A/N: So, I just wanted to let y'all know that I have rewritten the last two chapters "Do You Love Me?" and "Too Hot to Handle." LadyKate's review about convoluted mess was right, and I'm not entirely sure if the problem's fixed, but I took a stab at it. There is a new theme to unite them that those chapters introduce and is referenced in this one. If you don't want to go back it's about how the love story we know has been replaced by the Cold Epics of Tuck and the petty personal vendettas of Kate and the small, desperate story of Prince John that ends in, "And then they'll love me." Enjoy!
III.8 The King Is Dead, Long Live the King
The Hand That Signed Magna Carta
Because here's a thing little spoken of in Robin Hood lore: Prince John does become King.
But then, a King is a funny thing. It's a shape that melts in your hands and drips through your fingers the closer you bring the flames of Hell or Heaven. Even the common, everyday flames of Earth. It's a shape that anyone can assume, for the length of a story, in a flash of light from the long hidden sun. Sometimes that's all you need.
After all, stories are powerful things. They can do all kinds of things.
Make petulant boys into the rightful heir to the throne (which he isn't, actually, but we were denied a second King Arthur). A glorious story of the Lion Heart meeting his end at the hand of the infidels (by Lucky George, I wish he'd said that shit in front of Djaq). And suddenly Prince John can rearrange the country to suit him – take Nottingham for his seat of power to set himself on guard against the north and south, throw away governerships in a drinking game, make laws and collect taxes and wage war and burn and pillage to his heart's delight in order to bedeck his coronation gown with rubies. Because of a simple story of no more than twelve words.
A little story from a little man. The smallest and most petty man we have yet met, who would rearrange the entire country in a fit of pique at being given a generous pension in his forced retirement. Your former teacher, who had so much honor his mean little body could not hold it all, so it spilled over into better men and left him staring after it in dismay. He got lost, and he had a wax figure of Richard made, and the brought the crown to Caligula to change the world and set him back on top of it.
And the shape Isabella picked when her heart hardened in the cold of Hell is as fantastic, in a dark and twisty and hating-you kind of way. She is no longer Ophelia, because she was too strong to go mad. If she hadn't been, she would have gone mad long ago. There is a danger to Claudius's shape (and I don't just mean Hamlet), but it allows her to angle with the best of them for the most pivotal position in the country and to survive the new King's wildest fluctuations with grace. To draw the eye of her opponent to save her life, when a little man mistakes her for Gertrude. To get what she always wanted, in a way that plays everyone and lets her feel strong. Her favorite shape ever. And it was a story she told herself when you ripped away the old one that allowed her to forge this splendid shape.
The Archbishop, the Strong Saint, saw the shape of the king and nodded wearily to Caligula, grimly resigned himself to this new story. This new and petty creature the shape of a King would have to bend itself around.
But none of the stories fooled you. There are truths you hold to with a fierceness only legends can manage, with a love so few can sustain. And angels come to whisper new truths in your ear. You would know if the King were dead.
And it is under Kate's hands, the Citizen of Locksley, that the shape of the King first starts to melt and change. As you despair with the same grim resignation of the Powerful Saint, the people of England you have taken under your wing begin to change the meaning of a King. Because this fight is changed, especially if John will be King someday (soon). The England of Robin Hood can survive that, if you make preparation now. Just look how the idea of a new King melts away under the hands of the Citizen of Locksley, the ordinary woman thrown in among heroes.
And tossed into a grave with you to hide while Prince Cain and the Smallest Man We've Ever Met beat the false body and lament that they were too stupid to start disseminating rumors for the past several months while the wax figure was being made. Because they are men of very little stories with terribly sad endings, they do not know how powerful larger stories can be, even as they use them so deftly. They think it's all about the crown, not the tale of Richard's death.
But with the waxen king melted on a false pyre (which I think might be enough for the Politic Saint, as it's proof of the right story), the centrality of the crown is a lucky thing. Because the crown is stable, it still exists long after the Kings have come and gone. Long after John's hand was forced to sign Magna Carta, there is still the crown. Ask Ian Hamilton and the crew in the pub with him that fateful night about the Stone of Scone.
Or Laertes what he would like to do to Claudius at the end of the Revenge Tragedy if he hadn't been poisoned. There is a backslide on the road to redemption if you do not allow yourself to find a new purpose. Guy of Gisborne goes back to Hell to kill Isabella, who tells him dead or alive doesn't matter. Hell is on earth, and she's been there for the past seventeen years. She is strong enough for it. It will last an eternity anyway. And that's just enough of a story to keep our darling Guy from wanting to condemn his soul to that. And she offers him a way back to his old haunt in Hell.
Then Claudius asks if they can start again, carve their own family out of the mess, but Guy refuses to apologize in order to gain a place in Hell. The whole value of Hell, now that there is no one to protect, is the stories it keeps alive and breeds like wildfire that can melt wax sins away: it is not his fault that Isabella hated living with Thornton because she should have done whatever her lawful husband wanted, it is Hood's fault he killed Marian because he took her away, Vaisey would never have stood by him in time of trouble. So the deal breaks. Claudius applies a gentle potion to the scratch on Guy of Gisborne's hand – like the cut Marian made to hide the slice on the Night Watchman's arm once.
But eventually he breaks these bonds too, the second of three times. An old story that, the rule of three. A very old story, that can keep Guy from backsliding too far in his journey to redemption. Guy escapes his bonds and tries to assassinate Prince John and Isabella, getting his sister thrown into Hell again. Because she was given to Sheridan as his reward for stopping you from stealing the crown – the look on her face could break a heart, because no one deserves Hell. Except in stories. Sheridan spins a story about a man with a firm hand, because his stories are very small but very effective.
And that is the kind of story to use against him. Kate, the Mistress of Small Stories, with more reason for vendettas but made of the same stuff, is just the weapon to aim at Sheridan's breast. You spin him a story of comrades-in-arms which gets you a riddle, but it's Kate's tiny story of a drunken tavern wench who wants to play at wrestling-in-arms with a small but powerful man that gets you the keys and the time to steal the crown. Not quite enough, because her big brother came storming in and told Sheridan to get off her, as protective and unreasonable as ever Matthew would have been.
Although Much is the one who gets ridiculous, ruining the "Which Bag Is It?" game the outlaws play in the forest with Sheridan and his dogs because he has to rescue Kate. Both boys cannot see that, even with his arms around her, Kate is the best to play a very little man like Sheridan. But she couldn't, because of the boys who have decided to love her. Instead, you have to face your old mentor. You beat him, but he carts you off to Hull. Like that would ever work.
Tuck makes a very bad plan to steal the crown back at the coronation, and Kate shows what I initially thought was just how far she'd come from giving up Robin for Matthew. But it wasn't that kind of growth – realizing that bigger stories sometimes come at the cost of little ones – but a new small story. Hers and yours, she imagines. If the other silly boys would stop buzzing around her and getting you captured in the process. Because she would rather she suffers than you, which is not a bad place to start in a tale of love.
So Kate explains that Much has yet to actually see her and deal with the real live woman in front of him rather than impressing whatever his generic perfect woman is onto the pretty face of Will Scarlett's replacement and trying to make her his woman-shaped Robin Substitute and that the place Allen holds in her heart is that of a brother, because he was the one who stepped into that void when Matthew died. But much more succinctly because her stories have always been very small.
The crown returns and John has almost an entire coronation before you show up with shields of blinding light, and Tuck's Stewardship over England grows to include taking the shape of a King. Long enough to provoke Sheridan's very loud and expository repentance and the Strong Saint's power to strike back at Prince Cain, until the light fades and the shape made of wax tries to harden again. The grandest of stories to answer the smallest of stories, just as brief but Epic nonetheless. A story that will live for many ages to come. How Robin Hood shot the crown out of the pretender's hands. Took it away from the false monarch.
Guy of Gisborne attempts to come raging into this fight, grabs the crown as if that will work, and you have to stop him from shooting Prince John. Because you do believe in the monarchy, and you know that Civil War will come if John is deposed. Guy doesn't care about unleashing the power of Hell, but you love your country, as Isabella said. And the bewildered Laertes stuck in a Revenge Tragedy he cannot unravel is still too afraid to kill Claudius, so she dives in front of Caligula and wins the post of Sheriff. Marian's replacement transforms herself into Vaisey's, from Ophelia to Claudius. Her favorite shape ever. Then she breaks the ceasefire and violence erupts out of Hell on the orders of its child bride, all grown up.
And it is the Citizen of Locksley, in the melee of this battle without weapons, that grabs the Crown. Tuck provided her cue, "If God had wanted you to have the crown he would have given it to you," then he kicks it away from John and it is caught by Kate. And she acts silly with it at first, but this is important, Robin. Because someday Prince John will become King. But first, you'll spoil the game for him. Never in her old life would Kate Potter of Locksley have grabbed the crown. Before she met you, she would have stared from the sidelines or kicked it to someone more fitting than John. But she never would have taken the law and power of the land into her own hands as she did after a few months with your Merry Men. The people you taught to believe in England have learned, quite without you meaning them to, to believe in an England without a King at all. The England of Robin Hood. This the point of the Battle of the Hearts and Minds of England, given to us halfway through the final game. You were already winning, though you didn't know it, so the game had to change. To melt between your fingers just as you were grasping it.
Because England and Nottingham, and Locksley, are bigger than their representatives. That's the lesson of this story, and it's the key to this new Battle. And it gives you the upper hand that will someday force John's to sign Magna Carta. But it cost us Isabella, and you until Marian stepped in, and it will cost us King Richard. He is lovely, but he is not needed by his country anymore. They need the England of Robin Hood. Richard's Return was a talisman against the Dark, and this new battle has cost us that comfort. Now we have to bring on our own Dawn rather than waiting for it to break. But it will be a brighter dawn than the one you had imagined. Things we do not talk about, but they might have helped later with Leopold.
Until then, we must forge in the darkness a new creation. Something beautiful and terrible and strong: a story. The story of the England of Robin Hood.
It may not seem like much, compared to armies and greek fire and crowns. But a story is a powerful thing. It can do all kinds of things. Sometimes that's all you need.