Page 85 of Wench

Boots thunder down the stairs, descending like a sentence.

Marian’s heartbeat climbs her throat. It feels too soon for Lox, and yet too late for anything else. She squares her shoulders, preparing to face her groom with every ounce of her fury, but the figure that rounds the bend is not the Sheriff. Eamon Hallomere stumbles into the torchlight, thinner than memory, eyes fever-bright against a grey face. In his hands, a ring of keys jangles.

Marian’s lip curls before she can help it. ‘Come to collect me for the noose disguised as a wedding band?’ She tips her chin at the dress. ‘I suppose you’ll walk me down the aisle in case the Sheriff needs a reminder of who sold me.’

Eamon flinches. He glances up the stairs, then back, urgency cracking through the papery calm he wears like a habit.

‘Spare me your hatred,’ he whispers, ‘there isn’t time for it.’

‘How dare you—’ Her words stop short when he hurries to her cell’s door, fitting the key to the old lock with hands that can still manage intricacy even when they shake. She can’t mask the shock spreading across her face.

‘I told the guards that fae were amassing at the far edge of the forest and sent them out on a sweep. They won’t be back for a quarter hour, if that.’ He pulls the door open with a groan, metal scraping against metal.

Marian’s eyes tighten in suspicion. ‘If you’re searching for gratitude, you’ll find none here.’ She steps out, keeping the bars as a barrier between their bodies, but she turns around so he can access her cuffs.

‘I’m not asking you to forgive me. Saints know, I don’t deserve it.’ His fingers tremor against the cold metal before the cuffs click open and clatter to the ground. ‘When your mother died . . . the smidgeon of good that might have been left in me disappeared into the earth with her. A man can rot so slow he calls it living, until, one day, he smells himself.

‘But that’s no excuse. I am here because I have one thing left worth doing, and I would do it even if you spat in my face for the rest of my days.’ He stoops, snatches the ruin of silk from the straw, and thrusts it through the bars with a grimace. ‘Put it on.’ At her glare, he adds quickly, ‘The guards on the upper hall expect a bride. If anyone sees us, they’ll assume I’m marching you to the altar and him to the execution block. Keep your chin down and walk as if nothing is amiss. Once we are through the doors, run for the woods. Take the hedgerow path and don’t look back. The orchard gate is already unbarred.’

She snatches the fabric from him. ‘You don’t get absolution for finally tripping on a conscience and locating a spine,’ she hisses, turning her back to him. ‘One good deed doesn’t balance a ledger written in suffering.’

Marian slips out of her clothes and into the dress as quickly as she can. Her skin crawls as the whalebone of the corset tightens around her ribs. The high collar bites at her throat. She knots the ruined laces herself, fingers sure, before turning back around.

Eamon works on Allen’s cell, keys rattling until the lock stutters, then yields with a scrape that twinges in her inner ear.

‘Much as I adore the rustic jewellery,’ Allen says, lifting his bound wrists. ‘These beauties cut me off from the good stuff. Feels like cotton stuffed in my veins.’

‘That’s the point.’ Eamon doesn’t look at him; he looks at the cuffs. ‘Iron and fae ore filaments in the hinges. It dampens whatever river of power runs through your kind.’ With a click, the manacles spring open.

‘Much better.’ Allen inhales like a swimmer breaking the surface. ‘Removing them practically turned my blood back on.’ He rubs his wrists and slowly his whole body changes, as if something invisible settles back into his bones.

Marian’s blood goes cold. ‘That’s how they mean to catch him, isn’t it?’

Eamon’s face falls, but he nods. ‘The Sheriff’s spread metal shavings around the soil of the entire estate and had the smiths craft a lattice of ore and iron, strung between pylons. Once Hood steps inside, they’ll wrap it around him until the magic inside him just . . . stops.’

Marian feels the floor tilt beneath her. ‘He’ll draw Lox in and cut him off from Sherwood. Make him mortal long enough to?—’

‘Marian.’ Eamon says her name like a plea. He jerks his head toward the passage. ‘We must go.’

Eamon takes the lead, with steps swift but measured. Marian keeps to her father’s shadow with Allen beside her, his hands hidden behind his back as if still in chains.

The stairs cough them up into the manor’s gut. Servants plaster themselves to the panelling when they see them. Not one speaks. Fear grafts silence to their tongues. A part of Marian wishes she could catch a glimpse of Tilda, to tell her handmaiden that she is okay, but the wish curdles uselessly in her mouth. There isn’t time for tenderness.

‘This way,’ Eamon breathes, turning down a narrow door tucked between two banks of cabinetry.

They cut through the scullery. Heat rolls out: the kitchen. It breathes like a beast. Copper pots gleam along the wall; ovens glow with banked embers; the sweet-rot of old onions and the iron of knives rusting at their tangs mix in the air. An older woman, fingers sticky with wet dough, takes in Marian’s dress, Allen’s dark hairline, and Eamon’s ruin of a face. She reaches, without a word, to unlatch the door.

‘Thank you,’ Marian mouths as they pass.

‘Nunquam,’she replies – ‘never’ in the old tongue – as if to say there is no debt between them.

They cut through the larder, shelves muscle-tight with winter’s hoard. Apples gone soft with bruises rot in their bins. Salted pork sweats in the damp. Marian’s skirts catch on a protruding nail; Allen’s hand is there, quick, freeing silk with a whisk that doesn’t tear it. When they reach the back door, they halt, listening. Outside, the east hedge is a dark seam, and behind it the forest draws the horizon like the low line of a sleeping beast.

Eamon turns to face them. ‘This is where I leave you,’ he says.

Marian turns. The light is unkind to him. It carves his cheekbones into knives and shows every bruise that worry has pressed around his eyes. He looks, finally, what he is: a man who has dragged himself to the edge of a cliff and is about to step off. He does not reach for her.

‘Once you’re across the cobbles,’ he continues, ‘do not break stride. The outer gate should still be unguarded.’ Eamon tests the latch and it yields without complaint. For an instant he holds the door only wide enough for light to slip through, his head bent in the slat of brightness so that the white in his hair flares. ‘Go. Build a life the Sheriff cannot touch. Choose a path that does not end in ledgers or lords.’ His mouth works once, as if the next words catch on bone. ‘Choose a new name, Marian. Because once you cross Sherwood’s threshold, you can no longer be a Hallomere.’