Chapter 26 #2
‘I’d rather die wild than live obedient.’ Marian drags breath through clenched teeth, eyes blazing up into his.
The smile drops from his face. ‘This is what rebellion buys.’ He plunges the knife downward, and fire floods her side. The dagger sinks into her gut just beneath the navel. Once. Twice. Three times.
Heat blooms under her ribs, a sudden slick flood running into the torn silk. Sound leaves her chest in a wet gasp.
He wrenches the blade free and rises before kicking her, as if he could stomp her into submission. Boot to hip, then shoulder, then ribs, until she rolls into the sprawled form of a downed guard, his bow and quiver discarded beside him.
Marian tries to bring herself to stand, swallowing the agony that flares hot enough to steal her vision. She forces herself up onto her elbows.
‘The good folk of Nottingham will sleep easy tonight, knowing a man finally had the courage to put an end to fairy tricks and forest lies,’ the Sheriff muses, wiping the blade off on his trousers with neat little strokes.
‘I will cauterize what festers. The forges will sing until the last nest is torn from the branches and the final trickster hangs from the gate.’
Marian presses a hand to the largest wound, and gore spills under her palm. She clamps down hard enough to make her vision spark. Grass kisses her cheek, a thousand green knives against her fevered skin. The world tilts, rights itself, then tilts again.
The Sheriff pivots and starts back up the slope toward the lattice that still holds Lox. ‘Every story ends somewhere,’ he muses. ‘Today, it ends where it should have begun – by dragging a monster into daylight and gutting him from navel to nose.’
On shaking elbows, Marian forces herself to crawl, despite the unrelenting blood running down her side. Her body is a map of agony, every nerve a line etched in fire, but she drags herself forward anyway. One elbow, then the other, leaving a smear of red in the grass.
Across the field, Will is thrown back by a trenchant spear-thrust as they try to surge forward once more; Little John hacks through a pike that would have skewered his friend, only to be slashed across the forearm by a soldier’s blade.
They’re both fighting to peel down the ring of men, even as new guards surge to reinforce the Sheriff’s line.
For a heart-stopping moment a pair of armoured soldiers lurch between them and the slope holding Lox, pinning Will under a burden of blades and driving John backward with a wall of shields.
Lox looms a few feet away. His body is rigid with strain, chest heaving.
The ring of binding lines has grown tighter the harder he fights.
The skin around his chest, wrists and throat sinks beneath the pressure.
His eyes are wrecked and incandescent when they lock on hers.
He doesn’t call her name, but he holds her gaze unwaveringly.
For a heartbeat, pain falls away, until all that’s left is what’s bloomed between them during their time together.
What threads between them is not words, not even hope, but recognition: this is theirs, whatever comes.
Marian’s lips crack into the barest smile. Her voice is ragged and thin, but she knows his fae ears will hear her.
‘I’ll find you,’ she whispers, breath fluttering against the dirt. ‘In the soil. In the roots. I’ll bloom beside you in this lifetime or the next. This isn’t our end – wild things always grow back.’
Lox’s jaw clenches, but his gaze softens, an unspoken vow blazing through the exhaustion.
The Sheriff’s boots scuff closer, his laughter low, savouring the inevitability. ‘Pathetic,’ he sneers. ‘All that power, and what is he now? A beast caught in his own brambles.’ He taps his ore-tipped blade against the netting, eyes fixed on Lox’s throat, and the lattice hums louder at the contact.
Marian’s eyes tighten, a thread of memory winding through her pain: Mortal steel cannot sever what binds him, the Sheriff had said, so smug in his assumed victory.
But perhaps fae ore can.
Every muscle protests as she claws toward the downed guard sprawled nearby. The bow lies just out of reach, quiver spilled across the grass. Her fingers stretch, nails filling with dirt, until the wood scrapes her palm. She drags it to her chest and forces herself upright enough to string an arrow.
The tip glimmers faintly, a resonant tone thrumming in her blood. It sings not of obedience, but of endings and beginnings.
With his back still to her, the Sheriff pauses just long enough to savour the spectacle. ‘Watch closely,’ he calls to her. ‘You’ll want to remember how hope looks when it’s severed.’
I am not what he wanted, she thinks. Not a bride. Not a pawn. I am the wildfire that will not be tamed. The arrow that severs all chains.
Her breath stops as she pulls the bowstring back.
The ore-tipped shaft hums against her skin, vibrating with a frequency that makes her bones sing.
Blood slicks her knuckles, smears the wood, but she holds the draw.
The weight of it shakes her arms, tears her belly open anew, but she steadies herself on rage, on love, on the root-deep conviction that this moment is what she was made for.
The Sheriff straightens, blade poised above Lox’s bound throat. The lattice crackles brighter at the touch, threads tightening. Lox jerks, choking, veins bulging as the invisible snare bites.
Marian exhales and lets go.