registered the smells around her: the clear-eye sage, the stables on the other side of the house, old stone and the scraps of greenery clinging to it, the worn leather of the pack she’d unearthed from Robin’s wardrobe.
With her eyes closed, she could almost feel the gentle curve of the bow in her palm, see the clarity of the target ahead. Her shoulders drew back as she breathed again, and on the exhale she let go of the tension in her frame. In her mind’s eye she saw the arrow fly, and with it went her fear, vanishing into the fog of her imagination.
The sun was drying the sweat on her brow, and as Marian took another experimental breath, a part of her felt like laughing, shaky with relief.
Go back inside, she told herself, stern. But her body wouldn’t move. After all, she’d climbed this way before. True, she usually crept out of Robin’s house by safer means, but every now and then they lost track of time and she’d had to sneak out of his old bedroom, which was only a few windows down from where she crouched now. They’d never lain together, both too conscious of the laws of God and man, both too sure it would only be a matter of time before they were properly wed. But that wouldn’t stop the ruin of Marian’s reputation were she to be seen creeping from his house after dark.
Marian started the climb down, finding after only moments that she felt as exhausted as if she’d been climbing from a tower and not the second floor. Her terror could not have lasted more than a few minutes, but it felt as though she’d been toiling for hours. When she reached the ground, she landed with a thud and a much harder jarring of her bones than she’d intended. She could barely summon the breath to whistle for Jonquille. By the time the horse trotted up with half a dandelion plant and its dirt-covered roots still hanging from her lips, Marian had managed to find her feet again.
FOUR
IT WASN’T UNTIL MARIAN handed her cloak to her father’s steward that she remembered her bodice, remembered how disheveled she must appear—but her father was there an instant later, before she had time to pull herself together again. He blinked at her, eyebrows drawing together in concern. He had never been one to lecture her—most of Marian’s knowledge of the expectations placed on her by birth and by betrothal had come from other ladies her age. Her mother, who rarely lectured but was the perfect model of a lady to the public, had died when Marian was still a child. Most of the time, Marian felt it quite possible her father wouldn’t notice if she wandered around Edwinstowe in her shift and a dressing gown. But just now, he stared at her dangling bodice with obvious agitation.
“I went for a ride,” Marian said, crossing her arms over her belly, pressing the fabric of her dress back into place. She’d been gone for hours—dusk had nearly arrived.
“Get upstairs,” her father hissed, urgent. “Sir Guy is here.”
Marian went cold. Her shift was still damp where it had collected the sweat from the small of her back, and she wanted to shiver. “Here? Now? Why?”
“Go get yourself—you know.” Her father waved a vague, helpless hand in her direction.
Marian eyed the cloakroom, watching the steward hang her cloak—there was a third cloak there, black, oddly bulky, looking heavy enough to rip the iron hooks from their settings. She glanced at her father’s stricken face one more time, then hurried toward the staircase.
Uncertainty and alarm quickened her pace, but as if her earlier attack of “hysterics,” as the physician would’ve called it, had inured her to fear for a time, her hands stayed steady as she combed them through her hair and started working at the knot on the other side of her bodice. She wouldn’t have time to change her shift, but she could throw on a different dress.
“Elena!” she hissed, hurrying through her room toward her maid’s adjoining chamber. She came to a skidding halt, however, when she found Elena’s room still and dark. Marian drifted back into her own room and saw there was no fire, that the lamps hadn’t been lit. Venturing closer to the hearth, she found it cold—the fire had been out for hours.
In near darkness, Marian fumbled with the knots on the other side of her dress until her heartbeat did start