He turned to find David Fuller standing with him at the edge of the glade. The man pushed a tattered hood away from his face, looking sheepish and a little fearful. Although stout of body and built for hard labor, he had grown thin. A fresh scar stood in pale pink relief on his left cheek.
“Let the past lie,” Will found himself saying. Pity, not vengeance, had taken hold of his tongue. “What are you doing here, Fuller?”
“We’ve been driven out of Nottingham by another blasted sheriff.”
Walk away.
Walk away.
He had managed that simple act of self-preservation regardless of Meg’s pleas, and he could do it again. These ragged, lost people were not his concern, allies though they had once been. They were nothing but a hindrance, a danger to his plans and his duty to Marian.
But curiosity and some nastier impulse made him ask another question. “What has Finch done to you?”
“You worked for the man.” Wariness hunched the peasant’s shoulders, but Will recognized resentment as well. “D’you mean to say you’ve no notion of what’s happened?”
“Apparently not.”
“He sides with the Normans on every dispute,” Fuller said. Dark circles rested beneath watery gray eyes that would not hold still. “Unless you live within the shadow of the castle or speak French, you may’s well be outlawed. He imprisons everyone caught bartering or using chits instead of gold. No gold means no taxes, and he wants every penny.”
“But to live here?” He moved a critical gaze over the clearing. The outcast peasants gathered around a half dozen cook fires and meager shelters, preparing to sup. A pair of women removed dried clothes from where they hung in the trees. “How dreadful could it have been?”
Fuller looked across the same scene, but he managed a tight smile. “Not everyone shares your loathing of the woods.”
“Many hated it worse but said naught.”
“But of those who groused, none did so louder than you.”
“I would do now, Fuller, but no one has the good sense to listen.”
When the older man laughed, Will checked his humor. Indulging an old feeling of camaraderie with a peasant who would have hanged him did naught to advance his purposes.
“We took our chances coming back to the woods, like last time,” Fuller said. “Surely you can understand the appeal.”
“We both know why it worked last time, and he’s in France.”
“Then we’ll do it for ourselves.”
Will shook his head. “That thief, Hugo—he’s not the man to lead you.”
Those watery eyes narrowed. “No one else seems game for the task.”
Although the years had taken a physical toll on him, Fuller walked away with calm grace. He smiled at his companions when he reached the campfires. A thin woman of indeterminate age rubbed between his shoulder blades and handed him a cask of ale. He almost looked pleased within the confines of that scant life.
And why shouldn’t he?
Fuller lived quietly, in hiding, but he lived amongst friends—friends who would likely share the last of their food or die to defend him. Once, Will had been accepted with open arms. He had laughed and loved and fought with purpose. The trees had not seemed as loathsome then.
Impossible longings hollowed his chest, and traitorous thoughts augmented his headache.
“Will Scarlet?”
He spun to face the young fellow who had accompanied Meg. “What do you want?”
“To introduce myself.” No older than fourteen, the lad offered his hand. Curly black hair trailed over his ears and nearly past his eyebrows. “I’m called Jacob ben Asher, milord.”
“I am no one’s lord,” he said, exhaling his frustration. “Use some manner of my name and we’ll get along happily.”
Jacob shuffled his feet and offered an impish grin. “I know who you are. I’ve heard much of your exploits. ’Tis like meeting a woodland fairy in the flesh. Hardly to be believed.”
“Indulge in that bunch of nonsense, if you wish, but I would not repeat such falsehoods.”
The boy shrugged. Impenetrable black eyes defended his thoughts as well as a lowered portcullis. “My apologies.”
“You are a friend of Meg’s?”
“A friend? No. I am better acquainted with her sister. Their father worked with mine, alchemy and the like.” He cast black eyes around the clearing before leaning closer, whispering, “In truth, Meg frightens me.”
“You and everyone else here.” The lad never permitted his hands to stray far from the weapons he wore. He exuded an agile combination of suspicion and readiness. “Are you as good with that crossbow as you appear?”
Jacob did not blink. “Yes.”
“I’ll do well to remember that. And you’ll do well to learn the difference between ballads and the truth.”
Squeals from bats and a hooting owl signaled the onset of night, and somewhere in the black, Scarlet watched and waited. Discerning his location was impossible, like listening for the silent wings of a butterfly, but neither had he abandoned her. He had yet to confront her about the wolfsbane, a conversation she could only avoid by escaping the clearing altogether—and she would not leave without Dryden, her last, best chance for Ada’s freedom.
She cursed herself almost as vigorously as she did Will Scarlet.
“Hello, Meg.”
Cold muscles jerked. “Hugo.”
Like studying the details of an experiment, she recognized the effect of his glassy voice on her body. Rapid breaths. Trembling fingers. Busy eddies of blood beating a heavy measure at her temples. The earlier bravado she mustered, knowing dozens of expectant eyes scrutinized their verbal advances and deflections, dwindled to dangerously low stores.
Weariness remained, along with a snaking fear of her own weak resolve. She had once loved Hugo, the thief of Tunneley Wood, desiring him beyond reason. The prospect of drowning beneath those sordid sensations frightened her like the river’s rush. She could imagine nothing more humiliating than being his fool again.
She stood with deliberate slowness, refusing to remain seated when he loomed over her, looking down on her. “What do you want?”
“To offer you a warning,” he said. “You knew no one would turn you away, mad witch that you are. But try your tricks on me again and you’ll have to sleep with your eyes—no, your ears open.” Moving closer, his quiet breathing filled the scant distance between them. “Unless you’d rather take shelter in my bed.”
“Hardly.”
He laughed, cold and pitiless. “Where’s your sister?”
“She’s gone missing,” she said, her features feeling numb. “But likely you knew that.”
“I suppose I did. Surprised you haven’t accused me of some offense.”
“You’re guilty of much, but nothing to do with her disappearance.”
“Warms my heart, Meg, your faith.” He stroked her from shoulder to elbow, tugging her near. She entered enemy territory. “Come now, warm the rest of me.”
She tensed and shivered. “Let me go.”
Lean arms wrapped her into a compromising hold, banding her upper back. He smelled of wood fire and ale. His lips brushed hers, tempting her to taste. Memories of passion mingled with an acid streak of shame. She should hit him. Kick him. Hate him.
But, for the moment, someone held her in the dark. And she hated only her isolation. Her body molded to his, heat against heat.
“Without Ada to consider, I thought you’d welcome me.”
An old and bubbling pain threatened to burst. Regret and a distant betrayal pressed the backs of her eyes and scraped her throat raw.
“Welcome you to crawl into me again? I am not you, nor am I Ada. Do you believe me so disloyal?”
“No,” he whispered, claiming another nipping kiss. “I believe you so reckless.”
“Mongrel.”
“Perhaps Scarlet sees to you now. Are you grateful I broke you in?”
“I’m only grateful that our encounters never resulted in a child.”
“Meg, Meg, Meg.” A sure hand slid down her spine and grasped her backside. He pulled her pelvis flush to his. “You write history anew if you deny how you enjoyed me.”
Her limbs, brain, and pride finally cooperated. She smacked at his arms, hitting him until he released her—until she was alone in the blackness. “Get away from me.”
“No more for tonight, then?”
“Kiss him again, Meg.” Scarlet’s sharp command punctured the night air with the precision of an arrow. “But only if you have more lye.”
“What say you, Meg?” The sound of a sword pulled from its scabbard slipped through the night, as chill as death.
“Enough. Hugo, I see no reason to continue our…our conversation.” She hated the break in her voice.
“No worry,” Hugo said. “I’m not missing much when you refuse me your filthy company.”
The distant noises of supper and evening songs mumbled together, a quiet backdrop to their drama. Scarlet walked closer, his footsteps the loudest sound in the forest. “Leave.”
Hugo snickered. “I wonder if all this fuss means you’ve discovered the truth about her.”
“Which is?”
“When you touch that lovely flesh, she hasn’t a shred of pride.”
Kicked by his words, Meg struggled to breathe. Humiliation squeezed her neck like clenching hands. Over a distracting pulse in her ears, she heard the two adversaries circling. Feet shuffled through the leaves. A branch cracked. Their grunts and hisses punctuated the night air. Had Hugo drawn a weapon?
“Back away, Meg. About five paces.”
She followed Scarlet’s instructions without protest. Her bearings—any tenuous mental hold on direction—had spun loose. Only the disorientation of fear remained. “Don’t do this.”
“I’ve been in a foul mood all day,” Scarlet said. “You’ll be just the man to take the brunt of my blows.”
“I’d rather best your uncle.”
“That makes two of us. Alas, we have but each other.”
Steel crashed, breaking the night like glass. Meg flinched. She stumbled backward and found a tree. Chunks of bark chewed her fingertips. Masculine grunts volleyed. Lunges and strikes and evasions wrote a ballad of conflict. Unable to see the precision of any given blow, she could only wait for the sound of agony should a sword meet flesh. With every mortal clang, she held her breath.
One of them stumbled and thudded into something hard. A tree trunk? A fallen log? Hugo groaned on a painful exhale. A sword clanked to the ground, muffled by the forest refuse.
“I’ll tell you again,” Scarlet said. “Leave now.”
“Have it your way.” Hugo spat and groaned. “I simply cannot understand the bother in fighting for Mad Meg.”
Scarlet growled, a feral beast. “Go!”
She could no longer stand there. Running headlong into an oak held more appeal than waiting between those men for another moment. She turned and stumbled deeper into the woods.
Sweat slicked Will’s palms. He wanted nothing more than to bury his sword between the cagey thief’s eyes. But standing there, alone at the edge of the clearing, he had no choice but to follow Meg. He scowled after her in the darkness. Potent resentment boiled his blood.
And by the saints, his shoulder left him careworn.
Before knowing his own mind, his sword had jumped from its scabbard when he saw them kissing. The need to take umbrage with Hugo’s glib advances and crass remarks had propelled him like the wind at his back. But he acknowledged the truth behind his fury. Using the excuse of Hugo’s insults was exactly that. An excuse. He longed for a fight. Any fight. He needed to slake the frustrations that had been festering for what felt like years. Meg made him need to pummel something. Anything.
A tree. Her. Hugo.
Yes, Hugo would have done nicely. The man was a thief, however, not a fighter, and the brief duel provided no satisfaction. The passing moments of freedom he had discovered during the fight only whetted his need for a stronger release. But then, he could imagine no amount of violence to satisfy him now. His exasperation loomed too large—or too small, more like, standing in the gray grass with her shoulders hunched forward.
“What do you want from me, Scarlet?” Her wintry question offered no welcome.
“How did you know it was me?”
She kept her head low, her face obscured by a curtain of disheveled hair. “I heard Hugo fall. Did you wound him?”
Not enough.
“Would you care if I had?”
“Of course,” she said. “We would have to flee again, and I am much fatigued by today.”
“He will live. I did him no great harm, not even to his pride it seemed.”
“I would’ve thought the pair of you better suited to swapping braggart’s stories than fighting, at any rate.”
He walked to her. “You think me like him?”
“No, you’re worse.” Restless fingers knotted the fabric of her shabby skirts, wrinkling woad blue wool made black in the nighttime shadows. “You’re self-serving and deceitful, yet you mock me with chivalry. At least I know what Hugo is.”
“A right pig.”
A quiet burst of laughter brought her head high. “Yes.”
“And what am I?”
“A confusion.” Sobering, she reached for his wounded shoulder. “A weight on me.”
He recoiled at the hot tingle of her fingers, but the touch was like that of a stranger. The woman who had stroked his skin, tasted him, stood mere inches away, but she huddled so deeply inside herself that he might have dreamed their nighttime tryst. Every battlement was in place, ready to fight and kick, yet she still inquired after his injury.
Holding on to his resentment was a trial. But he managed.
“How greatly does it hurt?” she asked.
“Less than the lye did.”
“If you’ll keep from grousing about the pain of healing, the lye worked more than one miracle.”
“You poisoned me.”
Her features tightened like pond water freezing into ice. “I eased your pain.”
“I’ve heard the hereafter will do that for a body.”
“If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”
“Forgive my confusion,” he said, flexing and releasing his hands. Left then right. And again. “I was on the receiving end of a good many contradictory messages last night. What, exactly, did you want?”
“You. Banished from my head.” She spat the words, exorcising demons.
“If it was as terrible as that, why did you tumble with me?”
“I liked how you smell.”
Will snorted. “That’s all you required?”
“Consider yourself irresistible or me desperate. I care not. But I wager you had no higher reason.”
“I had little choice with you atop me.”
“The remedy for such a situation is short and easily formed:
no.
But I heard nothing of the sort last night.” She smirked, making him feel inexplicably foolish. “Now leave me be.”
He wanted to laugh. Two hands shorter, blind, hated and feared by the peasants who had grudgingly taken her in—and she was dismissing him. Yes, he wanted to laugh, but he was too busy defending against the nettling sticks she poked at his pride.
A fragment of memory slid forward. He remembered when she baited Hendon, claiming an association with the earl’s heir. An uncomfortable stab of jealousy prodded him at the thought of Meg and the nobleman together.
No. He could not afford to think that way. Marian. Safety. Clearing his name. He had squandered too much time already. Nothing else concerned him, not even the strange blind woman he would turn over to Finch.
“I suppose you have no need of me, not when you have Dryden.”
The unhurried rise and fall of her bodice seized. “Pardon me?”
“You said as much to Hendon, that you knew the earl’s son intimately.”
“I lied.”
“Is that the truth?”
Her unreadable face provided no clues. “You seem to have missed how I say what I must to get my way.”
“That’s no answer.”
“No. ’Tis a judgment on your powers of perception. He’s the earl’s heir and will help me in his father’s stead.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“Oh, that is rich, Scarlet. He bests you in combat, which makes him untrustworthy.”
She raised those empty eyes, blatantly confronting him with the uncomfortable proof of blindness. He was beginning to interpret the action as a challenge; she only used it after exhausting deceptive options, or when emotion got the better of her.
“He ran away from the ambush,” he said. “His father was slaughtered, but he didn’t stay to fight.”
“Shock. Fear. I’m sure you’ve felt both.”
He had attacked out of fear, admittedly, but Will had never run from a fight, not when running meant abandoning fellow men-at-arms. He stared at Meg’s lips, hating the sudden need to prove his worth to her, if only in words. But the subject of worth and valor and courage skirted too near unwanted memories. Pressing his tongue to the craggy roof of his mouth, he ran the sharp edge of his thumbnail over the long-healed scar on his palm, picking at the lump of flesh.
“You don’t trust him either,” he said.
“How do you figure?”
“Why did you keep the truth of my role in Ada’s arrest a secret from him?”
She pinched her lips into a scowl. “He doesn’t need to know.”
“Because you don’t trust him.”
“Stop it!”
She balled both hands and lunged. Perhaps she moved more slowly because of fatigue, or perhaps he knew better to guard against the angered assaults she was quick to use. Wheedle. Confront. Attack. The pattern of her behavior was becoming clear. Catching slender wrists, he absorbed every twist and thrust. He spun her twice, shoved her away. Meg stumbled and fell into the leaves.
She scrambled to her feet, angled away from him. Will felt a childish urge to hold his breath and stay hidden from her keen ears, but a swift flash of lust made that a difficult task. Sparring with her played unconscionable games with his control.
“You still need me,” he said, his claim scratching free of a tight throat.
Meg whipped her head around. “Ridiculous.”
“Do you know Nottingham? Or that castle? No.”
“And I suppose you do.”
He scowled. “Like I’d know my own father.”
“No, no,” she said. “You’ve more reason to sabotage me than help me.”
“How so?”
“If you bend the sheriff’s ear, maybe reveal me as the real alchemist, then life becomes easier for Will Scarlet.”
Her blindness had caused him nothing but trouble. She could have cleared his name. She could have made their flights through the forest easier to navigate. But at that moment, he was glad for her impairment. Although prepared to deflect a physical assault, he had not expected her flawless assessment of the stakes. He felt his surprise slash across his face in bold strokes.
“That may be true, but I need Dryden as much as you do,” he said. “He’s the only one who can help clear my name. If nothing else, I can prove my good worth by coming to your aid.”
“I knew you had ulterior motives.”
“You wounded me.”
“No, I cured you.”
He crossed his arms. “Based on our association, I see little difference.”
“You suggest that if we share Dryden’s influence, in a way, you’ll have no cause to betray me?”
Suspicion yet swam through her voice like fish in a stream. To get Meg to Nottingham, he needed to secure her full cooperation. No potions, no tricks, no reason to abandon him for Dryden’s convenient status and fickle bravery. She had to come willingly, if only for his own health and sanity.
But how to convince her? The truth was obviously impossible; it resembled his misdeeds too closely, no matter his concern for the safety of Robin’s family. And if Hugo were any example of her associations, she would never accept altruism.
Deceitful, lascivious,
greedy
Hugo.
He grinned. “And if you offered a few of those counterfeit emeralds, I’d appreciate it.”
“You low, slimy dunghill.” She closed the distance between them and jabbed a precise finger into the leather mail he wore. “You arrested my sister. You should be begging for my forgiveness, not offering your services for a price.”
“Truth be told, ’tis an inexpensive price,” he said. “What sacrifice is it to part with shoddy rocks? Rocks you can conjure?”
“The sacrifice is in giving you what you want.”
He stroked a thumb along her bottom lip, feeling powerful when she flinched. A wayward, lustful part of him anticipated the sweet sting of her teeth, fighting, biting him again. “I’ve already had from you what any man wants from a woman.”
She slapped his hand away. “Gelded bastard.”
“If I were a gelding, you would’ve discovered as much.”
“You’re no better than Hugo.”
Good girl.
“Two men working on your behalf will be better than one. Your unscrupulous soul knows as much.”
“The Devil take your offer,” she said.
“No, the Devil just made you an offer. Let me escort you to Nottingham.”