Bound by Honor

“Quite handsome,” Marian replied, smiling back. She happened to look toward the front of the hall at that moment, and her whole body froze. It chilled, then suddenly exploded into unpleasant heat in her cheeks.

Prince John was looking at her. Not merely looking at her, but pinning her with hooded dark eyes as though he wished to be doing so with his hands . . . or something else. Marian pulled her gaze away from his and felt her heart pounding rampantly. Her stomach suddenly felt unpleasantly heavy and disrupted.

“Is it true that the sheriff rescued you and his men chased off the bandits?” ventured another of the ladies.

Marian swallowed back the churning in her stomach that threatened to bubble up her throat. “The sheriff did arrive quite fortuitously,” she said, and was unable to keep from glancing back at the high table.

John was still watching her, slipping a chunk of food into his mouth and masticating as though he meant to be feeding on her rather than the food. The expression was unmistakable. Marian tore her eyes away again and they skittered over the prince’s companion, who, this time, was facing the front of the hall. Her throat dried again.

She hadn’t recognized him before, or perhaps she hadn’t looked closely enough. But ’twas most definitely Will there, sharing the most prominent seat in the hall with the prince as though he was his closest crony.

He, at the least, wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he leaned closer to John and spoke intimately to him while lifting a chunk of meat to his mouth on a small eating knife. Even from here, she saw the tension and harshness in a face tanned the color of deer hide, and made even more shadowy by the dark hair that brushed against it. And then the sudden gleam of a humorless smile.

“Why does he sit with the prince?” she asked. “In such a place of honor?”

“Oh,” said the lady who’d asked about him in the first place, and whose name Marian had forgotten, “he and the prince are inseparable companions.”

“Indeed,” Marian said, feeling her brows draw together in a frown. “Does the sheriff seek favor from the prince, then?”

“Nay, ’tis not so much that he seeks boons from the prince, but that the prince finds him amusing,” replied Sir Roderick, who had barely taken his eyes from Marian since she sat across from him. “The prince must include de Wendeval in all his amusements and activities or he is displeased by his absence.”

Will and Prince John? She looked again at the acquaintance of her youth and his royal companion. The depravity and lust shone unabashedly in John’s eyes, and though Will’s face was half-turned away, she recognized anew the hardness there. Unrelieved and stoic. Emotionless.

’Twas most definitely not the young man she’d known. If he and John had become constant companions, he must no longer be merely quiet and brooding, but as brutal and cruel as the unloved prince.

“The sheriff has not been able to capture Robin Hood,” Marian said, wondering about those two men. As children, they’d been rivals of a sort. Had that rivalry grown into something more ominous? Will was charged with catching, sentencing, and, if necessary, executing bandits such as Robin. “I trow the prince cannot be happy with that lack.”

“Nay, but the prince himself has been witness to Robin Hood’s cleverness. John and Nottingham have plotted many traps for the bandit, each one more dangerous than the last. And Robin Hood seems always to slip through the smallest crack and to make his escape. The sheriff was to execute a boy for treason. Hang him on the dais in the Ludlow bailey, in front of all who wished to watch. He intended to make an example of the poor boy.”

“Treason? ’Tis a serious offense.” And must be punished if law and order were to be kept. But a boy?

“Aye. The boy claimed he took only a deer that was already dead from the forest, in order to feed his family.”

Marian felt a little pang in her middle. It was treason to steal from the king, indeed, but . . . “Surely the beast was examined. It would be no hardship to determine if it had been freshly slaughtered.”

Sir Roderick shrugged. “Aye, and there were those who claimed the deer had not been recently killed. But the sheriff meant to hang him anyway, the boy. Merely fourteen winters he was, and if it weren’t for Robin Hood, the boy would have been swaying in the breeze.”

“Robin Hood?”

“Aye. He rescued him right off the scaffolding, whilst the sheriff could do naught but look on furiously.”

Fourteen. That was the same age Will and Robin had been that last summer spent at Mead’s Vale. Hardly boys, but not quite men.

Again she wondered about their rivalry. Even that short moment in the clearing, before she’d recognized Will, the antipathy between the men had been palpable.

Was it possible that they hadn’t recognized each other?

Nay, of course not. She had recognized Robin immediately; surely Will had done so. But Robin could not claim innocence. He was an outlaw.

And it was Will’s duty to punish outlaws.

Duty.