Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Light presses against Marian’s eyelids. Numbness cradles her, but the warmth behind her lids grows bolder. It coaxes her back from the dark, each breath a tether tugging her toward a world she’s not quite ready to rejoin.
Pain stirs before thought, but she swallows it and her lashes flutter open just a sliver.
Firelight pools against the walls. The ceiling slants above her in rough-hewn beams. Shadows flicker over woven tapestries and shelves lined with leather-bound books and curling scrolls. The air smells of cedar smoke and juniper.
This isn’t her room in Elswyth.
Marian’s gaze drifts to the chair beside the low bed, carved from twisted wood and polished smooth with age.
Lox is slumped in it, legs sprawled carelessly, arms crossed over his chest. His head rests against his chest, tilted just slightly, the shadow of stubble darkening his jaw.
He looks different, less guarded, in sleep.
The usual sharpness of his face is dulled now, angles softened by exhaustion. Even his tattoos seem dimmer.
Lox shouldn’t have come for her. He didn’t have to. But he did.
She swallows the guilt burning its way up her throat and shifts to sit up.
The sheet rasps against her skin and pain surges up her side so sudden she nearly gasps.
Her teeth sink into the inside of her cheek until copper floods her mouth.
She lowers herself back down, jaw clenched, not wanting to wake Lox.
A soft knock breaks the quiet.
Lox doesn’t startle the way most do when dragged from sleep. Instead, he exhales slowly, as though surfacing from somewhere deep, and pushes himself upright with a groan.
Marian’s eyes slam shut. She waits a breath or two before chancing a look through her thin veil of lashes. His movements are stiff. He drags a hand over his face, fingers catching in his tangled hair, then rolls his shoulders just as another knock comes, more insistent.
He pads barefoot toward the door and opens it without ceremony.
Will’s voice carries into the room. ‘The Council wishes to speak with you.’
Marian shifts slightly, enough to angle her body toward the gauze curtain drawn across the threshold. But the motion tugs at her wound. Her breath hitches, a tremor barely audible, and she bites the inside of her cheek harder.
Lox exhales through his nose, subtly shifting his stance as the coil of authority wraps back around him like a cloak shrugged on. ‘They can wait. Did you retrieve it?’
‘If they could wait, I wouldn’t be here,’ Will snaps.
‘Did you retrieve it?’ he repeats, his tone offering no reproach.
Will huffs. ‘Little John is stashing the ore behind the healing bough.’ Their lips curl into a sneer as they tip their head toward where Marian rests. ‘Though why you’d want to risk everything we’ve built for that girl is beyond my comprehension.’
That girl.
Not Marian or Mare. Not even ‘captive’. Just a problem in a girl’s shape. She wonders if that’s all she is to Will, to any of them, now: a liability wrapped in borrowed clothes.
Lox doesn’t rise to the insult, at least not aloud. But the silence that follows is heavier than anger – a pause that makes Will’s sneer falter. Lox stands with his back to Marian, broad shoulders dark against the fire-lit frame of the doorway, but she sees a subtle bracing of his weight.
‘She is under my protection,’ he says finally.
‘That’s shit and you know it!’
Lox exhales, long and ragged, like the breath of a man fighting not to bare his teeth. ‘There’s something about her, Willow.’ He balls a fist, thumping it against the jamb. ‘She’s different, she—’
‘Why? Because she’s pretty? Because saving her might make you less of a monster in the eyes of mortals?’
‘Sherwood spoke the night she arrived.’ Lox’s jaw flexes, the fire painting a harsh line down his cheek. ‘I don’t know how or when, but Sherwood made it clear she will be needed for what’s coming.’
Marian’s pulse hammers in her throat. She keeps her eyes half-shut, but she can almost feel Lox’s frustration radiating through the air, a heat that makes her ribs ache worse than the wound.
The flicker of the hearth catches on the golden trinkets woven through Will’s dark hair.
‘You’re risking everything on a feeling.
’ Their voice drops to a dangerous whisper.
‘You broke the oldest rule we have, Loxleigh. You killed three men! Three mortals. Time and again you’ve said we take gold or weapons, but we never trade blood for blood, not when we can help it.
And you did it with Sherwood’s magic! Do you have any idea what that means if the Sheriff comes sniffing this far north? ’
‘It means they will learn what it costs to trespass this deeply.’
‘You’re not the forest’s executioner,’ Will spits. ‘You’re its keeper. There’s a difference.’
‘Then let it judge me,’ he growls. ‘If Sherwood disapproves, it will take back what it’s given. Until then, I answer to its will – not yours.’
Will stares at him, something wounded flickering behind the anger. ‘Robin Hood has gone soft.’ They wield his name like an insult. ‘You’ve changed since she came. The forest may have whispered, but I think you’re the one who’s stopped listening.’
‘What would you have had me do?’ Lox snarls.
‘Three men gutted our land for ore, laid hands on what they had no right to. Would you have let them walk?’ His voice drips with restrained fury.
‘Would you have spared them if it was a fae child dragged into the dirt and threatened to be carved open like game?’
Will doesn’t answer right away. Their shadow leans long across the threshold, weight shifting restlessly as if the question itself presses them off balance.
Lox’s fingers curl against the wood until the grain creaks. ‘Tell the Council I’ll come when I’m ready. Not before.’
‘We both know you didn’t do this for Sherwood, and you’re fooling yourself to think that she would do the same for you or any of the rest of us.’ With those parting words, they leave, their footsteps fading into the hush beyond as the door shuts.
Silence returns, broken only by the muted pop of the fire.
Marian’s hands tighten in the bedsheets, fingers fisting around the coarse weave until her knuckles ache.
When she closes her eyes, all she sees is the dull shimmer of ore within the valley, the veins of her father’s ambition gleaming.
She can’t help but think that maybe she deserved what almost happened to her.
After all, what’s a single scar to weigh against what she’s helped carve into the bones of this land?
How many trees died to feed Hallomere greed?
How many children, fae or otherwise, will never take a breath beneath Sherwood’s canopy again because she sketched weapons and called it a daughter’s duty?
A sick heat blooms in her chest, part shame, part fury.
She shouldn’t feel this way. She shouldn’t feel anything at all.
Not about Lox. Not about the way his voice goes rough and hard when he’s angry.
Not about the way he looked at her when he pulled her off the forest floor, blood-streaked and shaking.
Or how he held her as if she were something worth saving.
But she does.
Soft footfalls pad over the wooden floorboards toward her and she squeezes her eyes tighter.
‘You can stop pretending now,’ Lox murmurs, voice coming from far too close for him to be anything but beside her again. ‘I know you’re awake.’
Her heart thuds as her eyes flutter open in time to see him crouch beside the bed, elbows resting lightly on his knees, gaze fixed on her with that unreadable stillness he wears like armour.
‘How?’ she croaks, the word sandpaper in her throat.
Lox’s mouth tugs at the corner, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
‘Fae senses. Your breathing changed the moment Will spoke. As did your heartbeat, which is always a little louder when you’re lying.
’ The intensity of his gaze doesn’t waver.
‘And when you moved against the sheets, you bit the inside of your cheek. I could smell the blood.’
Marian’s face is aflame with humiliation.
He reaches for the low table at her bedside and lifts a small clay cup, its rim glossy with moisture. ‘Here, drink this.’ She stares at the offering, suspicion blooming, before he adds, ‘It’s usnea and nettle tea to help stave off infection. No magic, on my honour.’
She moves to grab the cup and winces, pain zipping across her chest like lightning.
Lox is already there. One arm slips behind her shoulders, lifting her with a gentleness that undoes her.
The other hand holds the cup steady at her lips.
The liquid is warm and bitter, infused with herbs she doesn’t recognize, but she swallows anyway, each sip easing the rasp in her throat.
She can’t help but think of her mother’s tonic, of how she swallowed it to keep the wild out, only to now invite it in with little hesitation.
He doesn’t speak, and neither does she. The silence grows thick with something that crackles at the edges.
They’re close enough that heat bleeds through the fabric where his arm curls behind her back.
His pulse beats steady where her temple brushes against his collarbone.
She doesn’t mean to lean into it, but the contact is grounding.
Once the cup is drained, Lox sets it aside but doesn’t let go.
‘I don’t understand,’ Marian whispers, reaching up to touch the tender spot above her brow where her skull hit the rock. ‘When I first arrived in Elswyth, Allen said they healed me. Why not this time?’
‘That was before I knew how much you feared our magic,’ he says slowly, unwilling to meet her eyes now.
‘Considering you were willing to starve yourself to avoid eating anything that could have been tainted with it, I didn’t want you to wake up and fear that we’d warped your body in some way you didn’t have a say in.
’ He drags a hand through his hair, jaw flexing.
‘So this time . . . I waited. I didn’t want to take that choice from you. ’