find some way of justifying a refusal to cooperate.
Though nothing he said would justify it to her father.
She tried to put thoughts of him out of her mind. She was safe, and regardless of what transpired, “Robin” would not harm Marian, and she’d eventually return to her father and ease his fears. But her imagination kept summoning images of him, face lined with worry, refusing to eat, refusing to sleep, shouting down the Sheriff himself in a demand to put all his resources into finding his daughter.
Then it would take time to arrange the wagons and their contents. Three carts, the note had specified, and one driver to each cart. No bags larger than a child. Nowhere for more men to conceal themselves in order to ambush the others once the carts had arrived in Sherwood. No guards driving the carts, but kitchen staff. Untrained and unarmed.
Do as I instruct, the message read, and no one shall come to any harm. You have my word as a nobleman and as an outlaw. Robin Hood.
The note described a location that would serve as the first of three waypoints in the forest, designed to mislead pursuers if they should come after the carts. John, Will, and Alan would track their progress and eventually order the three men down from the carts, escorting them some distance back toward Nottingham, where they’d be released to return to the town.
And Marian would be “found,” shaken and bruised at the wrists from her bonds, but safe. Robin Hood would never have to show his face.
But that was only if all went as she had planned. If her previous excursions as Robin had taught Marian anything, it was that things never went according to plan.
The sun had retreated behind a thickening sheet of gray, and as the day wore on, the sky let fall a thin, cold drizzle of rain. Marian tucked her cloak more closely about her, reminding herself that those unfortunates who had crowded so gleefully around her men at dawn, and who were now scattered about the exterior of the walls, sat in the downpour every time it rained. But it didn’t stop her from thinking, longingly and guiltily, of the warmth of the fire in her bedchamber or the chest full of dry underclothes.
The people nearby largely ignored her. The increasingly heavy gray rain had muted the color of her cloak somewhat, and none of them were looking for their grand, legendary hero among the miserable wretches huddled by the walls. The owner of the lean-to she squatted by was a man about her father’s age, but thin and wearing a grizzled beard, who gave her a suspicious look when he’d returned to find himself with a neighbor. But when she merely gestured by all means to the filthy pallet under the lean-to’s shelter, he shrugged and turned his back on her as he curled up in his rags.
A face appeared amid the gray drizzle. It belonged to a girl some distance away, peering around the edge of a woman’s skirt. She was young, no more than seven or eight years. Marian could not help but look at her, reminded with a sudden, strange pang of Robin as he’d looked after his mother died. Thin and angry and in a kind of pain that defied comfort or logic.
The girl was staring at her, and too late Marian realized that while most of the people around her weren’t looking for their hero among them, children were not so blinded yet by practicality and experience.
So Marian smiled, and when the girl’s eyes widened in response, she lifted a finger to press it to her lips. The girl’s mouth opened, though Marian could not hear her gasp over the rain. Then she vanished again behind her mother’s skirts.
The gates opened, pushed across the mud by a pair of guards at each door. Marian’s breath caught, and she gripped her bow, watching. She could hear the creak of wheels and the thump of hooves, but not until the first cart emerged, driven by a boy wearing the spare, worn tunic and leggings of a servant, did Marian take a proper breath again.
Mary’s tits, she thought, echoing Will’s epithet in her mind with joyful rebellion. It’s working.
She watched the three carts trundle along, the beggars melting out of their path ahead of them. The gates stayed open, but that wasn’t unusual—the gates of the town opened each morning as a matter of routine. A few of the poor—those