Page 40 of Wench

‘And you humans call us savages,’ he huffs, biceps flexing beneath his rolled linen sleeves. The moment stretches, thick with a tension neither of them acknowledges. ‘We should go. The ridge isn’t far by fae standards, but I worry that with only one decent meal in your belly you may collapse halfway there.’

Marian stiffens. ‘I am not fragile.’

‘No, but youaremortal.’ Lox’s mouth tilts, the faintest provocation. ‘Humans burn bright, but briefly.’

‘I won’t gutter out so easily.’

His smile curves, dangerous in its restraint. ‘We shall see.’

* * *

Marian stumbles more often than not and Sherwood seems to relish testing her resolve. Roots rise like knuckles through the loam. Brambles flirt with her sleeves and tug free the curls she’d failed to tame. Marian grits her teeth and presses forward a few paces behind Lox, careful not to match his stride exactly, unwilling to admit she’s following his lead. She will not give either the trees or their lord the satisfaction of seeing her flounder.

Not once do his steps falter. The forest parts for him as though eager to smooth his way: a branch lifts a breath, a root settles deeper, the mist thickens to a veil before him and draws closed again after he’s passed.

They take a deer path that climbs in tight switchbacks. Lox moves just ahead, the line of his shoulders unhurried, the antlers making a moving lattice out of the pale light. When he slows, it’s not from strain but to let her catch her breath; she spurns his gift and lengthens her step to close the gap between them, lungs burning.

He’s the first to break the quiet. ‘We’ll rest here a moment.’

Embarrassment flushes up her neck. She misses a step and recovers, pretending it was the slope. ‘Tired already?’ she huffs.

Lox’s mouth tilts. ‘Not remotely.’ He gestures to a fallen trunk slick with moss. ‘But the sound of your mortal lungs wheezing is scaring off every critter within a thousand leagues.’

‘That’s hardly my fault,’ she seethes, leaning her quivering thighs against the trunk despite herself. ‘This place is challenging to navigate.’

‘Sherwood is not your enemy.’ Lox stands a pace away, hands loose at his sides. ‘The more you fight it, the more it will make you prove yourself. It listens. It learns. If you thrash, it will give you something to thrash against.’ His gaze flicks back to her, green catching in the filtered light. ‘You are in its body and you charge through it like it owes you passage. Walk like a guest, mind where you put your weight, and try not to look at every root as a vice.’

‘That’s easy for you to say; the roots seem to adore you,’ she mutters, rubbing the ache in her calf.

‘They know me. And I know them. I was weaned under these leaves.’ He steps beside her, not quite touching, and points at the path ahead of them. ‘Weight on the outside of your foot when the ground is soft. Heel to toe on rock. When the fern fronds tilt, that means the soil beneath is hollowed by roots. Avoid it. If the ivy clings to a trunk on one side, wind comes from the other. Read Sherwood the way you would before pressing charcoal to paper.’

The muscle in her jaw spasms at being taught like a child, yet his nearness unsettles her more. What would her mother think of their closeness? The thought rises unbidden. Isadora Hallomere would scarcely recognize the woman Marian’s become. Isa, who salted thresholds and strung iron nails over the hearth to ward against fae; she would condemn her daughter for walking willingly beside one, especially while being betrothed to another – even one as detestable as the Sheriff. Marian can almost hear her voice, warning that the woods take what they love, that they’d swallow her whole until only carrion remained.

And yet here she stands. Fae food still in her belly and deep within the heart of Sherwood, determined not to let it, or her captor, get the best of her.

She steps past him into the seam of the path. ‘Outside edge on soft ground,’ she murmurs to herself. ‘Heel to toe on rock. Avoid the ferns. Understood.’

Her feet push ahead. The path narrows to a thread between thorn and nettle, the ground slick where mist has beaded. She does as he said, if only to prove she can, and, to her irritation, it works. The ground receives her instead of shrugging her off. The brambles snag less when she anticipates their reach. Even the mist seems to loosen, parting in ribbons where they brush against her flesh.

All around them, Sherwood awakens. Birds loosen into tentative song, then lively chatter. A beetle trundles over a coffin of bark and disappears beneath a curtain of lichen. Marian lets the rhythm of noticing steady her. She reads the tilt of fronds, the lay of leaves, the way damp earth darkens where her step would sink deepest. Each small success is both balm and burr.

Lox falls in step behind her without comment, and when the path pitches, his presence tightens the air between her shoulder blades.

They crest a low rise where the trees thin. She pauses to breathe. He doesn’t close the space, only tilts his head, studying the shift in light.

‘Are you enjoying the Greenwake rituals?’ he asks, almost idly.

His question snares at a guilty place in Marian’s gut; the image of his face upturned to torchlight, the hush of confessions threading through the clearing, the way his gaze had struck her window like an arrow.

‘You were hardly inconspicuous,’ he adds casually, ‘leering from your perch like a hawk.’

She whips around, wild curls flying across her face. ‘I wasn’t leering! I was?—’

‘Learning?’

‘Observing,’she corrects, then hears how prim it sounds and winces.

‘From the best seat in Elswyth. See anything of note?’