Outlaw Princess of Sherwood Page 3

  Etty could see Rowan’s grave face only faintly, yet knew Rowan was remembering how her own mother, facing the lord’s men as they set fire to the thatch over her head, had used her last strength sending a spell to protect Rowan.

  Of her own mother Etty remembered no such courage—until now. Mostly she remembered her mother’s caution. Mother teaching her how to gauge her father’s mood and avoid his wrath. And compliance. Mother’s voice outside her chamber door when she was locked up, whispering, “Dear heart, it’s no use. Just do what he says.” And one covert rebellion. Mother trying to bribe the guards with jewels. Trying to slip Ettarde something besides bread and water to eat.

  That was probably what Father was feeding Mother. Bread and water. With the aroma of roasting meat rising from the soldiers’ cooking fires all around.

  “She sensed somehow that I might be there,” Etty said, “and she woke the guards to keep me from doing anything stupid. She sang a song that told me to fly away.”

  Rowan regarded her with a softened look. Lionel reached for more bread and cheese. The rocks all around the rowan hollow lustered like tarnished silver in moonlight and starlight. Somewhere back in the thorny crags an owl mourned.

  Rook said, “Then you should fly away.”

  Etty shook her head. Quietly enough she said, “No. I can’t.”

  “But she wants you to.”

  “I can’t let him treat her like—”

  But her voice broke into a gasp, for a black head with no face popped up from behind the wall of rock, far too near her. Etty nearly screamed. Only remembering that they might hear her in Fountain Dale kept her from shrieking. She cringed, groping for the dagger stuck in her belt, gawking at the dark thing looming. It looked as if it could be a black-masked doomster ready to behead someone with an ax, or Guy of Gisborn in his black horsehide armor, or—or something worse, a specter out of the night.

  Rook crouched and growled almost like the wolf-dog, Tykell. Lionel and Rowan leapt to their feet, snatching for weapons, their faces pale, shocked to their bones because they had been taken so badly by surprise. How had the intruder gotten so close without being heard?

  In a high, creaky voice it spoke. “A morsel of bread, young gentry, or a taste of cheese? Will ye take pity on a poor wayfaring stranger?”

  Dagger in hand, Etty felt her fear flare into annoyance. It was one of those accursed Wanderers, face hidden under the shadow of a black cowl. Stinking thing, it had no business being here. Its presence seemed to foul the hollow. Wanderers were filthy thieves, and how dare they beg when everyone knew they hid pouches full of gold and jewels under their black robes? Hard to tell from the voice whether this one was a man or a woman, but it scarcely mattered. Dirty, lying sneaks, they were all the same.

  “Even just the crust of the bread?” it wheedled, face still hidden in the shadow of its black hood. “The hard rind of the cheese?”

  Etty glanced at the others. Lionel’s face showed distaste such as she herself felt, and he lowered his quarterstaff. Rook had stopped growling. But Rowan kept her bow at the ready, standing arrow-straight, staring intently at the black form just beyond the rocks. “How did you know we were here?” she challenged.

  “They crawl everywhere,” Lionel grumped, “like lice, or fleas.”

  “Hush,” she told him without turning her gaze away from the intruder. “You, answer me. We showed no fire. How did you find us?” Her level gaze grew steely. Tall in her archer’s stance, she drew the peacock-feathered butt of her flint-tipped arrow back to her ear.

  Any sane person would have ducked behind the rocks, but the Wanderer froze where it was. It began to squeak and gibber with fear. “Mercy, young mistress! Mercy on a poor old, ah, old ah-ahh-ahhhh-choo!”

  The force of the sneeze shot his head partway out of the hood. Etty caught a glimpse of something that gleamed in the moonlight. Surprise took her breath away.

  Curly golden hair.

  “Robin!” she squeaked.

  “Oh, for the love of toads . . .” Rowan lowered her bow.

  “Robin, you rascal, you . . .” Etty could not think of anything stinging enough to call him. She grabbed a pebble and flung it at him.

  “Oww,” he drawled in his own tenor voice, grinning, then coughing. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

  “Father,” said Rowan, “what if I had shot you?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t.” Flinging the hood back from his handsome face, Robin stood up and vaulted over the rocks, into the rowan hollow. Rowan gave him a kiss of greeting on his cheek, but Etty was in no mood to kiss him.

  “What if one of us had screamed?” Rowan was still trying to chide her father.

  “I knew you wouldn’t.”

  “I nearly did,” Etty complained. Even in moonlight she could see the glint of fun in his blue eyes. Blast the scamp, she had thought she was beyond being fooled by his pranks. If Tykell had been here, he would have wagged his tail, and Robin would have been discovered at once. Or if he had stood up, they would have known it was him, he was so tall. Or if—

  “Don’t you ever wash your face?” Robin asked gravely, peering at Etty. “It looks dark.”

  He was teasing her. And it would have taken a hard heart to resist the mischief dancing in his eyes. Etty had to smile.

  “Here, Lionel, a snack for you.” Robin pulled a large packet of something from under his mantle and tossed it to him. Pulling off its coarse cloth wrapping, Lionel released the sumptuous aroma of roast venison.

  “Thanks!” he exclaimed, although of course it was not just for him. They all sat down to share it.

  “No thanks called for.” Robin coughed again. His voice sounded as clogged as his nose. Looking weary now, sitting within the hollow, he leaned against the rock.

  “I owe thanks also,” Etty told him, “to one of your men.”

  “Ay, for shooting the guard this morning? ’Twas Will Scathelock. What were you doing at Fountain Dale, lass?”

  “Being stupid.”

  “Ay, well, what’s life without a spice of stupidity?” Robin wiped his nose on his sleeve once more; did he have to do that? His sleeve looked crusty. He coughed again.

  Rowan told him, “You sound worse than yesterday. You should be in a warm bed with a mug of black mullein tea.”

  “Half my men have colds, and the other half have chills,” Robin grumbled. He was losing his voice. “And here I am out in the cold for no better reason than—”

  “To play the fool,” Rowan put in.

  “Nay, surely not! I came to see what we are to do about Queen Elsinor.”

  Etty wondered, had Rowan sent him word about Mother? Or had Will Scathelock reported the situation in Fountain Dale to him? One way or another, Robin seemed always to know what went on in Sherwood Forest.

  And somehow during the interval of his clowning, Etty realized, her mind had made itself up about a few things.

  “I found out one thing this morning,” she told Robin. “My mother wants me to run—”

  “You should,” Rook said in his flat way.

  Etty shook her head. “No. If I run now, I’ll spend my life running from my father. You don’t know him.” A petty king. Set upon his own power. Relentless when that power was challenged. “He’ll hunt me forever unless I put a stop to him somehow.”

  Silence. In the valley, frogs chimed like distant bells. Above the budding oaks, a bat buzzed like the insects it fed upon. Far away something snarled. Etty felt many eyes on her as the truth of what she had said hovered like a dark moth in the night.

  Rowan murmured, “I see.”

  “Dear me,” Lionel said, “you don’t want to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder?”

  Etty actually smiled, for Lionel knew exactly what she was talking about. He had gone through something of this sort with his father, Lord Roderick Lionclaw, who had put a blood-price of a thousand pounds on his son’s head until Lionel had confronted him.

  “So you want to stay and fight b
ack,” Robin said with both pride and phlegm in his voice.

  “Not with weapons. Not if I can help it.” Etty wanted no bloodshed. It had been bad enough to see the man-at-arms die today, his simple face looking surprised as a gray goose-feather flower sprouted from his chest.

  Rook asked curtly, “Then how?”

  “I don’t know yet. Robin, you’d better go warm yourself by a fire. I must think of a plan.”

  Five

  Seated on a high crag overlooking Fountain Dale, hidden by holly and keeping a cautious distance, Ettarde watched the encampment below for some hint of what to do. A sign, an omen, a token, anything, Etty didn’t know what. Two nights now her mother had been left out in the cold and damp without covering, while Etty had shivered in her mantle and blanket, and frost whitened the stones and ferns in the morning. How much more could Queen Elsinor endure before she caught her death of sickness?

  All around, in holly and rowan, wood larks and robins and wrens caroled that it was spring, morning, morning, spring! Ettarde hated them for singing when her mother was suffering. Through the crowns of the oaks below, wreathed with mistletoe but not yet in leaf, Ettarde could see that wretched golden cage and the entire encampment laid out in small, like the lead figures in the toy palace she had once played with. No. Don’t think of those days. Think what to do. How to rescue Mother?

  Have Lionel enchant the guards with his singing? No. They would recognize him and seize him at once. Have Robin Hood go in disguise? No. He was even more likely to be recognized than Lionel. Summon the aelfe, the spirits of the forest, to help somehow? I might just as well try to tell the wild geese what to do. Etty sighed. She needed one of Robin Hood’s foxy ideas, and Robin’s head was too stuffed with phlegm to give her any. Briefly she reviewed Plato in her mind, and Herodotus, and Julius Caesar’s history of the Gallic Wars. Nothing in any of them seemed to apply to the situation of one’s mother in a cage.

  In the middle of the clearing the golden cage glinted in the sunlight. Deceitful thing, shining so fair. Etty could see in it a figure like a tiny white pennon—her mother, like a flag marking the center of the camp. Off to one side of Mother, the horses stood tethered to a line. Off to another side were ranged the wagons and supplies. In another direction again flowed the wellspring of water that gave Fountain Dale its name, with tents pitched nearby for the men-at-arms. And at the fourth point of the compass, in splendid isolation from the lesser tents, stood King Solon’s pavilion all decked with rosettes, its canvas freshly painted bright red and white, its pennons fluttering.

  And everywhere, guards.

  Numbly Ettarde studied their positions, noting how they centered upon her mother’s golden cage, three concentric circles of guards. How to rescue her mother? Fly to her through the air? Not unless wings sprouted sometime soon. Burrow to her underground? That would take too long.

  It seemed hopeless.

  Yet Etty stayed where she was, frowning down on the encampment as if it were a puzzle she could solve somehow. The sun rose higher, drying the melted frost from crags and bracken and prickly holly leaves. The wood larks flew away, the robins and wrens quieted. Hawks circled in the high sky. Down below, a few travelers walked the Nottingham Way. A peasant driving a yoke of oxen. A charcoal burner with his load of wood piled on his donkey. A dark-cloaked figure . . .

  Etty stiffened, wondering if it might be Robin Hood in his idiotic disguise again. But no, this was a smaller man, and she could see his matted beard hanging. It truly was one of those accursed Wanderers this time. One of those roaming foreigners with their black hair and black eyes and their sad, narrow faces. At the sight of him, Etty’s nose wrinkled as if she smelled something bad. She felt entitled to sneer, for everyone hated the thieving, begging Wanderers with their hoards of gold. Everyone said they lent gold to rich lords, and demanded human flesh in return. Folk said that they stole babies from cradles and raised them to be witches. Folk said they possessed the evil eye, and that if one of them walked between two men, one of those men would die.

  Etty did not believe in the evil eye. But the beggary, the thievery, the hidden riches, these were common knowledge. She could see how the soldiers down below had frozen like songbirds when the hawk flies over, silent and wary as the accursed one passed. Etty’s lip curled like her nose as she watched the dark-robed figure slip by.

  Once it was out of sight, her body relaxed. Time inched on. Etty sighed. Had the sun ever before moved so slowly in the sky?

  Along came a peddler in a cart, trundling by almost as slowly as the sun. Later came a swineherd driving his pigs, and later yet, a knight with his squire trailing him. All turned their heads to stare at the encampment, the lady in her cage. Etty felt her face burn with mortification for her mother.

  Otherwise she took small interest in the travelers, even the knight shining in his mail, even a page boy on an aristocratic white pony. Etty did give a moment’s regard to the pony, slim and sleek and pretty, for even at a distance she could see the bright yellow plumes nodding between its ears, matching the plumes in the page boy’s hat above his long, curling yellow hair. Quite the dandy he was, what with the hat and the hair and a tight crimson tunic and perfectly fitted yellow hose above tall leather boots. Etty blinked as she saw him enter the encampment, sweeping off his hat as he approached her father’s canvas castle of a pavilion. But then she forgot about him. Some lord’s messenger, that was all.

  The sun crawled like a yellow snail toward noon. Somewhere, monotonously, a cuckoo began to call. Annoying bird. It laid its eggs in other birds’ nests. Backdoor bird, folk called it, because of the way it came and went when no one was watching. If a man’s wife were unfaithful, folk mocked him: Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Calling him a cuckold because someone had been sneaking in his back door.

  Bracken rustled slightly, and Etty heard a panting sound. She turned, then smiled. Tykell, her escort today, stood waving his plumy tail and breathing his meaty breath in her face. He licked her ear, then turned around three times and lay down on the sun-warmed rock beside her.

  “Ready for a nap, Ty?” Etty murmured, stroking his thick fur. But her smile did not last. Down below she saw that her father had emerged from his pavilion. Father, like a lead soldier—no, an itsy-bitsy leaden king—was stalking around the encampment and, judging by the way he flailed his arms, roaring orders.

  The cuckoo kept calling. “Hush,” Etty muttered.

  “Cuckoo!” It perched almost over her head now, in the holly, so close she could see its sleek gray feathers, its beady amber eye, its yellow bill gaping as it called. “Cuckoo!”

  “My father’s not a cuckold.” Mother was a virtuous woman. All the more reason that Father should not be treating her this way. “Go away, backdoor bird—”

  Etty gasped, and her eyes widened. The cuckoo did not go away, but she forgot all about it, sitting bolt upright, staring at the scene below. Mother seemed to be lying down on the hard, bare floor of the cage, maybe warming herself in the sunshine, maybe even napping. Nothing else had changed. But Etty whispered, “Yes! That’s it!”

  Stiff from her vigil, she struggled to her feet. “Ty,” she told the wolf-dog, “I am an idiot. Come on, let’s go find the others.”

  “I am an idiot!” she cried to the others when Ty had led her to them. They took no notice, preoccupied by the task at hand. In a secluded glade of Sherwood Forest, they were butchering a deer. The air smelled of new green leaves and violets in bud and innards and blood. Ettarde did not mind the guts and blood, but she noticed that Lionel did; he stood with his back to the deer—even though he had shot it, apparently. The skin lay at his feet. “Your kill?” Ettarde demanded.

  Lionel nodded. “Better one full-grown stag than a dozen yearlings,” he grumbled.

  There it hung by its hocks from the limb of an oak, its elegant head dragging on the ground, looking silvery naked with its skin off. Robin and a couple of his men were doing the butchering. They would receive a share of the meat, Etty knew, for this was not
a fallow deer or a roebuck; it was a massive red-deer stag, with so much meat it would spoil before Rowan’s small band could eat it all.

  “Well done. Even your great belly could not eat so much venison,” Etty teased, trying to cheer Lionel. He hated to kill. But someone had to, if the band was to eat. Rook brought in fish he caught with his bare hands, but it was not enough. Etty could shoot a bow, but she was no hunter. And Rowan, a fine hunter, could not yet follow the deer. She was still limping. Also, Rowan had all the gathering of herbs to see to. So it was left to poor overgrown-baby Lionel to kill game for meat. Etty smiled to herself, knowing that she and the others would hear Lionel lament for days now.

  Rowan saw the smile and returned it, perhaps thinking the same thing. Sitting with a mass of mistletoe in her lap, she plucked its cure-all leaves, which had to be gathered before the berries appeared. Next Rowan would be looking for nettles to heal sores, then mallow and mullein for poultices and colds, agrimony and camomile for fever and bellyache. And holly and hyssop and coltsfoot and comfrey.

  “I am an idiot,” Etty told her.

  “How so?” Rowan inquired gravely. “I have no cure for idiocy.”

  Forgetting to be either a princess or an outlaw, Etty bounced in place like a puppy. “I was an idiot, but I have it now!”

  They all turned to her—all except Tykell, who began devouring scraps. Rowan put aside her mistletoe. Rook, who had started scraping Lionel’s deerskin for him, stilled his knife. Robin stood with his jerkin sleeves rolled up and his bare arms bloody, organ meats in his hands. “Have what, lass?” His voice sounded hoarse from his cold.

  Lionel demanded, “You know how to rescue your mother?”

  “Yes. No. I mean, not exactly. Sort of through the back door.”

  They stared at her blankly.

  “Back door,” Etty repeated as if they were quite dense not to understand. “All I was thinking is Mother, Mother, rescue Mother. But I can’t. Father has her at the center of Fountain Dale, with all the guards in the world stationed around her. But his pavilion is off at the edge of the clearing. There are a few guards, but they won’t be expecting us. If someone can make a little diversion at the far end of the dale . . .” Etty looked at Robin Hood, then at Rowan. “An odd noise or something, just enough to distract the guards but not enough to make them raise the alarm, then Lionel and I can get to him before—”