when she would have moved forward. “I don’t understand enough of the world to know whether you’ve changed it. But my Lady—Marian—you’ve changed us. And that’s not nothing.”
If it had been anyone else, Marian would have turned away, hiding the moisture in her eyes and the reddening of her lips. She would have made some quick retort and moved on. But she bowed her head instead, and hugged her friend, who squeezed her back.
“I don’t regret any of it,” Elena whispered.
Alan would approve of the poetry in that farewell, Marian thought, emotions in a tangle. Elena let her go after another moment and continued on. They said nothing else to each other, but when they reached the workhorses watering in the stream, Elena pressed Jonquille’s reins into Marian’s palm. They nodded to one another, and Marian swung up into her saddle.
The others had less distance to cover and would already be in place. The other horses were eyeing Jonquille and the two women with dull curiosity, tails switching idly at imagined flies. Marian waited, listening, but she could hear only the warbling stream and the occasional puff and sigh of a tired horse. No sign that the guards had detected them.
Marian knew if she waited a moment longer, her courage would fail her. Her unease was still there, straining against the prison she’d built around it. Like water behind a dam, little trickles of restless turmoil leaked out to dampen her will. Marian took up her bow and fitted an arrow to the string, and automatically her legs squeezed. Jonquille started forward. A flurry of movement made the horses jolt—Elena was running at them, clapping her hands, splashing the water up. One half reared, and then they were all bolting, herding together for safety.
Another squeeze, and a sharp, low-voiced command, and Jonquille broke into a run after them.
The dam was cracking, shifting. Rather than fading behind the urgency of action, the nagging anxiety in Marian’s mind grew stronger as she rode. She kept her eyes on the distant figures of the guards, who were turning to look in confusion toward the source of the commotion.
She spotted one of the crossbowmen reaching for his weapon, and drew. She was still too far away to be sure of her aim, so she avoided risking a fatal shot by loosing the arrow into the ground near his feet. He dropped the crossbow and fell back, but Marian was already turning, looking for the next. If she could take out the bowmen, her band had a chance.
The pent-up pressure of insecurity swelled. Something was wrong, and not only within the tangle of Marian’s thoughts. Some detail she’d missed, some clue she’d been too foolish to see. She fired another arrow, and this one struck one of the guards in the knee, sending him thrashing to the ground.
The clash of swords and the quick, sharp thwack of wood on armor beyond her peripheral vision told her that Much and John had joined the fight, but she could not stop to check on them.
The stream melted into the muddy stretch of road ahead, and the horses began to scatter. Three went left, nearly trampling a guard trying to wrestle his sword from its sheath. One had peeled right so sharply that it had swung round behind the rest and was making its way back up the stream. And the fifth . . . the fifth had reached a cluster of guards and reared, startled.
Realization made the next arrow go wide, whistling harmlessly off into the trees on the other side of the road.
Five horses. Not the four required to pull the wagon, or the dozen required to mount all the guards. One extra horse.
It squealed piteously in pain as its legs gave way, and it crashed to the ground, pinning one of the guards. It should not have tried to rear back, for it was far older and skinnier than the others. No more than a nag.
Like the one that passed us this morning, its rider bent and cloaked . . .
The sudden seizing of Marian’s muscles made Jonquille bleat alarm and turn, confused by her rider’s conflicting signals. She caught a glimpse of John standing a head above the men around him, and she managed to loose an arrow in the direction of another crossbowman who was sighting down his weapon at him. She could not call it off—they were committed, and there’d be no retreat until one side or the other had felled enough