hand over his face again, fingers kneading roughly at his cheeks and swiping across his jaw, trying to mold them into shape like clay. His eyes filled again. “I can’t protect you.”
Marian could not breathe. It was not a warning, nor an apology—his eyes held many things, but what she saw most clearly, what she could not help but see, was pain. Accusation. Betrayal. Not because she’d lied, not because she’d jeopardized their lands and titles, not even because she’d risked her safety. But because she’d stripped from him something so precious he might not survive its loss.
Marian would have said, I need no one’s protection. She would have said she could take care of herself. She would have leaped to her feet and asked if she had not just proven herself the best archer in the land, if she had not outwitted the Sheriff’s best men at every step and gained the love and loyalty of the people. She would have cried out that she had not needed his protection for years, and that she could stand on her own without shame or fear.
And instead her heart broke, and she wept, and she dropped to the floor so she could reach for her father and press her tear-streaked face to the hands that rested at his knees. “I know,” she choked out. “I’m sorry.”
For a moment, he didn’t respond. His hands lay still beneath her cheek, and his knee was hard and unyielding, and his breath became shallow and tight, and remote. Then he bent low and left his own chair so he could draw her into his arms. He laid his cheek against her hair and tucked her under his chin as he’d done when she was small, and he would lift her up to carry her here or there. He could not do so anymore, had not been able to for years, but crumpled on the floor she was a child again, and he held her thus.
He asked her nothing else. He didn’t ask how she’d done it or why. He didn’t ask who else knew. He didn’t ask her whether there were others who followed her, or where she kept her disguise. He did not even ask her to stop being Robin Hood.
Later, when their tears were spent, Marian lay curled up on her side, her back to the glowing embers of the dead fire, head against her father’s side. He stroked her hair in that clumsy and familiar way, the way of someone who doesn’t understand how to stroke someone’s hair but knows it brings comfort.
He said softly, “We’ll go home tomorrow. We won’t linger for Gisborne. We’ll leave tomorrow and be home before dark.”
The light was cold and pale when Elena woke her. Marian’s father stood in the doorway, grim-faced, so Marian could not ask about Alan, but Elena’s eyes glowed. Marian’s father sent Elena with Marian’s belongings down to the stables, so that when Marian stood ready to mount, she’d had no time to tell her maid what her father knew.
Midge held Jonquille’s reins, and Marian looked from him to her maid to her father—they all knew her secret, and yet she was as bound by it as ever, for they could not know of each other’s involvement. Her mind was silent, and the pain of that after so long with Robin in her thoughts was like a strangling cloud.
So it was a jolt nearly like that of relief when a familiar, detestable voice called her name.
“Sir Guy,” Marian said warmly, turning to greet him with a smile.
He did not return her smile, approaching with swift, long strides, lips pinched with the pain of his bad leg. “I am glad to have reached you before you departed.”
“We hope to be in Edwinstowe well before dark.” Then Marian added, “I would have come to bid you farewell, but the hour is so early—”
Gisborne brushed her apology aside. “I am sorry to ruin your plans, my Lady.”
Marian did not risk turning her head, but she sensed her father behind her, tense. “Sir Guy?”
Gisborne’s face was grimmer than her father’s had been. “I cannot let you leave Nottingham.”
THIRTY-FIVE
HER FATHER PACED BEFORE the fire, wholly abandoning manners and caution, agitation radiating from him as tangibly as the heat from the hearth. “I forbid it,” he blurted, furious.
Gisborne’s face was impassive. As if in purposeful contrast, he stood motionless, hands folded behind his back, head bowed. He didn’t speak, perhaps sensing that Marian’s father required no prompting to