Everything is a Choice

Chapter 15

Previously...

“Here.” Gisborne places a bloody hand on my shoulder.  I swat it away. “No, here,” he says, holding the ring in front of my face, minus its leather strap.

I sink back onto my haunches and Guy squats in front of me and presses the tiny jewel into my dirty, bleeding hand. 

“You really should take more care of this,” he says, reaching out and touching my face, the pads of his fingers as soft as a highborn girl’s fingers. He swipes the corner of my mouth with his thumb and it comes away bloody.  “Snap,” he says, touching his own mouth by way of explanation and smiling.

I stare into his eyes, thinking how similar in colour they are to Marian’s, and return the smile.

The fight is over almost before it began. A token gesture to our long held hatred.  Just something we needed to do. 

It is only as we come to our feet that we see the girl.

Chapter 15

I have no idea how long she’s been standing there, watching us punching and kicking each other.

She looks to be about eight or nine summers, childishly plump, with waves of brunette hair cascading down to her waist. Her eyes, which are presently staring at us in both fascination and bewilderment, are as blue as the summer skies. I notice she is holding a twist of woven grasses in her hands.

Her bow-shaped lips part, as if to speak, and I anticipate the soft lilt of her native tongue.  I give what I hope is an encouraging smile, but she quickly presses her lips together and simply continues to stare.  

“Marianne!  Marianne!”

The girl turns sharply, back towards the farmstead.  “Je viens,mère!”

She turns back to me, stares straight into my eyes. My chest tightens, squeezing the breath out of me.

She could be my daughter – our daughter. 

If only Marian had lived.

If only I had saved her.

If only I had not become an outlaw.

If only I had not gone to war.

If only—

“Marianne!  L'heure du souper. ”

The girl drops the grasses and runs.

~

I had not known Marian at this age; she had already passed four and ten when I first met her. And she had not stared at me in fascination or bewilderment, but rather with disdain, an expression she became very adept at over the years, growing up alongside my childish pranks and occasionally idiotic behaviour.  But she’d had the same thick, wavy locks, the same bow-shaped mouth and her eyes were the same perfect blue: not of foreign skies, but the summers of home; the summer skies that bathed the trees of Sherwood Forest, where we would meet whenever we managed to escape from the chaperones and Muches of this world.

We had a favourite tree; The Kissing Tree I used to call it. It should have more rightly been called the ‘missing tree’ or the ‘Robin makes another big mistake tree’, since it seemed to be the focal point for many of the blunders I made with Marian over the years.

We used to meet under its wide canopy of branches. We used to flirt under it, tease each other under it and, sometimes, fight under it. It was the tree where I once foolishly tried to spy on her for a lark and had broken my wrist when the branch I was sitting on snapped off. It was the tree where I showed off my bow skills to impress her, where I failed to tell her how much she really meant to me, and where I told her I was leaving to go fight alongside King Richard in the Holy Land, perhaps my biggest mistake of all. If I had paid more attention to the things she was trying to tell me, I might never have gone to war. But I didn’t pay much attention to anyone in those days.