it—he spoke as he had done the previous night, before the fire with Marian, when she had made him laugh and he’d given her his secrets. “There was a chance. I hoped.”
The words came without expression, but they struck at Marian’s heart as if they’d been flung like spears. I hoped.
“But I knew when I went to her this morning and found her gone. You could not have taken her from that room against her will, not her. She would have fought you, and the guards would have heard, and I would have come.”
Marian remembered the note she’d written, with words as deadly as the weapon in her hand. She said nothing, ruthlessly forcing herself to watch his body and not his face, to match her movements to his, to be ready for the attack when it came.
“The worst thing,” Gisborne said, in a voice like tempered steel, “is that I always knew. Even as I hoped, I knew.”
You don’t know me at all, screamed Marian, pressing her dry lips together so tightly they cracked, and she tasted blood.
Gisborne watched her. “I always knew she was yours.”
The words came before she could stop them. “Marian belongs to no one.”
A curve settled along the thin, cruel line of Gisborne’s mouth. “On that, Robin of the Hood, we agree.”
His sword came down like an elemental force, but Marian saw the shift of his feet and the tension in his arm and she was ready. She dodged and swung her own sword. He was stronger, but she was faster, and she’d grown in confidence and skill since the first night they clashed blades. The night Gisborne first saw Robin Hood.
She saw recognition in his face as they exchanged another blow and parry, and another. They were well matched now, and locked in combat that would come down not to skill or strength or speed but to the force of will.
The sounds of nearby combat and flight had faded away. The groans of wounded men were like the songs of distant insects, faint and fuzzy. Sunlight split and shattered along the edges of their swords when they clashed, punctuated by ragged breath and the scrabble of their boots on the leaves.
Gisborne’s style was not so straightforward as Marian had believed. Though he wielded his sword as any Englishman might, folded in and around the downward strokes and heavy blows were smaller, subtler movements. A flick of his wrist here, a quick slash there. They were the movements of a much lighter, smaller blade, and Marian wondered if the style was something he had learned during his time in the Holy Land.
Had Robin fought like this, too, before the end? Or had he died because he wasn’t quick enough, had never been quite sharp enough, to learn faster than his opponent?
Marian ducked beneath an unexpected slash and rolled, sweeping out with her sword. She didn’t expect her blade to connect, but if he leaped back out of the way, it would buy her time to find her feet again.
Instead steel met steel with a clash that numbed Marian’s arm. Gisborne had driven the point of his sword down into the earth, blocking her haphazard swing. She had no defense against the mailed boot that slammed into her chest and sent her sword careening away down the slope.
Vision dim with pain, Marian scrambled to her feet and ran. Behind her she heard a strangled oath—Gisborne’s gambit had worked, but his sword was still stuck in the ground. Marian ignored the agony stabbing her with each breath and focused on speed.
A faint whistle in the air was her only warning before something knocked her sideways. Her momentum made her roll, and she was about to get her feet back under her when something snapped, twiglike, against her body. With that sound came a new pain that blossomed into searing awareness and dragged a scream from Marian’s lips.
She got one arm beneath her, lifting herself enough to see Gisborne standing where she’d first fallen, Robin’s bow in his hand, still outstretched, his other elbow lifted where he’d released the arrow. The point had broken off when she’d rolled, but when she looked down, a bloody, splintered thing protruded from her chest. He’d shot her in the back, and the force of it had driven the arrow straight through her.
And he had heard her scream.
The bow fell from his nerveless fingers. He staggered, then swayed, then broke into a run. Marian scrambled back, gasping, clutching with one hand at