Page 88 of Wench

Marian rises from the lattice, breath sawn thin, dagger small in her fist. ‘The king promised them clemency?—’

‘The king?’ He laughs, ugly and loud. ‘An old man fat on foreign piety, hacking at heathens in a desert while his own country festers. He’ll die on a sand dune, chasing a god that doesn’t want him there.’ He tips his chin toward Lox, before thumping his chest. ‘I am doing what this country needs. I am the only one with the courage to name the rot and cut it out.’

‘You call it rot because it refuses to bow.’ Marian barks a bitter laugh. Wind frets her loose auburn curls as she steps between him and Lox, the rising sun painting her in bruised gold. ‘I’d rather die with dirt in my mouth and sap in my veins than lie with you.’

‘Bold,’ he says, pulling an ore-threaded blade from its sheath. ‘But I’ve broken bolder.’

He advances with the lazy confidence of a butcher who already knows the weight of the carcass. Marian squares up to him, blade high, feet light on the churned turf. The air smells of cold iron and grass crushed under boots. Somewhere behind her, Lox drags a breath, the web’s low whine gnawing in the background.

The Sheriff flicks left, faster, and steel skims her forearm. Heat flares and he grins. She answers with a straight thrust for his throat that he slips by inches.

They trade quick, ugly work. He fights dirty: thumb for her eye, heel for her toes, elbow for her mouth. Marian keeps the dagger close, aiming for the gaps in his armour: the seam under his arm, the slit between gorget and breastplate. Twice she draws blood that drips in thick rivulets, and twice he repays her with slices that burn a line along her thigh and collarbone.

‘I can’t wait to peel his antlers and hang them over our bed,’ he spits. His eyes flick to Lox, who’s still struggling against the invisible bindings. The Sheriff’s smile returns, crueller.

Her vision narrows with fury. She charges forward and manages to rake the dagger across the thin skin under his eye. He hisses and comes at her fast. Slash, thrust, riposte. No wasted motion. Steel skims over her shoulder, her forearm, her hip.

He twists, catching her knife wrist, and whips her around until her back hits his chest, pinning her other arm between them. He squeezes until tendons creak. Pain lights up the nerves. Marian snarls and tries to drive her head back into his mouth. But he’s expecting it and evades, pressing his cheek to hers. The stench of rancid breath, sweat, and copper explodes across her senses. He flings their joined hands wide until her shoulder screams.

‘Drop it,’ he pants, ‘or I will break every finger that touches it.’

‘Never,’ she grits out.

He pulls her wrist back in a brutal wrench. Pain detonates up her arm, and the blade falls into the grass. His knee drills into the middle of her back and shoves her forward until she hits earth hard enough to knock the wind out of her.

She flips over just as his weight comes down like an anvil on her waist. Cold soil seeps through her back as she scrambles, bucking, trying to get a knee between them.

‘Feral little wench,’ he murmurs, pinning her wrists above her head.

His dagger rips straight down the centre seam of her dress. Cold air bites her bare abdomen as the bodice falls open. He presses the flat of the blade to exposed skin, dragging it up and down slowly, as if to sign his name there. His stare brightens with a hunger as he straddles her.

‘One last chance,’ he hisses, bearing down over her.

‘I’d rather die wild than live obedient.’ Marian drags breath through clenched teeth, eyes blazing up into his.

The smile drops from his face. ‘This is what rebellion buys.’ He plunges the knife downward, and fire floods her side. The dagger sinks into her gut just beneath the navel. Once. Twice. Three times.

Heat blooms under her ribs, a sudden slick flood running into the torn silk. Sound leaves her chest in a wet gasp.

He wrenches the blade free and rises before kicking her, as if he could stomp her into submission. Boot to hip, then shoulder, then ribs, until she rolls into the sprawled form of a downed guard, his bow and quiver discarded beside him.

Marian tries to bring herself to stand, swallowing the agony that flares hot enough to steal her vision. She forces herself up onto her elbows.

‘The good folk of Nottingham will sleep easy tonight, knowing a man finally had the courage to put an end to fairy tricks and forest lies,’ the Sheriff muses, wiping the blade off on his trousers with neat little strokes. ‘I will cauterize what festers. The forges will sing until the last nest is torn from the branches and the final trickster hangs from the gate.’

Marian presses a hand to the largest wound, and gore spills under her palm. She clamps down hard enough to make her vision spark. Grass kisses her cheek, a thousand green knives against her fevered skin. The world tilts, rights itself, then tilts again.

The Sheriff pivots and starts back up the slope toward the lattice that still holds Lox. ‘Every story ends somewhere,’ he muses. ‘Today, it ends where it should have begun – by dragging a monster into daylight and gutting him from navel to nose.’

On shaking elbows, Marian forces herself to crawl, despite the unrelenting blood running down her side. Her body is a map of agony, every nerve a line etched in fire, but she drags herself forward anyway. One elbow, then the other, leaving a smear of red in the grass.

Across the field, Will is thrown back by a trenchant spear-thrust as they try to surge forward once more; Little John hacks through a pike that would have skewered his friend, only to be slashed across the forearm by a soldier’s blade. They’re both fighting to peel down the ring of men, even as new guards surge to reinforce the Sheriff’s line. For a heart-stopping moment a pair of armoured soldiers lurch between them and the slope holding Lox, pinning Will under a burden of blades and driving John backward with a wall of shields.

Lox looms a few feet away. His body is rigid with strain, chest heaving. The ring of binding lines has grown tighter the harder he fights. The skin around his chest, wrists and throat sinks beneath the pressure. His eyes are wrecked and incandescent when they lock on hers. He doesn’t call her name, but he holds her gaze unwaveringly. For a heartbeat, pain falls away, until all that’s left is what’s bloomed between them during their time together. What threads between them is not words, not even hope, but recognition: this is theirs, whatever comes.

Marian’s lips crack into the barest smile. Her voice is ragged and thin, but she knows his fae ears will hear her.

‘I’ll find you,’ she whispers, breath fluttering against the dirt. ‘In the soil. In the roots. I’ll bloom beside you in this lifetime or the next. This isn’t our end – wild things always grow back.’