Nottingham

by Nathan Makaryk

  “That’s fine, Lena,” John quieted her.

  “Like hell it is. What are your regrets, Robin? What did you do to try and stop this? Your first reaction is to accuse your father’s most loyal friends of neglecting him? Where’s your remorse for abandoning him?”

  “I said that’s fine,” John repeated sternly, pawing her away toward the ruined staircase.

  Locksley’s face betrayed no emotion, no humanity. He was interested in doling blame, nothing more. He had expressed no interest in the quality of his father’s life. Or where they buried his body. Nor what had happened to their own families in the aftermath. It wasn’t just Walter’s stable that burned, it was a home for a hundred, maybe twice that. It was livelihoods and survival and safety and family. Robin of Locksley was away plundering riches from foreign lands while they went hungry.

  She could have left. Will would have gone in a heartbeat. They could have moved on to the next town, wandered on, pinched their way into something new. Instead they stayed, true to their group, part of it now. This arrogant ass was Lord Walter’s blood, he’d done literally nothing, and he wanted to know why they didn’t do more.

  “Lord Walter hated the king, you know,” Elena spat.

  John snapped at her. “That’s it, you’re done!”

  She looked Robin in the eye. “You deserted your father to protect a man he hated.” If there was any part of Robin of Locksley that had a soul, Elena was glad to have a role in crushing it.

  He just stared, with those dull beady eyes, full of hate. It’s easy for a man to hate. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Why wouldn’t Walter’s laziest son be an expert at it?

  SEVENTEEN

  MARION FITZWALTER

  LOCKSLEY CASTLE

  LITERALLY ANY OTHER PLACE would have been a preferable choice for a reunion. Marion had only been back to Locksley Castle once since the fire, only once since poor Walter died. This place was as devastating to her heart as the fire had been to its stone-and-timber walls. It hollowed her out. She had not been present for the fire, and had only inconsistent accounts to piece together the truth of what happened. Captain Gisbourne had described Lord Walter as a madman, throwing wine bottles and horseshoes, while Alan-a-Dale insisted that Walter meant no harm at all.

  The hardest truth was that the truth didn’t matter.

  The fire did not care what caused it, nor the events that followed. Walter’s people scattered or fought amongst themselves for the remains. Then nomads and raiders tried to pick it clean, until the Nottingham Guard chased them out again. In Nottingham, the castle wasn’t even called Locksley anymore, as there was no one to claim the land. In a mere three months it had become “Thieves Den,” a mythical place where the hermit lord had launched a rebellion and been stamped out of existence.

  Marion had done everything she could to find sympathetic lords to take in those who had lost their home again, but still she failed most of them. Only a handful had been safely relocated. The others had either fled or, to her utter heartbreak, refused her help. As for her most loyal pack, they had chosen to stick together and carve out a living in the Sherwood Forest.

  Three times she had petitioned Sheriff de Lacy for his assistance, but he could only do so much. Three times she had ignored her father’s summons from London—he thought he could lure her home with some fresh political scandal. Her grandfather, the Earl of Essex, had also written, but with different intentions. His advice was that she speak with a recently widowed lord in Clavering for help. Normally she found joy in rejecting his obvious attempts at arranging a marriage for her, but this time she was only disappointed. Her family’s reaction was a sobering reminder of how easy it was for those with power to turn a blind eye to the suffering of those without. She couldn’t be bothered with any of it now. Not while she was still juggling the ramifications of her failures in Nottinghamshire.

  She shared the blame for Walter’s death, the guilt of orchestrating it all. To return to Locksley now was to look her victim in the face.

  She slowed her rouncey Medus, who stomped his hooves in protest. They stopped before the dead jaws of the castle’s once proud main doors. Neither moat nor wall had ever protected Locksley’s entrance, often prompting Walter to insist it was a manor and not a castle, a scholastic distinction that would never matter again. She swung her leg free of Medus’s saddle and Sir Amon Swift helped her down, as diligent in his duties as he was silent in his opinion of them.

  “I’d prefer to take a look first, my lady,” he said, and she let him. She doubted there was any danger here, but he was the most expensive gift she’d ever received and it was best to let him feel useful. A knight in times as these was a rarity, but her father had insisted on her protection. He paid the entirety of Sir Amon’s retainer after realizing he couldn’t stop his daughter from “gallivanting through the woods.” Sir Amon wisely bit his tongue on such matters, but had little issue in reminding her that his orders came from her father, and not her.

  As Sir Amon side-stepped to the castle’s front entrance, Marion helped her attendant Clarell down from her own horse. Her puckered face was bright from the long ride.

  “Stay here,” Marion said. “Tend to yourself, and the horses.”

  In little time, Amon returned. Although there was little light left in the sky, Marion had no difficulty identifying the lean man at her knight’s side.

  “Lady Marion.” Alan-a-Dale seemed relieved, and stumbled over himself.

  She did not waste any time. “Where is he?”

  “Inside.” Alan blew out his cheeks. “We didn’t think you’d get here so quickly.”

  “I was in Sheffield, luckily.” She rarely used the room she paid for there, but David of Doncaster had found her with no difficulty. “We found someone you’ll be interested in,” he had said. “We’re bringing him home.”

  Alan shifted. “Do you want to—”

  “Lead the way. Sir Amon can stand watch.”

  Alan abided and hurried within, through corridors she had once known well. Its air was cruel with echoes now, its floor littered with careless debris. The orange light at the end of their path seemed like a threat. She almost wished Alan would not walk so fast, to put off seeing it a bit longer. But all too soon they were within the cadaver of Locksley’s great dining hall. Once lit from above by either daylight or chandeliers, now the hearth was its only light. Lit from below, it was like walking into hell. Giant’s shadows stomped across the crumbling walls, every crag and cleft was turned into an open canyon.

  “Does anybody need a pretty lady?” Alan announced glibly to the room. “I found one just wandering around.”

  Will Scarlet perked up from where he lay beside the fire. “How pretty?”

  “How pretty?” Elena, next to him, gasped and smacked him.

  Marion gave them no heed, and kept surveying the room until she saw him. She had actively refused to believe it until this moment—her mind had closed itself off to what it meant for him to be here.

  “Of all things. Robin.”

  Robin of Locksley, a little older and amusingly thicker, squinted back at her. “Marion?” They had evidently not told him she was coming. He likely didn’t even know about her involvement with this place.

  “I didn’t believe it when I heard, but here you are.”

  “Here I am,” he said absently, and did not move to greet her. There was a beaten quality about him. She could tell he was still in the midst of dealing with what had happened here.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, feeling the utter inadequacy of those words.

  Robin nodded, but he didn’t thank her, and he had not said hello. Some silent bond between them made greetings and farewells unimportant. However, she did not care for the way he asked, “What are you doing here?” As if she had no right to be here, as if she had not nearly called it home as well.

  “Well, it’s nice to see you, too,” she said.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What are you doin
g here?” she asked back, aiming for sarcasm. “I hadn’t heard the war was over. Did we win?”

  “He’s a deserter,” Will Scarlet moaned lazily, lying down again by the fire.

  “I’m not a deserter—”

  “He’s a deserter,” Scarlet drowned out Robin’s protest, “and our prisoner. What do you suppose we could get for him?”

  “Wait,” Alan startled, “he’s our prisoner? I thought it was the other way around?”

  Scarlet blinked with his entire face. “Are you serious?”

  “That’s what you told me.”

  “Alan. There are … six of us. There’s one of him.”

  “Right.”

  “We have the weapons.”

  Alan laughed. “No, I know we’re not actually his prisoners…”

  “Do you?”

  “Go on, I knew that.”

  “God’s balls, you’re—”

  “Boys!” shouted John Little, ever the father. Only now did Marion take stock of the rest of the room, finding Arthur a Bland also hiding at its edges, and Tuck kneeling by the fire. It was a bitter homecoming for them all.

  “I promised you all whatever help I could offer,” Robin addressed them, “but it would seem that’s not much. There’s a cave against the rocks out past the south wall. Doesn’t look like much, but it opens up. We used to store rations there. Hard to see if you’re not looking for it, so it may have survived the raiding.”

  Elena rolled forward into a stand. “We’ll have a look.” She snapped her hand out and plucked Scarlet’s ear, tugging him like a child. “Let’s go, pretty lady.”

  “There’s nothing there,” Arthur called out after the two lovers, but they had likely only been looking for an excuse to disappear. “There’s nothing there,” he repeated to Robin. “Weren’t you paying attention? We lived here. We know this place.”

  “Worth checking, though,” Little said glumly, plainly to give Marion some privacy. “There may be a cask of wine in the back.”

  The magic word had been spoken. “Wine, you say?” Tuck asked and was gone. Alan took the hint and left as well, but Little lingered at the door.

  “Not aiming to run off, are you?”

  Robin shrugged. “Would you care?”

  Little’s nod was grim. “Sorry about all this.” It was an apology as well as a goodbye.

  Marion threw a serious look up to Arthur, who had not left, and by the stone scowl on his face did not mean to. He was leaning on the balcony rail of the second floor, and made a show of getting comfortable. It was his way of protecting her, and Marion did not protest. Instead she lowered her voice and drew close to Robin.

  “It’s good to see you. Alive.”

  He gave her an unenthusiastic smile, and used his toe to punish a nearby pile of ash. “Maybe it’s better this way.”

  Marion studied him. “What’s better this way?”

  He grunted and turned away. That had clearly not changed. Robin had never had an easy time discussing his feelings, and she had no idea what he meant by “maybe it’s better this way.” It was cruel to imply that Lord Walter was better dead than alive. It was naïve to say the castle was better burned than destroyed. It was horrifying to think Lord Walter deserved to die in the same place as Vivian, so many years earlier. But with Robin there was no knowing when he was trying to be funny or when he was a raw nerve. He might have meant nothing more than a pithy insult at the pile of ash he had flattened, that it was “better this way.”

  “I had no idea things had grown so bad,” he said.

  Marion blinked. “Would it have mattered?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you had known that things were so bad, would you have done anything differently? Or is that why you’re back?”

  Robin took some time to consider before answering. “No,” maybe to both questions, then he lost his thought.

  “You know, your father was something of a hero.”

  “A hero.” He repeated the word like it was rotten.

  “He housed a lot of people here. Gave refuge to those with nowhere else to turn. He paid their taxes, they tended his land. Locksley was quite the little kingdom.” Her smile faded. His kingdom had been doomed, with no heir. “For a while.”

  “I’ve heard all about it. Is it true that he paid everyone else’s taxes, but not his own?”

  “Yes.” That gave Marion a chuckle. “I suppose he thought he could prove a point. Thought he was too prominent to be evicted.”

  “It sounds as if he only made things worse.”

  “Worse?” She had to bite her lip. Robin didn’t know he was insulting her as well.

  “These people he helped,” he pointed loosely up at Arthur, “have now been chased into the forest. Living as outlaws, stealing to survive. They have no land, they won’t survive the winter. Are they better off now, dying in the cold, than if they’d simply paid their taxes?”

  “Simply paid their taxes?” Marion repeated back at him. “You think they chose this?”

  “I know they chose this! I spent the day with them. They came here because they knew my father would pay for them. Isn’t that right?” This too he threw up to Arthur, who clenched his jaw and walked away. Robin relished his tiny victory and turned back to her. “Exactly. Why wouldn’t someone choose that?”

  “Nobody was here to take advantage of your father,” Marion tried to explain. “Landowners started abandoning their own people so they couldn’t be taxed on them. The wording of Richard’s decree was sloppy and inexact. The Sheriff has done his best to make sense of it, but when armed men and tax collectors pound on your door, you run. If they hadn’t run here, they would have died.”

  “They’ll still die. Just later, and colder, and poorer. That’s my father’s legacy.”

  “Your father fought for them,” Marion said sharply.

  “He died hiding in a stable, throwing horseshoes at tax collectors!” Robin’s voice echoed in the dining hall. The rats under the table scurried out to stare at him, and back again. “This is a great hero? What was he fighting for?”

  Marion was seething, but wouldn’t let him see it. “It’s easy to fight for yourself. Your father chose to fight for someone else, people who couldn’t fight for themselves. That’s a hero.”

  “He should have known better.”

  Several emotions lunged forward, but she bit them off one by one and swallowed them down again. Robin’s eyes were in the fire, the same untouchable silence that had defined their relationship for decades.

  Marion could not remember the first time she met him, he was simply a permanent connection in her life, like a family member. The same was true with Locksley Castle—it was a place that had always been. As a young lady, her family split their year between Essex and Sheffield, which was only a stonesthrow away. Nobility were always excited to pair young people of comparable age together, and her parents had been no different. And so, Marion and Vivian were frequently paired off with Robin and Edmond.

  Over a few years their friendship had naturally bloomed. Vivian was the prettier of the two and found that in common with Edmond, while Marion and Robin shared a love for learning. She would spend hours with Robin in the forest reading books aloud to each other and wondering about the stars at night. One night as they walked home, their hands briefly brushed together. Whether it had been an accident or the bravest thing Robin had ever done, Marion would never know. But both possibilities amused her, so she took his hand with her own. She walked closer to him and pressed her cheek against his shoulder, just before they returned to the manor and found Edmond staring at Vivian’s body, bloodied and beaten with her guts spilling onto the cobblestones, like the rabbits he used to hunt.

  Robin had closed off to her after that. Even now, Marion had too many things to say, and it seemed Robin had too few. She forced herself to remember he was still reacting to his father’s death, and he needed time. At long last she asked him, “Why don’t you come to Sheffield with me?”


  He smiled, but not kindly. “That’s good of you, but I don’t mean to stay.”

  “You need to sleep somewhere.”

  “I’ll take one of your horses, if you can spare it. I have pressing issues in Nottingham.”

  This time their eyes met, and the silence was long.

  “Don’t do that,” Marion almost whispered. “Don’t run away again.”

  “I’m not here on holiday, Marion. I have an errand for the king, your cousin, you may remember, and when it’s done I mean to return to him.”

  “You could stay.”

  “There’s nothing for me here.”

  She almost gasped, but caught it. “Nothing?”

  “No, not … I didn’t mean that.”

  “Oh don’t get too full of yourself, Robin,” she chastised him. “I wasn’t asking you for my sake. Your name carries weight here. People would listen to you. You could help things.”

  “The way my father helped things?” Robin threw his arms out and paraded about the room, as if she were blind to its devastation. “Here’s how to help things—they give me the weapons they stole, and then they never steal anything else again.”

  Marion was shocked. For months she had wondered if they would ever be held accountable for those war supplies, fearful that someone would one day come hunting for them. Someone finally had, and it was the one person who should be on their side. But Robin treated their lives as an annoyance from his own.

  “This group needs to disperse. Move back to their villages. They pay what they can, and the Sheriff stops persecuting them. Everything ends up fine. The solution here is to do nothing. I’m not very good at doing nothing.”

  She could argue that he was, in fact, a master of it. But instead she let it slide, happy for him to retreat to the hole in which he’d been living. “Fine. You’re right. There’s nothing worth fighting for here.”

  “Marion, you know that’s not—”