“Wait. Edmund, where’d the bloke go?”
“What bloke?” said the ruddy man.
“The man I shot, where is he?”
Mary craned her head and saw that the Ghost of Sherwood had disappeared, leaving behind only a mark of blood on the road.
“Christ, Morton. You two, go find him and slit his throat.”
“I had my eyes right on him! He just disappeared!”
“No, he crawled away when you weren’t looking—”
“They say Sherwood Forest is haunted. Maybe he wasn’t—”
“Bollocks! Go find him, now!”
Someone else yanked her arms behind her and tied her wrists tight, then shoved a cloth in her mouth and tied it in place and slung her over a shoulder. She couldn’t have done anything, she kept telling herself. There were too many of them and they were too strong.
And now the Ghost of Sherwood was likely dead, trying to save them. Mary choked back a scream.
They carried her and her siblings away, into the forest.
iv
DUSK CAME, AND MARIAN wasn’t quite worried about the children yet. Eleanor had disappeared, but so had the other two, which meant they were likely together. Robin and Will were off visiting Much at the mill and smithy. When he returned, she’d ask if he’d seen them. They might have found each other on the way. She put away the mending and spinning, lit candles in the hall for supper, and added fuel to the hearth.
When an hostler rushed in from the yard, shouting, then she worried.
“My lady, there is a man at the gate. He’s crazed, badly hurt—I would not let him in but he said . . . he asked for his lordship by name. He said the lord would see him. What should I do?”
“Show me,” she said. They ran to the yard, to the gate, which stood open. A crowd had gathered and parted for Marian.
There, in the middle of the dirt path, Pol the stable master and one of his boys supported a man who had an arrow in his shoulder and was covered in blood.
“Take me to Robin. I must see him, please!” the man cried.
She was both shocked and not, to see this man before her after so many years. His beard grew to his chest, his hair stuck out wild, all of it gone to a kind of hoary gray, like frost on slate. The blood from the arrow wound was sticky, near dried. How far had he come seeking help, and who had done this?
He saw her at last, in the open space the crowd had made for her.
“Marian,” he breathed. He lurched, and Pol and the boy stumbled to catch his weight.
Marian rushed up and displaced the boy to take his good arm over her shoulder, but he was too tall, too large, still all muscle and strength. She almost couldn’t hold him. “Bring him into the hall. Send for Robin!” Pol helped her, and the boy ran off.
“I have news, I must tell you—”
“Tell us after we’ve got that arrow out and you’ve had a drink. God, John, what have you been doing?”
“The children, Marian. They are taken. I could not stop it.”
She had been angry many times, she had been frightened many times, for herself and her friends and especially for Robin. But never like this, so that her breath choked in her throat and her blood ran to ice and she wanted to break something. No, she wanted a bow and arrow in her hand, and to kill something.
“Who? Who took them?”
They got him settled near the hearth, but the chill remained. Joan appeared with wate
r and linen and a knife to cut off his shirt. John seemed dazed and hardly noticed.