Disclaimer: the characters portrayed in this story are the property of Tiger Aspect and BBC. No infringement of their rights is intended.
Leaving
Acre, The Holy Land
Will
He is troubled. It is three months since they said goodbye to Robin and the others, and in those three months, Will Scarlett's life has changed, seemingly forever. Where there was once danger at every turn, there is now only silence. In many ways, this life is better than the one he knew before. After all, he lives in Bassam's house, and a grand place it is, unlike anything he has seen or imagined. He is treated with cautious interest, if not exactly respect, and on most days, this is enough. But there are days when he can feel a great weight in his chest, when he senses he is suffocating, even though the air here is so clear and the spaces here are so large.
At first, he thinks it must be the heat, infernal and strength-sapping, and an Englishman, no matter how strong or true, is hardly a match for it. But, if he is honest, he must admit that the heat does not bother him as much as it used to, it does not trouble him as much as the desert itself. It is a vast expanse of unrelenting sameness, of dune upon dune, where everything is colored with dust, and there is no escape from the sand. He sighs deeply, longing for the verdant greens of Nottingham, for a chance to see the leaves turn in Sherwood Forest, for the smell that comes with new things growing in the spring, for the way things feel back home.
Home? No, home is here now. With Djaq. For Djaq is perfect. Being with her is like finding the brightest warmth of the sun on the coldest of winter days. Djaq is his everything.
Only she's not really Djaq, not anymore. The fierce one that Will loves so well is not gone exactly, but she seems to be fading. She has exchanged the attire of an outlaw for the robes of a Saracen, and the calluses of a soldier for the ink stains of a scholar. Her hair is longer, and though she is no less beautiful to Will, she is mostly Saffiyah now. She has set the Saracen boy aside, and he begins to wonder if he will meet the same fate.
For he has seen her, seen how she blossoms in those pursuits that Will cannot share. She laughs with Bassam's sons, reading books in her own tongue, and in Greek and Latin, about astronomy and alchemy and medicine, and all other such wonders that he has even scarcely heard of before. And it strikes him then that he, a mere peasant, barely lettered, is no match for someone like her.
Bassam says that some birds are not meant to be in a cage, no matter how gilded, and he begins to slowly understand what this means.
Djaq
She watches him from the window in the aviary. The sun is blazing hot, and he is helping Bassam's men dig ditches in the sand. It is like him to be as helpful as possible, even though the heat is beyond him, and even though the others barely hide their disdain for him. They think he does not know it, because he cannot speak their language, but she knows he understands, and that he is troubled by it. She can see it in his eyes, in the way they narrow just a little as the others speak in not-very-hushed tones. She can see it in the way his shoulders droop when he thinks nobody else is watching.
She can feel his mood travel through the air and come to rest in her heart, so she shakes it off. It is of no matter, she tells herself. She has something to tell Will that will surely lift his spirits and make him forget whatever it is that troubles him now.
But later, when she tries to tell him, he steals her words away with his lips before she can speak. He is all limbs and heat, and as she melts into him, the thoughts fly out of her mind, until she can no longer remember what it was she meant to say in the first place. Later, as sleep is about to claim her, she thinks, I'll tell him tomorrow.
But she does not tell him tomorrow, or the next or even the day after that…and a month passes before she realizes that he never lets her speak.
Bassam
He likes Will Scarlett, he really does. But sometimes Bassam is not so sure he likes the idea of him. Since his arrival, there has been no harmony in Bassam's household. His sons resent the Englishman, seeing in his pale face only the shadow of the marauding Crusaders who took the lives of their friends and brothers-in-arms. The servants dislike him, finding his tongue and his ways too strange to bear. It is only the town craftsmen who show the pale one any respect, and that is only because he has shown some skill with a chisel.
And then there is the matter of Saffiyah. Propriety required that Bassam ask the Englishman to stay elsewhere, for Saffiyah is still a maiden, and they are not, and cannot be, properly wed. But Saffiyah is indignant, and Bassam eventually relents, even allowing that the two may already be as man and wife after their years together in the forest.
Still, Bassam likes him. Because Will Scarlett only speaks five words where other men of less sincerity speak twenty; because he is strong enough to withstand the desert and all it brings; and because he looks at Saffiyah as if she is the last thing on earth.
Then, one morning, the Englishman disappears. When he does not return, Saffiyah is beside herself, convinced that the young man has come to some harm, that he has been captured by those who do not wish him here. But Bassam knows the truth. He does not have the heart to tell her he has seen the pale one slip away in the dead of the night.
Some birds are not meant to be in a cage after all, no matter how gilded, and he hopes that Saffiyah will slowly understand what this means.