Chapter 9
Djaq's dreams often had no pictures, only sounds and smells and darkness. It was a legacy of her girlhood habit of squeezing her eyes tight shut to savour precious moments: the spice and buzz of the bazaar; a gentle voice singing and the scent of her mother's hair; the indefinable change in the air that told her it was about to rain. Such sweet, simple dreams. Then there was the one that still started her awake, some nights in the forest: the darkness, the clashing of swords, and the metallic taste of fear.
She had abandoned the practice after that day, discarding it along with a pile of veils and a long tail of dark hair: it had been Safiyah's childish luxury, but Djaq needed to keep her eyes open. Still, the visionless dreams were a part of her past that remained with her.
She had never dreamed of this smell before. Smoke and sweat and something else she could not define. It was a familiar smell, although she thought, in the absent way one thinks in dreams, that it had never been so close, so enveloping. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but she found it oddly comforting.
There was another smell as well, one that made Djaq's mouth water. Chicken, the word drifted across her mind. Roast chicken; real chicken, not Much-chicken. As if conjured by the thought of his name, a voice came to her through the darkness.
"Oh God, I'm so hungry!"
Even in her dreams, some things never changed...
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The Nightwatchman had something of a reputation amongst the people of Nottingham and the guards whose job it was to keep them downtrodden. Rumour had it that he was not human at all: the amazing fluidity with which he moved and leapt and fought had led some to whisper that he had been forged (by either God or the devil, depending on your point of view) out of molten metal. If he was wounded - but surely he could never be wounded – silver, not blood, would flow from his veins.
Tonight, though, the Nightwatchman was on less spectacular form. Tonight the Nightwatchman was cobbled together from stealth and necessity, his origins neither diabolical nor divine. He skulked in doorways, dodging from one patch of shadow to the next. An observer would have thought that perhaps, tonight, he was feeling a little less confident about his ability to battle hordes of the Sheriff's men and win.
All was well until he reached the guard post halfway along the east wall. The two soldiers on duty were whiling away the late watch by discussing just what horrible thing it was that Jewish men did to themselves to signify their faith.
"I'm telling you, they cut it off!"
"Don't be daft. Where d'you think little Jews come from then? And what do they do when they need to 'ave a piss? Speaking o' which..."
The guard turned at just the wrong time. If he'd been in any position to comment, afterwards, he might have been a little piqued at being treated to a much less dignified and exciting defeat than most of the Nightwatchman's victims. No flying kicks or breathtaking backflips for him, just a knife in the belly like any poor drunkard who's stumbled down the wrong alley. His companion was luckier, their nemesis sparing his life if not his ego; he slumped to the floor with a blow to the temple that would live to be embellished over an ale or twelve in the guardroom.
The Nightwatchman shook the sweat from beneath his mask and hurried on.
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"I mean, honestly, would it kill them to take their little picnic outside?" Much continued indignantly. "I haven't eaten a thing since breakfast, and there they are just gorging away without so much as throwing us a crust! It's just... barbaric!"
"Much. We have bigger problems than your stomach," John growled from the adjacent cell.
"Do you think I don't know that?" Much retorted, his voice steadily increasing in pitch as he went on. "But right now being hungry seems like the best thing to focus on. At least I'm used to being hungry! I am not used to being trapped in a dungeon, with the only person who can rescue us hundreds of miles away, and Gisborne and his goons rushing off to capture him, and Djaq lying there... Djaq lying there..." He trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.
Silently, the other two men agreed that he had a point. This was not good. The feast the guards were tucking into had been brought down by a young kitchen maid, who explained that Sir Guy had been called away on urgent business without touching the dinner that had been prepared for him.
"Your lucky night, boys."
It didn't take a genius to guess what that business might be, or that the guards' good fortune was ill luck for Robin and his men.
As Much stumbled over her name, Djaq slowly lifted her heavy eyelids, wincing as her lashes snagged against a crust of dried blood from the wounds on her forehead.
She blinked, twice. Gisborne must have hit her head harder than she remembered, and she was hallucinating. First the tantalising smell of the chicken – in a dungeon, of all places – and now Will was sitting there without his shirt.
Her weary mind turned over the conundrum. Pale skin. Long, lean torso, even when he sat hunched over like that. So thin that it made her ache, although that could have been Gisborne's doing. Tension tightening every muscle of his chest and back and shoulders.
As she shifted slightly to allow her eyes to follow the line of energy that flowed up his body and out through the curve of his neck, a jolt of pain informed her that this was no mirage. In the same instant, the feeling of rough cloth on her tender chest made sense of both the sight before her and the still-present, undefinable scent, as she realised that Will's shirt was draped over her.
Ever the gentleman, Will Scarlett...
Oblivious to her awakening, the gentleman in question was staring fixedly through the bars of the cell they shared. He was grateful for the guards' lack of initiative: in the absence of specific instructions, they had reverted to their usual practice and thrown him and Djaq in together and unbound. He had tried to make her as comfortable as possible, covering her with his shirt and folding his scarf beneath her head, but there was not even any water to clean the blood from her face. His instinct was to hold her hand or stroke her cheek, but almost every visible inch of skin bore some livid mark of the pain he had failed to save her from, and so, fearing to make it worse, he had retreated to the edge of the cell, pausing only to retrieve the knife.
The guards had stripped their weapons off them when they were first brought in, but they been complacent when searching the woman, failing to check inside her boots. Will knew it was there – she was always at the edge of his peripheral vision in any fight – and now it was clasped behind his back. The guards were out of range right now, but his chance would come. The patient, rational craftsman within him was considering how he could use the knife to win their escape, but was rapidly losing ground to the dark revel of fury brawling in his veins. Mostly, Will just wanted to kill Gisborne; and since he was on his way to Headingley on Robin's trail by now, any of his men would serve to die in his place.
"She's moving! She's awake! Djaq, are you all right?" Much's announcement dragged him back from the dark, angry world that had claimed him to the equally dark, fearful world of reality.
"Never better," Djaq muttered sarcastically, ending each word with the rolling r that always made Will's own tongue curl, as if he could taste her voice in his mouth. He scrambled across the few feet of stone that separated them, his face echoing Much's concern, though he scorned to repeat his stupid question.
"I do not think anything is broken," she said, gingerly feeling her ribs with her good hand, "except these." She held up her other hand, the fingers a crushed mess of darkening bruises. She slowly sat up, clutching Will's shirt against her chest, and let out a faint gasp at the accidental pressure against one of her burns.
"If I cut the sleeves off, you could put it on and it wouldn't touch your arms," he suggested. "They... they didn't give yours back." He turned his head away and held out his hand for the shirt. Djaq did not comment on the knife he used to slash the seams. As she shrugged the armless tunic over her head, he quietly confessed, "I told him about Headingley. I had to."
She sighed; she had guessed as much from the simple fact that she had woken up of her own accord, rather than to the hissing agony of another burning poker, or the stinking, crushing weight of a castle guard. She didn't ask exactly what Gisborne had threatened, not wanting to take her mind back to that room that had already left its groaning legacy on her body. Even while she was conscious, his hectoring words had been far-off, distorted, like voices heard underwater. She had ducked beneath the cool surface of the river and waited for the inferno of pain to pass.
It was just as well that it had, leaving only smouldering embers that she could endure on her own, for this time Will's blue-green eyes would not meet hers, instead staring miserably at the floor.
"Robin is not due back for over a week," she said as consolingly as she could, given the bleakness of her words. "There is no way we could have held out that long."
He knew she was right; they would all have succumbed long before Robin had a chance to rescue them. But it would have been to death, not betrayal, were it not for Gisborne's twisted master-stroke. Will had had no real choice - her eyes, the guards, the dagger, her eyes - and yet his choice had condemned Robin and Marian to die with them.
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The Nightwatchman paused outside the door that led down to the dungeons. Until now, he had managed to avoid raising the alarm, but this was where it ended. Once he opened that door, he would be out in the open, breaking cover; breaking too a lifetime habit of subterfuge and sleight of hand. There was a good chance the thin borrowed mask would fail him, and tonight's activity was a little too unambiguous to cover with his usual armoury of bravado, half-truths and just-plain-lies.
You could still walk away. They all hate you; you don't owe them anything. You were in that dungeon and nobody came to save you. You tried to tell Robin. You did all you could. It's out of your hands.
The excuses came thick and fast, with all the facility of a mind well used to rationalising the path of least resistance. Even as his hand flicked to the little wooden scrap of reclaimed fellowship in his pocket, the bitter voice found a way to cheapen it.
For all you know, that's been there since the day you left. Doesn't mean they still want you back. You've gone a lot further since then.
As he felt his will fading, he reached desperately for the last and strongest talisman against his own weakness: the one he had never yet called on for fear of tainting it with his doubts, not wanting to pit that lone voice that had said he was a good man against the chorus in his head that knew otherwise.
He held the memory of that moment before him like a shield, and hurriedly, before it could slip or buckle, pushed open the door and ran down the dungeon steps. Reaching the bottom, he almost swore aloud in his surprise. He had been expecting the usual crabbed, bent jailer, not half a dozen guards. Gisborne must have assigned extra men to cover the special prisoners.
Of course, that was unlikely to be a problem, since the guards were sprawled, half-naked and snoring, on the dungeon floor. Behind them, the cells stood open and deserted.
Author's note: I had originally planned to have Allan-as-Nightwatchman bust the gang out, but then 2.11 aired here a few weeks ago and I realised that would sort of ruin his big moment in that episode! So I decided to let him have a dress rehearsal instead, and luckily there were still several chapters for me to set up Escape Plan B, which will be revealed in the next update.
Since Allan's outlaw tags have made another reappearance here, I must take a moment to recommend a brilliant new oneshot by Harlett called Betrayal which, as well as being a beautiful exploration of the immediate aftermath of Allan's expulsion from the gang, also suggests one way in which the tags might have ended up where he found them in Chapter 7 of this story.
I should be updating this story more quickly from now on, since I've got a few relatively quiet weeks at uni before exams start. Thanks as always to my lovely readers and reviewers - I so love hearing your thoughts!
:) xx B.
