to cry.
She could not roll onto her side as she wished to do, or curl up—but she could turn her head, and she pillowed her cheek against his hand until she fell asleep again.
She slept, and woke, and slept again. The moon rose. The fire in the hearth crackled. Elena came to change the candles, and Marian listened to her quiet, graceful steps about the chamber, as familiar as the rustle of the branches at her window.
The monk checked her bandages and felt her brow and then knelt, with an audible popping of joints, to whisper an indistinct prayer.
Fog rose from the fields and lingered at Marian’s window. A fox cried out for her mate in the night. Marian ran her eyes over her misspelled name etched into the rafters, and breathed, and waited.
And still Gisborne did not come.
The sun rose, and the monk felt for the heat of fever again, and looked pleased before he left. Elena sat by her bed, calmly mending the rents in Robin’s tunic, first the neat hole where the arrow had penetrated Marian’s back, and then the more ragged gash it tore as it exited her chest. Her father brought his records and sat in the corner, frowning at his taxes.
And Marian raged.
Someone was with her always, no doubt to prevent her from moving. But she did not try again to rise, or insist that she had to leave. Rest had brought sense enough to keep her in her sickbed. But sense did not stop her from wanting to leap up with sword and bow and rush off into the forest. Sense did not lessen the need for action coursing through her veins, swelling with each throb of pain as her heart kept beating.
She slept fitfully, tormented by the intangible shift of memory to dream and back again. She was standing at one end of the corridor in Nottingham Castle, and the guard she’d killed stood at the other. Marian could not move or speak, but as she watched, his chest sprouted feathers like the opening of a morning bloom. She looked up and saw that he wore Gisborne’s face, eyes brimming with that same shattered confusion. The corridor seemed to stretch, then snapped taut like a bowstring so they were only a breath apart. Gisborne’s lips moved, his expression still surprised and broken, but no sound came out. Still, she heard the words in her mind, a searing brand of revelation: I love you.
The sun drooped in the sky, and Marian slept again, and it was dark when she woke. Elena came to tell her that Alan had come while she was asleep—with no sign of pursuit, he’d ridden to Nottingham to see Will and learn that no guards had ridden out, and no word had come that Robin Hood had been captured or identified. He’d spent the day traveling back and forth, but he could discover nothing. And no one could find Gisborne.
Marian woke in the night, so certain that she’d heard a pounding on the door that she cried out in fear. Her father talked to her until her heart began to calm, and told her stories of his misadventures when he was a boy, and she dreamed softer dreams.
Eventually the monk allowed her to sit up, and Elena helped her to a chair by the window so that she could see out. Her window looked over the fields rather than the road that would bring guards to arrest her, but the sight of the farmers gathering in the last of the year’s crops, oblivious to the peril facing their lord and his daughter, was reassuring.
Marian peeped under the bandages once, while Elena was cleaning the ashes from the fireplace and laying a new fire. The wound was a hand’s breadth below her collarbone. The hole was small and red and neat, and she stared at it, bemused, until Elena saw and swatted her hand away. Marian could not stop thinking that it looked fake, like Seild had taken rouge and painted the wound as carefully as she would paint her lips.
Another day passed. And still Gisborne did not come.
John abandoned his watch on the road. He and Alan took turns riding to Nottingham and back, expecting to meet Gisborne and his men each time they left Edwinstowe. Each time they saw only the usual travelers and had the same report from Will: nothing.
Marian ventured downstairs. Her arm was strapped to her body by bandages, and each step ached, but the