Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Marian’s shoulder drives between the Sheriff’s ribs, under the black-veined breastplate, and her full weight follows. He buckles beneath her hit, air leaving him in a harsh bark. Marian rolls across his back and plants herself between Lox and his captor.
The Sheriff freezes mid-rise, eyes narrowing to slits. ‘Come for him,’ she snarls, shoulders squared, ‘and you’ll have to go through me first.’
Behind her, Lox drags a wet breath that sounds like broken glass. She can practically feel the power, his very life force, draining out of him with every passing second.
Across the yard, Marian sees Will and Little John weaving through a ring of soldiers.
Will’s knives find strategic gaps in their mail, while Little John’s club splits shields and shoves men aside like saplings.
They’re cutting a path toward her, but a fresh contingent of soldiers surges to intercept them, forming a wall of spears that pins them back.
The Sheriff’s lips curl as the guards begin to close in. ‘What are you waiting for? Seize her!’
Four soldiers lunge, but Allen’s faster.
He meets the first with a low slip under a clumsy swing, palms braced to the man’s knee; a twist and a yank, and the joint pops sideways.
He crumples and Allen swipes the baton off his belt, which he uses, as a second soldier rushes him, to crack it across the newcomer’s knuckles.
Marian launches at the third, springing straight for the throat. The soldier turns, surprise breaking across his face just long enough for rage to carve new lines. His elbow snaps toward her temple. Marian turns with it, letting the blow glance off her cheek.
Allen’s training flashes through her. She drives her hip through the motion, catching his knee with hers. The soldier grabs her braid and wrenches her backward, flinging her into the mud.
He rips a dagger free from his hip. The blade’s edge winks viciously as he lunges.
Marian jerks aside, feels the knife kiss her ribs with a hot, shallow slice.
Silk tears and warmth dribbles across her side.
He jabs forward again, a quick cross meant to carve a cheek.
She ducks and spins, snapping her elbow up against his nose.
The cartilage pops, but she doesn’t give him a chance to recover before she slams the heel of her hand into his throat and he reels, gurgling as the blade falls from his grip.
The last soldier is a different breed. He’s massive, brutish, with scars like pale ropes across his jaw.
He circles Allen with an ugly smile, parrying each swing as if testing a new fiddle’s strings.
The brute feints left, then drives a meaty fist straight through Allen’s guard.
It lands with the sound of wet wood splitting.
Allen’s head snaps sideways; his body sags boneless for a heartbeat before he crumples.
The baton skitters from limp fingers, pinging against a rock.
‘Allen!’ Marian’s cry tears out raw.
The big man turns toward her with a slow anticipatory grin, knuckles flexing.
‘Take her, Gareth,’ the Sheriff orders, voice flat as a blade. ‘Any means you like. But I want her breathing.’
The barbarian’s eyes brighten. Gareth wipes Allen’s blood from his knuckles on his trousers as he stalks in, savouring the fear he assumes he’ll find.
But before he can rush her, Eamon Hallomere surges up the hill behind him. He reaches them at a staggering run, one hand out as though to placate, the other empty and shaking.
The Sheriff jerks his chin without looking. ‘Hallomere, hold her down.’
For a breath Marian thinks his obedience will win out. Then her father’s gaze flicks from her to the blood shining on Allen’s mouth, to the brute’s fists flexing for more.
Eamon lunges for the baton that skittered from Allen’s hand. He dives for it, comes up in the same motion, and swings. The oaken shaft whistles and cracks across Gareth’s ribs with a sound like splitting kindling.
Gareth staggers in surprise. He pivots toward Eamon with a snarl, size and fury turning his first counter into a battering ram.
A fist slams into Eamon’s gut. The old man folds but doesn’t fall.
He drives the baton into the soft of Gareth’s knee; the brute bellows, dropping to one leg.
He snarls, momentum checked for a beat, and twists to fling Eamon off.
Marian uses that breath. She slides across the damp grass to where the soldier’s dagger lies and yanks it up, the weight sharp and comforting in her palm.
Her ribs ache from the cut he left on her, silk torn and sticky with warmth, but there’s no time to think about pain.
Lox is still tethered in the trap’s lattice.
She sprints to him and slashes the blade once, twice, three times at the wires. Sparks of sickly green and gold leap off where steel meets ore, but nothing gives. She presses harder, sawing, wrists screaming with the effort, but the web hums louder, as if laughing in mockery.
‘Hold on, Lox,’ she pants, frantic, shoving wild curls from her face.
A laugh rasps across the field, ragged and mean.
‘You could grind your bones to dust against those lines, girl, and it wouldn’t make a dent.
’ The Sheriff’s voice carries like a bell.
‘Mortal steel cannot sever what binds him. That’s the beauty of it.
’ His grin glints wet with blood, red smeared across his cheek where his nose has started bleeding again.
‘The ore sings to its own. It severs their tether to their power, unthreading it from their marrow; the forest unmakes the very spawn it once cradled.’
Marian looks at Lox: on bended knee, antlers gilded in dawn light, sweat streaking down his temples as he drags air into lungs that don’t seem to want it. The vines at his feet twitch, hungry to rise, but every time they do, the lattice hisses, and the motion dies.
‘Face it,’ the Sheriff sneers, ‘your precious monster is leashed. But you don’t have to join him.
’ His eyes rake her up and down, lingering on the torn silk, the blood wet at her ribs.
‘Take my hand and we’ll raze the scourge of the fae from all of Albion together.
Think of it: no more beasts in the hedgerows, no more tricks in the wells.
Order. Prosperity. A kingdom remade, with you at my side. ’
Marian rises from the lattice, breath sawn thin, dagger small in her fist. ‘The king promised them clemency—’
‘The king?’ He laughs, ugly and loud. ‘An old man fat on foreign piety, hacking at heathens in a desert while his own country festers. He’ll die on a sand dune, chasing a god that doesn’t want him there.
’ He tips his chin toward Lox, before thumping his chest. ‘I am doing what this country needs. I am the only one with the courage to name the rot and cut it out.’
‘You call it rot because it refuses to bow.’ Marian barks a bitter laugh. Wind frets her loose auburn curls as she steps between him and Lox, the rising sun painting her in bruised gold. ‘I’d rather die with dirt in my mouth and sap in my veins than lie with you.’
‘Bold,’ he says, pulling an ore-threaded blade from its sheath. ‘But I’ve broken bolder.’
He advances with the lazy confidence of a butcher who already knows the weight of the carcass.
Marian squares up to him, blade high, feet light on the churned turf.
The air smells of cold iron and grass crushed under boots.
Somewhere behind her, Lox drags a breath, the web’s low whine gnawing in the background.
The Sheriff flicks left, faster, and steel skims her forearm. Heat flares and he grins. She answers with a straight thrust for his throat that he slips by inches.
They trade quick, ugly work. He fights dirty: thumb for her eye, heel for her toes, elbow for her mouth.
Marian keeps the dagger close, aiming for the gaps in his armour: the seam under his arm, the slit between gorget and breastplate.
Twice she draws blood that drips in thick rivulets, and twice he repays her with slices that burn a line along her thigh and collarbone.
‘I can’t wait to peel his antlers and hang them over our bed,’ he spits. His eyes flick to Lox, who’s still struggling against the invisible bindings. The Sheriff’s smile returns, crueller.
Her vision narrows with fury. She charges forward and manages to rake the dagger across the thin skin under his eye. He hisses and comes at her fast. Slash, thrust, riposte. No wasted motion. Steel skims over her shoulder, her forearm, her hip.
He twists, catching her knife wrist, and whips her around until her back hits his chest, pinning her other arm between them.
He squeezes until tendons creak. Pain lights up the nerves.
Marian snarls and tries to drive her head back into his mouth.
But he’s expecting it and evades, pressing his cheek to hers.
The stench of rancid breath, sweat, and copper explodes across her senses.
He flings their joined hands wide until her shoulder screams.
‘Drop it,’ he pants, ‘or I will break every finger that touches it.’
‘Never,’ she grits out.
He pulls her wrist back in a brutal wrench. Pain detonates up her arm, and the blade falls into the grass. His knee drills into the middle of her back and shoves her forward until she hits earth hard enough to knock the wind out of her.
She flips over just as his weight comes down like an anvil on her waist. Cold soil seeps through her back as she scrambles, bucking, trying to get a knee between them.
‘Feral little wench,’ he murmurs, pinning her wrists above her head.
His dagger rips straight down the centre seam of her dress. Cold air bites her bare abdomen as the bodice falls open. He presses the flat of the blade to exposed skin, dragging it up and down slowly, as if to sign his name there. His stare brightens with a hunger as he straddles her.
‘One last chance,’ he hisses, bearing down over her.