Chapter 6 #2
The decision slams through Marian like a blow. Her breath rushes out, shaky and uneven. Relief swells in her chest but quickly curdles. She should feel triumph at surviving this judgment. Instead, dread coils through her.
Lox resumes his seat at the head of the table. His eyes never leave her as he settles, as if to remind her the reprieve is his gift alone.
‘And what, in all of Albion, am I expected to do until the king returns from the Crusades?’ Her voice slips out sharper than she intends, frayed with the raw edge of her nerves.
Her words ripple across the chamber, too loud in the hush that follows. Heads turn. A few Elders exchange looks as if a sparrow had hopped onto their Council table and pecked at their fruit.
Lox’s lips pull into a thin line. ‘You will do what all humans do, despite our many prayers to the contrary – endure.’
A brittle sound leaves Marian’s throat before she can swallow it. ‘Endure what, precisely? A cage instead of the gallows?’
‘Many would count that a mercy.’ His voice is even and infuriatingly calm.
‘You call a locked door mercy and expect me to bend the knee in gratitude.’
‘Name it a cage if you like. But a cage is also a shelter during a storm.’ His tone does not change, yet the line lands like a thrown stone. ‘Consider which you prefer while you measure your pride.’
‘If she has wit enough to spit at your mercy,’ Onóra scoffs, ‘then she has wit enough to find the gate. Put her outside the wards and let the wolves take her.’
‘Or keep her where we can see her.’ Rían laughs, lazy as a cat on a sun-warmed sill. ‘Nothing turns a nuisance into a lesson like assigning chores.’
Aife considers Marian as if weighing a new bow. ‘Work her hands, not her knees. If she is to stay, let her learn something that serves us. Something useful.’
Every eye feels like a nettle wriggling beneath Marian’s skin. If she must live inside this net they have strung around her, then she will learn its pattern.
‘I can draw well enough,’ she says, surprised at how steady the words sound. ‘Give me charcoal and parchment, and I can map trails, mark crossings, render what I see. If you keep histories, I can copy them cleanly. If you don’t, I can begin them.’
Marian refuses to be an idle pawn in their games.
If she’s to play, then she will trace every roofline and root-bridge.
Count stores, measure paths, remember names.
If she is to barter for freedom from her betrothal, she will need more than defiance.
She will need proof. A ledger of fae truths that only she can deliver to her father.
Onóra’s jaw hardens. ‘The human offers to set our village to paper? Her map will be a knife drawn slow.’
‘Tell me, mortal . . .’ Lox stares, the corners of his perfect mouth lifting. ‘If our places were reversed, and I staggered through your father’s gates with blood on my sleeves and mud in my hair, would your people have bathed me, clothed me, and asked what trade I preferred?’
Marian’s tongue sticks to her palate. She imagines iron hinges and the stink of torches, the faces of men who wear law like armour. She imagines what they would do to someone like him.
He watches the answer form and die behind her lips. ‘I thought not.’
Fire rises up her neck. She hates the prickle of it, hates that he can draw shame from her.
‘Enough debate. I will find an appropriate task for our guest. This meeting of the Council is concluded.’
The chamber empties around her. Vines slide against wood as Elders rise and file toward the door in a slow procession. Marian does not track their faces. She keeps her focus where it has been since the verdict fell.
On him.
Loathing rises in her like a tide. Yet, beneath it, something treacherous uncoils and stretches. Attraction is too tidy a word, too human. The pull of Lox’s beauty is not the soft, courtly kind she was raised to admire. It’s sharp-edged and feral.
And Marian hates him for it.
She hates the treachery of it. She hates herself for feeling it. Her palms dampen. Her pulse climbs. A treasonous hum travels her spine and pools where she despises it most.
She tells herself it’s fear wearing a different mask. She tells herself many things in quick succession, until the lies stack neatly enough to stand on.
Lox does not move. He sits the way mountain faces sit, as if time itself must ask permission to pass. His gaze does not soften. It does not goad. It simply holds her where she stands until the last of the Elders are gone and the long door sighs shut on its hinges.
‘You stare as if sight were a blade,’ he says at last. ‘But beware, some things cut both ways.’
Her jaw tightens until it aches. ‘Then I suggest you look elsewhere.’
A faint sound answers her, almost a laugh. He leans back a fraction, and in that small slackening she remembers how to breathe. She realizes only then that her hands have curled into fists.
‘Allen,’ Lox calls, without turning his head.
Marian startles, a quick jerk that betrays just how tightly she had narrowed her world to Lox alone. She had forgotten that others still shared the room’s edges.
The minstrel peels away from the shadows where he’s been lingering, with Will close behind him. He strolls forward with his usual grace, though there’s an edge of curiosity in his eyes as they flick between Marian and Lox.
‘Since it was you who dragged her out of the snare and through our gates, she will be yours to mind,’ Lox announces. Allen blinks, his easy grin faltering for the first time since Marian met him. ‘My lord?’
‘Our generosity is not without cost. Elswyth is no refuge for idle mouths. See that her hands are kept busy, her feet stay where they belong, and her tongue halts before sowing discord as we prepare for the equinox. And if she disobeys, you will answer for it.’
Allen’s mouth opens, then closes again. For once, no quick quip leaps to his lips. His lute strap shifts against his chest as he drags a palm down it, buying himself a moment.
‘I am not a child who needs minding.’ Marian bristles with the humiliation of being bartered from one hand to another.
‘No, you’re a weed that needs pruning,’ Will seethes, hands resting on the pommel of one of their daggers. ‘Allow me the honour.’
Allen rolls his eyes. ‘For Shéruel’s sake! Not every problem is solved by cutting it to pieces, Will.’ He angles his body toward Marian with a wink.
Will bares their teeth and spins toward Lox. ‘You are making a mistake. After everything their kind has done, everyone we’ve lost, you’d let her stay?’
Lox doesn’t rise to the bait. ‘It isn’t I who allows it.’
Will’s eyes narrow. ‘Then who?’
‘Sherwood.’ The word lands like a decree, quiet but absolute.
For a heartbeat, the only sound is the low hum of the roots beneath their feet. Will’s jaw works, a thousand retorts burning behind their teeth, but none make it past their tongue.
Whatever argument they might have had with Lox dies there, smothered by something older and greater than either of them.
Marian looks between them, pulse quickening.
The forest? The idea that roots and leaves could decide her fate sends a chill through her chest. She’s no stranger to superstition, but this feels different.
The thought unsettles her more than the possibility of any punishment.
Why would the wood will her safety? What claim could it have on her life?
Lox turns his attention back to Allen, the moment already dismissed.
He leans back in his chair, the motion slow, casual, as though all of this unfolds by his design.
‘It is settled. Allen, she is yours to guard. And, little fox?’ His voice turns flint-sharp, cutting clean through the room as he drinks her in.
‘It was your fear for his neck that put you in our path. Now, it will be bound to yours,’ he finishes.
His words fall heavy as iron, final as stone.
‘Think twice before you bare your teeth. Bite too hard, and it will be his flesh, not yours, that bleeds.’