“No,” she said, “we won’t. I won’t. But first there is Much. I have a fortnight. He may have but a day.” She nodded at Robin. “Do we go to Nottingham now?”
He did not answer at once. She saw something in his eyes, some indefinable emotion. But it was gone too soon; she could not name it, nor study it to comprehend it.
“In the morning,” he answered. “For now we are going back to Ravenskeep—all of us,” he said firmly as the others raised brows. “Because for this night the sheriff will not trouble us. He has Much, and he believes he has Marian’s lands. He will do nothing before tomorrow, and likely not before afternoon.”
Will Scarlet was incredulous. “How can you know that?”
“Because, as Marian said, he will want as many witnesses as possible. And tomorrow is Market Day. It will be midday, I’d wager, when the square will be crowded. And so I think we may sleep the night safely beneath Ravenskeep’s roof.” He looked at Marian. “But not for the last time. That, I promise.”
She ventured it at last. “The word of an earl’s heir?”
He opened his mouth to answer, but shut it again. In a moment of incongruity, he seemed to recall what he wore. He glanced down at the fine summer-weight hosen, the silk-shot overtunic, the good leather boots. Saw himself as she did, as they saw him; and she watched him register also that a nobleman’s horse stood at his back, and the sword sheathed at the saddle was the blade of a knight who was also an earl’s son.
The mask shattered as the breath went out of him in a sharp exhalation. She saw now what was in his mind. How the truth entered his eyes, crowded on his tongue, and threatened to offer proof of who he truly was instead of whom she had feared.
She felt tears in her own. “No,” Marian said, knowing abruptly what he was thinking: to rid himself of what came of his father. “You would do better to go clothed than not; and the stallion will sire strong foals; and no man can afford to be rid of a good weapon when the Lord High Sheriff of Nottingham names him enemy.”
No one spoke. No one could, as they stared at one another.
It was Charlemagne who broke the moment, shattering the tension. The horse pushed his muzzle into the back of Robin’s neck, lipping at hair, and snorted wetly.
It was enough to allow Marian to smile, Robin to swear, and the others to laugh.
Shadows deepened. Time to go home, if only for the night. Marian led them there.
Twenty-Eight
Alan mourned his lost lute as they gathered in the hall to eat what Joan set before them, who waved Marian back down before she could rise to help. Will Scarlet suggested it was not a bad thing that Adam Bell and his men had relieved the minstrel of his instrument, as its absence meant they need not listen to his caterwauling; Alan affected elegant affrontedness. Yet there was no mistaking he truly did feel naked without his lute, nor that Tuck was not happy to lack his rosary. But it was Little John who banished thoughts and yearnings after lost things, when he reminded them what they lacked most was Much.
It silenced them all. Then the giant set back his bench and rose, saying he was for bed in the barn. Marian, startled, said he might have his place in the hall, but he shook his head and said he’d feel safer elsewhere, in a place affording a hasty escape. Scarlet considered that a sensible thing, and they departed together. Alan sighed again, clearly wishing to close the evening with music so he might ease his own apprehension, but got up without further comment and wandered out into the night. Tuck rather hastily finished his food and gulped down the last of his ale, then said he was bound for the oratory, where he had some discussing to do with God before they left for Nottingham to rescue Much.
And so they were gone, Will and John and Alan and Tuck, and Joan had shooed away the servants as well as herself, and Marian and Robin stared at one another across a table that resembled a battlefield of crockery, horn cups, pewter tankards, platters, and hard bread trenchers.
He was, in that moment, struck by the pallor of her face, the sharpness of bones beneath flesh thinned by tension. He rose, rounded the table, pulled her to her feet before she could frame an inquiry. He took her out of the hall, out of the courtyard, out to the stone wall beside the lane that edged the lower meadow where Little John’s sheep settled in for the night. The sun was gone and they had neither torches nor lamps, but the moon, nearly full, flooded the landscape with illumination.
Robin lifted her, sat her upon the moss-clad wall. Behind her stretched the meadows, and wood copses, and serpentines of stone walls and hedgerows. Behind him lay the gates opening onto the courtyard where torches blazed; where every window in the hall was limned in candlelight.
“This is yours,” he said. “All of it. And it shall remain so.”
Tears glittered in the light, but they did not fall, and she did not brush them away.
“I will do what I must,” he said. “This is yours.”
Marian was silent, gazing beyond him. He knew what she saw. Everything her father had built. All that was left of him, of her mother, her brother. Everything that was hers.
“One moment,” she murmured.
It puzzled him. “What?”
“You said: ‘one moment.’ And the world was unmade, turned upside down.”
He nodded, remembering.
“It is a plague,” she said, “of disaster. The king, dead; and now everything is gone wrong. Everything we had is threatened, everything we were is undone. We are like the world: unmade. And as men remake the world, they also remake us. Your father. The sheriff. They steal from us. Joy. Happiness. Contentment. The future.” Marian closed her eyes. “I feel as if I am grown old in a single day.”
He stood before her, felt the pressure of her knees against his body. He clasped his hands around her waist, slid them home to her hips. “If you are old, then I am ancient.”
That won a smile, albeit brief. She opened her eyes. “Older than ancient. You are dust in the tomb.”
“And your ghost wafting through it, ruffling it in your wake.”
But her mind had turned away from wordplay. “What did he say, Robin?”
He knew whom she meant. He had known it would come. He had not expected it to hurt quite so much.
He stared hard into her face, though he did not focus on it. “The Earl of Huntington has no son.”
She caught her breath on a quick inhalation. “Ah,” she said, “no.”
He did not repeat it. He did not deny it.
“So.” Her voice was uneven. “It is done.”
“Done,” he echoed, though he had not meant to.
“Oh, Jesu,” she said, and the tears fell at last. “I never wanted it. I wanted you, but I never wanted that. A son deserves a father—”
“That one?”
“Yes, even that one. He deserves to have a father of any ilk, to hope for a new beginning.”
“Or to witness an ending.” He sighed, staring past her now into the meadow. “We were naught but adversaries, ever. I could do no right in speech, in actions, in thought. I was hers entirely, though he might have blamed himself for that; and perhaps he did, when he realized he needed me after all.” That brought him up short; it seemed his father had not after all required him. “There was nothing between us but enmity. The road led here from the day I was born.”
Marian shook her head. “How he must hate me.”
He looked at her sharply.
“Think on it,” she said. “You say your mother stole you from him . . .”
“He gave me to her. He had my older brothers; there was no tolerance for a third son full of fey thoughts and fancies.”
She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “And now when he most needs you, I steal you.”
“You are,” he agreed, “an outlaw.” And then his heart closed up, and his throat. Outlaw was what he had been once, briefly, in the name of a king. Now what was he? That king was dead, and so was his past. So, perhaps, was his future.
Marian studied him for a long moment, marking the mask of h
is face, the burning dryness in his eyes. Then she parted her legs, leaned forward; set hands into his hair to cup his skull, and pulled him to her. With her upon the wall, their heads were on a level. She bent his against her shoulder, embraced it. Cradled him there, threading fingers through his hair. Murmured the sort of things a mother murmurs, or wife, wishing to ease a soul.
His soul was in need of ease. So, rather abruptly, was his body. She made it easy for him, with a knee against each hip. He moved close, caught her, lifted her from the wall with a thigh astride either hip. Hosen made it a simple matter to carry her this way, with no impedence of skirts.
Marian said, rather breathlessly, “Tuck is in the oratory, and the others are in the barn.”
“We have a room,” he answered, and proceeded to take her to it.
The earl shook his head at the servant. “No,” he repeated. “Not even if I am dying.”
“My lord.” Ralph’s voice was very calm. “My lord, I honor your decision; it was yours to make, and my place is not to dissuade you. But—”
Huntington cut him off, glaring. “Then why do you attempt to dissuade me now, in this?”
“My lord, give me leave to tell him, to send for him, should it be necessary. If you are dying, what does it matter?”
The earl lay propped against piled bolsters, sipping warm spiced wine as a bedtime posset. “Am I dying yet, Ralph?”
“No, my lord. Pray God you have years left. But you have been ill—”
“And I am old. Yes? Is that what you mean?”
“My lord, if you should take ill again, and it seems likely you may die—”
“I want him nowhere by me. Not now. Not when I’m dying. Not after I am dead.”
“He is all there is left, my lord.”
“I am alone, Ralph. Do you understand? There is no one.”
“If you are dying, my lord, would you not wish what remains of your family present?”
Huntington grimaced. “He was hers, never mine. Her I married. She was wife, not relative.”
Ralph sighed faintly. “I shall ask you again another day.”
“Another year,” the earl said belligerently. “Next year, when Arthur of Brittany becomes Arthur of England, and I can die knowing my work is not in vain. Ask me then, Ralph. But not before.”
The steward bowed. “Good night, my lord.”
Huntington scowled as the door was pulled to, the latch set. Then he drank off the remains of the posset, set the cup beside the bed, and slumped back against the bolsters to stare dry-eyed into the shadows.
One wife. Two sons. Dead. A third son as good as.
He was alone in the world. But it was a world he had had the making of, and he would not complain.
This union had been more urgent than most, if no less satisfying; indeed it was oddly more so, as if they sealed themselves to one another not as who they had been, but as what they had become: a woman in danger of losing her home; a man who had, in his pernicious principles, been stripped of everything. There was no knowledge in it of anything but that they had one another, that no one in the world might take that from them. It had provided ease for them both despite the storm that swept them up, a peace after turbulence that gave him sleep he might otherwise have lost in fretting; that gave her time to realize that for all she would fight for Ravenskeep even to the death, her home was with Robin. Wherever it might be.
The bed was narrow and sagged a bit in the middle, its frame weakened further by the violence visited upon it by the sheriff ’s soldiers but two days before. It crossed her mind, most incongruously, that the bed might actually collapse; but Robin, hearing that murmured into his ear in the midst of something other than discussion, merely laughed and suggested they could break it well enough even with no soldiers involved.
She had chided him in mock asperity for his vulgarity, then forgot the bed altogether.
Now she lay close, body set against the lean, warm length of him as he lay on his side. Her left arm was trapped beneath his neck, but she didn’t care. The other she employed to sweep the hand from his shoulder to hip, though she did not touch him, merely outlined in the air the jut of shoulder, the hollow of the waist, the slight curve of a male hip. She had found it somewhat annoying to divest herself of hosen in place of skirts, since she had applied any number of strangenesses to hold the hosen up and the tunic down; he had found it most entertaining to merely remove her belt, unknot the thongs, and let the hosen drop. She was far more accustomed to doing that to him than to herself, but in the end clothing had been evenly dispersed. His lay somewhere, hers were elsewhere.
All unexpectedly her thoughts found and centered upon a certain thing, stopped there to linger, to taste like a butterfly the nectar of her mind. But this was bittersweet, unpalatable; no blossoms would come of it.
He stirred, seemingly aware of her not-touch, or perhaps attuned to the tension that had crept back into her heart. “What is it?”
His voice was not as sleepy as expected. Marian dropped her hand to his hip, took security in the touch. “I was wishing . . . wishing a thing with all that is in me to wish.”
His head shifted slightly, moving upon her trapped arm. He waited.
“Wishing,” she confessed, “that I could give you children.”
He was very still. And then he turned, altering his posture to face her. They were close, too close for clarity of feature even if there was light beyond the moon sliding through cracks in the wall, but she could feel him, smell him, sense his heart.
He gathered her close, held her, set lips into her hair. “Marry me.”
She stiffened, even in his arms.
And again, in a whisper, “Marry me.”
She thought of all the arguments she could use, the disparagements of his choice, of his reasons. But he had stood firm before his father, paid that price, and she could no more dishonor him for that than she could conjure a child.
Overwhelmed, she was mute. She could find no words.
It alarmed him. She felt him tense, felt him tighten his embrace. “Marian—?”
“I will,” she blurted, realizing he might misconstrue her silence; she had refused him more than once when he had asked before. “Oh, I will . . . as many times as you like!”
His breath, as he expelled it on a rush, warmed her ear. “Praise God.” And in English, not Arabic.
She laughed. But, “Much first,” she said. “And this question of the taxes must be settled.”
“Of course.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “May Day?”
“Below in the hall,” he agreed, “with feasting in the courtyard. We shall have to find Alan another lute; what would a wedding be without music?”
“So long as he promises not to sing those horrible verses he made up about us both.”
Robin laughed. “I shall make him promise it.”
Marian, of a sudden completely overcome with an exaltation and exhilaration she could not possibly describe, wrapped herself around him—heart, soul, spirit, and limbs—and clung. For the first time in days the unmade world and its perilous future seemed not so daunting.
And these tears were all for joy.
William deLacey, on the verge of sleep, was visited by an idea so sudden and altogether entertaining that it jolted him back into complete wakefulness. In his head he heard the click-click-click! of a plan coming together, and grinned into the darkness. As the last piece locked into place, he laughed aloud in sheer jubilation.
He tore back the covers, leaned over to the chest beside his bed, and took from its lid the striker and flint. By touch he employed them; heard the scrape, saw the spark, smelled the pungent tang. In a moment the spark set the candle wick aflame. Parchment lay there beside it, and a quill, and an ink pot. He had learned that often his best inspiration came as he fell asleep; had also learned not to begrudge the lost sleep, because invariably the idea that interrupted it proved intensely satisfying.
He swung his legs over the edge and sat the
re, drawing parchment to him even as he uncapped the ink. When the quill was properly weighted, he began to write in haste, smiling all the while.
When he was done, he read what he’d written, thought it through again, added a final line, then signed it with a flourish so exuberant the feather passed through the candle flame and caught fire. DeLacey swore, dropped the quill to the floor, then leaped out of bed to make certain the burning feather would not set his coverlet afire. Satisfied it was put out at last, if burned and curled into a malodorous stump, he folded the parchment, sealed it closed, then got back into bed. The stench of crisped quill annoyed him, but as he thought again on his plan irritation faded.
Still smiling, he blew out the candle, slid beneath the covers, and went to sleep at once.
He lay very still beside her, aware of every inch of her body. How the skin met his, how the curves fit his own, how the hair, come loose of its braid, wound itself around him as if to make certain he would not leave. But he had no intention of it. He was where he most wanted to be.
She slept deeply, spent at last of labors both physical and emotional, unaware that he was awake. He did not disturb her. He merely lay there, content. There were tasks that lay ahead—Much’s rescue, the sorting out of the taxes—but in this moment, having settled at last the question of whether they would marry or continue to live in sin, such tasks were distant. This time she had said yes. This time she had agreed.
It was astonishing how so simple a thing could kindle such happiness. And ironic, he felt, that now, when she assented, he could offer her nothing at all. Nothing but himself.
With Marian beside him he lay in the darkness, staring at the roof, and swore then that he if he could offer her nothing of his own, he would do whatever was necessary to see that what was already hers remained so. Regardless of such men as earls and sheriffs. Even such men as kings.
Twenty-Nine
They gathered in the courtyard, longbows at hand and quivers at their belts, save for Tuck, who bore neither. Marian was clad again in her borrowed men’s clothing, hair braided tightly and stuffed down the back of her tunic, hidden beneath the hooded capelet. She agreed with Robin that she did not make an overly convincing boy, but she believed it possible to draw no attention: a bit of dirt smeared on her face to alter the lines even while hooded; eyes kept mostly downcast; nails pared back nearly to the quick and dirt worked into the cuticles; strides lengthened and posture roughened; a stain upon her chin that mimicked a blemish and drew the eye away from the rest of her face.
Lady of Sherwood Page 28
