HUNTINGDON CASTLE
WITHOUT VOMITING EVEN ONCE, Marion continued from where they had last left off. They had been discussing peerage and precedent, and the inequity of noncommensurate taxes. It was a tricky thing to focus on such ungodly boring topics while Prince John was electrifying the room with his presence. His arrival was the greatest gift she could have hoped for—after all, she didn’t need to convince her grandfather or Henry de Bohun of anything if she could win the prince instead.
He was dressed simply and might have easily passed as any commoner, but there was an indefinable quality that drew one’s eyes to him. His skin and his red-brown flop of hair were visibly healthy, his eyes bright and alert. Prince John carried himself like a man who was always slightly amused at a world that could never touch him. He’d always been that way—their mutual family had put Marion in the room with him half a dozen times over the years, though they rarely interacted. But whether seated on a dais or skulking in a corner, John was a man with only one foot in the world, judging every little thing for its audacity of existence. In a lesser man it would have read as brat, but in him it was a welcome strength, a cult of leadership.
Marion was doing her best to describe the advantages of levying a carucage tax over the geld, fully aware that the room was more interested in whether the prince would eat a grape or a fig first. But she didn’t care. She was still going through with her plan, and the prince was the best audience imaginable.
Friar Tuck entered at the edge of the room—as requested—and Marion interrupted herself. She turned to a young man with a stiff moustache who had barely said a single word the whole council, the man-who-was-not-Eustace-de-Vesci. “Oh, I’m sorry, before we continue, would you mind if I borrow your chair?”
He perked his head as she motioned for him to exchange places with Tuck.
“He has an injured arm, you see, I’d appreciate if he could have your seat, thank you.”
“Oh, of … course…” the man stalled, clearly wanting to ask why an injured arm would necessitate his seating comfort. But Tuck gave an exaggerated wince as he massaged his elbow, and the man-who-was-not-Eustace-de-Vesci toddled sheepishly to his feet, looking for another chair elsewhere that Marion had ensured would not exist.
“Thank you. As I was saying, regardless of one’s support of Chancellor Longchamp, we have identified multiple exemptions he’s given for the geld that were unquestionably … well, unquestionably questionable.”
And so they went into it again, her slow process of getting these messengers to admit to the existence of obvious facts without pledging any official stance. It was all the same infuriating neutrality they had shown in the morning, despite the prince’s presence.
But earlier she had waded in hypotheticals, and this time she posed a specific opinion quickly. When she asked for anyone to agree with her, they of course remained silent. So she turned sharply to the friar, who was sipping glibly from his predecessor’s wine goblet. “What do you think, Tuck?”
“I agree with you entirely,” he said without hesitation, folding his arms. The man-who-was-not-Eustace-de-Vesci’s mouth gaped open, still standing awkwardly to the side where he had found no place to sit.
“Well then at last we are getting somewhere!” Marion clapped her hands and considered the matter settled, moving on to the next. She stole a moment’s glance at Prince John, whose pursed lips and half-cocked eyebrow seemed to indicate he knew exactly what she was doing. And, perhaps, even approved.
Another few minutes passed as she detailed more of the Chancellor’s actions, two otherwise unconnected land seizures he had demanded in very different counties. “These are nearly identical issues, don’t you agree?”
She posed the question to a disheveled young page who was certainly not Saer de Quincy. He of course refused to either admit or deny any equity between the two events, but Marion swatted away his protest. “Never mind. Could you stand, please? I’m afraid I need your chair as well.”
The page’s lips trembled, but any objection disappeared at the sight of the mighty John Little rounding the corner, who had every intention of sitting in the page’s chair regardless of whether or not it was vacant. The young man barely got out of the way before John dragged the chair sidelong, lowered his frame into its seat, and sighed tremendously at the relief.
“What do you think, John?” she asked before he was even settled.
“Whatever it is you want me to think, Lady Marion.” His smile split across his face. “I’m so very comfortable.”
“Excellent!” She turned to the disposed page and summoned all her derision into a single smug grin. “Well then, we’ll no longer need you here at the council at all.”
The page’s cheeks twitched. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I’m not interested in your opinion—or lack of one—and so I’ve replaced you. This man now represents Earl Saer de Quincy in your stead. I’m removing you from the chamber.”
She nodded toward an exit, where Nick and Peter Delaney—along with their unreasonably athletic shoulders—suddenly stood in wait and moved into view.
“You can’t do that!” the useless man protested. “I’m here as a witness, to report on the findings of this council and report back to Winchester!”
“Curious how quickly you object,” Marion kept her tone as cold as winter iron, “when the thing being taken is yours. But don’t worry, your earl will get his report. John, when the council is over, do me the favor of riding to Winchester and let Saer de Quincy know that everyone here has rallied their strength behind me.”
John Little answered by way of popping a fig into his mouth.
“You’re insane!” The page folded his hands in acquittal. “You can’t keep me from telling my master the truth.”
“I can’t,” Marion admitted, “if he chooses to come visit your prison cell here. Otherwise, I think it would be quite easy.”
She snapped her fingers and the Delaney brothers moved, to the obvious horror of more than a few at the table. They were at the page’s side in seconds and did not hesitate to nudge his knees out from under him, catching him at the elbows to drag him away.
“That’s enough,” came a grumble—at last—from Henry de Bohun. His family members seemed far more alarmed that he chose to speak than at the display itself. Marion enjoyed her first victory, but braced herself for the next part. “Your point is made, you’ve been anything but subtle at it. Can we dispose of the cheap theatrics and return to policy, then?”
“You use the word we, Earl,” Marion rounded on him, “as if you have been participating. But you have remained silent through every question of policy, just as you remained silent when you watched me start taking chairs. So why do you speak up now?” She took in each of his family’s faces, noting curiously that the Earl of Warwick, Waleran de Beaumont, was missing from the room.
Henry de Bohun’s answer came slowly, scraping along the floor. “Because this council is dipping dangerously into the territory of being a farce.”
“As is the country,” Marion agreed. “But rather than merely take chairs, Longchamp takes titles. Land. This is not an empty exercise, it is happening all around us already! Men of worth are being replaced with Longchamp’s corrupt lackeys, while we sit by and do nothing! I wonder how many more chairs I could have taken before someone else stopped me? But Lord Henry de Bohun was wise enough to see the danger, anticipate where it was headed, and so he spoke up. Why then are we afraid to do the same against the Chancellor?”
The silence that followed was different than the silence they had given her all morning. One was the simple silence of abstinence—but this was a silence that comes with the axe, at its height, ready to fall. At the next table, her grandfather and grandmother watched with extreme scrutiny, but did not look away.
“I was seconds away from dragging this man into a prison cell,” Marion continued, hitting her consonants like an expert swordsman, “and every one of you made it possible. By staying mute in the face of oppression. But when one voice speaks up…” she dared the room to look away from her, “… the injustice stops.”
A few seats down from Hereford, Lord Robert bit off a smile that his eyes could not hide.
“You cannot equate the two,” old Lord Henry objected, before the gravity of her point could sink in. “You act as if there are only two choices—such a simplistic polarity of thought is the cause of our problems, not the solution. You would protect us from the lion by feeding us to the bear. It is perfectly possible to object to the Chancellor’s activities without demanding his head in payment. I do not agree with an inch of his decisions, but nor do I think it wise to abandon King Richard to this Austrian prison. I shall joyfully support our beloved prince, but only upon his rightful ascension. Politics is not all or nothing, my dear girl, something your grandfather should have taught you.”
That chilled the room a bit, as eyes careened from one esteemed earl to another. But Marion refused to let it rile her, nor would she let the focus be stolen from her. She was nobody’s dear girl.
“You may be right,” she said casually. “If we had all day, we could potentially find a happy middle ground. But keep in mind that every minute you waste pontificating about it, one more of my men will be sitting in a chair. Who will agree with you when you’re the only one left?”
The earl’s smile was dear girl without the dear. “But we do have all day. Is that not the point of us meeting here?”
“I have all day,” Marion answered. “You have approximately fifteen seconds. Nick, Peter, please take the earl’s chair.”
He cackled once and the Delaneys hesitated for a split second, but Marion gave them no reason to pause. There was intentionally no one from the Huntingdon Guard present in the room, nor had any of the few actual lords seen a need to bring their personal protection into a debate hall. So when the Delaneys moved, Henry de Bohun’s smile dropped. He glanced to his sides where his daughters and their husbands pushed back from the table, clearly unsure of how they were supposed to react. Each Delaney brother, by all rights the most impressive men in the room, barreled down either end of the hall until they converged on the elderly Lord Henry. They reached down to scoop his chair back and away, and the earl only barely lurched to his feet in time to watch them whisk it out from under him.
The great wise Earl of Hereford gasped for air and teetered, reaching blindly at the table, his lips wiggling in a breathless protest.
“At last,” Marion smiled at him, “I’ve got you to stand for something.”
The Delaney brothers, as she had instructed them earlier, smashed the earl’s chair down hard onto the ground, cracking its frame in half. Each of them tore a hefty leg from the base and brandished it like a club, challenging any man to so much as bat an eye at them. There was commotion, an instinctive reaction to the possibility of violence, but Marion’s voice was louder than their fear.
“If we wait, we lose! If we try to negotiate, we lose! You’re all trying to be honorable, to obey the king’s law, to figure out what is the right thing to do. That’s how good people die. They’re dying out there right now, your people are dying. This ransom—this damned ransom!—is taking the food from their mouths and the clothes off their backs, and the very people who are supposed to protect them are being replaced by those who would happily ruin their own land in the name of a little power. This is not a threat down the road, we are in its midst already. And we may very well be at the point of no return.
“Take it from me, Lady Marion Fitzwalter, leader of Robin Hood’s men, that there is a time when laws must be broken. The alternative is death. So here’s what each and every one of you is going to do. You’re not going to give some passive report to your masters about who said what here, you’re going to demand they join us. No rebellion was ever born of soft words and apologies. You won’t ask nicely, or beg, you’re going to yell and scream until you’re red in the face. Because if you don’t, if they sit back and try to wait this out, then you’ll be to blame for the end of England.”
She could feel the fire in her own words, the crystal clarity that pierced through the fog of ignorance that had otherwise smothered the room. But now, men who had come as messengers and who saw themselves as little else, were stirred toward something more. Not because her grandfather had endorsed the plan, not because Henry de Bohun had sanctioned it, but because she had shown them something true and real.
The danger of their own inaction.
“Huntingdon stands with you,” came a confident voice, and to a great disturbance Lord Robert stood from the raised table, pulling his hand away from the countess. “Oh please, they all know the truth of it. We called this council but were too afraid to stand by it, while we let Lady Marion risk everything.”
He stood taller, casting a private smile across the room for her.
“She’s right,” he proclaimed. “Silence is complicity. Every day we fail to stand up to the Chancellor, there will be fewer of us in position to do so. Every man represented here may find themselves replaced on a whim.”
“Is that an argument you are truly prepared to make?” asked de Bohun, still quivering without his chair. “Your own earldom you owe to exactly such a whim of King Richard. You gained everything from his royal prerogative. But now you decry that power when it is aimed against you? Ought we give your castle back to the Senlis family, if you are suddenly so concerned with fairness?”
“Perhaps we should.” Lord Robert shrugged. “But if I can do anything with the power I have, while I have it, it should be to protect others rather than myself. Why do you remain silent, then? For England’s interests, or your own?”
“We must be careful!” Marion’s grandfather finally rose to emotion. “If we act as a mob, and claw down that which we disagree with, then we invite the next mob to do the same to us. The Chancellor is corrupt, yes, but he does nothing that is not within his power to do. He is a fetid disease, any man can see that. To which we ought to prescribe medicine. You are suggesting we wield a hatchet. If we wish to support Prince John—as all of us here do—then we must do so from within the system, not by burning it down. There is no point in putting a new monarch on the throne if we destroy the monarchy to do so!”
“I agree,” answered Hereford. “You speak as if you know Richard’s mind on the matter, when you do not. Your kinship to him does not make you a Lionheart.”
Marion caught his gaze and held it captive. “That is true, it does not make me a Lionheart. I wonder then, if you know what that takes? Do you know the story, Earl, of how Richard obtained that name?”
“Of course—for the very discipline in strategy that you lack. He became Lionheart when he sacked the castle of Taillebourg in a mere two days. Over a rebellion, I might add, not unlike the one you here advocate.”
“I don’t deny his military successes. But he was called Lionheart before Taillebourg.”
“It was Poitou, when he was but sixteen,” creaked the voice of Robert de Vere, as proud as if the story were his own. “He rallied his barons to war, led the army himself. The boy became Lionheart that day, mark you.”
Old men, all of them—worse than any foreign army. “Admirable, yes,” Marion replied, “but he was Lionheart before that. Does anyone here know where it started? Your Grace, I imagine you know?”
Prince John chewed his lip, giving a slow nod. “You can tell it.”
A pause settled before she spoke. “He gave that name to himself.”
John’s eyebrows flashed upward, in confirmation.
“It was no heroic deed or battle, not at first. He simply wanted a grand name, and told an advisor to introduce him as such. Odd at first, yes, but nobody questioned it. And he backed the name up with actions later, and everyone assumes what they assume.”
Hereford, Oxford, and Essex, their mouths closed.
“So no, my kinship does not make me a Lionheart,” Marion laughed, letting it roll into every word now. “If I want to be one, I simply decide to be. And what I decide today, what you find preposterous today, you will in time take as unbending truth. Power is not divinely granted, it comes to those who stand up and take it. Not to those who sit by and watch, waiting for someone else to show the way. And by my calculations, there are far too many people in this room content to sit and watch.”
Her breath left her when Prince John stood, and the room stood with him.
“Sit,” he said instantly, humbly. “I should … I should probably speak.”
The hair on Marion’s neck stood upright, and she swallowed to maintain her composure. “We are indeed eager to hear from you.”
She stepped to the side, though the prince simply raised his hand for quiet.
Once silence was his, his arms dropped—but he still took a few moments to digest his thoughts. It was a transformation, Marion marveled. The brat was finally shedding his skin, to become the king he needed to be. The room itself awaited his every syllable.
“It’s rather funny, if you think about it,” Prince John chuckled. His words had a slow canter, but carried a casual grace. “You know, I was in the south of France around this time last year—Carcassonne, my first time there. My host bragged that he had one of the finest brothels in the country, and I’m not one to say no, of course. My entourage went ahead of me, to clear out any raff and make sure I was safe, you know how it is. It was a big deal for them—the owners of the brothel, that is—and they went above and beyond to welcome me. They had this sweet wine that was … well anyhow, it was a spectacular show, just for me, and then the time came for their whores to parade themselves for my choice.”
He started to act the encounter out, demonstrating where the whores had come by, nudging chairs about to get it right, and Marion allowed herself to relax. The room ate up his every word, enraptured. It was an unusually salacious tale to follow her rallying call, but she had rallied them to John’s hands, after all. And if the room felt comfortable hearing about John’s sexual escapades in France, it was proof enough they would follow him as the natural leader he was.
“I sat down in a chair, which they had lined in satin and raised up onto wooden boxes to make a throne out of it, you see, and there were these boys with harps and flutes and strings, and the whores came out and they were all—every one of them now, not just in the parade, I realized, but everyone in the entire building, even the pretty girls that had already swooned over me—every one of them was male.”
A laughter went around, which the prince nodded ferociously at.
“Exactly my reaction, yes! I laughed, until I realized it was not a joke at all! I was actually being quite offensive by laughing, because they were entirely serious. This was a whorehouse for homosexuals, as it were, and each of these boys was so very eager to be pricked by a prince!”
Marion laughed out loud, enjoying the new mirth of the room. Still sharing the space with him, she felt compelled to fill in some part of the conversation. “Do you think it was an honest mistake on the part of your host? Or was he trying to embarrass you?”
“Ehhh…” Prince John waffled his hand, “the former, I’d like to think, but that’s not really the point. The point is that all of these people—these good people with good intentions, who had bent over backward to treat me well—were in for an utter disappointment. I had to somehow tell them I simply wasn’t interested, despite the huge effort they had gone through to include me.”
Marion’s smile faded before she realized why.
“I’m in that male whorehouse again right now, and I’m afraid you’re all in for a terrible disappointment.”
She suddenly regretted her game with the chairs, as it left her nowhere to sit during what came next.
“You’ve got me entirely wrong. You all want to rally behind me to put me on the throne, and I don’t know how to tell you that I don’t want it. Do I like Will Longchamp? No, of course not, he’s a prissy little bitch. We’ve been spatting back and forth for a year now with petty land grabs and the such. But I’m not interested in a war against him. My brother appointed him as Chancellor, and my brother is King, and by God he’s going to stay King hopefully until well after I am dead. You think Longchamp is a bad leader? Wait until you see how bad things would be if I were in charge! I’d be terrible at it. At least Longchamp has the … strategic acuity for it all. I would just sort of … do whatever I want! Sorry. A bit too honest for the moment, but still. You all seem to be so angry with Longchamp for choosing to pay Richard’s ransom, but you’ve got it all wrong. We met. Him and I. Longchamp didn’t want to pay the ransom at all, he was in favor of giving me an army and having me march off to Austria to rescue Richard. But I would have been just as bad at leading an army as I would be at running a country. I was the one who demanded he pay the ransom.”
Marion’s stomach shrank into a very sharp coil.
“I came because I thought you simply wanted to replace Longchamp, which I would certainly enjoy. But you want to crown me? Under the assumption that I would refuse to pay this ransom? That … that is, no, no no no. No, I would sell the very land out from beneath you, this castle itself, to have my brother back all the sooner. So if you all want to rally together against your common enemy … I think…” he hissed in sharply, “… I think that enemy is … me?”
This silence, it was the worst kind.
Prince John sucked between his teeth, wincing as he took in the room.
A room full of people he had just labeled as his enemies.
“So … yes. So there’s that. I think I’m going to leave.”
With a reluctant clap of his hands, he did just that.
The chaos that erupted immediately afterward was the closest thing Marion had ever seen that could be described as actual hell.