Chapter 23 #3
‘The Council has spoken,’ Lox hisses. ‘Their will is that of Sherwood’s and my vote seals it. This matter is decided. Clear the chamber!’
The Elders rise in silence, some relieved, others with venom flickering behind their eyes, but none dare defy his command. One by one, they pass beneath the arch of living root, until only Lox and Marian remain, the air between them thick as pitch.
She reels, fury vibrating through her.
‘You damn your people with your patience,’ she spits, stepping closer. ‘Every day that you wait, more of Sherwood dies. A shield does not save if it never strikes back!’
‘And what would you have me do?’ His golden eyes are no longer calm seas but turbulent ones.
‘Send them to slaughter so that you can prove you are not your father’s daughter?
Do you think bleeding beside us will absolve you?
That if your body lies among our dead, the Sheriff will finally see the difference? ’
Her chest seizes. An ugly, frightened part of her knows he isn’t entirely wrong.
Still, she bares her teeth. ‘You hide behind your walls and call it prudence. Tell me how that is different from what my father called protection within the manor’s walls.
Or what the Sheriff calls order from behind his hangman’s cap.
Every man who holds a key names the cage a mercy. ’
‘I am not free to spend lives to ease your shame.’
‘Do not mistake my ire for guilt,’ she snarls. ‘I am furious because I am finally choosing something that isn’t survival, and you would have me run away from it.’
For a heartbeat his face softens, but he quickly shutters it.
‘This is why the Verdant Guardian is forbidden the comforts others take for granted. I cannot afford to think like a man reaching for a body in his bed, when I am asked to think like a root holding a forest. A leader does not gamble lives for the sake of his own heart’s noise.
’ His voice is rough, a confession he doesn’t want to name.
‘I cannot afford to let your wants become my compass.’
She hates how cleanly that wounds her. Hates that the hurt blooms right alongside the understanding.
‘My wants?’ she says, and her voice goes terribly calm.
‘You mean wanting to see children live to grow their second set of teeth or to walk in a wood that doesn’t smell like a pyre?
’ She shakes her head. ‘If that is a softness you cannot afford, then perhaps the forest needs a heart more than it ever needed a shield.’
She doesn’t wait for his response. The chamber air is suffocating, heavy with unspoken truths. Marian turns on her heel and flees. The heart tree groans as if in mourning, the lanterns dimming to a sickly pall when she passes.
The fury that held her spine straight in the chamber slips its leash and leaves her hollow. Tears come hot and graceless. They streak soot across her cheeks, sting the tender skin at the corners of her mouth. She wipes them once with the heel of her hand and only smears the pain wider.
Her legs carry her through Elswyth, up the winding staircase, and through the door of her quarters without breaking pace.
Inside, it’s too quiet. Her hands go straight to the window, to the basin, to anything that promises a smaller task than tearing the world down.
She empties the pitcher. The water hits the copper with a soft, forgiving sound that makes her throat knot.
She palms a cloth and dunks it. The first pass over the back of her neck is blessedly cold.
She holds it there until the chill bites, but when she drags the cloth down her face, across her brow and cheeks, the water turns brown and grey and sick.
She rinses, wrings, and presses harder. Again.
Again. The water clouds darker, a thin oil-sheen rimming the edges.
She scrubs until her skin stings, and when there’s nothing left to clean she flings the rag across the room with a roar.
Marian grips the basin until it creaks. In the warped reflection she is no Council’s guest and no baron’s daughter – just a woman filled with a rage as bright as pulsing coals.
If they won’t cut the hand that feeds her father’s forges, then she will.
The thought lands clean and certain.
She dries her hands on what’s left of her tunic, slips on a pair of leather bracers until they’re snug against her forearms. Her fingers bind her hair in a braid that she coils at the base of her skull, securing it in place with her mother’s fox pin.
She pulls on her cloak, fingers sure now that a decision has found them.
When she unbars the door and swings it open, she isn’t alone.
Allen stands on the threshold, lute nowhere in sight. In its place, a pair of twin bo staffs, and in his hand a bow slung next to a quiver full of arrows. His usual grin is gone; what sits in its place makes her entire body tense.
He’s furious.
He looks her up and down. Her mouth opens, excuse at the ready, but he holds up a hand to silence her. ‘I’m not here to talk you out of anything. I want blood.’ He holds out the bow and arrows. ‘If I can’t have that, then I’ll take fire.’