NOTTINGHAM
SATURDAY, 28TH DAY OF MARCH
MARION HAD BEEN RIGHT when she said that everything would be better when King Richard returned. What she had not known was what the cost to get there would be.
She did not fight the lump in her throat nor the tears in her eyes as she wandered the castle’s apron. Here, the fighting had been heaviest. The air was ribboned with white and black smoke still, and unidentifiable acrid odors. Here the ladders had been raised, even as arrows and hot oil came down from above. Here Richard’s armies had engaged with the defenders’ sortie when the gates had opened, and here they lay still. Men who did not hate each other, men who did not even disagree with each other—just men unfortunate enough to be on opposite sides of an epic misunderstanding.
As early as yesterday, this was the most dangerous place in Nottinghamshire. Now, Marion needed little more than a heavy cloak and her riding boots to stand safely in the mud that had cost so many lives.
Both the castle host and Richard’s allies tended the battlefield. Commonfolk picked their way like ghosts, looking for loved ones. Bodies were solemnly gathered onto carts and carried away. Knights would receive proper burials, no doubt, but footmen would likely share a communal grave. Men who had killed each other would now lie next to each other. The dirt didn’t care for which side they’d fought.
The dead would never see the better England that Richard’s return promised. They’d suffered the worst of his absence, of the Chancellor’s corruption, and the verge of civil war. To think of how close they’d come to seeing daylight on the other side of their long night was more than Marion could bear. She already knew that she would spend months unraveling her own role in what had happened, and whether she could have avoided such unnecessary loss. Marion had yet to fully believe what the others told her—that she was headed toward something greater—but if they were right, it was her duty to grow from this. To make the future truly better.
But her thoughts were decidedly less lofty at the moment.
Robert was still unaccounted for.
Arable was still unaccounted for.
The Delaneys.
Ahead of her, a corpse of a young man lay on his stomach, a short axe wedged between his shoulder blades. Based on his position, he must have been fleeing when he was killed. His weapon—she assumed it was his, at least—lay a foot from his hands, not a single drop of blood on it.
“We should not be here, my lady,” Sir Amon said from atop his horse, picking a careful path behind her. “It’s not safe.”
“Oh to hell with safe.” She did not bother to turn back. “Do you think one is going to wake up and attack me?”
“This area is not secured,” he answered. “There’s no knowing who is left in the city with a grudge to bear. And the dead bring disease, my lady, you would be—”
“Nowhere in the world is safe,” she cut him off. “I should think this has proven the point.”
The immediacy of the war had been her excuse to avoid this next conversation. Now that it was over, there was no point in delaying it. And with such tangible proof of her responsibilities around her, she was ashamed to have even put it off.
“You’re selfish, Amon,” she said. “Do you know that?”
He held back a slight gasp. Good. She’d meant to hurt him. “I have given much of myself for your safety, my lady. It pains me to hear that you do not recognize that.”
She ignored his protest. “You see the world only in terms of your charge. In whether or not something is safe for me, not whether it’s inherently right. That’s why you abducted me, it’s how you convinced yourself it was honorable to do so. I won’t be in need of your service any longer.”
“My charge is not—”
“I know.” She’d heard it before. “It’s my father’s to decide. I’ll be writing him a letter today to demand that he discharge you, and replace you with someone else. There are, after all, a great many other knights suddenly returned to England in need of retainer.”
His horse shuffled in the mud behind her. She wouldn’t look at him. There were too many bodies here, of young men who deserved her pity so very much more than he.
“As you say. But I will continue to watch over you until—”
“If I see you, I’ll cut my arm open.” She knelt down and picked the unbloodied sword from the ground, held its point to her wrist. “Do you understand? If you care about my safety so much, then know that the closer you are to me, the more damage I will do to myself. So protect me, then, by removing yourself from my sight.”
She wasn’t proud of dismissing him so, but she had no emotion to spare for him.
The soldier with the axe in his back, Marion didn’t know him. But at the same time, she knew him a thousand times. He was everyone she was fighting for, and everyone whose fate she did not yet know. He was all her responsibilities, and especially those she’d shied away from. Her thoughts turned to Will Scarlet, whom she’d once been so eager to cut out of her life. It had been a profound shock to see him again in King Richard’s command tent, side by side with Prince John of all people—and Marion was apparently the only person who had recognized either of them. She would give a great many things to learn what bizarre events had placed the two of them in that moment. Despite all her frustrations from the winter, she was dying to find out what had happened on Will’s half of their diverged road. She missed him, and perhaps, too, the adventurous side of her past that had vanished along with him. She wanted the opportunity to say farewell to both of those. Maybe even to apologize. But the world was rarely so tidy as to allow her that opportunity. She doubted she’d ever get that closure.
But whatever had happened to Will Scarlet, that, too, was her responsibility. To see to it that it never had to happen again.
Amon’s horse huffed and moved away, but Marion focused on the dead man on the ground until his every horrid feature was memorized. She wasn’t sure if she was happy that Amon left, or even more disappointed in him. But if ever there was a good time to clean the slate, this was it.
Each body here, there was no knowing what brought them to Nottingham. Some had followed their king’s orders to Jerusalem and back, some had marched for their liegelord, some had defended their city, their castle, because they didn’t know of another way. Because their leaders only knew how to solve their disputes by spilling blood. Because it was the way they saw the world. Like Amon, they could only think of solutions that fit their skills.
Hammers, all of them, who thought they could pound the world until it was made of nails.
SHE STORMED RIGHT PAST the line of noblemen waiting for a word with their King, which stretched the length of the war camp. Men who were vying for his recognition, men who wanted to remind him they were here on this day. Men who wanted land from their rivals, positions for their children. Men who had risked the lives of those beneath them, whose loss they would never mourn. Marion Fitzwalter refused to wait patiently behind men who wanted to profit from the dead, and be congratulated for it.
When she reached the entrance flaps to the command tent, a pair of foolhardy sentinels blocked her way. If she thought back upon it later, she would never remember what—if anything—she said to move them. Perhaps an entire life of suppressed rage had been funneled into a single cold glare, which set the two guards succinctly back to their places.
Within, she took the cup of wine from whatever capitulating nobleman was in front of the King, and wordlessly turned it over to spill into the dirt at their feet. Soon enough the room was empty.
“We need to change,” she said.
If there was any justification to all this, it was to place her in this exact spot, for her to say those exact words, and she would not leave King Richard’s command tent until he dealt with the enormity of her demand.
“Who are you, again?” Richard joked, in French.
She changed languages, her first and final concession. “I said, cousin, we need to change.”
“What are we changing?”
“England.”
And she told him why. She told him everything she’d told the others at the council in Huntingdon, and everything she’d learned since. She finally had the words that had just been whispers back at Locksley Castle, and now she could scream them. It was not enough for Richard to return, if the country just limped on as it always had. Its people needed protection beyond the unbridled whims of their masters. The earls and barons of England needed to be held accountable, as did her kings and princes—and Lady Marion Fitzwalter was not going to leave the room until her cousin, her King, who had finally returned, agreed to actually make it better.
At some point in her tirade, his face softened. His defenses lowered, he started genuinely listening, and he asked her to slow down. “Tell me more.”
MUSIC PLAYED THAT NIGHT. Not just in King Richard’s camp, but all throughout Nottingham. The city streets that had been black as pitch the last few nights now glowed, pouring their warmth up to light their stone and timber faces. A celebration of victory was shared by both sides—though Marion wondered how many truly understood the details. It didn’t matter. They were alive, and King Richard was returned to them, and that was enough to be joyful. All the death and animosity of yesterday was forgiven now. Amongst all the other things they discussed, Marion had also persuaded Richard to be lenient to John’s allies—who had only been following orders, and genuinely thought they were defending their country from the French. It was the first war in history, she reckoned, where there had been no losers.
None save the dead, of course. And those that mourned them.
She returned to Huntingdon’s campsite to find its main tent bustling more than she would have expected. It was almost too full for her to even approach, but she found her way within and spotted John Little in the throng.
“What is it?” she asked, managing a path close to him.
“Oh, Marion.” He embraced her with both arms. “They found Lord Robert.”
Her heart leapt at his maddeningly vague words. “Alive?”
“Alive, yes, sorry!” he chuckled, realizing his mistake. “Though maybe just barely.”
Marion ground her jaw and stared at him. My but she loved John Little, but he had a talent for sharing emotions before facts.
“He’s in the corner.” John gestured. “How did it go with the King?”
She paused, touching his shoulder as she thought on that.
“It went well,” she said, and felt the awesome relief of being able to say it aloud. John’s face lit up, his cheeks drawn tight in an expansive smile, and he turned away to hug the nearest people he could find, whether they wanted it or not.
There was a cot in the rear of the tent, and decency kept the crowd a few feet away from its occupant. It pained Marion that there were no better accommodations to be given him, but half the city had become a hospital and still there was not room enough. Robert lay propped up on the cot, looking anything but comfortable. His face—his face—she gasped, was a mess of black and purple, bloated around his eyes and lips, which had split wide and wore open wounds. Marion might not have recognized him at all if she’d not been told who he was.
She knelt beside him and put her hands to her face by instinct, then second-guessed herself. Certainly he would not want to know how wretched he looked, and she shouldn’t be the one to reveal it. Instead she clamped her lips tight and craned her head into his eyeline, giving a disapproving frown.
“That’s not the face I sent you off with,” she grumbled. “What did you do with your old one? I thought it looked better on you.”
“Sorry, my lady,” the earl whispered, the tips of his lips curling slightly upward. “I think it may still be attached to that knight’s fist. I’ll retrieve it for you if you ask me to, but maybe not until tomorrow?”
“Shhh.” She placed a hand on his chest. “You did it.”
He returned an ugly cackle and a chunk of black snorted from his nostrils. “Oh, I didn’t do anything. I was just along for the ride, and came out none too well for it. Arable went into the castle, she’s the one that did it.”
Marion turned, hoping perhaps Arable was nearby, but found only Friar Tuck. “Anyone else?” she asked him, afraid of the answer.
“Not yet,” Tuck said, bowing his head.
Marion returned her attention to Robert. She tried not to imagine how he’d received those injuries. He’d gone into the city in her stead, refusing to let her risk herself. It was possible that the Delaney brothers and Arable had been killed long before they accomplished their mission, and that the war had ceased entirely on its own. Perhaps it was Will Scarlet who had stopped the war, or Prince John had come to his senses without any help at all, and the only thing Marion had contributed was to make the pile of the dead a little higher.
Cold fingers entwined with her own, and she was pulled from her dark thoughts.
“I know what you’re doing,” came Robert’s coarse voice. “Don’t. It’s not on you.”
“It is on me.” She squeezed his hand. “But that’s alright. That’s the point. I want it to be on me.”
It was Robert who had taught her that, after all. And Amon, misguided as he may have been. Marion’s burden was that of leadership now, which meant she needed to feel every loss, every injury, in order to know the weight of her every decision. The moment she grew numb to the consequences of her actions would be the day she turned into the very thing she fought against. She would not play with people’s lives the way others move numbers in a ledger.
Which reminded her. “I spoke with the king, Robert, and he was interested in our ideas. We can make some progress, real progress, on all the things we wanted.”
“That’s good.” He smiled. “While we were sneaking into the city, you were trapped talking politics with the King? Sounds like you had it worse after all.”
She had to blink away a tear, just at the joy of seeing his humor intact. “Well, since you won’t let me join you on your mad adventures, then I can at least handle the big things.”
His fingers stretched farther, taking her wrist. “That’s a deal. You manage the king parts, I’ll take care of the getting-our-face-beaten-in parts.”
She laughed for him. “That’s a deal.”
“And no more Robin Hooding,” he added, with something more serious in his eye.
The name no longer brought the immediate pain it once had. Now it was just a stone in her belly. She pursed her lips, refusing to let another tear come. “Agreed. You know, when Robin died we realized the best part of Robin Hood was that it didn’t matter who he was. That anybody could be Robin Hood.”
Robert’s thumb traced her wrist, back and forth. “But?”
“But you know what the worst part was?” She looked into him. “That anybody could be Robin Hood.”
Bruised and beaten, his eyes were gentle, and he understood. Some instinct recognized that private smile and Marion wanted to lose herself, but modesty forced her to withdraw her hand. She was all too aware of the number of eyes on them, and the impropriety of their closeness. She would have liked to kiss that hand, to touch his face, but not with an audience. There was too much at stake, she chided herself, to follow such adolescent urges. She wasn’t quite sure where she stood right now, but she had the ear of the King—and it would do poorly for her to be too friendly with a married earl.
On the other hand, she considered, who the fuck cares?
She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips, holding his head softly with both hands. His skin was puffy and swollen, his lips thicker than before, her nose scratched against a hard scab, and she didn’t mind any of it one bit. Robert did not flinch in shock, nor smile his way through this one. His other hand floated up to find the fabric of her dress, pulling her gently closer. Marion didn’t know what this meant, and didn’t want to know. For the moment, it was what her heart wanted, it was a thank-you, it was relief and celebration. Yesterday none of them had any reason to think they had any future at all, so today they could all of them live as if the future was anything they wanted it to be.
And at last—at last—they were in a position to actually build that future, rather than simply survive it.
The war was over, Richard was returned, and there was no need for anyone else to die in Nottingham.