way to her room—when she reached her door and glanced back, he was gone.
He is in the woods, kicking at acorns and strips of birch bark. The sun is high, but only slivers of it slip through the blanket of leaves whispering overhead. His head is ringing with voices—his father’s, the priest’s, his tutors’. Dozens of old men telling him what to think, how to feel, where to go, how to look.
He wants to scream.
“They’re saying your mother died.”
Robin looks up, and there’s the Edwinstowe girl up in the branches of a massive oak, peering down at him over a freckled nose.
“Mm-hmm,” he says. “She did.”
“I’m sorry.”
Robin waits for her to say more, to tell him how he’s going to feel in a few days or weeks or months, or what he should do to feel better. But she just keeps staring at him, chewing at her bottom lip. Her feet dangle over empty space.
“Thanks,” he says finally. Then, the words bubbling up despite his attempts to push them down, he blurts, “Everyone keeps pretending it didn’t happen.”
“My mother died when I was little,” says Marian, glancing aside to pick at a patch of loose bark beside her. “People kept saying I should be happy she was with God.”
Robin’s anger makes him kick out again, and the acorn goes shooting across the forest floor like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake. “I’m so sick of people telling me what I should be.”
Marian’s heels swing to and fro, and she balances herself as she ducks her head. “Well, I’ll promise never to tell you what to be . . . or how to feel about things.”
Robin squints up at her through the fractured sunlight. Mousy brown hair haloes her face, and her feet are filthy. Robin tries to imagine wanting to marry this creature someday—tries to imagine her wearing the ruby ring, and instead all his imagination can conjure is his mother’s hand, pale and still, her handkerchief lying where she dropped it. His eyes burn and he looks away, jaw clenched tight.
“Or I could be like Father Gerolt and give you a sermon about God’s plan,” Marian offers from overhead. “Don’t despair, my child, for it is not for us to know the will of heaven. . . .”
Her voice is so like that of the nasal, overbearing priest at his mother’s bedside that for a moment Robin almost laughs, and when he looks back up at the girl in the tree, he sees her smile for a second.
“I won’t tell you what to be either,” he says.
Marian’s smile vanishes, and she rolls her eyes skyward, still half imitating the holy man. “Everyone always does, when you’re a girl.”
“Not me. I promise.”
Marian looks back down at him, her gaze measuring. It holds him, and he doesn’t move away. Then she bows her head, a strangely genteel gesture from someone perched high above in the branches of a tree. “It’s a promise, then.”
FOURTEEN
“MARIAN, DO COME IN!”
Marian hesitated in the doorway of Seild’s chamber, then entered. Her heart was pounding—what if, in the light of day, Seild recognized something about her from the night before? Her height, her gait, the sound of her breath . . . Seild was not a stupid woman, and not given to superstition, no matter what she seemed to believe in the night. But Elena had brought a summons from Lady Seild before Marian had broken her fast, and Marian could not refuse without seeming suspicious.
Marian crossed toward the bed, where Seild sat clad in a dressing gown—borrowed, no doubt, for hers was in Marian’s room, hidden atop the bed’s canopy—with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders.
“Have you heard what happened last night?” Seild’s eyes were big and anxious and fixed on Marian’s face. Marian could only glance up and shake her head. “The hooded man was here! You’ve heard, someone must have told you . . . the rumors about Robin?”
Marian hesitated, but nodded. “They aren’t true,” she mumbled.
“But he was here,” said Seild, leaning forward, her eyes lighting. “I saw him with my own eyes, Marian!”
Marian allowed a bit of her fear to show. “Someone broke into your bedchamber last night?” She sounded almost as horrified as she felt.
“Not just someone—someone wearing Robin’s cloak, speaking in his voice. He didn’t harm me or threaten me as an ordinary thief might have done.”
“He spoke in Robin’s voice?” Marian felt her brow furrowing.
“Whispered, but it sounded like him. That same . . . passion.”