Marian let her breath out slowly. No point in trying to hide her identity anymore. “You seem to know Will,” she said finally. “Have you seen him, then?”
The two men exchanged a glance. Little John took a step toward her but stopped when Marian jolted backward, lifting the staff. He raised his hands. “Easy, my Lady. Aye, we’ve seen the lad. But why are you here, alone, seeking him?”
“He’s my maid’s brother. And he grew up on Rob—on Lord Locksley’s lands. I don’t believe he is guilty of the crimes laid on him, and I wish to help him.” She glanced at Alan, whose expressive features bore signs of grief now. “How . . . how do you know Will?”
Little John followed Marian’s gaze, then rolled his eyes when he saw Alan’s face. “He is betrothed to Will’s sister. I suppose that makes him your maid’s fiancé.”
“Wh—Elena?” Marian’s startled eyes first found Little John, then Alan, who now looked off into the forest, jaw clenched. “But . . . she never . . .”
Marian felt as though her head was full of chaff, thick and muffled—her thoughts dragged. Her maid had never mentioned so much as a sweetheart, let alone a fiancé, and certainly nothing about having had any ties to outlaws before the morning she found out Will was arrested.
Little John sighed, rubbing at his tailbone, which he had no doubt bruised while dodging Jonquille’s charge. “We’ve a camp a league south. Perhaps you’d do us the honor of being our guest this afternoon, Lady Marian, and we’ll tell you what we know of Will Scarlet. And then we can try to help you find your horse.”
NINE
“WE WERE CHILDREN, ELENA and I.” Alan leaned against a stout tree, fiddling with the pegs of an ancient and battered lute he’d retrieved after they’d brought Marian to their camp. “We loved each other from the moment we met. We were destined for each other, the greatest of loves, like Pyramus and Thisbe, like Orpheus and his Eurydice. . . .”
“Shut up, Alan.” Little John tossed a clump of leaves at the other man’s leg, earning him a scowl and a twang of strings. “Forgive him, my Lady. He was a minstrel at one point in his life—Alan-a-Dale he was called in the towns he visited—and sometimes the romance of it all gets to be a bit much for him.”
“I am a minstrel still,” Alan protested. “Once a man hears the call of the muses, he cannot turn away any more than a bird can leave the endless ocean of the sky.”
“Uh-huh.” John removed his cloak and spread it on a crumbling log, then gestured toward Marian. She would rather have sat upon the rotting log itself—the cloak had seen far too many seasons, and had a somewhat ripe stench—but she sat anyway, with a nod of thanks for John.
“Elena has been my maid for years,” she said, eyeing Alan curiously. He was handsome, in a fine-boned, willowy way, underneath the filth and grime from living in the wilderness. “She’s never mentioned you.”
“Many trials, and the laws of men, have kept us apart,” Alan said woefully. “But true love and destiny will triumph, my Lady—do not weep for us.”
Marian eyed Little John, who was snickering as he dropped to the ground beside a stone-ringed fire pit. “I’ll try not to,” she said. John was definitely not handsome, with a nose that had been broken more than once, pockmarked cheeks, and an unkempt reddish beard. And yet his eyes were merry, and kind, and despite his massive size, there was a care to his movements like that of a craftsman. Or, thought Marian wryly, with the experience of her own life, like someone who has had to learn to pay attention to keep his long arms and legs from knocking over every bit of furniture in the house.
“They were childhood sweethearts,” John said, leaning back on his elbows. “Till Alan was caught poaching, and gave up the life of an entertainer for a life of petty theft.”
“Noble theft,” Alan corrected him. “Someday I’ll amass a fortune great enough to provide for my Elena again, someday when the King has returned and pardoned those good Englishmen whose only treason was deciding not to starve beneath