shoulder, his manner too polished for a woodsman. Halward recognized the type. Sent from the city to fill the Sheriff’s larder, he hunted not for hunger, but performance.
"Warden," the man called with exaggerated formality, dipping his head in feigned respect. "The Sheriff requires venison. I may have to settle for hare."
"Take what the forest offers," Halward replied.
"It offers less these days."
Halward said nothing. The man passed into the mist.
Then came two pilgrims, their tunics soaked at the hem and eyes too wide for comfort. Wilmot perked up at the sight of them.
"Are they going to Saint Mary’s?"
"Let them speak for themselves," Halward said.
The taller pilgrim nodded. "To the Hollow Oak. They say its bark draws out sorrow, and the roots set broken hearts straight."
Halward inspected their writ, stamped it, and returned it with a dry reply: "If bark cured heartbreak, the monasteries would be empty."
They laughed, too quickly. Halward noticed their hands—shaking slightly, from cold or fear, or both. They were not merely traveling; they were fleeing. Whether from guilt or pursuit, it made no difference. All passed through Woodgate.
***
Oswin appeared near noon, descending the chapel stairs as if each step were a small pilgrimage.
"Your boy still hasn’t learned to tie his boots," he observed, motioning toward Wilmot, who was now hammering a rusted hinge with a tool two sizes too large.
"He’ll learn," Halward replied.
"And if he doesn’t?"
"Then he won’t stay. Or worse, he’ll stay and remain useless."
Oswin scratched at his beard. "You’ve always had such a tender soul."
Halward glanced at him. "And you’ve always liked hearing yourself speak."
They stood together, watching the boy strike again. This time, the hinge groaned—but held.
"There’s talk," Oswin said at last. "A wagon found overturned near the King’s Way. No driver. No oxen. Just ruts in the earth. And then—nothing."
"Bandits?"
"Possibly. Or something that doesn’t leave prints."
Halward didn’t respond. His gaze had drifted skyward, where a single raven wheeled above the trees, its path circling the gate like a question waiting to land.
By midmorning, the sun had risen just high enough to gild the tops of the trees when the sound of approaching hooves echoed across the packed earth. Halward, stationed near the Woodgate’s eastern brace, turned his head at the familiar cadence of an official ride—brisk, even, urgent but unhurried. A lone rider emerged from the road that wound toward Nottingham, his posture rigid, his cloak powdered with road dust and stitched at the collar with the green thread of the Sheriff’s office. A brass sealcase clinked at his side with each step of the horse.
"Orders for the Warden," the man said without ceremony, his voice clipped and rehearsed. He did not dismount. Instead, he held out the parchment, the wax seal glinting faintly in the mid-morning light.
Halward received the scroll with steady hands. He broke the seal—a stylized wolf beneath a crown—and scanned the contents without expression.
"By decree of the Sheriff of Nottingham, you are hereby appointed to collect, safeguard, and duly report all tolls, customs, and passage fees levied at the Woodgate. These funds shall be held in trust for His Majesty King John and audited quarterly by a clerk of the Sheriff’s choosing. Failure to comply shall be construed as dereliction of duty, punishable by fine or removal."
The language was bureaucratic, heavily ornamented, and unmistakably clear. What had once been a customary courtesy—coins left in a wooden bowl at the chapel, handshakes between travelers and guards—was now to become formal, regulated, and extractive. The Sheriff’s office was tightening its grip on the threshold, and Halward, like the gate he served, was being repurposed.
The rider waited, lips tight. "There will be audits," he added, as if the ink had not said enough.
Halward nodded once. "Naturally. You may tell the Sheriff his orders are received."
The rider turned without farewell and urged his horse back toward the city, leaving only a line of hoofprints and a slowly settling cloud of dust.
***
By midday, the fog had thinned into vapors clinging to low shrubs and hedges, and the mood around the gate shifted into one of slow endurance. The gate itself remained cracked open by its customary handspan, a gesture more symbolic than practical, but rich with ritual. Fewer travelers approached now—local merchants with familiar faces, a shepherd driving a small flock, a woman carrying bread wrapped in oilcloth for the market at Nottingham. Each one was stopped. Each one was recorded.
Wilmot, perched on the low bench beside the gate’s logbook, scribbled carefully in his uneven but improving hand. The boy had learned to blot his quill with care, and today had only smudged the ink once. He sat straighter now. He asked fewer questions. He was trying.
Oswin passed through occasionally, carrying a pail of water or brushing dust from the chapel’s outer steps. Though he said little, he watched the boy with narrowed eyes and nodded faintly at Halward each time he passed, as if measuring some private progress.
Late in the afternoon, the hunter returned.
He came walking, not riding, his boots muddy and his breath visible in the cooling air. His fox-pelt cloak clung damply to his shoulders, and from one hand he carried a brace of pheasants. Slung over the other shoulder was a limp hare, its fur matted with dew, its limbs swinging with each step.
"The Sheriff will eat well tonight," he said with the smugness of a man who knew the worth of his offering. "And you, Warden, are not forgotten."
Without hesitation, he tossed the hare. Halward caught it one-handed, weighing it with a practiced glance.
"Generosity is rare among those who profit from silence," Halward said evenly.
"Call it kinship," the hunter replied. "One watchman to another. We see what others miss."
Halward gave a dry nod. "Oswin! Wilmot! Supper’s come."
From the chapel door, Oswin emerged with a grunt, shielding his eyes from the westering sun. Wilmot followed quickly, wiping his hands on the hem of his tunic, face bright with expectation.
Halward held out the hare. "Skin it carefully. Split from the chest and mind the liver. Pale means poison, or sickness."
Wilmot took the carcass with two hands, serious as a scribe with a sealed writ. Oswin chuckled from behind.
"Nothing like roast hare to turn a dry chapel into holy ground."
They gathered near the chapel’s side wall, where Oswin knelt to stack dry pine and kindling into a modest cooking fire. Wilmot prepared the hare on a flat stone, his knife slow but deliberate, as Halward corrected his grip and offered quiet instruction. Smoke rose in slow spirals, scented with resin and ash, curling up toward the stone lintel like incense.
As dusk crept in from the forest’s edge, the labors of the day began to fade—not forgotten, but set aside. The air filled with the crisp sound of fat crackling over the fire and the soft murmur of shared speech. There was no laughter, but there was ease. In the simple work of preparing a meal, the three found a rhythm of belonging that no parchment could command and no seal could nullify.
For a little while, the gate stood as it always had. Quiet. Watching. And behind it, three souls who, though bound by duty, allowed themselves the comfort of warmth, food, and silent fellowship.
Evening crept down the flanks of Sherwood like ink seeping into parchment, staining the branches with shadow and bathing the road in amber hush. As the sun sank behind the high ridge, what light remained fell slanted and gold across the Woodgate, casting long, fractured silhouettes through the iron bars and bramble-tangled trees beyond. Halward stood at his post, as he had done countless times before, hand resting on the familiar iron brace, his senses tuned to the quiet rituals of closure—checking the gate’s teeth, feeling the tension in the hinges, watching the curve of the road vanish into the gloom.
He had just turned to finish the task when something moved.
A solitary figure emerged from the forest—not by the road, but from between the trees themselves, as if expelled by the breath of the woods. The man’s gait was uneven, his left leg dragging slightly. His cloak, once green, was now dulled by dust and torn at the hem. No blade hung at his side, no pack over his shoulder. He came with nothing but his breath and his bearing, and both were troubled. His movements carried a brittle tension, like that of a man who had run far and fast and could no longer tell whether he was still being pursued.
Halward did not speak. He simply waited, still as stone.
"I seek no quarrel," the man said when he was close enough for his voice to reach. It was rough and wind-worn. "Just a place away from the trees."
Halward measured him with a soldier’s eye. “You were followed?”
The man hesitated. "Not in the way of bandits or taxmen. There was no steel. No voice. Just a figure, shadowed, cloaked. I thought I saw green—but it moved too fast to see clearly. I called out. No answer. I turned, and it was gone. But the woods changed. It’s the quiet—it’s wrong. The birds stopped. The path behind me... vanished."
Wilmot appeared beside Halward, barefoot and curious, the cold not yet strong enough to deter his eagerness. Oswin followed, slower and silent, his walking stick striking each step with the rhythm of memory.
“You speak of the Hood?” Oswin asked, voice low as a prayer.
The man gave a half-shrug. “I don’t know what I saw. But it wore the shape of the old stories. Not a man, exactly. More like something that remembered being one.”
Halward’s gaze did not soften. “You’ll find no empty beds here. But the stable’s dry, and the goat won’t mind the company.”
The man nodded slowly. “That’s more than I hoped for.” His eyes lingered over his shoulder, scanning the trees one final time before following Halward past the gate.
***
The Woodgate’s stable had not housed horses in a decade. It had become a place of storage and quiet disuse—barrels of coarse salt and cracked tools piled against the walls, coils of rope gone stiff with age. Only Elspeth remained—a broad-bellied goat with mournful eyes and the quiet demeanor of a nun. She occupied the cleanest corner of the building and seemed to hold silent dominion over the space.
She greeted the man with a single disapproving bleat.
Halward returned minutes later with provisions: a small loaf, a wedge of hard cheese, and a flask of watered wine. He placed them on an overturned bucket beside the man’s makeshift bedding.
“You’ll be safe enough here tonight,” he said, and though his voice was quiet, the words landed like a judgment pronounced.
The man nodded and sat heavily, already unfastening his cloak.
Wilmot lingered near the door. "Do you think it was him? Robin Hood?"
The man looked up, eyes distant. “If it was, he’s not the hero your songs make him. There’s something old in those woods. Older than ballads.”
Halward placed a hand on Wilmot’s shoulder. “Back to the tower.”
***
The night passed without further sound. Rain came briefly before dawn, soft and cold, and it left behind a silver sheen on the iron of the gate. When Halward came to check the stable, Elspeth was alone.
The man was gone.
No gate had been opened. No latch disturbed. The straw was pressed where he’d lain, the bread consumed, the flask empty and placed neatly back on the bucket. No footprints marked the ground.
Only a single item remained—a small object tied to the post of the goat’s stall.
It was a token, woven from twine and charcoal-scarred wood. In its center, the outline of an arrow had been etched with something sharp. Primitive. Unmistakable.
Oswin examined it without lifting it. “A ward,” he murmured. “Folk magic. Not harmful. Not exactly protective, either. Something between.”
Halward said nothing. He picked it up, weighed it in his hand, and then slipped it into his cloak’s inner pocket, where it disappeared into wool and silence.
Wilmot, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, stood by the open doorway.
“Do you think he’ll come back?”
Halward looked out toward the woods, where the mist now rolled low like smoke from an unseen fire.
“I think,” he said quietly, “he was never meant to stay.”
He turned, and with a practiced motion, secured the Woodgate for the new day. The iron latch clicked home, and for a brief moment, it sounded like a seal pressed on parchment.