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“You think I can trust the word of a bandit? A highwaymen who holds no code?” Guy growled.
John wasn’t getting anywhere with him. My eyes darted to the frightened faces of Tuck, Alan, and Will. Not frightened for themselves, for surely they could take a single man, no matter how much of a renowned swordsman he was.
No, they were scared for me. Seeing their little heathen, little songbird, little thorn with a sword across her neck, inches from death.
I swallowed hard. A bead of blood inched down my neck, swelling in the hollow of my throat. I saw the righteous anger on their faces—their tight, coiled bodies, ready to lash out the moment they could.
Then the dull clop of hooves outside the back door had everyone looking over—
Everyone except Sir Guy of Gisborne, who continued to study the Merry Men and Uncle Gregory.
A horse galloped to the fields, Maid Marian astride it. A second figure burst free from the grass, frightening the steed and making it neigh and rear back on its hind legs.
The shadow, my father, grabbed at the reins. He shouted with Marian for a moment, before Thomas got the horse under control and managed to leap and sit behind Marian. Then they were off again, and all eyes were turning back to me.
“Sword-fighting isn’t your calling, little mouse. Perhaps you’ll best me in something else some day?” Sir Guy whispered in my ear—
And my body plunged forward, suddenly, toward the Merry Men.
Guy held a crooked smile and jumped through the window behind us. The thin man angled his body perfectly through the aperture, rolled on the ground outside, and then his black cloak covered him in the moonlit darkness as he fled.
“Robin!” John shouted as I fell forward into his waiting arms. The burly man held me firm in a tight embrace, as if he sought to never let me go again.
I pushed myself out of his grip, and his face screwed up, features sinking with rejected sadness. I moved to Alan, throwing my arms around him—
And grabbed the bow off his shoulder, along with an arrow from his quiver. “Give me that,” I growled as blood rushed in my ears.
I spun, shoved my way past Uncle Gregory, to the patio outside. I raised the bow as the men congregated behind me like sentinels.
I nocked an arrow and gauged my options.
Marian galloped through the knee-high fields, my father holding her waist. They shrank smaller and smaller with every shallow breath I let out. Guy of Gisborne zigzagged through the field to the right of the riders, closer than them but heading the opposite way.
I didn’t have time to aim at both targets.
My heart hammered. I closed my eyes, steeled myself, and took a deep breath to let calmness wash over me. The pain at my ribs, my neck, my stomach—it all subsided, drowning away along with the fading hooves.
The Merry Men didn’t guide me. Didn’t say a word. How could they, when the decision was in my hands, in the fingers pinching the bowstring taut?
I stared down the shaft of the arrow, jerking the bow toward Sir Guy’s awkwardly moving body, then back over to Marian and my father.
“Don’t do it, sister,” Robert said to me. “Give him a chance to explain himself. He’s still your father. My father.”
I sighed. “He’s had a lifetime to explain himself, Robert. And you’re dead. So is mother.”
I lowered my gaze, back on Sir Guy of Gisborne, peeling my lips back.
My fingers lifted from the string and it snapped forward. The arrow whistled away, piercing through the night sky—
Then my father grunted, jerked, and pitched off the side of the saddle onto the high grass.
Maid Marian continued on, only glancing back once to see her promised meal ticket collapse onto the grass before she was to the edge of trees past the field.
Will Scarlet bolted forward, making sure to keep an eye on my father in case he tried to sneak away.
I’d struck him in the shoulder.
From this distance, with this visibility, I shouldn’t have been able to hit him at all.
