Marian moaned and stirred. Cecily tried to make her bent elbows take as much of the jolting as she could, but it was not easy. They trotted on for some time, Little John apparently smelling his way, for it was soon too dark to see clearly; but he rarely stumbled or swerved. Cecily panted in his wake, expecting at any moment to have to beg humiliatingly for a pause to breathe; and her feet went on picking themselves up just high enough to avoid being tangled by roots and rocks. But perhaps he knew her limits—or his own; for she never came quite to that point, and they walked and trotted and walked again into the dark hours.
They stopped once, to drink at a stream. Little John said briefly, “Stonebrook; we’re above the Small Falls here,” and Cecily suddenly understood where they were, and that they were quartering their way through a small corner of Sherwood—and with some chance of coming to Friar Tuck before they fell down with exhaustion.
When they went on it was at a gentler pace, but they still covered much ground. Cecily’s shoulders ached and her finger joints were on fire, and she had blisters starting. They stopped a second time and Cecily offered Little John half her bread, but he shook his head. “I’ve eaten mine.”
It was full night now, and as Cecily slumped against a tree and ate her bread in ragged mouthfuls Little John paced carefully around them, peering at the sky where the trees would let him. “Do you know where we are?” Cecily asked, and realised she was too tired to care overmuch what he replied. She still could not chew, and had to hold the hard bread in her mouth till it began to disintegrate on its own.
There was a glint of teeth in the shifting starlight. “I hope so. I dare not wait till dawn, for Marian’s sake if not ours. If the breeze has veered much, I could be leading us past Friar Tuck. I would be happier if the moon would rise, but wishing will not hurry her. And here I should be finding one of our marked trees, and I am not.”
Cecily, on the ground, had a slightly different angle of sight, and her eyes had grown accustomed to the shadows of the trees. “Yes, you are,” she said dreamily. “There. Perhaps the last storm displaced it.”
Little John followed her pointing finger, and there indeed was the little device of braided twigs that the outlaws sometimes used to mark a path. It had broken off and fallen from its high place into a bush, and there lay almost hidden but for the rustle of evening wind across the shadows.
“Ah.” Little John heaved a sigh that told Cecily he was more worried than he was admitting.
They arrived at Friar Tuck’s cottage soon after; there was one long questioning bay from one of the dogs, but they knew most of Robin’s band. Little John and Cecily were old friends, and the dogs came up to thwack their thighs with their great brutal tails. Tuck knew his dogs’ voices and recognised the single query that meant the arrival of a friend, and his door opened before Little John and Cecily had got close enough to knock.
“Why—?” he began, and saw the litter. “Come in,” he said. “I will risk a fire.”
He had one ready laid for such an extremity, and it caught and flared up at once. Cecily shivered; it was her thoughts that made her cold more than the gentle air—or a reasonable fear of the conditions of Tuck’s roof and fire-hole, despite Jocelin’s attentions—but cold she was. Tuck knelt by the litter, which they had laid upon the floor as they could, and hissed between his teeth. “Marian,” he said. “What happened?” He began to raid a small cupboard as Little John told him.
“Guy of Gisbourne,” said Tuck, dismayed; “that is the worst news yet. Folk see things so differently.” He had knelt again, and was delicately cutting at the sash around Marian’s body.
“All who were there today, save us two, I think, believe they saw Robin Hood,” said Little John.
“Ah,” said Friar Tuck. “I believe you, and yet that is not what I meant.”
Cecily was foggily aware that Tuck was saying something important, but she could not make herself understand. “What do you mean?” she said.
“There is water in that tun by the door. Bring me some,” said Tuck; and when she had done so, he said, “Have you asked Robin Hood who he is?”
Cecily said, puzzled, watching Tuck’s deft hands, “No. I would not.”
“Have you asked yourself who he is?”
Cecily said slowly, “He—he is our leader.”
“The leader of a band of outlaws,” said Friar Tuck, “who live leanly in Sherwood. And did you hear the folk today talk of this Robin Hood whom they saw shooting his arrows into the target better than anyone else?”
“They spoke of him—as if he were not human,” Cecily said, thinking of the woman selling trinkets. “She said he was one of the Old Ones, come to save England.”
“Robin Hood would not agree, I think,” said Friar Tuck, laying back the clotted cloth; Marian gasped and murmured, and one of the dogs whined outside the door.
“No,” said Cecily, shocked.
“I would not agree with either Robin or your fairground tale-teller,” said the friar. “And Marian, I guess, agrees with me, or she would not be here.” He added softly, “But, my dear, was it worth your life to make the tale come true?”
“But—” said Cecily, and could think of no words to follow.
Friar Tuck said kindly, but with some humour, “Ask me about the meaning of life, or anything else you choose. Tales are as much the necessary fabric of our lives as our bodies are. There are blankets in that chest; pull them out and lie down beside it; there is just room for you, I think, as you are the smaller. Little John, I will trouble you to help me bring my mattress here by the fire, and then if Cecil will let you have any of the blankets, you can sleep too. There should be space enough where the mattress lay, although I may require you to keep your feet tucked up.”
“They will look here,” said Little John.
“Not tonight,” said Friar Tuck. “Only an outlaw could find his way to me on a night with no moon. I will not let you move her further tonight anyway; tomorrow we will decide what to do—early tomorrow, I promise you. Perhaps we should all four—and the dogs—go to ground in the little bolt-hole you and Robin arranged for me after the good baron had cause to hate me. Perhaps I will merely send you. I have not decided. Go to sleep.”
Cecily said, struggling to keep her eyelids open a minute longer, “You—say—four—of us. Then Marian will live through this night.”
There was a pause long enough to notice, before Tuck said, “I believe so. In all events, you can do nothing about it; you have done your turn, and it is now mine. Go to sleep. I dislike repeating myself.”
Smells haunted Cecily’s dreams: bright sharp smells of green spring and bitter herbs, and grim smells of blood and death, but nothing woke her for several hours, till her stomach observed that she was now smelling food, and then her eyes came stiffly open.
“Good morning,” said Friar Tuck as she sat up. “It is a fine morning, and the dogs are disturbed by no far-off rumble of armed men coming this way. There is bread and cheese and ale on the table and stew on the fire.”
“How is Marian?” said Cecily; her voice sounded as rusty as a neglected byrnie.
Tuck shook his head, but his face was not gloomy. “I do not know yet. I may know today; perhaps not till tomorrow. I believe she will live if she can, and that is a great thing.”
Cecily looked at Marian’s sleeping face, and thought that some of the lines that had been there yesterday were there no longer, and she felt a little hopeful. This left her some freedom to think of other things—like the fact that her clothes chafed her as if she had been wearing them a year. “I would wash,” she said gruffly; Friar Tuck looked mildly surprised. “You may borrow a change of clothes from me if you do not mind the skirts.”
Cecily ducked out of the hut with a roll of Friar Tuck’s spare gown under her arm. The dogs were inclined to wish to help her at her bath in the little pool beyond the chapel; and then she had some trouble deciding how to tie (or not tie) the billows of Friar Tuck’s robe so that her gender would not inadvertently reveal itself, telling herself first that it didn’t matter anyway and then that it did, and then again that it didn’t. Little John knew already and Friar Tuck wouldn’t care. Probably. He was too busy with Marian anyway. She decided that she couldn’t decide and that not deciding was best expressed by not tying. Whereupon she wadded up some of the billows in one hand so they would not catch between her legs and trip her that way (the hem ended well above her ankles) and her wet, reasonably clean, or at least less dirty, clothes in the other, and went back to the hut for breakfast. She found she still hated the feeling of skirts flapping around her, and wondered why Tuck bothered wearing them. It was not as though he did not possess several other individualistic approaches to being a priest and friar.
Little John and Tuck were in the middle of an argument; the friar was shaking his head. “I do not know if that is wise,” he said. Little John protested at once: “Would you have him not told?”
Friar Tuck stood looking down at Marian, who was lying very still. “I might,” Tuck said at last, “for he can do no good by knowing; you could wait a day, in the hope that I might have good tidings to allay a terrible tale.”
“And what if someone hears a tale of Robin Hood shooting at the fair and being wounded by Guy of Gisbourne and rescued by a tall man and a boy? And brings the tale to Sherwood? Cecil and I should be bringing our own tale by this morning. We are the only folk from Greentree who were in Nottingham yesterday, but there are those who love Robin well enough to venture into Sherwood for his sake, or the sake of news of him after what they know they saw.”
Friar Tuck took a long minute to answer. “I did not expect to be able to stop you; bad news travels fast, but not so quickly that, were it my choice, I would not risk the delay of one day. I would ask you to bear her to our hiding-place, however, ere you leave; for I do not like the risk of any man coming to inquire of me today about any belly wounds I may have seen recently.”
Cecily surprised herself by saying, “Only one of us needs to take news to Robin; and Friar Tuck should be seen about his chapel in the ordinary way. Marian should not be left alone—at very least that she might not wake in the dark and have no one to tell her where she is. I will stay if there is no reason against it.”
Little John’s smile was so slight and so wry that had he still been wearing a beard she would not have seen it. “It is a good plan and a good thought, but I would rather face twenty foresters than wait in the dark for something that may not come.”
Cecily said sadly, through a mouthful of cheese (which required no chewing), “So would I. Ten foresters anyway. But you are the better tracker and the faster, and it is only sensible you should be the one to go.”
Robin had not liked the idea of Little John and Cecil—Cecily—going into the sheriff’s baited trap; but it was true that since Sir Richard regained his land the air the outlaws breathed seemed thick with the sheriff’s hatred, and the leaves seemed to have eyes in them, that had been their friends before.
The loss of Rafe’s source of news when Lucy married and moved a town away was a severe one, and came at a particularly bad time from the outlaws’ point of view; as if fate had arranged it, the pieces fit so neatly. And Rafe himself, one of the sunnier-tempered members of Greentree, had been trailing around like a lost fawn since Lucy had told him.
“I can’t blame her,” he said miserably; “I couldn’t marry her, now could I? Or I could, I suppose, but what man who loved a woman would ask her to live as we do?”
Robin had overheard this much of a conversation between Rafe and Simon and Jocelin; they had fallen silent when they recognised Robin’s step. It might merely have been the end of the conversation anyway, but Robin thought not. What man would ask a woman he loved to live as they did? It was a thought he was only too familiar with.
The other rumour he had heard of late, one he could not decide whether to hope for or not, was that the Lionheart was coming home to England. Richard was a Norman and spoke English like a Frenchman, but he was king. Would he uphold the laws of England or would he be careless of the rights of the English so long as his fellow Normans were happy? Whom would he believe, the sheriff of Nottingham or Robin Hood? Was it, Robin thought dismally, a question worth asking?
It was not just that he was the king. Everyone loved Richard Lion-heart, even outlaws hiding in the king’s forests. He was tall and blond and heroic, and he had been fighting for the Holy Land, a cause that the Saxons—except perhaps when there was a sheriff leaning on them too heavily—could love too. Almost everyone seemed to forget his Norman blood when they spoke of him. Maybe Robin had once felt that way too, long ago, when he was still a king’s forester himself. But he did not forget it now, just as he feared that if the king did decide to hear the sheriff’s complaint of them as true and serious, his outlaws would give up in despair that the Lionheart had turned against them, before any one of them was taken.
Robin had an uneasy day while Little John and Cecily were at the fair; he half-imagined he could hear the crowd from the heart of Sherwood. He listened to his imagination and it sounded like an angry crowd, shouting of cruelty and disaster … and then he cursed himself for a fool and was more uneasy than ever. It was not surprising that Little John and Cecily did not return that night; the fair would go on till evening, and if Little John was keeping in his role as a wrestler, he would have proven a popular contestant.
But as the next morning drew on toward noon, Robin gave up all pretence of not being anxious.
It was past noon when there was the cry from the nearest guard that someone bearing news approached. Robin’s heart tried to rise and sink simultaneously when he saw Little John come toward him, obviously hale and—when he got a little closer Robin saw some of the bruises, and that the shirt he wore was not his own; it looked like it might fit Friar Tuck. The cut on his cheek did not look like the kind of thing a wrestler should have received. “Where is Cecily?”
“With Marian.”
“With Marian?”
Little John hesitated, and Robin took him by the arms and shook him. “Speak, man! What has Marian to do with the news from Nottingham?”
Little John sounded as if he were reciting a speech he had memorized; maybe he was. “At the shooting contest at the fair, one archer stood out among them all as the best. As the final arrow struck the target, a man leaped from the sheriff’s tent and challenged the winner, naming Robin Hood. As the crowd had done among themselves already.”
“And?” said Robin violently, as Little John paused; but he knew already the end of the story.
Little John’s voice was flat. “This man called himself Guy of Gisbourne, and he drew a sword on the archer, who had no sword, and the crowd pressed around the two of them in anger, for they had liked it that Robin Hood should win the sheriff’s contest, and did not like Guy. But Guy … wounded the archer with the point of his sword.”
“Marian,” said Robin. “She lives?”
“She lives,” said Little John. “She is with Friar Tuck, who would have had me stay the news for a day; he hopes that Marian may rally and we be sure of her by tomorrow. Cecily is with them.”
“Is Cecily hurt?” Robin asked; but his lips moved stiffly over the name. Marian was lying wounded by the closing of the sheriff’s trap.…
“No,” said Little John, and touched his purple cheek. “Not to signify. Bruises. There’s less of her to resist when a nailed boot steps on her. There was quite a mix-up at the end, when we were getting Marian away.” Little John paused.
Robin looked at him, his eyes dark with visions of the day before; of the day to come; of the woman who lay under Friar Tuck’s roof.
“Will’s little sister saved my life,” Little John added as if inconsequentially.
Robin’s eyes cleared long enough to stare into the face of his friend. Another stroke upon the sheriff’s tally, that he nearly caused the death of Little John. “I am glad of that small favour. And you were right to come straight on; by tomorrow I would have been walking down the main street of Nottingham, shouting your names. Where is now Guy?”
Little John lifted his shoulders. “I do not know. But the tale is that the sheriff has bought him and his men to find the outlaws of Sherwood.” After a moment he said, “We were followed out of Nottingham, I believe, but with luck we lost them in Sherwood; no one had come to the chapel by this morning. I do not know if those who followed included Guy; it would be bad luck indeed if he should have chosen our direction to start his search.”
“The sort of bad luck we need to expect,” said Robin. He had picked up his bow and quiver, which the tension of the day had caused him to have nearer at hand than was his custom at Greentree. His fingers paused over his staff, and then he picked it up slowly, turning it in his hands. “A sword, you said?”
“Aye. A long sword, such as a knight might wear.”
Robin said, with a recklessness that Little John did not like at all, “Well, I have no sword; my dagger will have to suffice.”
Little John said, “You will not go alone.”
“Will I not?” said Robin; but his thoughts were far away. “I do not care. You may come with me if you wish.”
Much approached the two of them; Little John’s hand was on Robin’s arm, but even Little John’s grip was not going to detain him long. “Where is Cecily?” he said. “What happens here? I like not either of your faces.”
“You will find me at Tuck’s chapel,” said Robin, stepping away and settling his strung bow over his shoulder; and he was gone through the gap in the trees that served Greentree as a front door—gone at a running pace that a hunted stag might set.
“What?” said Much; and. Little John told him.
He finished by saying, “Round up all of us you can, will you? And let us meet at the chapel. Robin will see Marian first, which will delay him a little—I like this mood least of any I have seen. I don’t want him left alone—even for these moments I spend in talking with you.”
“Guy of Gisbourne,” said Much, appalled; but he said it to empty air, for Little John was gone after Robin.
It was a hard journey for Little John, who had had too much of hard journeying in the last two days; but he caught up and kept pace, though he went less quietly than was his usual.
Once, when they stopped to drink at Rosebrook, Little John said, “Do you know who it is you are chasing? You cannot mean to take him as you stand.”
Robin said savagely, “I mean to take him with an arrow in the back, if I can. It will be no less a choice than he gave Marian. But I also mean to give myself as many choices as I am able; and even if he is a demon in human form, as they like to say of him—yes, I know the tales—I still believe that I know Sherwood better than he does, which may, I hope, give some length over a longsword’s reach.”
Robin seemed to flee over the leaf-strewn floor of Sherwood without ever quite setting a foot firmly down; their time back to Friar Tuck was less than Little John’s to come to Robin to give the news, and Little John had not lingered by the way. Robin said, almost over his shoulder, to his companion: “There is some method behind my passion for speed besides the love for Marian that you fear may betray me to rashness. Guy is an ill enemy—the worst, I think, that we have had, for the sheriff is only as great an enemy as he can hire other folk to be for him. I am glad now that I have been so merciless in cutting our camp down to so few; that fewer folk are now to be at risk.
“The sooner we confront him the better; I think it will not be numbers that decide the ending to this tale, but luck and perhaps some skill. Guy has the devil’s own luck; we will see if the luck that has kept us alive thus far may stand against that dark gentleman’s.”
They were now close to Tuck’s cottage, and Robin dropped to a walk. And he said then, with an expression on his face more like the Robin Hood that his people knew, “And as for meeting Guy alone—did you not leave word with Much for all of us that he could muster to meet at Tuck’s chapel, before you came after me?”
Beauty gave the single cry of hound welcome, and Tuck emerged from the chapel path into the meadow, turning to face the way Beauty stood, and said to the trees: “They have gone, they who would ask me of you; you may come out from where you watch in hiding.”
“So men did come,” said Little John.
Tuck said, smiling, but not so comfortably as was his usual way: “They did; I grow slow and dull in the wilderness. I did not realise how the sheriff’s hatred for Robin has grown.”
“Marian?” said Robin, as Little John said, “You were not there when we bought back Sir Richard’s life from out the sheriff’s hand.”
“Marian is not well, but no more ill than when Little John left to find you,” said Tuck grimly, “—I hope. Now that my last lot of visitors is well on their way”—he and Little John turned to look at the dogs, who were untroubled by any wandering whiff of strangers—“we may go look to her again.”
The silence within was perfect as Friar Tuck drew the brush aside from the hidden earthwork; Robin was nearly stepping on his heels with impatience, and it was Robin’s hand that yanked open the low, carefully moss-grown door.
There was a brief glint in the darkness within, and then Cecily dropped her dagger-point with a sigh. “You might have identified yourselves,” she said; “I am weary of being frightened, these last two days.”
“How is she?” said Tuck; Robin had pushed in past him, blinking in the dark. “A little better, I think,” said Cecily. “She has come to herself enough to know me, once or twice.” She stooped, pulling the voluminous skirts of Tuck’s spare robe clumsily out of the way. There was the smell of flint, and then a little rush-light wavered into brightness, and Robin fell on his knees beside Marian’s pallet.
The other three drew quietly outside, and Little John touched the nape of Cecily’s neck with two fingers and said, “You have only learnt to be tired of fear in the last two days? I am a poor teacher, then.”
Cecily wondered that with all else happening she should instantly be most aware of a whisker-light touch of Little John’s hand, and she said, tiredly enough, “Nay, it is I who was the poor student, for I believed that my teacher need fear nothing, and I have learnt better.”
“I am glad you learnt, ere you died of the ignorance,” said Little John; “but—I wonder if, then, the student has no further use for a teacher so fallen from perfect strength.”
“Oh,” she said, too bone-weary to pretend: “I would far rather that I love you as I saw yesterday I do than that I had gone on worshipping you as I did not long since.” And she turned away hastily, and did not see that Little John would reach out to her; and, half-running, went to Tuck’s cottage, where she could pull on her half-dry clothes, and become a proper outlaw again. At least, she thought, fighting back tears, like this I am Cecil, with a place among friends, and a task to do. I am someone. I wonder if perhaps if I am no longer Cecil, I am no one at all.
“Marian,” said Robin; or he meant to say it, but his lips parted and no sound came. He touched her hand and tried again. “Marian?”
The light was so dim, through the brush that still hung over the opening to the out-of-doors and in the tiny flicker of flame on the earth floor, that he could not even be sure that she breathed. He seemed to have been waiting for hours, gathering up her hand between his, when he saw that her eyes slowly opened. At first it was the merest glint between the lashes; then they opened full, and cast about for a moment as if they did not know why they were being forced to look out; and then Marian turned her face a little, and looked at him. Her smile looked only wistful and drowsy, as if he had awakened her from a sweet happy dream that she was sorry to lose.
“Robin,” she said. “I am glad to see you; yet I fear you are very angry with me.”
There was time for three heartbeats between each of her words, and when she said “angry” he had almost forgotten that she had earlier said “you.” By the time he remembered, she had gone on, and he had to lean close to hear her: “We had not parted good friends, I fear, when we last met; and I knew if you heard of yesterday it would be the worst of all.”
Robin said at random, “I am sure you should not talk so much, but save your strength”; and she smiled into his eyes and fell silent, and then he could think of nothing else to say. He remembered the many times he had told her she must not come back to Greentree and how many times she had ignored him; and how he had come to rely on that—disobedience—because he was as sure that he could not live without her as he was sure that she should not risk another journey into Sherwood.
He remembered seeing her, with her curling hair drawn back smoothly as a lady’s should be, in her long amber gown that fell so beautifully around her feet, so near the sheriff, so near mortal danger: danger that he knew she faced for his sake. She had known what she faced and why, but she had known from the beginning, from the first day when she and Much had found him hiding near the place where they had played as children. She had known and had dealt with the knowledge; he had known, and had refused to know, and had left her to bear the weight of responsibility alone, accusing her, to spare himself, of an idealism that in truth none of his band had been guilty of, Marian least of all. He had let her come to him because he wanted her to, while he soothed his conscience by listening to his tongue telling her to go away.
He looked at her, pale and hollow-cheeked; her eyes were sunken as from an illness of many months, and her rich hair was lank and dull; and he thought she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he knew his heart was breaking. “My dear,” he said, crouching beside her, “I am so sorry.”
Some look he could not read flitted across her face. “A sore belly seems to make me deaf,” she said. “You cannot be apologising for my arrogance and stupidity.”
Robin laughed a little, but the laugh made his throat hurt. “No; I do not apologise for your arrogance and stupidity, but for my own.”
Her eyes drifted shut, and for a moment he thought she was gone from him, and he stared at her breast till his eyes, now accustomed to the shadows, saw the faint rise and fall of her breathing. But after a few minutes her eyes opened again and she said, “Thank you. We do not make it easy for ourselves, you and I, do we?”
“No,” he said. “I love you, Marian.”
She gave a tiny gasp, as if she would chuckle and had not the strength. “Well, my love, this wound of mine is worth something after all, to have forced those words out of you after so many years I have longed to hear them. But please, my dearest love, let us learn to be a little softer? I do not like the thought that crisis is our only chance of contact. First you must promise to say what you have just said to me again when I am well.”
“I promise,” said Robin, “if you promise that Robin Hood will not go again to Nottingham Fair.”
“It is an easy promise to make,” said Marian, “for I have learnt my lesson. I learnt many things, suddenly, when I felt my own blood sliding between my fingers. But there was a time not long ago when I thought that all you would ever let me have of you was your legend—and—and I might at least use that to some effect.” She stopped talking and Robin thought she would spare him the rest; but after a little pause she went on: “I have never made you understand, I think, how the folk outside Sherwood see you; you are too preoccupied with keeping your own folk safe. It was—it was the one thing I could give you, that some of those people should see you as they wished to see you.” She paused again, and sighed. “And I liked the idea of doing something stupid and violent. I was feeling stupid and violent.”
Robin was silent. Marian’s fingers curled weakly around his. “I am weary, Robin, but I am determined to stay alive. Tell me that I have something to look forward to, besides the dangerous and lonely business of the burnishing of a legend.”
“Marry me,” said Robin. “Stay with me, never leave me. Come with me to the ends of the earth—which I fear will soon be all that’s left safe from the sheriff of Nottingham. Will that do?”
“Yes,” said Marian, and closed her eyes, and they sat thus for some time.
Robin stirred and looked up as Tuck appeared hesitantly at the door, with a bucket in one hand and a cup in the other. “You should not be tiring my patient,” he said, but his voice was kind.
“He does not tire me,” said Marian; “I feel stronger now than I have ever felt.”
“Ah,” said the friar. “I am of course pleased to hear this, but I would prefer you to remain lying down for some while yet till you accustom yourself to all your new strength.” He knelt beside Marian and offered her the cup, sliding his hand under her head to make her drinking easier. “That was not water,” she said.
“Some of it was water,” said Tuck. “Some of it was not. You might sleep now.” She closed her eyes as if the lids were of stone, and Tuck dipped a cloth in the bucket and began to wash her face. “Let me,” said Robin.
“Very well,” said Tuck; “but then you have to go away, for I will not have you here when I change the poultice. You can call Cecil, who has a steady hand and eye for the work, as I discovered this morning. A lad of many parts, that one.”
Robin felt as clumsy and uncertain as if he had spent months crouched in a small dark cave, when at last Tuck forced him gently outside. Cecily was hovering not far away and came forward when she saw him. “Tuck wants you,” he said. She nodded. “He calls you Cecil.”
She nodded again, and gave a flickering smile. “Does it matter? At least now.”
Robin stood staring as if at nothing, and she made to go by him, when he said quietly: “It mattered to Marian, what name they used.”
Cecily wanted to say, but Friar Tuck doesn’t want to kill me. Then she thought of Little John’s face tipped back, with the early sun on his beardless skin, saying, “You have no call to complain about my appearing suddenly different”—it had been but yesterday morning. And she remembered that only an hour ago she had told him she loved him. “I will tell Tuck my name,” she said, and ducked under the low lintel.
Robin found that he was breathing rather too quickly, as if in anticipation of—of what? What he most wanted was to sight down a bowstring at Guy of Gisbourne’s heart. But he felt, meanwhile, like a man waiting for the herald to call the beginning of the contest; like someone who has come to the city gates too early and found them closed, and now waits impatiently for the first trace of dawn in the sky.
He walked slowly down to the little pool beyond the chapel, and there found Little John hurling pebbles; he, too, seemed preoccupied with some thoughts of his own, and needed an effort to turn and acknowledge Robin’s presence. “I feel like a hawk with my hood still on,” said Robin. Little John grunted. “If there was a cloud in the sky, I would be happy to think that there was a storm coming to blame for the prickling of my skin.”
“You too?” said Robin.
“Aye. And it was my idea that I should come with you to prevent you from doing anything rash … and I cannot sit still, nor begin to give good advice.”
“I hate the thought of waiting like a child in a cradle for Guy of Gisbourne to come and find me,” said Robin. “I must decide which way is likeliest and go to find him—and yet I do not want to leave Marian, though staying will draw Guy near her.”
“He may think his job is already done,” said Little John, “and have gone on.”
Robin shook his head. “I doubt it. The sheriff would not have gone to such lengths as to hire such a one if he were the sort to leave before he brought Robin Hood’s own head to the sheriff’s table.”
Sweetheart gave the single long cry of a friend approaching, and Much and Rafe appeared, looking warm. Much took a quick look at Robin’s face and arranged his own to placidity, trying to disguise the hastiness of his breathing. Rafe hung a little back. “Marian?” said Much, speaking to the air somewhere between Little John and Robin.
“She is not worse,” said Robin; and at that moment all three dogs bayed and went on baying. Tuck and Cecily burst out of the earthwork and began feverishly pulling the brush down that concealed it. As Robin turned toward them, Simon appeared as if by magic at Tuck’s elbow. Tuck turned away, rubbing his hands along the generous folds of his friar’s robe with a hard, set expression on his face so unlike him that he might have been some other friar. Simon and Cecily finished their business hurriedly and melted into the undergrowth as Little John, Much, and Rafe had already done. Robin began to make his way round the far side of the pool, to come upon whatever might appear from that direction; the dogs said that was the direction to look.
There were the delicate but purposeful crunches of outlaw feet on dry leaves all around Tuck’s clearing.