A World That Will Not Turn to Ash (English)(From Ashes Vol.1)

Chapter 5 - Absence

Marian found herself staring at the ceiling beams, as she was enchanted by the grain of the wood.
Apparently she was lying on her bed, but she had not the faintest idea how she got there. She did not remember at all when she went back to her room or when she retired for the night and then, she noticed, it wasn't night.
She was lying there staring at the ceiling and she felt light-headed.
Her arms ached and she realized that she was clutching her chest and that she was holding something soft, warmed by contact with her body. She got that thing closer to her face and she took a deep breath: she could recognize the smell of leather, horses and, mixed with them, another weak, but very familiar scent.
Guy.
The black jacket she clutched in her hands smelled of Guy and if Marian closed her eyes, she could imagine very well to be near the Black Knight, as always.
Usually, when Marian was at the castle and Guy wasn't busy with his duties to the sheriff, he was never too far from her.
Sometimes his presence, so intrusive, had annoyed her, but now Guy wasn't there.
There was his jacket in Marian's hands, but he was not there.
Because he was dead.
Guy.
Dead.
Marian's fingers tightened convulsively on the jacket and the girl sat up in bed with a muffled cry.
That thought was absurd, unreal.
Guy of Gisborne could be many different things: the ruthless henchman of the sheriff, an arrogant, passionate man and sometimes absurdly naive, but not dead.
Guy was the kind of person who in one way or another always managed to come out more or less unscathed from even more disastrous failures and Marian thought that it was impossible to associate the terrible end told by the young soldier with him.
Gisborne captured and tortured by unknown outlaws and then killed without any mercy, between insults and derision?
The sheriff's dog...
The words of the soldier sounded all too clearly in Marian's mind and the girl was horrified at the thought that maybe those were the last words that Guy heard in his life.
A soft knock on the door made her turn her head towards it and she said to come in.
Allan was at the door and Marian thought he seemed to have aged suddenly. He looked drawn, with no energy, and the expression on his face was tired.
He entered the room and closed the door behind him, leaning with his back to it.
"We followed the boy's directions." He said flatly. "And we found them. Everything was as he had said: dead horses, the massacred soldiers..."
"And Guy?" Marian whispered, almost voiceless.
"I found his coat thrown in the mud and then there were ropes tied to a tree. The trunk..." Allan paused and swallowed, as to dispel an attack of nausea. "The trunk and the grass around it were splattered with blood... And his sword was on the ground, next to the bodies of the guards... We looked along the cliff and on the banks of the river, but we could not find his... his body."
Allan broke off with a kind of sob, and then he handed the bundle that he had been holding in his hands to Marian. The girl did nothing to take it and she didn't answer, apparently petrified.
Allan took a few steps towards the girl who was sitting on the bed and he laid next to her Guy's sword, without its scabbard, but wrapped in the black leather coat, stained with mud.
"Gisborne would have wanted you to have them, I think."
Marian looked at the sword, as if she was hypnotized and she touched the sharp blade with a finger, without noticing the twinge of pain when it cut her skin. She looked at the drop of blood that appeared on her finger, bright red against the pallor of the hand, then she stared at it as it slid on her fingernail and fell down.
The drop of blood landed on Guy's jacket, that the girl was still holding on her lap.
Marian looked at it: a small ruby gleaming against the black leather.
Then she began to scream.

Tuck went back into the cave, holding up the pointed stick on which he skewered the fish he had caught.
He stuck it in the ground next to the fire so that the smoke would hold the flies away and he checked the liquid that was boiling in the pot.
He poured a bit in a bowl and he tasted a sip to control the right dosage of the herbs he had used, then he walked over to the wounded man and approached the bowl to his lips. Guy drank, but didn't try to open his eyes and he lay curled on his side, shivering despite the blanket that was wrapped around his body.
Tuck touched his forehead and he wasn't surprised to find it hot with fever. He took a clean cloth, dipped it in the bucket of cold water that he had just brought from the river and he used it to refresh the face and the neck of the wounded man.
He pulled back the blanket and removed the bandages to check the wounds and he was glad to see that they didn't seem to have infected. He dabbed them with the ointment he had prepared and Guy moaned in his sleep, but he did not regain consciousness.
Since he had brought him into the cave, Guy had opened his eyes just a couple of times and he had lost consciousness again almost immediately, but Tuck wasn't worried for that reason: to heal, his body needed time and energy and sleeping would help him to save his strength.
The real danger could be a fever or an infection, but the wounded man was young, strong and not weakened by disease or malnutrition, therefore Tuck had good reasons to think that he could recover. He dipped again the cloth into the bucket and put it back on Guy's forehead, then he returned to sit by the fire, took a knife and started to clean the fish.

The sheriff bit into a chicken leg, tearing off the meat with his healthy teeth and he chewed furiously.
He was still angry about what happened: that idiot Gisborne has been killed in the most stupid way he could imagine and he had lost the opportunity to assassinate King Richard.
The plan was almost perfect: they would have reached the king in the Holy Land to kill him before Robin Hood could show him the Pact and warn him of their conspiracy.
The problem was that Vaisey had assumed that Gisborne would be the one to kill the king. Other than that silly infatuation with the leper, Gisborne had always obeyed his orders without any protest, even the most senseless one, given to him for the only purpose to check his blind loyalty.
If he had ordered it, Guy of Gisborne would kill the king, the sheriff was sure of it.
His henchman was a perfect weapon and now he had lost him.
Vaisey didn't feel sorry for the Gisborne's death, he would not hesitate to sacrifice him, blaming the regicide on him, once he exhausted his purpose, but Vaisey couldn't stand the idea that the many years he spent to train the black knight to obey him had been wasted without achieving the minimum result.
Now he had to find someone else to carry out his plans.
The sheriff pulled another bite from the chicken leg.