The forest had always been his way of getting home, since he'd been a small boy. His father had taught him that. How to read the trees, and the ground, and the sky, and find his way home again. So when he'd woken, disoriented and in a room he didn't recognise, his first instinct had been to get outside. And when he'd seen the trees in the distance, he'd run. Get to the trees, find his way home. That was his plan. But it hadn't taken long for him to realise this was far from Sherwood. Even before he'd talked to people over that device with the letters.
After twenty minutes or so of walking he came across the tree house, and with no better ideas, he climbed up and in to the small wooden structure. There he at least felt a bit safer and out of sight, to give him a chance to really talk to people and find out what he could. His head was swimming with possibilities of what might be going on. Talk of adults looking after everyone baffled him. As did the concept of a servant being strange. Robin was a nine year old who less than a year past had had the responsibilities of an adult thrust upon him, with the death of his father. He was the Lord of a village now. Acting like a child was a rare treat any more.
It was maybe a few hours later that he heard someone approaching the tree. He dropped the phone he'd been holding and drew the dagger hanging from the belt at his side. He sat up straighter when a woman called his name. The voice was familiar, though he couldn't quite place it. But then she addressed him by his title, and he froze. That sounded like Lady Katherine. He could have sworn it was her. She often called him that when she was teasing, when he came to visit her and little Marian. But how could she be here?
Turning and shifting on to his knees, he stuck his head up briefly to peer just over the edge of the small square hole that passed for a window. He wasn't there for long, just long enough for whoever was watching to see a flash of dark brown hair. The colour it had been before age and the bleaching sun in the desert had lightened it.
Closing his eyes for a moment, Robin pulled together his courage. In a voice filled with all the authority his father had always been able to muster, he spoke down to the woman, knowing deep down it couldn't be who he had thought.