A/N: This was another important chapter that required some particular attention - hence the delay. For all who may be wondering, rest assured that this story is already completed, and will be posted in its entirety. I'll try my best to be a bit more prompt with the updates.
Thank you to all who are reading and reviewing.
Bound Home
Chapter 18
A lonely swan from the sea flies,
To alight on puddles it does not deign.
Nesting in the poplar of pearls
It spies and questions green birds twain:
"Don't you fear the threat of slings,
Perched on top of branches so high?
Nice clothes invite pointing fingers,
High climbers god's good will defy.
Bird-hunters will crave me in vain,
For I roam the limitless sky."
-Zhang Jiuling, Thoughts I
The last time he left Acre, he was living in a nightmare. This time, things are much different.
Strange, he muses, gazing down at the white waves that surround the ship like lace trim. Just a few months ago, he was still caught in Marian's broken embrace. The world was drenched in his memories of her – she was so fixed in his mind in all the years after her death that he had unwittingly begun to live his life around her instead of without her. And, like a beast tied to a mill, he walked through life tied to her, always circling around to where he started only to circle around yet again.
He thought he'd moved on a long time ago. Only now does he realize what it is to be free of her ghost, now that he can look back and see the difference between suffering for her and simply missing her.
His regret will always linger. His guilt will always drive him toward atonement. But he is no longer looking at his life through the veil of her blood. He no longer tortures himself with what-ifs. He has made his peace.
He means to find some happiness now, if such a thing is still possible.
He thinks about Aalim, usually in the afternoons when the temperature of the air reminds him of all their days sitting at the port. When he stands on the deck, warmed by the sea's boundless sunlight, he looks at the eastern horizon and wonders if perhaps his line of sight, traveling across the miles of empty ocean that now separate him from Acre, is meeting directly with his friend's. He wonders if Aalim still stares at the water with his dark, searching eyes. In his heart, he knows it is so.
Saffiya is also a constant presence in his thoughts. He has long days on the sea to do nothing but sit and think about her, to ask himself if he was right to leave her so soon, to hope that she finds some happiness of her own. He even prayed for her once in an odd moment when the sunlight was blinding and the waves calm, and he felt moved by some ancient, buried yearning to connect with the skies and whomever might lie beyond. He prayed with his eyes open and his face set to the wide blue heavens, and afterward felt a certainty - a small voice sounding from the deepest parts of his soul - that his prayer had been heard.
One week before the ship's estimated arrival at England, he sits at a cramped writing desk and smooths out a piece of vellum. It had cost him a fair amount - everything becomes more valuable on a seagoing vessel - but it was worth the price. He feels a small smile pull at his mouth as he dips his stylus into the ink and scratches out an opening address.
I, a well-traveled and weary servant, give greetings of the warmest affection to my trusted friend Saffiya.
May you receive this letter in peace.
One year, six months, five days - measured, not with a calendar, but by the prayers she has offered with tears and with trembling, with stillness and with silence. The final days of that summer with Will are gone – a haze of heat and darkness. The following autumn and winter and this past summer were a stretch of nothing, an exercise in getting by, forgotten seasons pinpricked by occasional brushes with the here and now.
And now autumn has left again. She sits in her house with her clothes still full of sand from a visit to Will's grave. She knows what this winter will bring. She knows these rooms will not change, and the shadows will turn as they always have while, once more, winter passes into spring, and spring into summer, and summer into another bottomless, dying autumn.
She is a singularity here. Family is everything to her people, but her family is mostly gone, and what is left of it can bear the title only by reason of blood, and not affection - relatives who cannot relate, and who stopped wanting to when she came to them with an English husband. The only thing that has kept her in Acre has been the deep belief that being close to Will's grave means being close to him.
She knows better now.
Gisborne's letter is nearly worn through, so often has she handled it. Judging by the date on the letter, he has been back home for at least three months. She sits with the shutters open and the morning air blowing in. Sunlight pools around her. She watches the people - so many, all unknown to her - travel past her house, going about the business of their lives. Her finger rests on Gisborne's letter, and taps against it in a broken rhythm.
My thoughts are upon you with the greatest constancy. I owe you a debt of gratitude such as can never be repaid. It is my strongest desire that you be well and satisfied with what each day now brings you.
Gisborne must have known what he was about in coming to make peace with death, and then leaving that death behind. Just like Marian, Will Scarlet is no longer here. His scent has vanished from their rooms. His absence is no longer an aberration, and she no longer carries the feeling that, at any moment, he will walk through the door or call her name from the upper rooms.
The sands have swallowed him up and covered him over, as they did her father and brother before him.
Will you not reconsider returning to England? If only for a visit, a lengthy one so as to make the journey worthwhile. I can testify with real accuracy that the months you spend at sea - the aches and discomforts - will vanish as soon as you set foot on England's shores.
You must know how your friends here would rejoice at once more seeing your face.
She is ready to leave this place. It took a great deal of time to acknowledge it, but she knows now that her home is back in Sherwood forest, because her home is wherever her husband is - and he is no longer here. Sherwood is where his imprint will always be strongest. There, it is in the villages and forests, along the rivers and lanes that she can trace the genealogy of his character. It is there underneath Sherwood's heavy branches that she can feel the weight of their shared history. On the sun-dappled forest floor, despite the thick cover of dead leaves which have no doubt erased all their worn paths, she can walk in her husband's footsteps. She can laugh with his friends. She can live once more with the people who became her cause, with the men who became her brothers.
She gently folds Gisborne's letter, and sets off to say her goodbyes.