Wild Boy Read online

  Rook only growled, his eyes narrowing to slits.

  Rowan answered for him. “Tell us what?”

  “Why, you were all invited for dinner, lass, to give the Nottingham lad a Sherwood Forest welcome.” Robin’s eyes glinted with fun as he turned toward Lionel. “We traded the horse for a goatskin full of milk and a whole wheel of yellow cheese—”

  “Cheese?” Lionel yelped, lurching to his enormous feet.

  “—and a dozen loaves of white wheat bread.”

  “And bread?”

  “But it doesn’t matter,” Robin went on, “because the imp has given us the slip.” Robin said this with a certain admiration. “First he refused to tell us his name, then he cursed my ancestry and threatened that his father would hang us by our heels from our own oak tree, and then while we passed the mead around, somehow he befooled us all.”

  “Mon foi, he got away? From you?” Beau’s dark eyes sparkled with mockery to remind Robin that she herself had once gotten away from him and his merry men.

  But Robin seemed not to mind. “He got away clean as a whistle.”

  “You hadn’t tied him up?” Rowan asked, soberly teasing.

  “Why, no, lass, he’s just a bit of a boy.”

  Bit of a boy? Rook felt emotions like blackthorn bristle in his chest. He felt himself starting to tremble with rage. But no one seemed to notice.

  Serious now, Rowan thought aloud. “He’ll bring Nottingham down on you like a hornet’s nest.”

  “If he can find his way home! But I’m more afraid he’ll come to harm.” Robin’s hands flew up like startled doves. “He’s afoot, he has no idea where he is, and how will he fend for himself in the woods? He’s likely to starve—”

  “Let him starve!” Rook burst out, fists clenched like his heart.

  Every head turned; every face stared at him. “Goodness gracious,” Lionel said.

  Robin asked Rook, “Lad, what has the Sheriff’s son ever done to—”

  “He’s devil get!” Rook matched Robin Hood stare for stare.

  But he felt Rowan’s gaze on him. She said slowly, “Rook, I’ve often known you to speak good sense, and I’ve never known you to waste breath in anger.”

  He turned his head to face her, but said nothing. His reasons for hatred were his own.

  With a low, worried note in his voice, Robin asked, “Rowan, lass, what if the lad comes here? I was hoping he might see the light of your fire….”

  “He’ll come to no harm here.”

  She spoke firmly, as was her right. She was the healer, and her spirit inhabited this rowan hollow; nothing evil could happen here. Still, she looked to Rook for his promise.

  Rook nodded to her. He, too, wore one strand of Rowan’s silver ring on a leather thong slung around his neck, so that the circlet rested over his heart. Until he gave it back, he was a member of Rowan’s band.

  But it was not for her to say whether the Sheriff’s son would come to harm on the tors where Rook denned like a fox in a cave. Rook met Rowan’s gaze for only a moment more before he turned and strode away, his bare, hard feet carrying him surely into the night on his own.

  Three

  At daybreak, Rook sat cross-legged on a crag near the top of a steep, rocky tor. He had not slept much, but then, wild things seldom did. From his rocky vantage, he watched Sherwood Forest awakening like a living being, breathing its morning mist, steam rising white between the deeply green oaks as they stretched their limbs toward the sun. But no sunshine would caress them today. The sky brooded leaden gray and low, heavy with rain.

  Rook noticed that Rowan and Beau and Lionel were up already, even before the thrushes and wood larks. He could not see them through the lush leaves of early summer, but he saw hints, movements. And he saw other such intimations throughout Sherwood Forest, shadows flitting beneath the trees, thickets stirring even though no breeze blew. Those shadows and stirrings were Robin Hood’s outlaws on the hunt. Evidently the Sheriff’s son had not yet been found.

  Let him be lost. Let him starve and die.

  As if she heard him thinking, Rowan slipped into view through the feathery foliage of the rowan grove. In her oak-green kirtle, with her dark hair pulled back in a braid, she did not so much walk into sight as appear like a spirit of the forest, soundless in her soft deerskin boots, her bow and arrows riding like wings on her back. She looked up at Rook, and although she was too far away for him to see her warm glance of greeting, he felt it. Then she looked downward at her footing and started climbing the rocky slope toward him. Too slowly, Rook thought. If only she could heal herself. He could see that Rowan’s legs, broken in a man trap the autumn before, still troubled her. There was no telling whether she would ever be strong again.

  Rook sighed, slipped off his rock and walked down the tor to meet her, digging his callused heels into the rocky slope.

  “We’re going to help search for the boy, Rook,” she told him as soon as she was close enough to speak to him without shouting.

  “Not I.”

  She nodded in acknowledgment. Rowan never gave orders; she considered herself a strand of the band, not its leader. But her gentle brown gaze studied Rook. “What is wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing your touch can cure.” With his lips tightened into a line like a flint knife’s edge, Rook turned away.

  And started walking.

  Homeward.

  Although not even to himself did Rook admit where he was going.

  As quiet as a brown owl feather, Rook slipped through the forest, edging his way between rocky scarps and great grandfather oaks and thickets as thorny as the bitter tangle in his heart. His meandering way followed no path. Only instinct led him back, back to—

  No. He would not think about that life. Or the day it had ended.

  But whatever he tried not to think, his wayward footsteps carried him toward the farthest edge of the forest, toward a straggle of woods where he had not ventured since—

  Since that day. A dank day, like this one—Rook scorned the damp air chilling his bare shoulders. A wild thing does not feel cold. He blinked his eyes and shook his head, trying to shake away the memory of what had happened that day a year and a half ago, the day he had become an outlaw, hunted for bounty, like a wolf.

  Very well. A wolf does not cry.

  Now there was a path, veering down a steep hillside, probably made by deer and less fortunate wanderers going down to water. Rook seldom allowed himself to feel thirst, but knew he should drink once a day or so to stay alive. This might be as good a chance as any. He turned the downhill way and ghosted along to one side of the path—outlaws knew better than to follow trails.

  There. His guess had been right. He could hear the soft voice of living water murmuring ahead.

  At the bottom of a rocky gorge, swift water leapt and ran like a flood of black squirrels. It was a fine, full, rushing stream, good for trout’s long-finned larger cousin, the grayling. The scent and sight of such water made Rook’s chest swell, as always. Halfway down the side of the gorge he stood for a moment just looking—

  “Rook.”

  The low voice jabbed him like a spear point. He jumped, turned and looked straight into the eyes of the Sheriff’s son.

  And the brat remembered his name.

  Huddled against the damp belly of a boulder, the boy gazed back at Rook, his dark eyes like a shot deer’s. His pale, narrow face glistened with moisture; his hunched shoulders trembled. Then Rook saw dark blotches on his jerkin and leggings: blood. Just below the boy’s right knee, half hidden by dried leaves, clung a great cold arc of steel.

  Man trap.

  Those heavy saw-toothed jaws were built to harm as well as to hold. The boy’s leg was broken. Not just broken. Mangled.

  Crouching, growling, Rook backed away. There in the trap the Sheriff’s son could very well stay. It was as if fate had put him there. It was justice.

  “Rook,” said the Sheriff’s son in the same low, level tone, “help me.”

&
nbsp; “My curse on you,” Rook told him, thorns in his voice. “Die there.”

  “Why do you hate me?”

  Silence. Rook felt the boy’s gaze on him. He felt the stricken, trembling pain in that gaze, but even more, he felt how much the Sheriff’s son was not saying. The proud brat had not screamed for help. He did not beg. He did not speak again. He waited for an answer.

  In that silence Rook heard his own father’s scream.

  He clenched his fists until his ragged fingernails bit into the palms of his hands. “Devil’s son! My father died in a man trap because of yours.”

  “Then your father was a lawbreaker.”

  “He was not! He was a brave man and an honest one.” Passion made Rook clumsy. He stumbled to his knees amid rocks and loam, panting, his chest tight with the pain of remembering his father. “He was … a swineherd….” Dull, dirt-ridden word, it did not begin to tell what Rook’s father had been. Jack-o-Shoats, Jack Pigkeep, Jack By-the-Woods, none of his names bespoke the swineherd’s courage. Rook’s father had lived on his own, outside the village, far from the lord’s protection and tyranny, near the forest’s edge. Without the help of neighbors, he had fought off wolves and human marauders trying to steal his pigs. And he had raised his motherless son. Kept me. Took care of me. Fed me. And fed others. Peasants would have starved during the long winters without the smoked meat Jack Woodsby had provided. Scars had whitened every part of Jack Woodsby’s body from the tusks of wild swine. Every spring Jack the swineherd had risked his life, capturing the young wild pigs. Had the Sheriff’s son ever faced the charge of a wild boar? Rook wondered. Most likely not. Most likely the snot-nosed boy had never even seen a dark, swift, prick-eared long-legged smart-eyed sharp-snouted contrary-minded scourge of a hog such as the ones his father had pastured through the summer and herded into the forest in the fall—

  Which was when it had happened.

  Between clenched teeth Rook told the Sheriff’s son, “My father brought hogs here to the woods to fatten….” Rook struggled to speak, remembering that deadly day. He had been up in a beech tree, shaking the boughs to send down beechnuts for the pigs to eat along with mushrooms and the roots they grubbed from the ground. His father had heard a shoat choking on an acorn and had run into the bushes after it.

  Then—the scream. His father’s scream.

  Rook whispered, “He stepped into one of those accursed man traps.”

  White-faced and shaking, the boy appeared to be learning what it meant to be caught in a man trap. The king’s foresters had set this one where the trail narrowed, passing between a tree trunk and the boulder, where the leaves that hid the steel would naturally gather. They would not be back to check their handiwork for another month or two, hoping to find the moldering skeleton of an outlaw, or any poor man who had dared to venture into the king’s hunting lands. Already the Sheriff’s son listened silently, lacking strength to talk. Soon he would faint. He might well die of his injury before thirst and starvation took him. The horrible hurt of the thing, that was how … how Jack By-the-Woods had died.

  My father.

  The Sheriff’s son met Rook’s stare without blinking, silent.

  Rook’s mouth worked hard to shape the words. “I couldn’t get him out.” It took two strong yeomen to spring a man trap. “I ran….” Rook struggled to speak, remembering his father’s shriek of pain, his father’s stricken face. “I ran all the way to Nottingham for help, but no one …” Cowards, they had been afraid. “They told me to go to your father.”

  The Sheriff’s son whispered, “My father is duty sworn to uphold the laws of the king.”

  “Swineherds roamed these woods before the king was thought of! I knelt to your father. I knelt.” As he was kneeling right now in the dirt and leaf loam. “I begged him.” Rook trembled now like the Sheriff’s son, but not with pain; he shook with rage. “I begged him to spare my father’s life.”

  “My father would not refuse such a plea,” said the Sheriff’s son.

  Rook’s voice fought its way out through fury fit to choke him. “He did refuse. He said, ‘Bad cess to you, what’s one stinking swineherd the less? Let him die.’”

  “You lie!” The boy pushed himself upright, wrath giving him strength, although his face paled whiter than ever. “My father never said so. You are a liar!”

  Watching the boy’s anger, Rook became suddenly very calm. “Meseems your father must be a liar,” he said.

  “Not so! He will punish you for saying so.”

  “I have already cursed him to his face and he has made me an outlaw for it.” As if watching my father die weren’t bad enough? Rook burst into dark laughter. Dark and cruel. His father had taught him no cruelty—even when slaughtering his hogs, Jack Woodsby had struck quick and true so as not to be cruel—but Rook considered that he had learned cruelty from the Sheriff of Nottingham. Rook smiled.

  “Tell me that your father is a liar and a scurvy knave,” he said, “and I will help you.”

  “Knave yourself!” the Sheriff’s son flared, panting with pain.

  “I mean it,” said Rook, no longer shaking, sitting back now with his hands around his bare brown knees, quite cool. “Tell me that your father is a black-hearted villain, and I will set you free.”

  The Sheriff’s son gazed back at him, cold sweat standing like dew on his wincing eyelids, his trembling lips.

  “Tell me that your father is a clodpole and a scoundrel,” Rook urged, “or words of your own choosing. Say it.”

  But the boy slumped against the boulder as if all his strength were gone. He turned his face to the stone.

  Quietly he said, “No.”

  Rook stood up to walk away. “Then stay where you are and die.”

  Four

  The boy lay with his eyes closed, with the side of his face pressed against cold stone. Rook tried to turn away, but something stirred in him like breath of the forest in the limbs of the trees, a wild sigh of second thought. He looked again at the Sheriff’s son, and saw tears trembling at the corners of the boy’s clenched eyes.

  Yet the Sheriff’s son would not betray his father.

  Rook’s heart turned over. He knew what it was to love a father.

  And to be loyal to him. Lady have mercy, but the Sheriff’s son was brave.

  Leave him. Let him starve.

  But already Rook knew he couldn’t do it. His father’s life and death had taught Rook what he could and couldn’t do. There had been a time, as he had sat beside his father toward the end, that his father had gone mad with the pain and begged him to take the hog-sticking knife and kill him.

  Rook hadn’t been able to do it.

  He let out a long, shaky breath and swallowed hard. He muttered, “A pox on all that comes out of Nottingham.” Then he lifted his head, put his fingers to his teeth and whistled. His alarm signal rose wavering at first, then high and clear, as shrill as a hawk’s scream.

  He heard a gasp, and looked down to see that the Sheriff’s son had fainted. In a moment, cold rain began to fall.

  It took a long time for help to arrive. Rook sat in the rain by the boy’s side, waiting. He had to whistle twice more before he heard the faint answer of Robin Hood’s horn. One of Robin’s men found them finally, and slipped off his jerkin to lay it over the unconscious, rain-drenched boy. Rook wore no jerkin nor even leggings, just a wrapping around his waist and breech. He scorned to shiver. A stag or fox or badger does not feel the cold. Neither should a wild boy, creature of the forest.

  Silently Rook took his place on the opposite side of the man trap from the outlaw, but even though they leaned on its stubborn springs with all their combined strength, it would not open. They bore down on it, straining till they shook.

  “Wait,” said a quiet voice, and Rook looked up to see Rowan limping toward him along the ravine, with Tykell running puppyish circles around her. The wolf-dog bounded up to the Sheriff’s son, sniffed his unconscious head, then charged off toward the rowan hollow. Rowan stood loo
king at the boy in the man trap, her thin face taut. She had to be remembering how it had felt, the steel jaws springing shut, both her legs snapping like saplings.

  Rowan said, “He’s likely to bleed to death if you open that. We need to have bandaging at the ready.” Placing her bow and arrows to one side, she drew her dagger and began to rip at the hem of her kirtle. “Lady have mercy, he’s pale.” Stilling her knife a moment, she knelt beside the Sheriff’s son, feeling his hand, his forehead. “And cold.”

  Rook scowled, watching: Rowan cared too much. How could she care so much for a boy she didn’t even know? The look on her face made Rook blurt at her roughly, “He won’t die!”

  She gave him a quizzical glance, and he remembered that he had wanted the Sheriff’s son to die. But Rowan said only, “We need to get him to shelter. Toads take it, where is everyone?”

  In the distance, Tykell barked. A moment later, a single pebble rattled down the slope, and there stood Robin Hood, rain flattening his blond curls darkly against his head. “By my troth,” Robin murmured, “caught in one of his own father’s traps.”

  But there was no gloating in Robin’s tone.

  Rook heard brush crash at the top of the ravine and turned to look up there, knowing it had to be that clumsy newcomer, Beau, or perhaps Lionel—although Lionel’s big feet were getting better at finding their way quietly around the forest. Hah, it was both of them, led by Tykell. Beau plunged recklessly down the side of the ravine, her parti-colored black-and-golden hair flying. Lionel followed more slowly, stooping from his great height to pass under branches. Even Little John was not so tall and strong as Lionel.

  As soon as they saw the boy in the man trap, both of them stopped short. Lionel gasped, his round face as white as a moon. Beau opened her mouth, but for once no words came.

  “Lionel, lad, come help here.” Robin knelt by the man trap.

  The Sheriff’s son moaned, stirred, and opened his eyes to look Robin straight in the face. “My father will kill you,” he panted.