an escape, the section of wall she’d tampered with had seemed dangerously close to the front gates. Now the wall curved ahead of her, stretching on toward the horizon. The mud underfoot gave way to grass, but before she could shift her focus from balance to speed, her boots slid against the wet blades and shot out from under her. She ducked her shoulder, turning on instinct so that she could roll when she hit the ground, and managed to use her momentum to get to her feet again.
But her slip had cost her valuable seconds, and as she reached up to pull her hood down low to hide her hair, a hand shot out of the drizzle and slammed into her shoulder. She skidded backward, breath driven from her lungs as she hit the wall. Her head snapped back and she would’ve been knocked cold had she not had the knot of hair at the back of her skull to cushion the blow.
Dazed, ears ringing, she forced her eyes to focus in time to see the hand coming at her again. She ducked, and twisted, and grabbed for the arm as it passed her, and threw all her weight against the body the arm was attached to, and sent it into the wall with a sickening thud.
Gisborne reeled back, swinging, but Marian had danced out of his reach. She could have cursed herself, had she the breath for it—all this time she’d counted on the fact that these men, her allies and enemies alike, saw what they expected to see and believed what they knew to be true, and in the space between, Marian had Robin Hood. But she’d looked straight at Gisborne in that cart, and all she saw was a servant in a faded jerkin.
He looked different in his beige tunic, without the unrelieved black of his usual attire. Marian knew now why he preferred that shade, for his scars were all the more visible above the pale collar of his shirt. Gisborne put a hand to his mouth, and Marian saw a flash of crimson on his fingertips before he spat into the mud at their feet.
His sword lay next to them. She’d been lucky, for had he simply struck with the blade, Marian would be dead now instead of standing poised on the balls of her feet, facing her opponent, watching his blood mingle with the rain as it puddled and began to course down the slope away from Nottingham. The sword was no closer to him than to her.
Gisborne’s gaze followed hers, a flick of his eyes only, and he spared breath and focus enough for a twitch of his lips, a wryness that called an answering sense of the absurd from Marian. “You’re not that fast.” His voice was calm, as calm as if they were speaking over a game of dice, and yet there was an intensity in his face that gave him more life than she’d ever seen in him before.
Go, shouted Robin in her mind. You stay, you speak to him, and you’re playing his game. Abandon your plan, head for Sherwood, and figure out how to bring “Marian” back. Run.
But Marian felt her own lips twitch. “You don’t know me.” Experimentally, she shifted her weight with a barely perceptible movement to the right, her eyes on her opponent. Gisborne matched the movement, head tilting left, so that she stayed exactly in the center of his focus.
“You’re of noble birth,” Gisborne said quietly, watching her. “Disgraced one too many times with the household servants, or else a bastard son banished when you came of age. Either way, you’ve never belonged. You’ve never been offered greatness—you’ve had to create your own. And this is how you’ve chosen to do it. Stealing trinkets from helpless women and pretending to be the people’s savior.”
Marian kept her face immobile. The mask was still in place across her eyes, but how much else the hood concealed in this light, she could not know. I’m no bastard, she thought. But the rest . . . had she not spent the small hours before dawn telling herself this masquerade was worth it, for a chance at greatness, as Gisborne called it? A chance at being a hero?
She must have revealed something in her face, for Gisborne’s lips twisted in grim satisfaction. “I’ve had plenty of time to think about who you are,” he continued. “Not your identity, though I intend to find that out once you’re in