despite his best efforts to compensate for his youth. Marian strode forward, ignoring him as most of the visiting nobility did, and he made no move to stop her. They were all so busy looking for a masked man in a green cloak, and so besieged by unfamiliar visitors, that Marian had more freedom than ever.
She was halfway down the hall when a voice called from the stairwell behind her, “Here—halt a minute, your Lordship.”
Marian pretended she hadn’t heard the guard’s request and hurried her steps.
“Wait—you dropped your . . . uh . . .”
Marian risked a glance over her shoulder and saw that the guard had stooped to retrieve something from the floor. It was no more than a scrap of fabric, but as soon as she saw it, Marian’s heart seized.
The mask.
She’d tucked it inside her tunic, but it must have worked its way free as she walked.
The guard was examining it, poking his gloved fingers through the eyeholes. He looked up, and his eyes met Marian’s in the same instant that she realized turning over her shoulder had pushed the hood back far enough to show her features.
The moment stretched out, punctuated by the distant, surly crow of a cockerel in the town, protesting the night. The guard was slack-jawed, wispy beard quivering, and Marian’s mind had gone blank. The mask, her identity . . . she needed an explanation, some excuse that would satisfy the guard. Some way out . . .
The guard’s eyes dropped, and with a confused oath, he reached for his sword. Marian saw that she’d shifted her grip on her bow, and that she held it ready at her side, not tucked out of sight below her cloak.
The sword scraped against its sheath. Marian moved without thought. Her fingertips searched the coded fletching in the quiver at her hip and found the twist of cord that meant a sharp, mail-piercing tip. The arrow found its way to the string, and she lifted the bow. Her hand was steady, her breath still. And the arrow whispered its familiar quiet song as it flew through the air.
The guard’s sword hit the floor with an ear-shattering clang of metal on stone. The force of the arrow’s impact had knocked him back against the wall, and he stayed leaning there, mouth open. He stared in open confusion down at his chest, where his chain mail had sprouted an arrow shaft and ivory fletching. His beard trembled. He did not look back at Marian but tried to take a step on quivering legs—and when they gave way, he moaned as he slumped toward the ground.
Marian could not move. She still held the bow at length, feet still braced, fingers still half curled by her cheek where they’d let fly the arrow. She’d brushed her hood with her arm and it had fallen the rest of the way down, and she stood exposed until a voice called out from the stairs. Someone had heard the sword hit the floor, or the guard’s cry, or the thud of his body on the stone.
Marian wrenched herself out of stillness and leaned against the wall, reeling and dizzy, before summoning the will to make it the rest of the way to her door as booted feet came pounding up the stairs at the end of the hall.
The bow clattered to the floor once she’d shut the door behind her, and Marian fell back against it, every nerve screaming.
It was not a mortal injury. It had struck nearer the shoulder than the heart. He could live. Flesh wounds could bleed like a death blow. And his fellow guards had been moments away. They’d stop the bleeding. Remove the arrow. Send for a physician.
He’d be fine.
Marian drew a breath, and it made her retch. She doubled over, too stricken to reach the chamber pot, and vomited in the corner, stomach heaving long after it had emptied itself. The sound of bile splattering the floor sounded, in her ringing ears, exactly like the clang of metal on stone.
Marian had missed. She hadn’t been aiming for his shoulder. She’d been aiming for his heart.
She’d been trying to kill him.
THIRTY
“HE SAW ME.” MARIAN sat, limp, as disconnected from her own body as she’d been the moment Gisborne had told her, all those weeks ago, that Robin was dead.
“I know, my Lady, I know.” Elena was bundling soiled rags into a sack, pouring fresh water over the stone where Marian had thrown up, and wiping it a