Lady Thief: A Scarlet Novel (6 page)

We all looked at him. “What?” I squeaked.

“You have to go,” he said again, swallowing whatever were stuck in his pipes. He looked at me and away. “All of you. I want you to go to Tuck’s and stay there.”

“No,” I spat. “Don’t be daft.”

“
Daft
?” he growled. “Daft? I beat you within an inch of your
life
and you’d stay here, but I’m crazy? You want me to do it again, is that it?” His voice raised. “Do you want me to kill you?”

John pushed Rob hard, and he hit the wall.

“Rob!” I yelled, and it made me hurt everywhere. “We don’t leave each other. You made me promise to stay when all I wanted to do was run, Rob, and that were the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Don’t make me break that oath.”

Rob straightened up, staying farther from me. “No,” he said. “No. This isn’t the same. This is your safety and my sanity, so you leave or I will, Scar. Tuck will take you in, but I don’t trust myself there.” He swallowed again. “I don’t trust myself anywhere.”

“I won’t go, Rob,” I told him. “Why can’t we fight this together?”

“Because it’s not your fight, Scar!” he yelled. “You can’t fight this for me. And I can’t fight this with you.”

His eyes stared at me, wide and lost, and I felt like every rope tied between us were snapping. I felt bloodless, like I hadn’t anything inside me but bones and air.

Rob’s eyes dashed away from me. “John, you’ll take her to Tuck’s.”

“I won’t come back here, Rob,” he told him. “Not for a few nights at the least. I can’t even look at you right now.”

My eyes dropped to the floor like my gaze were weighted with stone. There were nothing between us all but quiet.

“Much, go with them,” Rob said.

Much swallowed, but he nodded.

John’s big feet shuffled close to me, and he let me lean on him. “Come on,” he told me. “We’re going now. Much, can you gather everything up?”

Much nodded. “I’ll meet you there.”

I wanted to yell—to scream that I would stay, that I wouldn’t leave him, that I didn’t much care if it killed me.

But I didn’t. I let John herd me out, and I didn’t say a thing more, my voice tiny and trapped inside me.

John led me outside like I were a child, and he walked slow beside me, watching me.

“I’m fine, you big lug,” I murmured.

“You’re not. He beat you,” he said, and it turned into a snarl. “Christ, I want to kill him.”

“He weren’t himself.”

“I know that. I don’t care about that.” His fist went tight. “And I wasn’t there to help. And I’m
furious
that somehow this is my responsibility, to be there when everyone is damn well sleeping so that the man
you love
won’t beat you. This isn’t fair, Scarlet. It is awful to somehow be part of you and Rob. To protect you from him. And I can’t do that anymore. I can’t.” He threw a punch at nothing, batting away the cold. “I loved you, do you know that?”

He looked at me, but I fixed on the ground. “You never loved me,” I told him soft. “You fancied me, but it weren’t the same.”

“No, Scar. I
loved
you, but it wasn’t enough. Love isn’t enough. There has to be other things there, like choice, and duty. I keep thinking these things, Scar—I think about having a family. What it would be like, to be a father. I want that more than anything. That role—it’s more important than everything mashed up together.”

I dared look up at him. “You’d be an uncommon good father, John,” I told him.

His shoulders lifted a bit. “Do you think?” he asked, his voice awful quiet.

“I just said so, didn’t I?”

“Bess is with child,” he said soft. “My child—”

“John!” I yelled, and winced at the pain that shot through my face. “Ow.”

He smirked. “Easy. I asked her to marry me—to make a right family of it all—and she hasn’t said yes yet. And waiting for her answer, Scar, it burns. Every second burns. Because maybe she won’t. Maybe all my sins have piled up so high I’m beyond saving, and I’m not supposed to have a family.” I started to protest—of all the damn things!—but he shook his head. “And my point is that maybe if you have the chance to annul your marriage, you should take it. Rob’s crazier than a bag full of cats right now, but he loves you. And it has to be killing him that he can’t be to you what he wants to be, because love
isn’t
enough. You have to choose that person. You have to
choose them every damn day. I made my choice—you have to make yours.”

That were it, the thing that had been rolling round my mind like a loose marble. “You think I should take Gisbourne’s offer.” Shivers ran through me as I thought of that day in the castle, when he had me by the throat, squeezing, and his growled words:
I want to see you die. I want to see the light tamp out of those devil’s eyes
.

“No,” he said, kicking a branch out of his path. “No. I don’t think you should go to Gisbourne. I don’t think you should go back to Rob. I don’t think you’re getting anything done by staying at Tuck’s. There isn’t a right way here, Scar, but if I were Rob … I’d want that annulment more than anything.” He looked at me. “The monks said you were asking about how to get out of a marriage. Seems you want this annulment too.”

“I do,” I admitted. “And sometimes I think, there ain’t nothing what I can’t take, thinking on all we’ve already been through. What could Gisbourne possibly do that I couldn’t take?”

“Kill you,” he said quiet.

“He wants something. It’s such a strange offer, he wouldn’t make it just to kill me.”

“He well might, Scarlet. But say he is telling the truth. There are other ways he could hurt you.”

I remembered listening to the things my sister had to do in London, the way men touched her. It pushed blood into my cheeks and made me shiver. “Not if he wants an annulment.”

“
You
want the annulment. What if
he
doesn’t really want an annulment?”

My shoulders shrugged up, but I didn’t answer him.

“You’re already married, Scar. If he can’t—or won’t—swear before a priest that you’re still a virgin, there is no annulment. That’s all it takes. He outweighs you by more than a hundred pounds, at least. If he comes after you in close quarters, there isn’t much you and your knives can do about it.”

I were starting to sway, my head dizzying round.

“I know I’m scaring you, Scar, even if you can’t admit it. You should be scared. You have a lot of fight ahead of you no matter which way you go.”

Rubbing my arms didn’t do nothing for the cold, for the hot swirl in my head. “I’m tired of fighting, John.”

“We’ve all been fighting more than our fair share, Scar. Maybe both of us should start fighting for our happy ending.”

My eyes shut and my eyeballs felt like ice behind them, like little bits of my eye had gone to frost. “What if there ain’t an end, and it ain’t happy besides?” I asked him. “How could it be, after all this?”

“I don’t know, Scar.”

“Can we stop?” I said. My stomach were overtight and rolling and twisting. “I think … ugh,” I whined, bending over, ready to cast up anything that remained in my belly. Nothing came up, but the pain didn’t ease and the world were sliding round me.

“Come on, we need to get you out of the cold,” he said, tugging my arm.

I straightened, standing on wobbly knees. My head beat a
cruel tattoo, and it were choking me. “J-John—” I never got a chance to finish the thought, as the dark trees and bright day pushed together and changed to total dark.

My eyes were bare open before my belly twisted and I retched. I were in a bed, and the best place seemed to be off the side of it. Lucky there were a pot there, and someone set my face toward it.

When I were done, I looked, and it were Ellie, one of Tuck’s girls. She petted the duck feathers left of my hair where I’d cut it off months before. “You all right?” she asked.

I shut my eyes and hugged the pillow, but the lumps Rob had put on me yelled in protest and I rolled onto my back. “Christ,” I moaned.

“Sit up a bit,” she told me. “Tuck sent some broth up.”

I obeyed, though I didn’t much feel like it. She pushed a bowl at me and I reached to grab it when I saw one hand was covered with bandages hard and stiff. “What …” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Brother from the monastery said you broke your hand.”

My chest felt like it cracked open. My hand were broken? I couldn’t throw knives. I couldn’t … Christ, I could barely defend myself. My hands shook as I took the bowl from her.

Ellie leaned back on her hands. “So strange,” she said, staring at me. “Never would have even thought you’re a girl, but now that I know I feel stupid for not seeing it before.”

I frowned. She were more stupid for hussing her bits at me so often.

“Robin’s downstairs, you know,” she told me. “Stalking outside like a lion. John won’t let him in.”

Coughing a bit, I shrugged. “He won’t never, not with Bess in here.”

Ellie sat up straighter. “You think? Do you reckon he’s serious about her, then? I told her John is just a boy, and a stupid, disloyal one at that.”

I didn’t throw the soup at her. I felt right proud for that. “You don’t know nothing, Ellie,” I snapped at her. “John is the most loyal. The most protective. He chooses Bess and he’ll love her till he rots. He deserves a family.”

Now her eyes narrowed. “Have you and John fooled around, then? Living in the woods with all them boys, must be just like everyone says, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be a fool. I ain’t never done nothing with John.
You
have.”

She shrugged. “So?”

I put the soup down and tossed the blanket off. “I’m going to see Rob,” I told her.

She didn’t stop me. I went down the stairs and near the door, but I stopped. I went to the window, looking outside.

He were there. He were pacing, just as she said. Looking fair miserable.

I didn’t want him to know what he’d done. Sure, he knew, but seeing me were a different thing. The hand were bad, and
he’d know just how bad. He’d know what it meant for me. And he couldn’t know.

Most because, as I watched him, sad and hurting and the kind of alone that I couldn’t be a part of, I knew what I had to do. I knew what I wanted to do. And Rob wouldn’t never rest if he knew I were going to Gisbourne and couldn’t bare throw a knife.

Rob wouldn’t never forgive himself, neither, if I died.

I went back from the window and asked Tuck where John were. John came up from around the bar, glaring at the door, where Rob were just beyond. “What?” John asked.

“Find out what Gisbourne wants,” I said. “And find out when the prince comes.”

Three days later, I hadn’t much moved from the bed Tuck had given me. I’d looked once in a glass, and my face were purple by half. My belly were yellow and black, and my hand had set to aching fierce. From what the girls were saying, Rob were outside most of the time, which were like to mean he ain’t slept. Weren’t nothing good coming from that.

It were dusk when Much came to me. I were downstairs, hanging back from the windows to watch Rob without him seeing me. He were just sitting now, waiting. Watching.

Much looked bigger to me, like his bones were growing, and it made me remember how young he were still. He were only half formed, half grown. A few years never seemed like much between us, but he still had changing to do. “John told me,” he said. “What you’re thinking of doing. And I tried to find out what Gisbourne wants—we both did—but we couldn’t. And Rob’s suspicious.”

“You can’t tell him,” I said. “Even after I go, keep it as long as you can.”

He nodded. “So you’re going.”

“Maybe. How long till the prince comes?”

“He’ll be here tomorrow. They’re releasing the men at the same time so a good crowd will greet the prince.”

My eyes shut. Weren’t there no luck for me in this world? “I can’t go to him with no way to defend myself, Much. What am I supposed to do with a broke hand?”

Much frowned. He had such a serious face, so oft full of thoughts, but this were strange on him, like there were something he didn’t understand—which happened rare enough. He’d spent most of the winter tearing through the library of monks’ books that I could bare pick up, never mind understand. “What does your hand have to do with defending yourself?”

“Now you’re just making fun,” I told him, standing and drawing closer to the windows as Rob began to pace.

“No, I’m not,” he said. I looked at him and he kept on frowning. “I think you’re confused.”

“My hand’s
broke
, Much,” I snapped, looking away.

“And you think that’s how you fight,” he said, like light just dawned in his head. “Christ, you think your knives make you what you are?” He came closer and put his hand on my shoulder, but I didn’t turn to him. “You remember when you bought me the
kattari
?” he asked.

I shrugged under his hand.

“Why’d you do that?”

“Because you were whining and moping all about and complaining that you couldn’t fight.”

“So what did the
kattari
change?”

“Nothing,” I snapped. “I just gave you a weapon that weren’t hard for you to carry.”