she blinked, sending another few tears down her wet cheeks, the shape transformed into Gisborne’s face.
“Forgive me,” he said quietly, and for once the words didn’t sound as if he were reciting them from a list of things one says to a well-bred lady. “I should not have touched you—but what the boy said is too . . . Curse it. I should not have let you do this.”
Marian coughed and brushed at her eyes. “No,” she managed, voice rather tremulous. “I’m glad you did, Sir Guy. You heard?”
Gisborne nodded, his face grim. Had it been her father, or Robin, or anyone in all England other than Gisborne, he would have smiled and tried to distract her and offered her a handkerchief. But Gisborne merely glowered at her. “I cannot say I trust what I heard. He sounded uncertain himself. But you, my Lady, did in a few moments what none of us could do in days of interrogation.”
“I think,” said Marian carefully, sniffing delicately to buy herself a moment to build the lie, “that you can trust him. He looked like he might weep, Sir Guy—he believed he was betraying Robin. Or if not Robin, then at least a man who’d tried to save his life.”
“Do not concern yourself any further with it. You have done more to help the Sheriff and the crown than I had any right to expect. What comes after is my duty, not yours. My Lady, you must stop weeping.” His tone actually held a note of frustration.
Marian could have laughed, there on the stone floor, with Gisborne crouching awkwardly beside her.
Oh, yes, said Robin, mirth making his voice dance, she hears your command, sir. She will stop weeping this instant.
Marian was caught between exhaustion and giddiness, and she wasn’t entirely sure she could stop herself from answering, so she covered her face again.
Gisborne muttered something, and as the leather of his clothing creaked, Marian risked a glance between her fingers. He’d looked away, scanning the corridors as if looking for someone he could hand her off to, someone better suited to dealing with a hysterical lady. In that moment he looked so unlike himself, the stony facade giving way to a baffled helplessness that made him look oddly youthful.
Then the world reasserted itself, and Marian found her tears had stopped abruptly. Gisborne’s hand was on his sword, and his fingers gripped the hilt, and he wasn’t so much helpless as urgent. He might not wholly believe Will’s—Marian’s—story about a clandestine meeting in Sherwood Forest between the man in the hood and his unknown cohorts, but he was fixated on it regardless, desperate to act on anything that might bring him closer to dispatching his quarry.
By the time he looked back down at Marian, she was calm again. She smiled at him, and let him help her to her feet, and leaned on his arm as he walked her back through the castle halls. She bade him farewell, and wished him luck, and told him he need not apologize for being unavailable the rest of the day and the next. She didn’t shrink when he bowed over her hand, and she made herself remain in her doorway as he retreated down the corridor so that, in case he looked back, he’d see her watching him go, like a damsel in an old tale gazing at her knight.
He didn’t look back.
SEVENTEEN
MARIAN STOOD BY A window overlooking the stables, head down, listening to the rise and fall of voices and footsteps in the castle corridors. The overlapping rhythms of each separate life held no obvious pattern, for the various nobles and guards and servants who occupied Nottingham Castle were like bits of wheat chaff tumbling about on a fitfully breezy day, all scurrying in different directions, unpredictable. But the longer she listened, the more it seemed she could feel a general rise and fall to the sounds of castle life, ripples of activity that spread from a shout in the great hall or a clatter of dishes in the kitchen.
To anyone passing, she’d look pensive, ladylike, gazing idly out over the long slope down to Nottingham town. So she hoped, at any rate. Beneath her cool expression, she felt like she might burst into flames with the effort of inactivity.
Always in the past, her excursions as “Robin” had been entirely of her own making, dependent only on her own skill and timing and planning. But to rescue a prisoner from the heart of Nottingham Castle without