Page 39 of Sherwood
I loved both; I’d have both. No one could force some bullshit choice onto me, not even my own father.
Both, I’d said again, stubbornly.You can’t make me choose. I won’t do it.
He’d smiled then, one of his wide, half-wild smiles. The kind that my mother used to tell me I’d inherited from him.That’s my daughter, he’d said, eyes twinkling.Never, ever let anyone make you take less than what you want.
“Not like you’re thinking,” I said finally. “It wasn’t always easy, but he always gave me what I needed.” I waved a hand at the room around us. “And he still is, even though he’s gone.”
Marian dropped her hand from the bookshelf and stepped toward me. “I’m glad,” she said quietly. “I’m glad you’ve had someplace safe to hide.”
My chest ached. I didn’t deserve that from her, not after the way I left things.
Marian’s gaze moved past me, and then something flitted over her face, soft and almost wounded.
“My ribbon,” she whispered.
I turned to see what she saw, and yes, there was her hair ribbon from that fateful day, tied in a neat bow around one of the rails that made up my headboard. The ends were ragged and fluffed where the weft had slowly unraveled through years of handling. The ribbon had gone into combat with me, on missions so dangerous that I wasn’t even allowed to wear American clothing while I did them. That ribbon had been to hell and back with me.
Even Robin Loxley wasn’t brave enough to visit hell without a piece of heaven nestled close to her heart.
“I didn’t know,” she said, sounding stunned. “I had no idea.”
“I told you, Marian. I remember that day so well, it hurts. Come,” I said, swallowing down the ache and taking Marian’s hand. Her fingers were cool and slender in mine, and I felt along the contours of her knuckles with my thumb. Every part of her was so exquisitely made, like porcelain and silk, and all I wanted was to shove her against the wall instead of taking her to see the rest of the castle and its crew.
Alas.
“Let’s meet everyone,” I said with heroic self-restraint, and with hands linked, we left my room.
ChapterTen
LOX
The Castle wasthe size of two or three warehouses laid side by side, divided into the three more or less similarly sized pods. One pod was a storehouse—food and other supplies were kept there, along with our miniature water and wastewater treatment facility—and the next was our living quarters, which was a ring of bedrooms surrounding an open central area with a kitchen and common space. There was also a gym, a pool, and a small first aid center. The final pod was where we stored the rigs and we usually kept it closed off from the rest, since the machines gave off so much heat.
I was still in my clothes from earlier, and my boots thudded on the polished concrete as we walked into the common area. Half the people in the room were hidden behind triple monitor setups and desks piled with energy drink cans.
“These are the Merry Men,” I said, waving at the room’s occupants, who didn’t bother looking up from their screens when they waved back.
“Merry Men?”
“When my dad built this place, he called it the Castle of the North Wind—what Robin Hood called his hideout in my favorite childhood book of stories. And Will and I started joking thatwewere the Merry Men now, hiding in our own Sherwood forest. We’re not bandits or deer poachers, of course, but we are stealing. We are hiding.”
Marian’s full mouth pressed in at the corners. “It fits, I think.”
“You don’t even know why we’re hiding here yet. For all you know, it could be exactly as Rafe said.”
“Treason? I don’t think it’s that…at least not simply that. I trust you, Lox.”
Like it was just that easy. Like she could just trust that I was a good person and trust that my reasons were good ones, and that was the end of it.
I blew out a long breath, looking down at our interlaced hands. I hadn’t realized how much I needed her belief until I had it. Because maybe my father had been able to subsist on his own delirious convictions alone, but I couldn’t. People saw me and thought they saw unshakeable faith, absolute certainty, and that wasn’talwayswrong.
Maybe it wasn’t even wrong most of the time.
But the times that I did feel doubt, disquiet, wavering…those timesinfectedme. All of me. Like a multipartite virus, overwriting and rewriting everything I thought I knew with bedrock certitude, erasing any confidence I had and planting new code in its place. Code that said:you’re wrong about what you’ve found, code that said:you should have gone to someone with this.
Code that said,you’re going to be locked away forever and so will your friends…and that might even be the best possible outcome of this gamble, you know.
I didn’t know what I would have done without the crew, without their clear-eyed faith. Without their confirmations that they were seeing what I was seeing, without their agreement that the things we saw couldn’t stay as they were.
