The earl’s smile was dear girl without the dear. “But we do have all day. Is that not the point of us meeting here?”
“I have all day,” Marion answered. “You have approximately fifteen seconds. Nick, Peter, please take the earl’s chair.”
He cackled once and the Delaneys hesitated for a split second, but Marion gave them no reason to pause. There was intentionally no one from the Huntingdon Guard present in the room, nor had any of the few actual lords seen a need to bring their personal protection into a debate hall. So when the Delaneys moved, Henry de Bohun’s smile dropped. He glanced to his sides where his daughters and their husbands pushed back from the table, clearly unsure of how they were supposed to react. Each Delaney brother, by all rights the most impressive men in the room, barreled down either end of the hall until they converged on the elderly Lord Henry. They reached down to scoop his chair back and away, and the earl only barely lurched to his feet in time to watch them whisk it out from under him.
The great wise Earl of Hereford gasped for air and teetered, reaching blindly at the table, his lips wiggling in a breathless protest.
“At last,” Marion smiled at him, “I’ve got you to stand for something.”
The Delaney brothers, as she had instructed them earlier, smashed the earl’s chair down hard onto the ground, cracking its frame in half. Each of them tore a hefty leg from the base and brandished it like a club, challenging any man to so much as bat an eye at them. There was commotion, an instinctive reaction to the possibility of violence, but Marion’s voice was louder than their fear.
“If we wait, we lose! If we try to negotiate, we lose! You’re all trying to be honorable, to obey the king’s law, to figure out what is the right thing to do. That’s how good people die. They’re dying out there right now, your people are dying. This ransom—this damned ransom!—is taking the food from their mouths and the clothes off their backs, and the very people who are supposed to protect them are being replaced by those who would happily ruin their own land in the name of a little power. This is not a threat down the road, we are in its midst already. And we may very well be at the point of no return.
“Take it from me, Lady Marion Fitzwalter, leader of Robin Hood’s men, that there is a time when laws must be broken. The alternative is death. So here’s what each and every one of you is going to do. You’re not going to give some passive report to your masters about who said what here, you’re going to demand they join us. No rebellion was ever born of soft words and apologies. You won’t ask nicely, or beg, you’re going to yell and scream until you’re red in the face. Because if you don’t, if they sit back and try to wait this out, then you’ll be to blame for the end of England.”
She could feel the fire in her own words, the crystal clarity that pierced through the fog of ignorance that had otherwise smothered the room. But now, men who had come as messengers and who saw themselves as little else, were stirred toward something more. Not because her grandfather had endorsed the plan, not because Henry de Bohun had sanctioned it, but because she had shown them something true and real.
The danger of their own inaction.
“Huntingdon stands with you,” came a confident voice, and to a great disturbance Lord Robert stood from the raised table, pulling his hand away from the countess. “Oh please, they all know the truth of it. We called this council but were too afraid to stand by it, while we let Lady Marion risk everything.”
He stood taller, casting a private smile across the room for her.
“She’s right,” he proclaimed. “Silence is complicity. Every day we fail to stand up to the Chancellor, there will be fewer of us in position to do so. Every man represented here may find themselves replaced on a whim.”
“Is that an argument you are truly prepared to make?” asked de Bohun, still quivering without his chair. “Your own earldom you owe to exactly such a whim of King Richard. You gained everything from his royal prerogative. But now you decry that power when it is aimed against you? Ought we give your castle back to the Senlis family, if you are suddenly so concerned with fairness?”
“Perhaps we should.” Lord Robert shrugged. “But if I can do anything with the power I have, while I have it, it should be to protect others rather than myself. Why do you remain silent, then? For England’s interests, or your own?”
“We must be careful!” Marion’s grandfather finally rose to emotion. “If we act as a mob, and claw down that which we disagree with, then we invite the next mob to do the same to us. The Chancellor is corrupt, yes, but he does nothing that is not within his power to do. He is a fetid disease, any man can see that. To which we ought to prescribe medicine. You are suggesting we wield a hatchet. If we wish to support Prince John—as all of us here do—then we must do so from within the system, not by burning it down. There is no point in putting a new monarch on the throne if we destroy the monarchy to do so!”
“I agree,” answered Hereford. “You speak as if you know Richard’s mind on the matter, when you do not. Your kinship to him does not make you a Lionheart.”
Marion caught his gaze and held it captive. “That is true, it does not make me a Lionheart. I wonder then, if you know what that takes? Do you know the story, Earl, of how Richard obtained that name?”
“Of course—for the very discipline in strategy that you lack. He became Lionheart when he sacked the castle of Taillebourg in a mere two days. Over a rebellion, I might add, not unlike the one you here advocate.”
“I don’t deny his military successes. But he was called Lionheart before Taillebourg.”
“It was Poitou, when he was but sixteen,” creaked the voice of Robert de Vere, as proud as if the story were his own. “He rallied his barons to war, led the army himself. The boy became Lionheart that day, mark you.”
Old men, all of them—worse than any foreign army. “Admirable, yes,” Marion replied, “but he was Lionheart before that. Does anyone here know where it started? Your Grace, I imagine you know?”
Prince John chewed his lip, giving a slow nod. “You can tell it.”
A pause settled before she spoke. “He gave that name to himself.”
John’s eyebrows flashed upward, in confirmation.
“It was no heroic deed or battle, not at first. He simply wanted a grand name, and told an advisor to introduce him as such. Odd at first, yes, but nobody questioned it. And he backed the name up with actions later, and everyone assumes what they assume.”
Hereford, Oxford, and Essex, their mouths closed.
“So no, my kinship does not make me a Lionheart,” Marion laughed, letting it roll into every word now. “If I want to be one, I simply decide to be. And what I decide today, what you find preposterous today, you will in time take as unbending truth. Power is not divinely granted, it comes to those who stand up and take it. Not to those who sit by and watch, waiting for someone else to show the way. And by my calculations, there are far too many people in this room content to sit and watch.”
Her breath left her when Prince John stood, and the room stood with him.
“Sit,” he said instantly, humbly. “I should … I should probably speak.”
The hair on Marion’s neck stood upright, and she swallowed to maintain her composure. “We are indeed eager to hear from you.”
She stepped to the side, though the prince simply raised his hand for quiet.
Once silence was his, his arms dropped—but he still took a few moments to digest his thoughts. It was a transformation, Marion marveled. The brat was finally shedding his skin, to become the king he needed to be. The room itself awaited his every syllable.
“It’s rather funny, if you think about it,” Prince John chuckled. His words had a slow canter, but carried a casual grace. “You know, I was in the south of France around this time last year—Carcassonne, my first time there. My host bragged that he had one of the finest brothels in the country, and I’m not one to say no, of course. My entourage went ahead of me, to clear out any raff and make su
re I was safe, you know how it is. It was a big deal for them—the owners of the brothel, that is—and they went above and beyond to welcome me. They had this sweet wine that was … well anyhow, it was a spectacular show, just for me, and then the time came for their whores to parade themselves for my choice.”
He started to act the encounter out, demonstrating where the whores had come by, nudging chairs about to get it right, and Marion allowed herself to relax. The room ate up his every word, enraptured. It was an unusually salacious tale to follow her rallying call, but she had rallied them to John’s hands, after all. And if the room felt comfortable hearing about John’s sexual escapades in France, it was proof enough they would follow him as the natural leader he was.
“I sat down in a chair, which they had lined in satin and raised up onto wooden boxes to make a throne out of it, you see, and there were these boys with harps and flutes and strings, and the whores came out and they were all—every one of them now, not just in the parade, I realized, but everyone in the entire building, even the pretty girls that had already swooned over me—every one of them was male.”
A laughter went around, which the prince nodded ferociously at.
“Exactly my reaction, yes! I laughed, until I realized it was not a joke at all! I was actually being quite offensive by laughing, because they were entirely serious. This was a whorehouse for homosexuals, as it were, and each of these boys was so very eager to be pricked by a prince!”
Marion laughed out loud, enjoying the new mirth of the room. Still sharing the space with him, she felt compelled to fill in some part of the conversation. “Do you think it was an honest mistake on the part of your host? Or was he trying to embarrass you?”
“Ehhh…” Prince John waffled his hand, “the former, I’d like to think, but that’s not really the point. The point is that all of these people—these good people with good intentions, who had bent over backward to treat me well—were in for an utter disappointment. I had to somehow tell them I simply wasn’t interested, despite the huge effort they had gone through to include me.”
Marion’s smile faded before she realized why.
“I’m in that male whorehouse again right now, and I’m afraid you’re all in for a terrible disappointment.”
She suddenly regretted her game with the chairs, as it left her nowhere to sit during what came next.
“You’ve got me entirely wrong. You all want to rally behind me to put me on the throne, and I don’t know how to tell you that I don’t want it. Do I like Will Longchamp? No, of course not, he’s a prissy little bitch. We’ve been spatting back and forth for a year now with petty land grabs and the such. But I’m not interested in a war against him. My brother appointed him as Chancellor, and my brother is King, and by God he’s going to stay King hopefully until well after I am dead. You think Longchamp is a bad leader? Wait until you see how bad things would be if I were in charge! I’d be terrible at it. At least Longchamp has the … strategic acuity for it all. I would just sort of … do whatever I want! Sorry. A bit too honest for the moment, but still. You all seem to be so angry with Longchamp for choosing to pay Richard’s ransom, but you’ve got it all wrong. We met. Him and I. Longchamp didn’t want to pay the ransom at all, he was in favor of giving me an army and having me march off to Austria to rescue Richard. But I would have been just as bad at leading an army as I would be at running a country. I was the one who demanded he pay the ransom.”
Marion’s stomach shrank into a very sharp coil.
“I came because I thought you simply wanted to replace Longchamp, which I would certainly enjoy. But you want to crown me? Under the assumption that I would refuse to pay this ransom? That … that is, no, no no no. No, I would sell the very land out from beneath you, this castle itself, to have my brother back all the sooner. So if you all want to rally together against your common enemy … I think…” he hissed in sharply, “… I think that enemy is … me?”
This silence, it was the worst kind.
Prince John sucked between his teeth, wincing as he took in the room.
A room full of people he had just labeled as his enemies.
“So … yes. So there’s that. I think I’m going to leave.”
With a reluctant clap of his hands, he did just that.
The chaos that erupted immediately afterward was the closest thing Marion had ever seen that could be described as actual hell.
INTERLUDE
SIR ROBERT FITZODO
NOTTINGHAM
THIS POOR DUMB GUARDSMAN wasn’t dead, but he might never walk again without a limp. His name was Dillon Fellows—a young man with doughy, wideset features. Even in sleep, that gentle face grimaced as if he were reliving his attack in his dreams. Blood seeped through the bandages wrapped around his left thigh, which the cooks had already changed twice.
Robert had been there—by the Hounds Gate entrance of St. Peter’s Square—when it happened. A figure, robed and hooded, had sprung from a window and loosed his arrows at the Guardsmen watching over the early mass. Dillon had taken the first arrow in the thigh while other arrows overshot toward the crowd, fortunately without hitting anyone. A cowardly attack, meant to scare good people. Robert had chased the bowman off all on his own, protected the parishioners, and carried this poor young Guardsman back to the castle for help. He’d stayed by Dillon Fellows’s side the whole time, but rather than be thanked for it—fuck them all—Lord Beneger de Wendenal had given him hell for helping Dillon rather than chasing Robin Hood down.
“He might have bled out if I hadn’t brought him here,” Robert said, looking down at the lad. He was mercifully asleep now, with no idea an audience had gathered around him, here in the castle’s infirmary. “God-her-fucking-self knows where Robin Hood is now, but I don’t regret my choice.”
One of the cooks wrung out a bloody rag into a basin, and the Peveril whelp paled and turned away. Some pups were new to seeing freshly spilt blood, but Sir Robert FitzOdo had breached that gate more fucking years ago than he could count. Lord Beneger de Wendenal, at least, seemed more than comfortable with handling the Guardsman’s bloody discarded clothes he was inspecting.
“Look at that.” Wendenal stood, holding the lad’s belt up to the torchlight. “There’s the mark of your Robin Hood.”
Everyone leaned in to see for themselves, but Robert had seen it enough already. The arrow had struck him in the hip, punching a clean hole through the man’s leather baldric that Wendenal was currently fingering.
“I thought Robin Hood was supposed to be some sort of expert bowman,” Peveril whined. “Was he running away when he got struck?”
“No, that was intentional, I guarantee it.” Lord Wendenal admired the wounds, comparing the damaged belt to the blood spots on Dillon Fellows’s unclothed leg. “This is the work of an expert. It kept our boy from pulling steel, see? Pinned his sword’s hilt in place so it couldn’t be drawn from the scabbard.”
“And it also put an arrow in his hip,” Quillen Peveril said with a weak smile, keeping his distance. “That couldn’t have been too pleasant neither.”
Robert was about as interested in Peveril’s fickle humor as he was in sucking the man’s cock.
“Why not kill him, then?” asked Jacelyn de Lacy. “And why him instead of FitzOdo, who was a more obvious target?”
Robert refused to be offended by that. “Well, who is he?”
“Common Guard,” Peveril answered.
“I can fucking see that. If you don’t know his name, just say you don’t know.”
The whelp frowned and made to retort some goddamned snark, but apparently thought better of it. Right choice, but probably not for the right reasons. He should’ve shut his mouth just for being in the presence of a knight, he should be saying sir every time he addressed Robert, he should show some fucking respect. But Peveril and the half-bitch niece were just like everyone else, all side glances and whispered barbs. Jokes, derision. Because they all assumed the same thing—that any knight left
in England was a coward. They assumed a so-called “real knight” would be off fighting in the king’s war.
Because fucking pansy noble boys like Quillen Peveril didn’t know the first fuck about what it means to be a knight.
Lord Beneger stood and stretched his back, his eyes squinting outside at the glowing tips of the castle’s battlements. It had been a long morning. “We might have prevented this, if the Sheriff had let me move on the Spotted Leopard. While we spend all our time preparing for this archery tournament, Scarlet is out there unopposed. And apparently,” he did not hide a growl for Robert, “we can’t even catch him when he sticks his neck out right in front of us.”
The arrogance, to call Robert’s compassion a mistake. But this Lord Beneger de Wendenal only saw what he wanted, and the man was obsessed with seeing failure.
Robert watched as the man’s mouth made noises he mistook as wisdom, inventing new orders to hunt Robin Hood’s already cold trail in St. Peter’s Square. Lord Beneger de Wendenal was a direct man and stern, but his good traits ended there. He, too, saw Robert as some stooge, an ignorant grunt to use for heavy work. A failure. It was true that Robert had yet to claim a prisoner despite months of hunting, but this was a testament to his quarry’s skills, not to Robert’s shortcomings. They didn’t even know exactly who they were chasing. Wendenal suspected that someone else was disguising themself as Robin Hood, but after dismissing Gilbert as an option, nobody had come up with a better suspect.
But it didn’t matter. It was Robin Hood they chased, and one could not kill a name. Robin Hood was loved, and that was damned harder to fight than any swordsman. The fact that Lord Wendenal thought he could finish the hunt with nothing but rage guaranteed him to be the next man to look the fool. At least that wasn’t Robert’s role anymore.
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