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the tips of the trees shudder. Hot needles were stabbing at the back of his neck. His heart raced. The dread wave was heading for the forest edge, snaking ever closer to Wodenhurst …
    Thankfully the clouds were spreading thicker and were beginning to defeat the moonlight, the valley fading to black. Robin lost track of the movement through the trees.
    He became aware that Marian was watching him intently.
    ‘What happened to your parents?’ she said. ‘Are they dead?’
    He shook his head.
    ‘Where are they then?’
    He didn’t answer. He stared at the phantom flickering of the balefires.
    ‘Are they coming back?’ Marian said.
    He nodded.
    Marian pinched her lower lip. ‘And when they do …’ she said, ‘what will happen then? Where will you live?’
    He looked at her. ‘With them, of course. With my parents and Thane and Hal. In our house, at the top of Herne Hill.’
    Marian turned her back and went further along the parapet. In Summerswood two owls
hoo-hooed
back and forth.
    After a while, Robin said: ‘You can come too. Come and live with us, in our house.’
    Marian turned and glowered. ‘To grub in the dirt with the swineherds? I’d rather be dead. I’ll stay right here and I’ll be glad, a castle of my own, and if you ever try to come back you’ll get rocks on your head, and if you’re going why don’t you go now then, leave and never come back, I’ll be fine on my own.’
    She fell quiet, and she was scowling, and Robin found himself growing angry.
    ‘Anyway, why do you care?’ he said. ‘Soon you’ll go running to Mistress Bawg, and your servants and cooks.’
    ‘I won’t!’
    ‘That’s what you said before. You said you wouldn’t go back, but you did.’
    ‘That was different. A duchess – which is practically a princess – cannot very well live in the woods, with the toads. Now we have a home of our own. Mother hated that house and everyone in it and so do I and I’m never going back there, no matter what, even if …’ She fell silent and looked up, blinking. She held out both palms. ‘Robin, I think … yes, look, it’s snowing!’
    She came back to him. She opened one side of his cloak and burrowed inside. The snow drifted, then swirled, then pelted them in great gusting waves. Marian squealed and darted for shelter, and the pair of them scrambled through the trap door, pulling it closed.
    Robin stoked the fire and they sat near it, wrapped in blankets. Marian’s scowl had disappeared and she was grinning as they listened to the snowstorm howl outside. Very faintly now they could hear the villagers, still a-ganging at the forest edge.
    ‘It won’t make any difference, will it?’ Marian said. ‘They’ll keep at it, until first light?’
    Robin nodded.
    ‘I wouldn’t like to be them,’ Marian said.
    Robin fed the fire and the flames crackled. The timbers of the tower creaked and groaned, stretching themselves between the stones, the way they always did when it was cold outside and warm within.
    Marian sat up straight and turned to him. ‘If you don’t go back to the village,’ she said, ‘I won’t go back to the house. Agreed?’
    Robin looked at her and nodded.
    ‘That means,’ she said, ‘if I never leave you, you’ll never leave me. Promise?’
    He nodded again. And what happened next came as a shock to them both. Before he realized he was doing it, without even really meaning to, Robin found he was leaning across and quickly kissing Marian on the cheek.
    She shrieked and twisted away. ‘No, no, no! You must
never
touch another person with your lips. It brings down the worst of all possible luck. My mother told me that. You have to kiss properly, like this.’ She put two fingers to her lips, then placed the same fingers to Robin’s forehead, between his eyes. ‘Now you … Robin, I said “now you”.’
    Robin’s face was burning and he couldn’t meet her gaze. He put two fingers to his lips and hurriedly brushed them across her