Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 02] by Lady of Sherwood Page A

sees me. But admit me, and I vow by the time I leave, the earl’s displeasure will be mitigated.”
    Ralph’s suspicion led him out of courtesy into demand. “How?”
    Joan, bearing the bundle of things Marian had ordered brought for the earl’s pleasure, blurted a shocked exclamation that a fellow servant would so far overstep his duties as to question her mistress.
    “Convey my request to the earl,” Marian repeated. “Tell him I am aware of the king’s illness, and what it means to my circumstances as well as his own . . .” She paused. “And those of his son.”
    Something flickered in Ralph’s eyes. After a moment he briefly inclined his head and directed them to wait. Still clad in cloaks, still bearing as yet unaccepted gifts, Marian and Joan waited.
    “Will he see you?” Joan murmured.
    “Oh, yes.”
    “How can you be certain, Lady Marian?”
    “He is ill. He needs an heir.”
    Joan whispered it. “But—my lord of Locksley has repudiated his father.”
    “All things change when a king dies.”
    “ All things, my lady?”
    Marian felt the pinch of grief. “When old King Henry died ten years ago, my father yet lived. But the new king, the warrior-prince who dedicated himself to regaining Jerusalem, summoned knights to serve him. And my father died for it.”
    “But that was Holy Crusade, my lady!”
    “Of course it was. But my father died nonetheless.” Marian brushed a strand of hair from her face. “And now the warrior-king is dying, and a new king shall have the ordering of the realm, the ordering of our lives. And I cannot promise you anything of those lives shall remain as they are.”
    Ralph was back. “The earl will see you.”
    Marian smiled at Joan and gave her the second basket even as a page appeared to gather up their cloaks. “I should not be long.”

Five
    The day dawned befogged, but promised yet to be sunny, lacking the clouds and drizzling rain of the previous days. Robin felt an unexpected lift in his spirits—until he recalled why he and Mercardier were on this road.
    Dulled again into an abrupt and pernicious sense of futility, he watered his horse, then hastily saddled it and mounted, settling the cloak around his shoulders and pinning it haphazardly into place even as he urged the gray to move. Mercardier already waited on the edge of the road a few paces from the small clearing they had inhabited for the night, wreathed in layers of thinning fog. Robin, annoyed by the pinch of guilt—he felt rather as if his father waited for him—expected to be reprimanded for tardiness, but he found Mercardier distracted, at pains to identify a rider coming their way.
    Fog yet obscured him. The slap-and-dig of galloping hooves into wet track became more apparent as the rider neared, as did his haste and the raspy, rhythmic breathing of his mount. At last the fog thinned and peeled away, stirred to recoiling by the motion of horse and rider, so that Robin and the captain caught their first glimpse of the man who rode so swiftly.
    His quartered crimson tabard, flapping in the wind of his passage, was mud-spattered, soiled with his mount’s lather and froth. It was not until he was nearly on them that his badge came into hazy view and was thus identified: the triple leopards of England.
    “No,” Robin murmured. And inwardly: It is come.
    Mercardier spurred his horse into the center of the road into a pocket of fog, shouting at the rider to stop in the king’s name. The rider, wind-ruffled and red-cheeked from the efforts of his gallop, pulled up sharply. His expression was grim, tense, focused on his task. His sliding, muddy-legged mount fretted at its bit, grinding steel in massive teeth as it fought for footing.
    Oh, my lord . . . oh, Richard . . .
    “Gerard!” Mercardier blurted.
    The messenger, focusing now on the man who stopped him, blurted a startled and heartfelt oath in French. He reined in his blowing horse with unthinking expertise. “Captain—”
    Mercardier cut him