food from the mouths of hungry children?” His shoulders slumped, and the silhouette of his body against the fire cast a monstrous shadow on the walls and ceiling of the chamber that wavered and loomed like a specter. “It’s easy to be a hero when you never look beyond your next battle. Only fools believe they know all there is to know.”
I believed that.
Marian felt tears on her cheeks, but she still could not move, her body so disconnected from the rest of her that had Gisborne whirled with sword in hand, she could not have lifted a finger to defend herself. His voice was so changed—the informality of it, the heat of emotion, the depth of feeling—she would believe him an impostor, some demon sent to torment her in his stead, except that she had seen, and not recognized until now, so many glimpses of what lay beneath his stony facade that the revelations made more sense than the lie she wanted to cling to.
“I admire him,” Gisborne went on, still muffled, head still bowed. “You accused me once of doing so, and I denied it, but I do. And I hate him. Because he does as I wish I could, with utter abandon, and certainty of where he stands betwixt good and evil—he does what I used to dream of doing when I was a boy. I would have worshipped him, but the world is still in ruins, and the King still fights his war, and people from here to the eastern desert still starve.”
Marian’s arms and legs still refused to obey her, but now they moved of their own accord. She rose from her chair and took three faltering steps toward the fireplace, her own shadow swelling and mingling with Gisborne’s on the walls of the chamber as she approached. “He’s trying,” she said.
Gisborne’s eyes were closed tightly, and he seemed not to notice she had drawn near. “If he truly cares for this land, Robin Hood will realize how much he does not know, and stop trying.”
Numbed, her world upended, Marian breathed, “Maybe he can’t.” She could not look at Gisborne, the shadows wavering and tilting as he turned toward her. “If he stops now, then maybe he would have always been wrong, and the things he’s done . . . If he stops now, he will never be more than a murderer.”
Gisborne took her hand. His touch summoned her back into her body, as quick and abrupt as a thunderbolt’s strike, and Marian’s legs nearly gave way as she was granted control of herself again. Gisborne drew her close, his other hand wrapping around her waist, fingers pressed to the fabric of her dress. He had already torn her world apart—that his touch now made her whole body sing in response was only one more thing that did not make sense.
“Marry me,” he said, his dark eyes intent on her face with a strange urgency.
Marian, dazed, whispered, “What?”
Gisborne pulled her in a little more tightly and then released her hand, so that his fingers could nudge aside the veil and touch the soft waves of her hair. He moved so slowly that Marian could have pulled away at any moment, or turned her head, or asked him to stop. She stood utterly still, but for the rise and fall of her chest, and the tremble in her body that made her long to tilt her head into his touch.
“I don’t care what you’ve done,” whispered Gisborne, with no trace of the remote, icy calm that he showed to the world. “Who you’ve helped. Marian—please. As my wife, you’d be under my protection.”
She could feel each of his fingers against her back, five individual points of pressure. One moved in the tiniest of caresses, as if memorizing the texture of her dress, or the warmth of the body beneath it.
Use it, said the voice.
This was what she’d wanted all along, after all—her enemy under her spell, an unwitting but devoted ally. Rendered powerless, made easy, another obstacle cleared. Safe.
“I would ask nothing of you,” whispered Gisborne. “I know your feelings toward me, Marian. Believe me, you have never tried to hide them. I would know you married me for your people, and your father, and—and for him. I would not touch you unless you wished me to, would not—” He stopped, voice catching and eyes falling. His arm stiffened, as if he was only now realizing that he’d pulled her close, already giving her reason to