him, drawing back against the wall. He felt the change in her instantly and went motionless, breathing hard. They stayed that way, leaning together, her fingers tight around his wrist, his lips still touching her collarbone—until the fire popped, and Marian jumped, and Gisborne stepped back.
They stared at each other, too shaken for propriety or self-consciousness to find its way back and force their gazes away. It had all taken only seconds to unfold, both of them moving together on some unspoken understanding. Marian knew how she must look, her face flushed, lips swollen, eyes as wild and fearful as a deer’s in the moment before its hunter lets fly the fatal arrow—she knew, because it was exactly how Gisborne looked.
Shaken, he whispered with an odd quiver of surprise, “I love you.”
She said nothing, because he was her enemy, and because she wanted him still, and because he looked so frightened that she could not speak for fear he would bolt—or that she would. She hated him, and she wanted him, and she did not know who she was.
Gisborne was the first to move. He did not try to renew their embrace, or lean toward her again—he only took her hand, drawing it up so he could enfold it in both of his. He kissed her fingers, pressing them close and lingering long enough for Marian to feel the tremor in his lips. Then he bowed his head forward and rested his brow and the bridge of his nose against her skin, and his hand shook as if releasing her was an effort nearly beyond his strength.
She knew what was coming, knew it as if she were about to say it herself—Forgive me, he would murmur, and he would be calm and cold the next time she saw him, and she would remember how she hated him, and the spell, the fragile connection of like souls, would be broken.
But when he spoke, he only said, “Good night, Marian.”
She didn’t see him go, only heard the door open and close. She stood sagging against the wall as if bound there, as if she really were in a prison cell—and she felt as undone and raw as if it were her torturer who had just departed. Eyes filling, lungs burning, Marian shoved away from the wall and went to the window, where she tore the shutters loose and stood, gasping, in the frigid fall air.
Marian was so disoriented that the cold air felt like a torrent of water, and for a moment it felt as though she could swim through the window, away from the heat at her back. But then something dropped from the shutters, fluttering and falling against her foot. Dizzy, she looked down to find a folded piece of parchment.
Numbly, she bent and picked it up between her fingertips. It crackled anxiously as she unfolded it, and shivered and trembled as she brought it closer to the nearest candle.
It read:
Marian—
Take heart. I’m coming for you.
R.H.
THIRTY-SIX
PANIC SEARED MARIAN’S BODY, as tangible and painful as liquid fire. The note was trembling now in her hand so violently that she could no longer read the words, but she’d read them already, and could not unsee them.
Robin was alive. Robin was coming for her. Robin had been there, had scaled the wall outside her window, had risked his life to bring her a moment of comfort and hope. Robin was alive. Robin was alive, and she’d kissed Gisborne. Robin was alive, and she had given her heart—full of love or loathing, she did not know—to another man.
Robin was alive.
It didn’t matter that the letters of the note were not written in his hand. It didn’t matter that he never would have signed the initials of Robin Hood and not Robert of Locksley. Truth and logic didn’t matter, for panic had seized Marian so suddenly and unyieldingly that she could not think past that single thought that spun on endlessly, cutting her over and over.
Robin was alive.
There was no physician’s drug to help her. She’d not needed it, these past weeks, too preoccupied with matters of life and death to fear the shadows in her own mind. And when the room for her imprisonment had been appointed, no one—least of all Marian herself—had thought to ask for it.
She tried to breathe, but she could not remember how to breathe without remembering Robin teaching her, his hands on her ribs as they rose and fell, and then she could not think of anything but Gisborne’s