ache grew no worse for the effort. It had been four days. Marian’s brow was cool. The fever that had killed Tom had spared her.
Marian’s rage at inactivity faded away, and she found herself weeping instead. She hid the tears as best she could from her father and from Elena, although she could not hide them from the holy man. He did not seem to mind them, though.
She wandered, aimless, ghostlike in her own home. A memory came to her. She was walking through Locksley Manor, surrounded by the spectral forms of furniture draped in linen. She had thought then that she might as well be the restless spirit who haunted its halls, for all she felt like flesh and bone.
On the fifth day, Marian was wrapped up in blankets on a chair by the front window when hoofbeats drew her attention. Her heart clenched with fear and relief together. At last, an end to this purgatory of waiting.
But the rider was Will. She was so shocked by his appearance, as haggard and weary as he’d been when she’d visited him in Nottingham’s jail, that she could not speak. He entered without knocking, leaning heavily on a crutch at his right and looking around. His eyes fell on Marian and lit a little at the sight of her.
“My Lady,” he said, with a little bow. Then his brow furrowed as he absorbed the way she looked, wrapped in blankets against a chill, huddled in the chair, pale as ivory. “Are you ill?”
Marian blinked, too confused to think of an answer until Elena came bustling in from the kitchen, interrupting in a flurry of activity.
“Will!” she cried, rushing to hug her brother, tears of relief in her eyes. “My lady is ill with worry,” she said, before Marian could speak, and without looking in her direction. “But what are you doing here? What about Nottingham, and watching for Gisborne, and—”
“Gisborne is there.” Will spread his hands a little in helpless gesture. “I never saw him arrive—he must have been there all along. I saw him go to the stables and back, and once I followed him out past the castle grounds to the town, where he prowled along a section of the inner wall before going back into the castle.”
Marian glanced between the two siblings and their identical expressions of puzzlement. Elena shook her head, speechless, still not looking at Marian. Will glanced her way, but it was to his sister that he spoke. “Somehow, I don’t think it’s occurred to the authorities that Marian might be hiding Robin here.”
The words fell on Marian’s ears like crashing thunder. Elena spoke, and Will replied, and they continued to converse—Marian did not hear. Not until Will had kissed his sister’s cheek, bade Marian a polite farewell, and left did Elena finally look at Marian.
“How?” Marian whispered.
“They only saw you briefly, unconscious, bleeding. And Alan is the only one who’s visited you.”
“But . . . but the mask. Gisborne tore it off.”
Elena had crossed the room to her side and leaned against the wall, looking almost as weary and drawn as her brother. “I pulled your hood over your face before the others came.”
“They don’t know. They think I’m hiding Robin, keeping him safe while he recovers, here in Edwinstowe.” Marian put a shaking hand to her head, trying to steady her thoughts. “But to get me from there to here, someone had to carry me, they would have felt . . .” A woman’s hips, a woman’s waist, a woman’s breasts and throat and arms and—Marian could not think.
“Jonquille is no warhorse—she can’t easily carry two. Only the lightest of us could go with you. The rest came on foot as they could.”
Marian gazed at Elena mutely, lips trembling. It was Elena who had kept her secret, who had gotten her onto Jonquille’s back. Elena, the only person other than Marian whose presence the gray mare tolerated, who had spent so many hours at her needlework in the shade by the pasture. Elena, who had held her in the saddle and ridden from the northern edge of Sherwood Forest to Edwinstowe at a gallop fast enough that Marian was still alive when she got there.
“You hit him,” Marian blurted, astonishment momentarily banishing pain, tingling down to her very fingertips. “You’re the one who knocked him out, right before I fainted.”
Elena gazed back at her and nodded. “I was hoping I’d killed him,” she said calmly. “But Will says he’s certain it was Gisborne