it might as well have been an iron chain binding her to the bed.
“You can’t leave.” Elena smoothed away the hair stuck to Marian’s wet forehead. “You’re badly hurt, Marian.”
Marian tipped her chin and looked down. They’d removed her tunic, and her shirt, and had cut away the tattered strips of cloth binding her breasts flat. Above the edge of the blankets she could see bandages circling her body, following the curve of her chest, under her arm, around her shoulder. She saw no blood, but the bandages were thick, and every breath brought with it a throb of pain singing down her body.
“I can’t stay here.” Marian let her head fall, staring up at the wooden rafters. One of them bore a row of scratches, worn by time and obscured by dust. Robin had carved their names there in Greek lettering, though he’d misspelled her name in two places. “Gisborne knows. The physician in Nottingham may be the first place he searches—this house will be the second.”
“I know. You’ll die if you try to ride, though—Frère Tuck says it’s a miracle you survived the trip here in the first place, and that even traveling in a cart could kill you.”
“I’d rather die on my own terms than by Gisborne’s hand.” Marian gasped with the effort of trying to lift one leg and shift it toward the edge of the bed.
“So excited about dying” came the monk’s voice, mumbling, as if speaking to himself. He sounded amused.
Elena ignored him. “John and Alan are watching the roads, and Will’s in Nottingham watching the stables—we’ll know when Gisborne comes for you, and if you cannot walk by then, that is when we’ll decide whether to risk moving you or not.”
Her voice was so firm that Marian did not dare argue. Meekly, she asked, “Where is my father?”
“On his way back from Nottingham by now.” Elena squeezed her hand again. “Word came this morning that Robin had rescued you from Nottingham Castle, that he’d stolen you away without so much as alerting the guard, but he knew . . .” She hesitated, glancing at the monk. “He knew that couldn’t be true. Will was going to tell him what happened before taking up watch on the stables for Gisborne.”
“He was the rider,” Marian murmured, too weary to keep her eyes open any longer. “The old man on the nag who passed by us.”
Elena’s hand tightened. “Who?”
“He wore a hooded cloak.” Marian’s voice sounded dreamlike to her own ears, as wispy and insubstantial as a cloud. “And I saw what I wanted to see.”
Elena turned to demand explanation from the monk, but Marian was already falling asleep again, dropping this time into a gentler oblivion than the one that had claimed her in Sherwood.
Candlelight flickered against her closed eyelids, and the tree tapped furiously against the window, stirred up by a wind that whistled through the thatch. The hands that cradled hers were so familiar that she was speaking before she’d remembered how to open her eyes.
“You have to run,” she rasped, her throat so dry it burned. She raised her eyelids with a monumental effort.
Her father just smiled at her, the same indulgent, amused smile with which he’d always responded to her fancies and whims. He lowered her hand to the bed, keeping it clasped in one of his, and put the other to her brow, soothing. “Go back to sleep, my dear. All is well.”
Marian’s hand tried to move, but though her father’s touch was if anything gentler than Elena’s, she had no more success. Frustration bubbled over and strengthened her voice. “Father—you have to leave. Gisborne knows. He’ll come. He could be outside now—you cannot delay. If you’re here . . . he’ll arrest you whether I live or die, whether I’m here or not.”
His lined hand patted her hair in that awkward, familiar way. “Let him come,” he said gently.
Marian stirred feebly, her body incapable of expressing the urgency she felt. She gave up, tension fleeing and leaving her limp. With a sob, she whispered, “They’ll hang you.”
Her father smiled his mild smile. “Let them try.”
There was no violence or challenge in his tone, no change in the touch at her brow or the clasp of his hand. Resignation hung in the air, but it was not a resignation to death. Marian tried to imagine her father taking up sword or bow against a detachment of guardsmen, defending the door of his home and his daughter upstairs, and she started