[Episode OOM -- "Childhood" 2.03 (4)]
Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV - Part V - Part VI
~*~
Marian wasn't quite sure when she realized she was headed there.
She'd made all the choices, which road, how far, what direction. But she'd been a good third of the way there before it had formed as a solid thought with a conscious decision backing it. The tumble of thoughts between what she was doing, and why, against the confusion and anger and dry, only faintly chilly, night air which whipped her hair back into streams lost in the dark night.
You want your freedom back merged into an outburst had nearly a week beforehand. A worse reaction, not kept in check. A response to a truth, to a thing she had not seen, had to let go of without recompense. Even when it was going to overrun the limits of any reasonable time to and from Locksley Manor, she couldn't find a shred of will to turn her from her destination.
Knighton Hall. Or whatever was left of it.
You want your freedom back, he'd said and he shown how very little he'd ever known of her really. Knighton Hall was not freedom, even if it had included far more freedom than her current living arrangement, as the Sheriff's prisoner. She had only been lived there during the last four and half years. And if it had become home, it had become normal, that did not make it free.
Even in its infancy, it was banishment, to a corner, as graceful and underhanded as could be managed. Freedom had been Nottingham, further back than even the prior year to being moved to this place. Before the year when Robin had left, and she had thought she knew all she could know about the devastation that could be reaped upon a heart.
Back until she was fourteen, barely fifteen, when she still believed nothing could change so greatly, no truly terrible evil yet existed in the perfect bower of her world. Where she was adored, cherished, to the point of beyond gentle spoiling at times, but never amiss, when she knew where she was going and who she would be come in that world.
If Marian stood, dry-eyed, beside her borrowed horse, who stamped the ground uneasily still, with her fingers holding to the harness, maybe it was easier to think these thoughts. Split hairs, and unspoken justifications, and never understood or shared explanations, in the silence of night than truly process the scene before her.
Even in the dark of night, even tumbled by weather and the wind, she could see it. The few charred beams, of house or stable, that had survived the flames. Most having careened and fallen, themselves. What was left of the debris, ill-formed, misshapen objects. The circle of the closest trees that had been scorched away by the blaze.
All that they had ever owned, ever touched: gone.
The payment for making their own bed.
The consequences for the choices they had made;
The treachery for her father standing up with those other brave souls in the Council of Nobles, half of whom had died in the return of Vasey's false King Richard. Her own, for daring not only to leave Guy at the altar, where even before the priest he had lied and threatened her, but punching him, with his own wedding ring, before all his peers, as she did so.