Everything is a Choice

Chapter 18

Previously...

Still reeling from thinking Marian had somehow survived Guy’s blade, I push Much aside and stride towards Allan and the angry mob.

“Get out of my way,” I snarl, in both French and English. 

My grief, once immense and unchecked, has since become a steady trickle that ebbs and flows with the days, but now, this act of showing off – for surely that is all it is, no matter how I dress it up – has it ballooning large again. 

She isn’t here.

I push and shove my way through the squash of people and animals.

“There are two things that men like to do, Robin,” my father once said to me, “and they both begin with the sixth letter of the alphabet.”  When he’d refused to elaborate, I’d asked Gisborne what he meant. One is fight, Gisborne had said, and the other your father does with my mother.  The bailiff eventually told me what the word fuck meant. 

Someone bashes into my injured arm. Incensed, I whirl around. I don’t care who I hit, as long as I hit someone. However, that someone just happens to be Gisborne.

Chapter 18

“Locksley!” Gisborne massages his jaw, doubtless grateful that I wear no heavy rings that might have added severity to my punch. “I might have known.  Only you would have the audacity to try a shot like that.” He points at the target board and then turns back to me.

I simply stare, not only because I’m surprised at seeing Guy here, at the archery contest, but also because he looks so different from the last time I saw him, and I don’t just mean his clothes, black though they still are.

His face has lost its ghostly pallor and his hair, although still long, is clean, untangled and presently tucked behind his ears.  In many ways, he reminds me of the Gisborne of old, the same Gisborne who’d once sat arrogantly astride a black-brown mare as I walked into Locksley village after five years of living hell in the Holy Land. The same Gisborne who declared himself the new lord of Locksley, advising me that my services were, as he put it, no longer required.

“I thought you’d left us,” I say. “Gone back on the deal we made about being our spy back in England.”

“I changed my mind.” He turns away quickly, as though he wishes to leave it at that. “So, what have you started here?” He nods towards the angry, milling crowd.

I point at Allan, presently trading blows with a couple of irate Frenchmen.

“I might have known a-Dale had something to do with it,” he says.  “He can smell coin a mile off, that one.”

“Are you definitely with us?” I ask, pushing my way through the mass of swearing, gesticulating, fist-swinging men and women.

“If you’ll have me,” he says, following in my wake.

To be honest, I’m sure how I feel about having Guy back in our midst despite my earlier hope of finding him in Le Havre. However, now is not the time to dwell on it.

For a handful of heartbeats, I lose sight of Allan. When I spot him again, I see that Dumont has changed his mind about attacking him personally. Perhaps John’s great staff, Much’s upraised sword and shield, or my deadly aim had put him off.  Either way, he is presently standing on the dais, cursing my name and yanking my arrows from the centre of the target board.  The dark-haired woman I’d fleetingly mistaken for a raised from the dead Marian has vanished, along with the silver-haired gentleman and the rest of the seated nobles, doubtless deciding to let the rabble get on with it.