MARION OPENED HER EYES, not alarmed but instantly awake. There had been a faraway clamor, such that she thought it a creation of her dreams. Even her conscious thoughts strayed too often of late to disturbing fantasies, and when she slept her head swam with the positively bizarre. Regardless, she maneuvered from the bed to have a peek out the clapboard window. It was dark, perhaps a few hours still until dawn. The sky mottled itself with heavy clouds, scattering the moonlight irregularly over the baileys of Nottingham Castle below.

For nearly three weeks she had been here, and the last few days in particular saw the castle churning in preparation. The yards had filled with multi-colored tents and camps, the ever-increasing complement of prestigious guests to tomorrow’s funeral. The castle was not continent enough to hold them all, so only the most influential were now housed in its stony keeps. Prince John’s detail had claimed all the grounds about the highest keep, leaving other lords’ entourages to fend for themselves in the sprawling lower bailey. From her window, Marion had seen their colors go up, banners that sprouted like flowers in spring. A small green tent for Rutland next to the larger red-crossed canopy of Lincolnshire, while the yellows of the Yorkshire host sprawled wall-to-wall across half the yard. It was practically a miniature model of the whole of England, all contained within the castle’s footprint.

Each day she strained to search for the white swords of Essex, never certain whether she hoped to find them or not. Her grandfather was earl there, though she doubted his health was reliable enough to travel. She had spied the horn of Huntingdonshire the day before, which filled her with dread. The Earl Robert of Huntingdon had been one of her most lucrative secret supporters. She feared what the present nobility would say if they knew they were sitting beside the man who had purchased all the precious gemstones and necklaces they had lost in the Sherwood Forest.

More prominent than anything else, Marion’s room offered a prize view of the gallows that had been erected. Raked seating wrapped the middle bailey’s perimeter the way it might for a tournament. The constant clamor of its construction had finally abated, and only silence now surrounded the haunting wood sentinel that promised the next day’s “entertainment.”

The violence of the hangings would be the reason the commoners came. They were always drawn to the smell of blood. The visiting aristocracy, however, only used the event as an excuse. Most of them had neither met nor dealt with the late Roger de Lacy in life. Their feigned grief was an act, disguising their hope to fill the holes he left behind in death. They, too, then, had come for the blood.