Sense

The barracks were worse than a henhouse for gossip since Allan-a-dale had turned up and made himself at home; and that nightmare of a narrow shave with Marian had him grinning like a fox. He went on about heroes and true love and -- in short, spent his evening in the guardhouse retailing the most idiotic swill, like the bloody idiot he was. With the inevitable result that Gisborne's entire company of guards, every lackwitted mother's son of them, was agog for the next -- completely fabricated -- chapter.

Or so Allan assured him. "Well, I mean, come on, Giz," he said. "Borin' lives they lead, the poor sods, right? Makes a change from kill this, maim that, and go dig out the privy. Boost for morale, like." With that grin that invited a solid clout to the head.

Gisborne snarled and Allan made himself scarce, with an oddly sympathetic smack on the shoulder. And Gisborne hadn't gone looking, he swore it.

He'd meant to put a cohort of guards to work on the shield-walls beyond the keep, and then see the saddler, who -- very well. Who was finishing a commission for him. For Marian. He found her by chance the morning after, near the stables, watching the grooms.

He headed that way as though he'd planned it all along; while behind him, the guards went as still as if rooted to the pavement. He felt their eyes like pinpricks of curiosity at his back; told himself, hopefully, that his fame was so dark that even the sight of him stupid with love would scarcely lighten it.

He knew many ways of reminding them of that, should it become necessary. If only, he thought, watching her, he could remember what they were.

He deliberately dropped the harness he'd been carrying, letting it clatter to the stones next the gate, jeering inwardly at himself the while. But her face, when she turned at the sudden noise, had none of its usual hauteur. She looked—inquisitive, alert, apprehensive—stern, as she took in the troop of blackshirts behind him. She looked alive.

He closed the distance between them without haste, feeling as though he'd run from York to Nottingham town in the hot sun.

She did not retreat, of course; nor shrink even when he put a hand against the rough wall to either side of her, and leaned and kissed her as though it were something he did every day. And a second time because he couldn't help himself; and a third, when she gathered a handful of his leather coat and pulled him forward to press her mouth again to his. He heard her breath catch and quicken and would have staggered had the wall not been holding him up.

He was still trying for balance when she put both hands against his breast and shoved him casually back a step, looking past him and saying impatiently, "Well, Stephen?"

"Milady—" A protest, evidently, from this Stephen. Gisborne gathered himself, breathing hard.

"Before I'm old, man," was Marian's crisp reply, but he saw, fascinated, how her pulse beat hectically under the skin at the base of her throat, alluring as velvet or rose-leaves of Persia.

He'd little pride and no shame left, as he learned, and would have bent and pressed his mouth to the spot, but she looked steadfastly over his shoulder so that he had no choice but to turn, taking in the grins of the stablehands and the worry in the head groom's face as he shifted, ill at ease, between them. Her blessed sanity made him want to kiss her again, but Gisborne crossed his arms instead and leaned back against the wall next to her. The stableman's anxious look faded to resignation.

"Aye," he said over his shoulder, to someone within the stone mews. "Bring him."

A great brute of a horse, one of the Austrian get the Sheriff had talked of importing, back when Gisborne's work on plate-armor had looked promising, to extend the appeal, he'd said, of the steel. Black as the Lionheart's soul, with a blaze of white down its face, and one white foot. Gisborne bit his tongue on a protest of his own. The creature stamped an enormous hoof, and he'd have sworn the cobbled yard rattled on its earthen bed.

"On the soft, damn you," shouted Stephen irritably. The man holding the bridle looked a startled question, then nodded and hissed agreeably to the beast, and led it through the postern to the exhibitioners' ring.

Whereupon, a pardonable error, he made a gesture of inquiry in Gisborne's direction; and it was a tempting thought. Not that anyone in less than full battle dress would have any use for such a monster; but it had fine lines and a noble head, and looked ready for a morning's work. Gisborne felt, in that moment -- and that company -- a vast and energetic urge for such a trial. The idiots yonder could go back to the guardhouse to wait on his convenience.

Marian's cool voice startled him out of his daydream: "Do you not have business elsewhere, Sir Guy?"

There was a slight edge of hostility to the question, which caught one corner of his mouth like a fishhook and dragged it up in a smile. He looked sidelong at her, leaning shoulder to shoulder with him against the cool stone. She was giving him the wide stare that always made him feel that explanations were due.

"I am sure I heard you say that the Sheriff expects you as early as may be this morning," she added.

The need to laugh made him slightly lightheaded, He brazened it out with a raised brow at the the man Stephen, who, like Gisborne himself, seemed to understand the strategic art of retreat.

"Go on, then," he said to Marian, nudging her shoulder with his, but she didn't move until he finally turned to face her again. There was something like surprise in the look she gave him, and also a hint of apology, perhaps for the kiss, and he'd expected as much; she was nothing if not impulsive. He repeated the invitation with a tilt of the head and got her smile, the real one.

She was more than a match for the excitable foreigner, of course. The head groom all but dragged him out of her path as she approached the mounting block, but there was no need for Gisborne to intervene. Once she'd gone he went forward to stand next to Stephen, who was shading his eyes and muttering. The foreigner looked fit to expire of outrage.

For all its theatrics the beast had a marvelous gait, responding without check or pause as Marian made her wishes known. She took it from a soft, beautiful trot to a thundering lope, and how in hell's name could she hope to hold the animal if it took a notion to misbehave?

"Will she handle him?" he asked. He succeeded, he thought, in keeping the question free of anything but detached interest.

Stephen stared at the big horse now rounding the far rail, still collected in its massive movements, with Marian a small, warlike figure on its back, and then turned his head.

"Will he have the sense to let her, more like," was his blunt reply. "M'lord," he added, his gaze dropping briefly to the leathers disarranged by Marian's hands. He touched his cap and went back to harassing the stablehands.

Gisborne turned to find Allan-a-dale at his shoulder, like the bloody nuisance he was.

"Fair question, innit," said Allan, unsmiling, and Gisborne for once let the insolence go. Over his shoulder Marian was putting the horse through a set of field maneuvers that would make his blood run cold, later, as he added up where she'd learned them.

"Belt up," was all he said, trying not to think of the light hands and their easy hold on the power beneath. He shrugged his coat back to fall as it should. "Sense," he added, "has nothing to do with it." Allan's laugh followed him all the way back to gate.

[End
December 18, 2007