gnimaerd | Fic: Dreamers continued (Reply)

third and final bit...

Marian’s grief, however, was not to be underestimated, and Edward saw again his own passion born inside of her, as she sickened.

For the best part of that spring after Robin’s departure, she was bedridden and weak. Refusing food and almost all sustenance aside from water and the occasional mouthful of bread, she grew thin and drawn and horribly reminiscent of her pregnant mother, without the swollen belly. She slept the vast majority of her days away and was irritable and listless on those few occasions when she was properly coherent. Even as her physical body gradually began to claw its way back to health, she remained in bed, largely mute and apparently unconcerned by everything about her.

Perhaps it was worry for her that caused Edward to stop paying attention to the political situation in England: stop listening in court, stop thinking of the shire. Perhaps he had simply grown old and tired without noticing.

But whatever it was, he would curse himself then and ever afterwards for not having the sense to see the next blow coming, as Prince John redistributed the shires to those with far less public loyalty to his brother.

Something strange was beginning to happen to his body, he noticed, in those following years. Where he had been gradually gaining awareness of his greying hair and portly belly for some time; and the fact that he needed more sleep at night and found riding more uncomfortable than he once had; and that he would no longer be able to swing a sword with any real strength; it seemed that now he was being jolted downwards.

It started with the shock, like a cold slap, of his losing his place as Sheriff of Nottingham, and ended with the realisation, one morning, that he couldn’t breathe.

“Father?” Marian, now seventeen and (as he had often heard whispered about the court these days) ‘striking’, blinked at him, instantly concerned as he began coughing.

He waved a hand, trying desperately to inhale, his lungs suddenly ragged and weak.

“Father!” Marian leapt to her feet and grabbed his arm with surprising strength, helping him to a seat and thumping him on the back.

The physician said that his humours had been unbalanced by the shock of losing the shire the previous year; that his chest was filling with fluid; and that that bout of pneumonia he had had as a child had finally caught up with him.

A fever took him, and cast him deep into rivers of unconsciousness – filled him with thoughts of Kate, who he was always sure was never far from his bed, and made him think of Robin and his good, loyal Much dying in the holy lands, and Nottingham drowning in debt as the new Sheriff Vaysey bled it dry.

By the time he awoke, Marian had dismissed all but a handful of their household staff to free up funds for the physician and his medicine, had sold several of their possessions to bribe the bailiffs away from their door and been to court every day in his absence, taking notes.

He was too impressed to be angry.

When had she turned from a tempestuous girl into such a practical, determined young woman?

“This is a situation to be survived,” she informed him, firmly, sitting at his bedside and helping him sip water from a cup, “We shall get you better, father, and you and our allies will have Vaysey removed in due time and the king will return and all will be well. Eventually. We just have to live to see it. Both of us.”

She never spoke of Robin.

Not when Sheriff Vaysey placed Locksley under the control of one of his henchmen – the singularly unpleasant Guy of Gisborne; not when Guy of Gisborne’s intentions towards Marian became alarmingly apparent; not until the day, five years after his departure, when the erstwhile lord of Locksley appeared on their doorstep, now twenty five years of age, with good loyal Much still in tow.

And Edward’s strong, grown up daughter, twenty one and still unmarried and more like Kate and more like himself than she had ever been, saw them both off with a bow – before going to pieces the moment she had slammed the door on them.

“He’s alive!” She covered her face with her hands and sat down rather heavily, the colour draining out of her face, “Oh, God…”

Edward let her sob for a moment, uninterrupted, before suggesting that it was time they get to court.

He knew Robin would cause trouble the moment he arrived in the court grinning like he had as nothing more than a fourteen year old boy teasing Marian about her turned up nose.

But there was something ragged about Robin now; a bitter, haunted edge to him. Even as he acted like a spoiled, rash little boy – even as he got himself outlawed and chased into Sherwood – Edward was reminded of his own words to the lad so many years ago.

Death does not make men of us.

True enough, he knew – but war, he also knew, would certainly make mad men of those like Robin.

Why it did not occur to him that Robin would once more start courting Marian as eagerly as he might have before he had left, Edward didn’t know. It took him months to realise that of course the outlaw was still visiting her – seeking information, advice and counsel; adoring her as blindly as she had always done him. It took longer still for Edward’s aging, tired mind to see the old affection beginning to burn in Marian’s eyes when she spoke of the man, even in scorn.

“I never could handle a sword the way you did today,” he remarked, after witnessing her as the Nightwatchman for the first time, seeing off the brother of Allan-a-Dale and his men. “You must get it from your mother.”

“Mother could handle a sword?” Marian enquired, amused, as she cleaned a cut on her forearm acquired during the skirmish.

Edward allowed a fond smile to touch his features, “I wouldn’t have put it past her.”

Marian laughed.

He would not have believed her capable of loving Robin again until he found her in his arms, quite by chance, the night after her disastrous wedding to Gisborne. They were in the kitchen, talking in hushed tones, giggling like children and holding one another like adults. Edward startled them when he knocked a pot off the side and smashed it.

“Father!” Marian yelped, colouring as she sprang away from Robin as if he’d burned her.

“Sir Edward,” Robin was wry, grubby with the forest, smiling sheepishly from beneath his uncut mop of hair.

“Ah, good evening,” Edward made to pick up the bits of the pot but found his back failing to co-operate.

“I’ll clear it up – Father, go back to bed,” Marian hastened to help him, “What are you doing up?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Edward observed, rather amused by how flustered she still was, casting his gaze to Robin, then back to his daughter, “But I think it wiser not to. I, on the other hand, was looking for a drink of water – I am quite thirsty.”

“Here, then,” Marian took a mug from the side and handed it to Robin, “Robin, go and fill this from the well in the yard. Go!”

Robin raised his eyebrows, amused, but acquiesced with only a dry smirk and a mocking salute.

The silence that the outlaw left behind him seemed somewhat strained.

“I see there may have been some reason for you to abandon Gisborne at the altar other than an urgent need to save your father from Vaysey’s assassins,” Edward remarked.

“That had nothing to do with Robin,” Marian informed him, firmly.

“I am sure it didn’t,” Edward replied.

Marian rolled her eyes.

There, in her, was the old passion – the unassuming, self-deprecating devotion that had so bloomed in him for Kate, now running in Marian’s veins as she cared for Robin. It was no longer a girl’s heart that Marian gave to the outlaw so completely, but a woman’s – experienced and several times broken, cynical and quick to wound but enduring, always, endlessly.

She would love Robin to the ends of the Earth; beyond her father’s bafflement at her devotion.

It seemed oddly fitting to Edward that Marian should be entering her prime just as his body seemed about ready to crumble away entirely. His fevers were often and the fatigue they visited on him almost unbearable. There were weeks at a time when he could not rouse himself from his bed, and he became aware sometimes of Marian by his side, and other times of the Saracen lad who Robin had somehow acquired, who had apparently saved Marian’s life and was now working to save his.

During those endless, running streams of semi-consciousness, he found himself sinking into old dreams of Kate. He found himself a boy again, sixteen and newly into his titles, bounding through the grounds of his estate on foot, talking to the villagers, and finding Kate, miraculously the same age. She laughed so much when he told her of their daughter, sitting upon the roof of the miller’s cottage. Oh, Eddie – isn’t she funny?

“You kept calling me Kate,” Marian told him when he awoke after one particularly feverish night, “and telling me all about me.”

“Did I?” Edward wondered what he had said.

“Yes,” Marian smoothed his hair, “You so loved my mother, father, didn’t you?”

“Yes, my dear. I loved her very much.”

Marian had only smiled, wistfully, and Edward wondered what he had done to make her so sad.

Knighton burned that night, what little peace they had somehow salvaged in those few quiet months after Marian’s wedding attempt turning all to ash on the dark air. Edward watched the house that his great grandfather had build – before the Norman invasion, when the country had still sat under its true, Saxon rulers – crumble into hell fire, and couldn’t weep.

He and Marian had been conceived amongst those walls, his sisters and brothers; his father before him; his before that.

He heard Marian screaming in anguish as she was dragged out of her burning home by Gisborne’s men, and hated everything that Nottingham had become – hated himself more, for allowing it.

But his body was old, and tired, and he could do nothing more than curse them all and himself most of all in the Saxon tongue of his ancestors, over and over.

“Never once had I thought it better your mother died that she not witness this future, until tonight,” Edward had told Marian, softly, as she helped him into the cold, damp smelling bed that the Sheriff had provided for them in the gilded cage he was calling their chambers.

“Don’t say that,” Marian whispered, her eyes filling with tears for the first time in a long time.

“Oh, Marian, we are lost,” Edward could only shake his head.

Marian sniffed, and climbed up onto the bed next to him. “Hush,” she begged.

And, as she had not done since she was a very little child, she climbed under the covers next to him, and huddled up to his side, and fell as close to sleep as either of them was going to get that night.

On the one hand, as the following weeks unwound themselves in an unpleasant haze of grey walls and dark fevers, Edward understood why Marian was still taking risks.

Of course, to her it would seem as if they had very little left to lose. All their wealth was gone, their home, their lands, her inheritance and any hope of a secure future. And Robin asked things of her, and she never could refuse the man, even when she protested otherwise.

Edward, however, who had seen loss and knew grief, was only too well aware of what else they had to lose – for they were dispossessed survivors of the shipwreck of their own lives, and they had only each other left: that which was most vulnerable. That which was most easy to take and which would cause the most devastation.

If she got caught, they would hang her – or hang him, to punish her all the more.

One way or the other, Marian was going to get one of them killed.

And why the girl seemed so stubbornly unable to see that, he did not know. Though there were times, he suspected, when she did see it – but was wilfully blind.

Because of Robin, filling her with his idealism, still. Robin who never did know when to let go – when to be pragmatic, bide time, consider options and lay low when the prospect of imminent death was too close for comfort.

“What has he done that makes him worthy of your love?” He asked her, once, despairing, from behind the bars of his cell in the dungeons two days after they moved him there to punish her for some wounding of the Sheriff’s precious pride.

Marian had simply stared at him, uncomprehending.

“If you truly loved my mother you would not have to ask that,” she had replied, before leaving him, angry and cold.

He wanted Kate to see her, so badly, when they argued like that. So full of stubborn pride and fierce determination and utter devotion.

Kate would have been proud.

He endured the dungeon quietly, not because he thought that the best way to get himself out of the situation a little quicker, but because he could do little else. The damp and the dark and the cold, not to mention the meagre rations he was fed on, did nothing to improve his failing health.

The hacking cough that had become as familiar as on old friend over the past few years now became a constant companion. His fevers were deeper and more fretful than ever, carrying him away from reality sometimes for days at a time, through which he slept and awoke almost without noticing. He dreamt of Kate, and was glad that she could not see the pathetic husk of a thing he had become, as Marian distantly pleaded with the jailor to let him out – just once, please – for air, for medicine – to let him have a thicker blanket, at least…

The day that he argued with Marian for the last time, he had had a particularly vivid dream the night before. Kate and he had been playing marbles as children, and he had found Marian amongst them – not bigger than his thumbnail, fast asleep. Kate had laughed.

Oh, Eddie – isn’t she funny looking?

He had made the mistake of criticising Robin – and then they had taken to arguing over deeper things. For she and Robin were dreamers, of course – going to get one or all of them killed, soon enough.

“I’m ashamed of you sometimes,” Marian said, her eyes cold, her voice cracking with something… lost.

And hearing his own dearest doubts coming out of her mouth had finally been too much.

It was so strange a thing, to die, he thought, when the knife found his chest that same day. How strange a place, as well, on somebody’s washing green, next to a well, gazing up at – of all people – Robin of Locksley, who held his head on his knees.

Marian hadn’t killed either of them after all.

He’d done it all by himself.

“You cannot die,” Robin told him, and Edward thought it funny that the boy looked on the verge of crying – he who had been deprived of his innocence and his Marian by the man now dying in his arms. He who had lost so much to the regime that Edward had allowed into power.

He found Kate welling up on the back of his tongue with a sharp Yes I can! In reply, but thought it better not to waist what few words he had left.

Was he dying?

God – yes – yes – slipping with the breath past his lips into the air itself; into the Earth. A dull ache in his chest where the knife still stuck out, his lungs steadily crumpling to emptiness about the intruding metal.

He’d wanted so much to see Marian and Robin’s children…

God – his last words to her were in anger – and hers to him – sweet girl, crying over a crushed snail; fighting to put bread into the mouths of those who the Sheriff starved. Such a perfect, fretful, funny little thing…

Here, now, there was only Robin: that foolish, well-meaning boy.

So he told Robin the only thing he suddenly knew, irrefutably, to be true, and thought, bizarrely, of cherry blossoms and snails and marbles.

It’s good to dream.

And then he died.

No angels, no bright lights, not even Kate, there in that cold quiet that he tumbled into. Nothing he knew there.

Nothing at all.