by Lucy Tempest
He only propped up my body, gently resting my back against his chest, stroking my dark hair off my face as he rasped, “I told you that you could tell me anything. Why didn’t you just tell me? But it doesn’t matter. I’m here now, so come back. You have to come back to me, Fairuza. You have to.”
I couldn’t say anything. Could no longer breathe.
I could only stare at him, learning a new level of helplessness as silence permeated the tower, the only sounds his harsh breathing, the only motion his hand stroking my cheek. My body’s chest was death still.
If I were emotionally detached from this scene, I’d call it poetic, poignant even. A moment to frame in plays or paintings, the tragic hero and his lost love.
But we were never together to be torn apart. We weren’t Sweet William and Princess Marguerite. Those two, regardless of how their story ended, had gotten time to be together. To be in love. What we’d never been, and would never be. It was all too late.
“Don’t tell me I’m too late,” he finally choked, as if answering me. “I just found you, and it felt like you should have been with me all along. We have so much time to make up for. I never got to tell you about my adventures, or hear your music.” He pressed his forehead against mine, cupping my jaw in his calloused hand as the tears escaping his closed eyes flowed down his downturned face and onto my own. “Please, come back. I don’t care if you remain a ghost, or even a part of one, and I’m the only one who sees you, and you haunt me for the rest of my days. I just want you back!”
“Please go!” I found my voice at last, unable to withstand his pain as he cradled my lifeless body. “Forget about me, marry Marian, move on with your life. Don’t do this to yourself.”
“He can’t hear you,” said the Horned God somberly. “This is the River of Memory, and what you’re seeing now are events that will be recorded in the waves of eternity. You couldn’t interfere even if you wanted to.”
“Then why are you showing me this? Why?” I cried, torn between resignation towards my fate, and fury for Robin’s suffering.
“To give you closure before you move on to your afterlife, so you don’t become a true ghost, clinging to the upper world by the false hope that you could still be saved.” He was too close to me now, his hand outstretched. “It’s time for you both to move on.”
But I couldn’t move on until I was sure Robin had left the castle safely, to live his life the way he deserved to.
Instead, he bent to my lips, formed the words, “I love you,” against them, and pressed them with his own.
But nothing happened.
A burst of agony razed through me as I watched him pull back, gaze fixed on my limp form in his arms, before he let out an anguished cry.
He shook me, begging and pleading with me, with the Fates, with all the gods he knew by name.
“Fairuza, wake up. I mean it. I meant every word I ever said to you. I love you. I love you!”
But I still wasn’t pulled out of this pit of desperation and back into my body. Like the Horned God had said, it was too late.
All I could do was watch in futile torment as Robin held me tighter against him like it would kill him to let me go.
This was all I had ever wanted from him, and never thought I could have. His love.
Now I had it, I didn’t want it. Not like this.
Not like this.
I never wanted him to love me and suffer my loss for the rest of his life.
As if he could hear my anguished regret, his tears ran faster, drenching my cold, still face. “You showed me a new way to live, Fairuza, but I don’t want to go down that new path without you. I don’t want that future, or any at all, if you’re not in it. I can’t live without you now, and I won’t let you go.” Then he suddenly looked up, as if to the heavens, and shouted in defiance, “I won’t!”
I didn’t want him to. And I didn’t want to let him go, either. I was ready to become a true ghost, to be a welcome haunting following him through his adventures and achievements.
But I couldn’t. That would only trap him forever, would never give him the chance to let me go. To live his life. To ever find any measure of peace or happiness.
I had to move on, like the Horned God said, so he could.
Tearing my eyes away from the scene, my most ecstatic dream and most terrible nightmare come true, I trudged out of the river, my head hung low with desolation and defeat.
My soul bleeding out of me, I reached out to take Death’s outstretched hand, to let him lead me deeper into his domain, and away from the life I had never lived. The love I’d never had, and had just lost.
“What happens now?” I whispered. “Do I go to paradise or am I bound for–for…?”
Death didn’t answer. But when my fingertips brushed his palm, my chest locked up, and I felt like a rug had been pulled out from under me.
I fell back and down, down, down into an endless abyss.
I fell forever.
Then suddenly, a searing light flooded my eyes, making them burn.
Gasping like I had been underwater, lungs burning for air, tears flooded my eyes as they acclimated to the brightness, and…
A pair of tear-filled, forest-green eyes were staring down at me.
Was this the torment I had in store for me throughout my afterlife? Always seeing him and longing for him?
But that would also be my idea of paradise. If only I didn’t see him like I had in those last moments, anguished, desperate.
But since this was in my mind, I could tell this imaginary version of him to be happy.
“Robin,” I rasped, throat parched, voice insubstantial. “Robin, I…”
“You’re alive!”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Alive.
Alive.
Alive.
Robin said that word, again and again.
Robin who didn’t feel like a figment of my imagination at all. Who felt solid and warm and wonderful as he pulled me into a desperate embrace, one that wouldn’t end. One I was too boneless to return.
I just let my too-heavy head flop onto his shoulder, trying to believe him, to remember how to breathe real air, how to not jump at feeling real heartbeats within my chest. How to have flesh and bone again.
I melted into him and absorbed all the intensity of my regained senses. All of them focused on him as he encompassed me, his body trembling, his voice breaking over the same word again, and again. Alive.
“I’m—alive?” I finally whispered, thoughts sluggish with disbelief, still processing where I was, who I was, and what I was. Alive. “You saved me?”
He pulled back, hands shaking as he gripped my arms to hold me up so I could witness his elated, tear-stained face crumple. Then a barrage of questions assailed me, each one more agitated than the last.
“Why didn’t you tell me I was the one you needed? Don’t you know how much I wished I could be? I couldn’t breathe most of the time with how much I wanted to be! But I thought I could never be, had to run around looking for another man to save you! Why did I have to work it out myself from all your cryptic, half-spoken statements? Do you have any idea what I felt after you disappeared again, and as I tore back here, hoping I was right, but fearing I could be too late anyway? I could have been! If I had arrived any later, you could have died!”
Stunned by how upset he was, jubilation still seeped through me at his every nuance and word. I raised my hand and did something I’d thought I never would.
I touched his cheek.
I couldn’t believe that after what felt like a forever of yearning, of being intangible and untouchable, I could touch him.
He was real, as was I.
This wasn’t a dying dream, but a miraculous revival.
“I thought…I thought…”
His eyes searched mine feverishly. “Yes?”
I shook my head, body and mind still rousing from my extended sleep slowly. “What about Marian?”
He frowned. “What about her?�
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“You love her, you went to Faerie to save her, and you finally found her.”
“Is that why you didn’t tell me?” he exclaimed.
I ducked my head. “It is.”
He gawked at me. “That’s why you almost signed your own death warrant? Because you were too stubborn to ask me how I felt? After all we’ve been through, you’re still making grand assumptions!”
“But you said—you told me…”
“Told you what? I never said I loved her.”
“Leander told me you were promised to each other,” I whispered, still feeling the pain of his unavailability, as both Reynard and Robin.
“There was talk of that, when we were very young. But we grew up, and I became Robin Hood, and we became companions who hunted and fought together. We never corrected anyone’s assumptions, because it helped us both avoid unwanted attention. As for going to Faerie after her, have you met me? I risk my life for strangers. She’s my friend, and Will is my brother-in-arms, and I would have done anything to get her back, when we thought she’s been kidnapped.”
Still feeling like a rag doll, I slipped off his lap and faced him urgently. “She might not have been kidnapped, but something as horrifying as the werewolf you saved me from that first night bit her, and she will need all the help she can get finding him. But you left her to come after me. You have to go back for her right now!”
He only shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
I gaped at him. “Why? If you’re worried I’ll sleep again, curses don’t work that way.”
He gave a weary exhalation. “I can’t go after her, and neither can Will, because she said if we try to interfere, she’d shoot us both, and I had to respect her wishes—and arrows.” As I exclaimed, he raised his hands. “Seriously, she said it’s a magical infection, something like your curse, that demands a specific method of reversing it. The infected must best and kill the one who infected them themselves, or it won’t work. That’s why the Wild Hunt can only point her the werewolf’s way. She has to hunt and kill it all on her own.”
Disbelief and turmoil fogged my mind, encompassing everything from my encounter with Death, to watching Robin return for me, to confessing his love, to waking up—now this.
A tight ache spread from my haunches to the base of my skull, the pain of prolonged immobility mixing with dread. “Will–will she be okay?”
Robin exhaled. “I have to believe she will be. She’s an incredible fighter, and she’s ready for it now.” He gathered my swaying body in his arms again. “She told us we needed to go home and live our lives at last, now the war is over. She promised she’d join us when she was done killing her werewolf.”
We remained like this for a long while, just clinging to each other, feeling each other, and breathing.
He finally inhaled deeply. “She was right, like you have always been. It’s about time I start living my life for me, too. I’ll find a more efficient way of helping people, one that doesn’t stretch me thinner than my bowstring.”
“Or your violin strings,” I said, the enormity of what was happening sinking through me in degrees. “Think you still remember how to play?”
“I’ll be quite rusty, but you can be the judge of that.”
“I feel like you’ll surprise me, you always do.”
“You surprise me as well, in both heart-wrenching and delightful ways.” He pushed my hair behind my ear, eyes slowly traveling over my face. “I feel like I’ve met different versions of you, yet each felt as real as this one.”
“They were all real. I was only ever myself, completely, with you. But it still feels like the first time we’re really seeing each other, with no masks, hoods, apparitions, curses, or hidden identities.”
“Not exactly in that last bit, but let me fix that.” He gently let me go and stood up, bowing deeply before me. “Reynard Loxley II, son of Sir Lyall, the late, disgraced Earl of Sherwood, at your service, Your Highness. Friends call me Robin.” He took my hand, pressed a lingering kiss on its back. “It’s an honor and a pleasure to finally meet you in the flesh.”
Giggling, I delighted in the touch of his lips, at how tough and big and real his hand felt in mine. “Fairuza Silverthorn, Princess of Arbore, and the honor and pleasure are definitely all mine.”
“Now that introductions are out of the way, we really need to get out of here.” Still bending over me, he offered me his arm with the most exquisite smile. “I’d like to get you back home before it gets dark.”
Home. I wondered how long I’d been gone, and if Leander was still searching for that demigod. Or had he and everyone given me up for dead, or as good as, by now?
Linking my arm with his, he helped me onto unsteady feet, and supported me out of the room that had witnessed my worst times, but also my most significant and happiest moments so far, both with him.
Through our descent from the tower, I felt the dark magic receding from my body, and I regained my strength and mobility, enough to steady myself by the time we reached the ground floor.
I was starting to worry if the briar field was still there, and how I’d clear it with Robin, when he pulled open the front door to reveal a clear view.
My curse, and all its amendments and counter-reinforcements, was broken.
Despite being literal, living proof of that fact, after a lifetime with its perpetual shadow darkening my every thought and cell, I couldn’t fully believe it yet.
Amabel galloped over to us, whinnying excitedly. I held out my arms, joyful tears springing from my eyes again as I wrapped my arms around her neck, a true hug this time.
“You are the best, bravest girl, Mabily,” I sobbed to her as I stroked her long powerful neck. “I don’t know what I would have done without you, in Faerie, and all my life. And from now on, there will be no more sneaking out to you when I can. Now it’s open fields and riding and playing—and apples and sugar, every day!”
She snorted and shimmied, seemingly delighted with my promise. I pulled back to rain kisses on her face.
“What about me?” Robin joined me in showering Amabel with affection, making her ears wiggle happily, his warm eyes melting indulgence over me. “Don’t I get at least one kiss for a job well done?”
There was the opening I needed to broach the insecurities that still niggled at me. “And now it is done, where do we go from here?”
“To your family, you know that.”
“I meant us.” I licked my parched lips. “You said you loved me, and you meant it, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
“I do mean it, with everything in me.” He suddenly frowned. “But I understand if you don’t feel the same.”
I pounced on him, grabbing his arms, still reeling at the feel of him. “Of course I do! Why would you think I don’t?”
He waved his hand around his head. “I’m the furthest thing from what you wanted, or what your parents would approve of. I’m half-fey, I lost my father’s title and lands, I’m a wanted man—the worst fit for even a lady, let alone a princess.” His mouth quirked in a resigned smirk. “The second they have you back, they’ll thank me, hopefully not arrest me, and send me on my way with a reward, then arrange for you to marry some prince or king.”
“They won’t. If they insist, I won’t be a princess anymore. Everything we’ve been through together made me realize who I am and what I want. I’m not meant to be a king’s wife or mother. I want to be more than that, and you want to be more than a vigilante. And I want us to be what we want to be, together.” I placed a trembling hand on his stubbled cheek, stomach in knots. “So are you going to stay with me, or will you vanish into the night again?”
He leaned into my touch with a squeeze of his eyes and a quiet groan. “I’ll stay as long as you want me to. If it’s for the rest of my life, then that’s what I’ll do.” Before I could jump with joy to give him that kiss he’d asked for, he added, “Besides, I miss spending time with your brother. And if I’m not arrested, I could talk to your fathe
r about a few things regarding the kingdom on a civilian level. I won’t make any promises about respecting Prince Jonquil, though. I’d sooner make him bow to me.”
“How would you make a prince bow to you?”
“Easy, with an arrow in his knee.”
Painful as that sounded, I couldn’t help laughing at how blunt he was about it. But then, he was the only one who could make me laugh this way. Everything he did made me feel—free.
And now I truly was. After a lifetime of having an executioner’s axe hanging over my neck, and the shackles of my status around it, they’d both been lifted.
As for all the obstacles that still lay ahead of me, of us, they didn’t matter. We’d just surmount them together.
I reached out to brush a sandy curl off his forehead as I’d been longing to since I’d first seen his face. “Try not to do that with any witnesses around. I can’t have you locked away for treason before our marriage can offer you immunity.”
His eyebrows shot up, his expression at once stunned, elated and mischievous. “Are you proposing to me?”
“Do you accept my proposal?” I cupped his face with both hands, reveling in my return to my body, our closeness, and the possibility of all that I had thought unreachable before.
Robin put his hands over mine, palms rough and lined with bowstring scars. “I’ll accept whatever ensures that I’ll never find you gone ever again. I’ve lost too much in life and I survived. But I’d rather die than lose you.”
My tears ran free as I wiped at one that escaped his vivid eyes, smearing it over an enchanting cluster of freckles. Then I reached up to trace the pointed tip of his ear, a shuddering breath escaping me as he closed his eyes in relief at my touch. What I had once thought features worth disdain and mistrust, had become most fascinating and beloved, only because they were parts of him.
“I’d rather die than be without you, too,” I said, rising on my toes to return his life-saving kiss.
Long have I dreamt of this moment, wondering whether it would be like the ballads and books describe. All the elements were there, the brave warrior on the white horse had ridden in the nick of time to the tower, and saved the slumbering princess with true love’s kiss.
