to you. Alan, I will not sit quiet and safe in my room in Edwinstowe, waiting to learn from a crier that everyone I love is dead. I’ll distract them, spook the horses, call warnings if I see danger the rest of you don’t. I won’t pretend I can stand next to you, sword in hand. But damned if I will not stand behind you.”
Alan did not answer—or, at the least, he did not answer in a way that they could overhear. Silence enclosed them in a tight embrace. Marian glanced aside and saw Little John leaning against a tree. His head was bowed, but enough moonlight filtered through the leaves that she could see he was smiling. His eyes met Marian’s and twinkled.
By the time they reached the road at dawn, Marian had managed to give Elena a few lessons in the use of the dagger she wore at her waist. She did not know if it would help, for it took more than a few words and hurried explanations to overwrite the raw instinct that took over when danger threatened. But Elena seemed unconcerned—of all of them, her face was lightest, her step easiest.
Marian felt the weight of the sword at her belt, the curve of the bow on her shoulder, brushed her fingertips against the fletching of the arrows in their quiver at her hip. She swore to herself, silently, that she would see Elena and Alan both safe, if she could do nothing else.
The road bore the scars of repeated travel, the ruts of wagon wheels and the half-moon dents of hoofprints. Marian stooped with Much, examining them. It had rained heavily up until the festival, which meant that the tracks on the road now belonged only to those travelers who had come this way since. The edges of most of the wheel tracks were dry and hard, rounded where they’d sunk easily into fresh mud—but there were some tracks that were little more than crumbled dust, moving in and out of the other tracks.
Those tracks had been left long after the mud had dried. Those tracks had been left that night.
They melted back into the trees and continued on in the direction the wagons had gone, tense and watchful. Twice they passed other travelers, unseen in the shadow of Sherwood Forest. The first time, it was a small group, a family perhaps, travel worn and slow, and moving toward Nottingham town. They traveled on foot, and the band let them pass without speaking.
The second traveler came on horseback, and at the sound of hoofbeats approaching, Marian stiffened and signaled for the others to conceal themselves among the brush. Her heart thudded with certainty that when he rounded the curve of the road, the rider would be astride a big, black horse, and he’d be clad in unrelieved black, and his face would be scarred, and he’d see in an instant straight through the undergrowth to where she hid.
But the horse was a skinny old nag, and her rider a bent man huddled in the warmth of a tattered cloak, and he rode without skill or purpose.
Still, Marian waited until the soft thud of the nag’s hooves had faded into silence before she gestured for the others to continue on.
They caught up to the caravan after the sun passed the highest point in its arc. It was not a caravan at all, but a single covered wagon, its contents concealed with coarse burlap siding. The wagon was stopped in a hollow, where the King’s Road intersected a sluggish stream that turned the hard-packed earth to mud. It was tilted dangerously to one side, and as Marian and her band gathered in a thicket that overlooked the stream, she realized why it was stopped: one of the wheels was half sunk in the mud, and the horses had been unhitched and left to water themselves at the stream, quivering and exhausted.
“A sliver of luck, at last,” whispered Alan at her elbow.
“Maybe.” Marian’s eyes would not stop moving, though she had counted the number of guards five times with the same result: a trio of crossbowmen stood some distance from each other, scanning the trees with bored but competent efficiency, and half a dozen other men were gathered around the wagon, halfheartedly working to free the wheel. It looked as if they’d been at the task for some time without success, for their actions held less urgency than resignation.
Marian gestured, and the band withdrew enough to crouch down