Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The dark folds around Marian for mere seconds before the roots draw back from her skin. Cool air and the last remnants of the day’s sun flood the hollow.
She takes a deep breath and it tastes sickly-sweet.
The pain in her gut is gone. She touches her stomach, half-expecting the wound to open fresh under her palm, but instead her fingers brush raised ridges, a pattern of scars seared into her belly – her very own set of roots.
Their ridges thrum faintly, as if Sherwood itself has stitched itself into her body.
Her eyes flutter open and the world erupts in threads of gold.
Everywhere she looks, molten veins throb through every living thing, moving under the skin of creation.
It spills through the earth in bright currents, rising in rivulets through roots, shimmering inside the bodies of trees.
Leaves shiver with it. Ferns breathe it.
Even the moss beneath her hands hums, tiny capillaries pulsing just under the surface.
Her breath sticks in her throat. The light is not confined to the plants. It burns in the shape of the fox slinking between shrubs, golden ore coursing through every tendon. Birds flutter overhead, each wingbeat scattering sparks within the current.
The ore is in everything.
Marian looks down and swallows a gasp. Ore shines faintly beneath her skin, glimmering through her veins, but the scars at her belly blaze brighter than the rest, gold caught in the grooves like molten sap sealed into bark.
Her pulse trips over itself. The ore is anything but silent – a chorus of veins singing at once.
It floods her system until she tastes metal on her tongue.
The tone crescendoes, climbing higher, until she can barely think.
Every pulse of ore, every golden thread in the clearing, it all collides inside her until she’s a vessel spilling over.
She squeezes her eyes shut but the glow remains etched into her vision.
Every vein is a bright scream. They press against her skin, begging to be pulled, to be commanded.
Her knees buckle as she staggers from the hollow. She clutches at her ribs in the hopes of holding herself together while the current threatens to shred her apart. She sways, desperate to find a lighthouse within this storm.
And then she sees him.
Lox sits a few paces away, at the tree’s base.
His hands rest steady on his thighs, palms upturned and lips moving wordlessly in prayer.
His body is a storm of golden ore, bright currents moving through muscle and bone, veins burning so bright that she’s forced to squint.
His heart smoulders like a forge. To look at him is almost unbearable.
Marian is staring at the sun made flesh.
She starts to turn away from it, before remembering something Wodenna said: He will take what overflows, reminding you where you end, when the flood would convince you otherwise.
This time, when she looks again, she does not try to see all of him at once.
She lets herself notice a single thing – the steady cadence of his pulse.
In, then out. The rise and fall is a rowboat on the black lake of her insides, each oar pushing and pulling through the flood that surges in her veins.
She fixes on the rhythm until the blaze in him softens from sun to hearth.
The moss hushes underfoot as she moves toward him. She keeps Lox’s breathing in the front of her mind the way Little John taught her. The gold threads clamouring at her edges don’t vanish, but they follow that pulse, as if the current wants a channel and he is giving her one.
Lox is the tether.
Marian sinks to her knees before him. ‘Robin,’ she whispers.
His head snaps up. For a heartbeat, he doesn’t move, as though he doesn’t trust his own eyes. Then his mouth parts, breath trembling out of him.
‘M-M-Marian?’
His eyes are wild-bright, wet at the corners, relief and terror braided tight.
He seizes her, hands roaming her arms, her ribs, as though checking she’s real.
When he cups her face, his thumbs press almost painfully into her cheekbones, as if the world were a rocking ship and he was desperate to keep her from being pitched into black water.
Her throat closes. Words scatter uselessly, so she answers the only way she can: her lips crush into his.
The kiss is a wildfire. Her magic slams through her veins, wild and unbound, and the instant their mouths meet, it leaps into him. The air sparks with it, sharp as ozone. The moss beneath them hums. Even the roots stir, restless, as though eager to curl around them both.
Lox makes a strangled sound in his chest, half-growl, half-prayer, as the ore within him flares. His teeth catch her lower lip and he swallows her gasp.
Her body arches into his, craving more, craving everything, as if no barrier of flesh or bone could be enough. She wants to be one with him, marrow braided into marrow, two Verdant Guardian halves finally rejoined.
It is too much – too much hunger, too much magic – and yet not enough.
He tears his mouth away long enough to mutter against her jaw. ‘You’re alive. Marian, I can’t believe it . . .’ His words dissolve into another kiss: rougher, wetter, so deep that she feels it in the base of her spine.
She moans into him, hungry, desperate, needing more than lips. Needing to be threaded through him, stitched into his skin. She fists his tunic and drags him closer until their bodies collide.
Every point where their flesh meets, magic bursts brighter.
He grips her waist, his fingers digging in, pulling her flush against him.
Her thighs tremble, her fingers claw at his shoulders, her breath catches with the ache of wanting.
She feels every bit of him through the tether that snaps taut between them.
Marian wrenches away and falls back, forcing them apart in the hopes that it will help, but distance only makes her hunger surge.
‘How is this possible?’ he pants, golden eyes burning.
She opens her mouth to tell him everything – the smouldering ember-heart, meeting Shéruel and Wodenna, what Sherwood asked of her – but when she reaches for it, the memory slides away like sand in an hourglass.
Her lips part, trembling with the need to explain, but no words come.
Only the hollow echo of something immense she knows she should remember.
‘I can’t tell you,’ she whispers, broken. She cups his jaw, her thumb brushing the wild stubble there, and it takes a concentrated effort not to throw herself on top of him again. ‘But perhaps I can show you.’
His brow furrows, golden eyes blazing, but he rises without question.
* * *
They don’t travel far. The air is thick, the char biting at Marian’s throat with each inhale. Where once there had been a clearing with scattered flame, now ash carpets the ground, soft as snow but acrid, clinging to her boots.
Lox stares at the ruin. A cord in his neck dances as he squats on the layer of ash.
‘I don’t know how Sherwood will recover from this.
Even the oldest roots might not wake from such burning.
’ He looks at the soil like it is a corpse he must bury.
‘I don’t . . .’ His hands clench. ‘I don’t think I can fix this. ’
But perhaps Marian can.
She closes her eyes and the world transforms. Beneath them, she can see faint, golden threads pulse weakly.
Thin streams of fae ore trembling on the edge of collapse.
Sherwood’s marrow hums against her ribs.
She sinks to her knees in the soot. When she presses her palm against the scorched ground, the hum seizes her bones.
Weak. Distant. But there. The fae ore is strangled, trapped under the kindling.
The thrum rushes toward her, through her, until her body trembles under the surge. The sensations overlap – fragments of trees felled, beasts slain, and fae silenced, begging not to be forgotten.
It’s all too much.
Marian staggers under the chorus of wounds that don’t belong to her, yet lodge themselves inside her bones all the same.
Her stomach knots, bile burning up her throat – and still, she doesn’t move her hand.
She can’t. To lift it would be to abandon what little life clings here, and Sherwood has suffered enough abandonment.
Instinct tells her to pull, and she listens.
The hum threads upward, splintering through her ribs. She lets it scrape the hollow places inside her, leaning into the ache to offer herself as a conduit. If the ore needs breath, then let her lungs be bellows.
Her palm burns against the soil. The ash grows hot, searing, but she only presses deeper.
Slowly, the threads begin to tighten. What had been faint, flickering, starts to gather itself, knitting in her palm before spreading outward to strengthen every line across the clearing. Her pulse falls in rhythm with the feeble golden streams beneath her.
Behind her, Lox stiffens and she knows he can feel it swelling beneath him. He takes one step closer, burned twigs crunching beneath his boots.
‘You . . .’ He stops, swallows hard, then tries again. ‘You’re doing this?’
Marian doesn’t answer. She can’t. Speech would fracture the thin filament of connection she’s holding. Instead, her body folds toward the ground until her forehead nearly touches the soil.
The air changes.
It carries the slight tang of sap, of something green struggling through blackened ruin, and beneath the ash she can feel the earth breathe again.
‘Marian.’
Lox kneels beside her, voice torn between awe and reverence.
He presses his palm into the soil, beside hers, and the response is immediate.
The hum seizes them both, spiralling through her ribs and into his, winding into a circuit that binds them to each other as surely as it binds them to Sherwood.
A sharp grunt rattles him as if the ache of the ore wounds him as deeply as it does her.