the northern nobles and a man in royal livery, who Marian assumed was a representative of Prince John. The Sheriff was saluting the Prince’s man with his cup, grinning, his beard glistening with fat from the meal. Gisborne stood nearby, almost vanishing into the shadows by the wall in his black garb; he scowled out at the rest of the diners, as though trying to offset his master’s genial air.
Marian could not dismiss the image from her mind of Edwinstowe stripped of its meager wealth, its good people evicted and turned from farmers and bakers and herdsmen to thieves and beggars. Her vision seemed to blur as she watched the Sheriff signal for more food, and the pounding of her heart roared in her ears.
Abruptly she shoved away from the table and rose to her feet. Her father dropped his cup, splashing wine over the remains of his meal—across the table from her, a nobleman she didn’t know got halfway to his feet in alarm.
“Pardon me,” Marian said stiffly. “I’m still feeling ill.”
Her father flicked wine from his fingertips and sighed. “Marian, please—”
“Father, may I go back to my room and rest?” She spoke loudly so as to be easily overheard by those nearby.
Her father eyed her with something like suspicion—she rarely asked permission to do anything. “Of course,” he said finally, sighing a second time and gesturing for the man across the table to sit back down.
Marian turned before she could glance toward Seild, or worse, toward Gisborne, to see if they were watching her undignified retreat. Instead, she slipped out into the corridor.
The chill of the castle stone returned only a few paces away from the overcrowded great hall, but Marian welcomed it. It cooled her cheeks and helped her order her thoughts. She nodded to the guard at the corridor’s end and strode off toward her quarters. Once out of sight, though, she located a winding staircase that took her down toward the lower levels of the castle.
She would have preferred to walk outside, but the stench of a city in summer still hung in the air of Nottingham, and the thought of facing the destitute crowds again made Marian stick to the gloomy corridors of the castle.
Footsteps made her slow her pace—a pair of guards passed through the hall before her, complaining about the extra hours they were forced to work as a result of all the visitors to Nottingham. They had not seen her, but the clink of their chain mail and creak of their sword belts gave her pause.
She hadn’t been able to bring her bow with her, or any weapons at all, for fear of alerting her father or their servants to her masquerade. She didn’t intend for anyone to get close enough for her to need a weapon, but as her first outing as Robin had proved, events didn’t always go according to plan. But while she might not have been able to bring her own weapons to the castle, the castle itself had steel to spare.
She couldn’t know for sure exactly where or how Will had been arrested—but she’d left her sword behind when she ran to distract Gisborne and his men, and there was a good chance he’d still had it when they captured him. Which meant there was an equally good chance that it was now sitting in the castle’s armory. If she was going to let “Robin” be seen tonight, she might as well accomplish two tasks at once. If she couldn’t find her own sword, any blade would be a welcome deterrent to keep anyone from interfering with her.
Marian made her way through the lower floors of the castle, avoiding the occasional servant or guard hurrying this way or that. She’d been to Nottingham Castle countless times but was only familiar with the upper floors. Her only reference point was that the jail was on the far eastern side of the castle—for that was where the doors opened onto the gallows.
The armory for the castle guard would not be far from the jail, so Marian headed that way and tried not to think of Will, and the gallows. She kept a running tally in her head of the turns she made, noting the stairways and corridors that led back toward the rest of the castle.
She found the armory by accident—a thick oaken door opened as she turned the corner, and before she could retreat, her momentum carried her headlong into the man exiting.