Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
The trees stand as silent sentinels. The gaps between them reveal a star-studded sky that watches with a stillness that belies the trepidation zipping through Marian’s veins.
She crouches among the roots, her body pressed low on a platform of woven saplings hidden beneath the ribbed skeleton of a lightning-split oak, its bark glossy with old sap.
Below, two of the Sheriff’s carts, sagging low with weighty casks, make their way down the narrow forest road.
The supplies are flanked by eight men on foot and two mounted, the horses’ ears flicking at the creeping things their riders pretend not to feel.
The creak of the wheels mixes with the tramp of boots and the clank of armoured men too weary to mask their sound.
This is their third raid in a week. Each time, they’ve gotten smarter.
The first had been more luck than art: a spooked horse, a cut trace, the wild tumble of crates.
Lox managed to cocoon the guards with a wall of vines while the rest of them made off with the cache of weapons.
The second raid had been cleaner. They’d scouted the bend by the alder stand for hours, dug a rut where wagons would lurch, and rehearsed the hand signals and bird calls until they were muscle memory.
When it came, the strike was a single, braided motion: Will’s thrown blade severed the lead lantern, Lox coaxed the road to ripple, Marian’s arrow snapped a hitching pin, and the wagon’s axle kissed the earth.
The Merry Men took their score and melted away before the smoke gilded the canopy.
Tonight, they would take back what the Sheriff stole from Sherwood.
Iron rings at the wagons’ corners clink. Leather groans. Boots scuff. One man coughs wetly, clearing his throat of spit he’ll fling carelessly into the ditches. Marian feels each sound hum through her palms.
Lox lies belly-flat beside her, his antlers lost in the ivy draped over them, breath steady and sure. He lifts two fingers without looking at her.
Ready?
To which she answers with a mirror of the motion.
Ready.
A bird calls out and both their eyes shift to where Will crouches on the next trunk over, their knives already out. They tilt their chin toward the road.
Wind moves through the trees carrying the reek of the convoy: stale sweat, iron, and pitch that doesn’t belong on a supply run.
Marian’s fingers tighten around the bow. These men came prepared to burn something.
Voices float up the road, loose with exhaustion and the false privacy of night. Two of the footmen have let their formation bleed. They lag behind the rear axle, right where the road dips and mud sucks slowly at boots.
‘The Sheriff’s beside himself,’ one mutters, shifting his pike from one hand to the other. ‘After they found what was left of Aengus, he hasn’t stopped raging. “Burn the heart out of Sherwood,” he told us. “Make it remember what it means to fear a man’s hand.”’
Another guard snorts. ‘For what? Heard the Hallomere whelp is pretty, if you want them with more mouth than sense, but I can’t see how what’s between her legs is worth all this blood. He could buy a dozen better whores in Nottingham.’
Their laughter is coarse and cruel. Fury rises hot enough to burn through Marian’s chest, but she inhales down into the bowels of her belly, and exhales slowly, until the air threads through her bones and the rage no longer clouds her judgement.
‘Shut your noise,’ a third voice cuts in from ahead – a sergeant, by the steel in it. ‘You want to lose your head because you couldn’t keep it out of your breeches?’
The men grumble and fall back into formation.
Marian holds her breath as they pass the trunk that hides her.
The wagons creak, the horses snort clouds of white breath into the chill night.
But beneath that, a slow, thrumming note starts to vibrate through Marian’s sternum; the same bone-deep sound she heard at the ruined ridge.
The tone swells beneath the rattle of wheels and the iron stench of the wagons.
Marian’s chest pulses hot beneath her inked vines, as if the tattoo itself feels it. She leans toward Lox, whispering just low enough for him alone. ‘The wagons aren’t full of blades. It’s pure ore. Freshly mined.’
He glances at her, eyes a narrowed gleam in the dark. ‘How do you know?’
She shakes her head, words tumbling. ‘I can’t explain it. I feel it. It’s . . . singing the same way it did at the ridge.’
For a heartbeat, silence stretches. But then Lox exhales through his nose, the sound equal parts disbelief and trust as his jaw sets.
He nods, swirls two fingers in the air and points to the wagon.
The signal passes swiftly through the trees.
Will’s bird call ripples outward then echoes back twice from the opposite side of the road.
Shadows stir as the Merry Men draw tight around the convoy like the noose of a snare.
The convoy groans into the hollow bend. The mud deepens, sucking hard at hooves and boots. A wheel jerks forward with a splatter. The men curse as the horses toss their heads.
Roots writhe up from the ditches, tangling across the road. One horse screams and rears, snapping its trace. Another lurches sideways, nearly toppling the first wagon. The sergeant bellows, rallying his men, but the Merry Men are already moving.
Little John steps from the shadows with an ease that belies his bulk, seizing one guard by the collar and slamming him into the mud. Will drops silent as a hawk behind another, their blade flashing once, neat and sure, to hamstring his pike arm before he can lift it.
Marian looses an arrow that whistles into the shaft of a spear and knocks it from its wielder’s hands.
The ore’s song grates against her, louder now that the wagons are halted.
It’s not sound exactly, more a pressure in her bones that vibrates down to her marrow.
She presses her palms against her temples, hoping it might steady the strange resonance thrumming through her.
‘Hold the line!’ the sergeant roars. He hacks at a root with his sword, his horse rearing when the iron kisses bark. ‘Keep the wagons moving!’
A guard lunges toward Will, but Marian’s arrow flies in between blinks. It thuds into the dirt between his boots, so close that he staggers back with a curse. Will glances over their shoulder long enough to flash her a sharp-edged grin, before spinning and kicking the man in the chest.
The clash is chaos: a cacophony of metal clanging and horses shrieking.
The Merry Men never hold the same place long enough to be pinned.
Lox is a blur. When a spear thrusts too close to his ribs, he catches it mid-shaft and twists, vines snaking up to wrench it free.
Every motion is brutal and precise as they comply with the rule to maim, not murder, the guards.
Marian shifts in her hollow and fires another arrow at a man aiming at Allen’s back. The shaft knocks his sword wide and Allen takes the opening, slamming his fist into the man’s throat with a gleeful shout.
The sergeant, seeing his men falter, bellows and drives toward the first wagon. ‘Wagon’s free, we need to move. NOW!’
Marian’s stomach knots. If the wagons break free, the ore will vanish into her father’s forges, into chains and cages and nets that burn fae flesh.
She slithers out of her hiding place and leaps over the trunk, landing in a crouch.
Mud splashes up her trousers. A guard lunges at her with a spear, iron tip glinting pale.
She pivots sideways and the shaft skims past her gut. Her hand shoots out to grip the wood. She wrenches hard. The man stumbles forward, momentum carrying him off balance. Marian drives her knee into his stomach with all her weight and he folds with a groan.
Before he can recover, she slams the butt into his temple. Her chest heaves, but she doesn’t stop. She spins the spear in her grip, feeling the strange rightness of it, and darts toward the sergeant, whose eyes widen at her approach.
He uses his sword to cut his horse free from the cart and bares his teeth at Marian.
‘You’ll burn for this, girl,’ he spits. ‘You and this wretched forest.’
He yanks his horse around with a savage jerk and digs his heels into its sides. The animal surges, finds purchase where the roots have pulled back, and bolts.
Marian grits her teeth and looses another arrow in his direction, kicking the air in front of her when it misses.
‘Will!’ Lox bellows, pointing after him.
‘I see him,’ they snap. In the next heartbeat, they spring to a branch, limbs as sure as a squirrel’s, and become a shadow running along a bough.
The remaining men-at-arms see the tide turn and start to break, abandoning the fight and peeling off into the trees.
For a moment, there is only relief. Allen whoops something obscene about the Sheriff’s mother and vaults onto the wagon like a triumphant magpie. He plants himself on the driver’s bench and turns to Little John. ‘Darling, be a dear and put that big, beautiful body of yours to work?’
Little John winks at Allen and lifts the handles of the laden cart with ease, before they both look to Lox.
‘Go.’ He nods. ‘Rían will know where to store it.’
Night folds back around them as Allen and Little John peel away. Silence falls so quickly that Marian flinches when a jay calls. Her hands shake but she doesn’t hide it. She’s alive in a way that makes her skin feel too small for her body.
Lox notices.
‘Are you hurt?’ He is at her side in a breath, gaze raking over her with clinical precision.
‘A few scrapes and bruises,’ she sighs, wiping the wet earth from her cheek. ‘But mostly mud.’
‘Good,’ he says softly, brushing a crooked finger across her chin. He gestures to the path and they start back toward Elswyth.