Rowan Hood Returns Page 4

  “You don’t have a beard,” Etty said. “Dried pears, I think.”

  “Apples, pears, I care not, where did it come from?”

  “While my uncle’s men were bullying Rowan, Rook robbed their horses’ saddlebags, of course.” Etty stated this as if she had expected nothing less. “Thank you, Rook.”

  He actually replied. “You’re welcome.”

  Cheese, bread and fruit were a treat for any outlaw; the usual fare in Sherwood Forest was meat, meat and more meat. Nibbling at the good food, Rowan felt sick with hunger, yet had to force herself to chew and swallow. After eating less than half her portion, Rowan sighed, pushed the rest away and leaned back.

  “Don’t you want that?” Lionel asked.

  There was a ripple of laughter, and even Rowan almost smiled, feeling a bit better now that she’d eaten. Trust Lionel to beg for food. “Toads have laid their eggs in it,” she told him.

  “Ew!” But then, rather doubtfully Lionel inquired, “May I have it anyway?”

  Etty picked up a bit of wood and tossed it at Lionel’s head.

  “Ow!” he complained, although the chip had hit him with all the force of a feather.

  “For the love of mercy, Lionel, hush.” In the near-darkness within the hollow oak, Rowan could feel Etty studying her. “Rowan,” the outlaw princess demanded—softly, but with authority to command—“what’s wrong?”

  Silence. Listening for the forest to help her answer, Rowan heard the distant nightfall song of a thrush, but she could not hear the breathing of the oak within which she sat, or feel its embrace.

  She felt only the patience of her friends waiting for an answer. Which was all she could give them.

  Although feeling not quite as numb and heavy as the night before, Rowan still had to struggle to speak. Slowly she told them, “I think—I think I’m not Rowan anymore.”

  Silence cried out for a moment before Rook asked in his matter-of-fact way, “If not Rowan, then who are you?”

  “I think—I’m just Rosemary.”

  Again silence screamed. Again it was Rook who spoke. “Why?”

  “I don’t—I can’t hear the stones breathing anymore. This oak”—Rowan touched the ridgy inner wood against which she leaned—“it’s just an oak, it doesn’t welcome me. I felt no spirit in any tree I encountered today, or in running water, or in ferns, flowers, air, sky, anything.”

  Silence, in which Rowan felt their stares. In the hush of dusk, a nightingale added its song to that of the thrush.

  “At the rowan grove, I can’t converse with the spring.” Rowan leaned toward the others, laboring to explain, her words faltering much as her feet had been stumbling all day. ”The rowans said good-bye to me, and since then, they haven’t spoken to me at all.”

  Rook asked, “When was this?”

  “Yesterday.”

  Etty pressed her lips together into a line like a knife blade. “I knew it,” she said, bleak and stark. “I brought it on you somehow. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Mischance is no one’s fault.” Beau, usually the loquacious one, had been silent for so long that everyone turned toward the sound of her voice as she quoted, “‘Welcome the stormwind of the soul, for it sweeps all clean and prepares it for a new day’s sunrise.’ Marcus Aurelius.”

  Etty’s eyes widened. “I don’t remember that in Marcus Aurelius.”

  “So, maybe it was Cicero. Peu importe; no matter. We need a fire.”

  “We need music.” Lionel reached for the bag in which he kept his harp.

  Both Lionel and Beau were trying to offer the same thing: comfort.

  Rook, however, bespoke the hard thing that Ro had not yet mentioned. “You can’t tell where Robin is.”

  Ro’s eyes filled with tears, but she sobbed only once before she checked herself.

  She did not need to answer. That small sound had answered for her.

  Without a word, Beau struck her steel dagger blade with a shard of flint she carried for that purpose. She struck again, with a chuffing sound, and again, making sparks fly in a bright shower to sprinkle a handful of pulpy tinder. She did not stop until tiny flames sprouted from the dry, powdery wood.

  Rowan could see the others now, or at least their faces hovering in the firelight like four tawny oval moons.

  Eyes on the flames, Etty murmured, “Well thought, Beau. It’s safe enough, a campfire in here, if we don’t let it get too big.”

  “Like me, perhaps?” Lionel inquired.

  No one answered the joke.

  Rook said, “Rowan.”

  Not just Rowan looked to him; they all did. When Rook spoke at all, he spoke like an arrow to the mark, always.

  Rook said, “What you have lost is nothing any of us need to survive. Beau cannot see spirits. I cannot converse with trees. Ettarde cannot find hidden water. Lionel cannot tell where his father is.”

  Rowan thought about that for a moment, then mumbled, “I see.”

  “See what?” Etty asked. “I don’t.”

  “That I’m being a crybaby. It is no loss for me to be like the rest of you.”

  “But it is loss! You are part aelfin—”

  “Bah.” Rook’s gruff voice took over again. “Speak no more of spirits. What use are spirits when she can’t even walk?”

  Somehow the weakness in her legs seemed to Rowan of less importance than the hollow in her heart. Yet Rook was right. An outlaw could live without seeing the faces of the aelfe in the mists that rose between the oak trees, but no outlaw could live without walking.

  “My legs are much worse today,” Rowan admitted. Somehow she was able to speak more easily now. “I don’t know why.”

  “You’re all but crippled,” Rook said.

  No one else spoke, but Rowan knew well enough what they were thinking: that a tall man striding a straight line through the forest would take two weeks or more to reach Celandine’s Wood from here. Longer, if he needed to hunt and forage food to eat. A full cycle of the moon. That was how long it had taken Rowan to make the journey from Celandine’s Wood to Sherwood Forest. Two years ago, when she still had strong legs.

  Softly Lionel strummed his harp, its honey-golden notes melting into the bitter night, sweetening it. Etty laid sticks on the fire. Blossoming no bigger than a damask rose, it sent a dusting of pale yellow light onto the faces all around it. Sober faces.

  Lionel said, “You can still go to Celandine’s Wood. I’ll carry you.”

  “No. That’s ridiculous.”

  “It is not. I—”

  “La, do not like fools argue,” Beau broke in, Frankish accent rampant. “The little Dove, she will carry Rowan.”

  “Toads,” Rowan murmured. She hated riding horses. The only times she had tried, she had fallen off and fallen off. Still—

  Etty said, “But Dove is too white. Riding her is like riding a target.”

  “So? I dye her.” Beau grinned. “With the lichens, aubergine, yes?”

  A purple pony? Lionel threw back his big head and laughed. Etty laughed. Even Rowan had to smile.

  Beau elaborated, “Or yellow, with the wild onions. I put her in the big, big pot and boil her—”

  Rook said, “Put soot on the horse.”

  “Mon foi, that is too simple.”

  It was simple. Rowan sat up straighter, thinking. Yes, she could ride the pony if she had to. And Beau would go wherever Dove went, and Lionel had already made it plain that he planned to accompany Rowan.

  Rowan looked to another old friend. “Etty, what will you do?” she asked.

  “Walk alongside, of course.”

  “With your uncle’s men after you?”

  “They won’t look for me to the north. Why would I run back toward my uncle’s domain?”

  Rook said, “They’re looking for her at the grove.”

  Rowan’s eyes widened.

  “At first light, up they came through Fountain Dale.”

  “They found the grove?”

  Rook nodded.

/>   Odd, Rowan thought, that her heart should ache, when she did not mean to go back to the rowan grove anyway.

  Rook said, “They got close before Lionel saw them coming.” No wonder, Ro thought, as the clodpole had been asleep when she had left. But she hadn’t the heart to rebuke him, and apparently no one else did either. Rook was saying, “We got out with what we could snatch up and carry, nothing more.”

  Dully Rowan considered what had been left behind—blankets, cooking gear, supplies. But what matter, when even the grove and the spring did not seem to matter anymore? After a minute she said slowly, “So none of us would be safe there anyway. It was meant to be. We’ll go north to—”

  Etty interrupted, her usually placid voice fierce. “To do what, Rowan?”

  Lionel’s hand slipped and struck a discordant note. Quickly he stilled his harp.

  Silence. For a moment Rowan could not answer. But then she said, “Guy Longhead. Jasper of the Sinister Hand. Hurst Orricson and his brother Holt.” The names flamed in her mind and in her voice.

  “What do you plan to do to them, Rowan? What can you do to them?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m going.”

  “I’ll go with you anywhere, Ro. But I will not help you murder—”

  “Vengeance is not murder!” Rowan curled her fists. “Mine is the blood right under—”

  “Under the code of knights, so that they may never lack an enemy with whom to fight for the sake of so-called honor—”

  “No! I am saying, mine is the right under the common law.”

  “The same law that has made us outlaws?”

  Beau whispered, “I will not do killing in cold blood.” In the firelight her dark eyes looked huge, like shadowed moons.

  Lionel appealed, “Surely it will not come to that.”

  “I have known what it is to crave vengeance,” said Rook, his tone toneless, neutral. “So have you, Princess Ettarde.”

  “I am going back to my mother’s woods,” Rowan told her friends through clenched teeth. “I am going home. With you if I may. Without you if I must. Even if my legs fail me. Even if I have to crawl.”

  Seven

  Surely we will encounter Robin somewhere along the way,” Lionel told Rowan softly as he lifted her onto the pony.

  In Dove’s saddle, Ro turned to find her face on a level with Lionel’s. It felt odd not to look up at him. It felt odd to be seated on a pony, any pony, let alone one rubbed gray all over with charcoal from last night’s campfire. It felt odd to see Robin Hood’s Dell without Robin Hood in it. It felt odd to look at hazel bushes and oak saplings and fair linden trees that did not look back. It felt odd to be leaving.

  Everything felt odd.

  But Rowan nodded at Lionel. It was true; surely on their journey they would at least hear word of Robin Hood from some peasant or forest recluse or traveler met along the way.

  “Fare well and safely,” Lionel told her. Picking up his longbow in one hand and his six-foot staff in the other, he strode off northward with his quiver of arrows on his back. Ranging ahead of the rest of them, he would scout for danger while trying to shoot something, perhaps a deer, for supper.

  Beau slipped out of the hollow oak to stand by Rowan’s side, silent for once, listening, waiting.

  From the northeast lip of the hollow came the harsh call of a rook. A bit farther to the east sounded the whistle of a mistle thrush. Rook, the rook, was in position and ready. So was Etty, the mistle thrush.

  Rowan trilled the warbling song of a wren in reply. Beau grinned up at her, silently telling her, “Mon foi! You do that well.” Then Beau walked away. Rowan wondered how she was supposed to make Dove walk; lift the reins, or kick, or what? But no need. Dove followed Beau the way Tykell followed Rowan. There he was now, the wolf-dog, trotting in zigzags near her side.

  Rook, who moved like a shadow in the forest, would be on the lookout for Marcus’s men or any other danger. Etty, dressed in deerskin boots and a brown kirtle borrowed from Rowan, would do the same; in the woods she walked almost as silently as Rook. Beau would stay with Rowan and help her with the pony. And of course Tykell stayed with Rowan also, to protect her.

  Rowan found it necessary to remind herself that she was an outlaw on a quest to avenge her mother’s death. She didn’t feel like much of an avenger. She felt worthless.

  By the third day Rowan could tell herself that at least she had learned to balance on the pony and take charge of the reins. Necessarily so. On Dove’s back, with her head at the height of Lionel’s, Rowan encountered myriad sharp twigs that seemed determined to poke out her eyes, obstacles she needed to duck and steer clear of. Stout branches, also, seemed beset upon sweeping her off her mount. And grapevines, pesky things. If Rowan did not see them in time to push them aside, they caught like ropes around her waist. Once Rowan found herself dangling, head down above Dove’s tail, before her grip on the reins halted the pony.

  Never before had Rowan found herself so at war with the forest. She hated feeling that Sherwood had turned against her. She felt wretched.

  Having never quite enough to eat did not help. Lionel shot meat, and Tykell, impatient with the slowness of Ro’s pace, left her side to range about, sometimes bringing back a rabbit or two. Etty gathered greens, fennel and such. But there was little else to forage so early in the year.

  Chill gray weather did not help either. It did not rain, but fog and damp shrouded the stark trees, and the sky stayed as gray as poor little Dove, covered with ashes.

  And riding did not help—at first. But after a day or two of stiffness and sore muscles, Rowan learned to let her body sway along with the rhythm of the well-bred pony’s pace, and then she found herself soothed, rocked as if in a mother’s arms. Looking all day at Dove’s ears, she found that they talked to her, fox-pricked alert, or angled with worry, or relaxed, or laid back in disapproval. But Dove seldom disapproved, almost always responding immediately to Rowan’s gentlest tug on the reins. Ro learned gratitude to the patient pony who helped her struggle around and between the thorn thickets, the rustling bracken, the hanging grapevines. It was not Dove’s fault that the oaks and beeches spread their branches too low, that sometimes Rowan had to lie flat, wrap her arms around Dove’s neck and hide her face in Dove’s soot-blackened mane to ride beneath the trees.

  It was not Dove’s fault, either, that human dangers threatened. Beau, like Rook and Etty and Lionel, carried a staff with which to test and probe the path, although there was less danger of man traps this early in the spring, when it was difficult for the foresters to conceal them. But the fewer the man traps, it seemed, the more the patrols. Half a dozen times a day the warning signal, a jay’s cry, would come from Rook or Etty or both, and Beau would grab Dove’s bridle and dart into the nearest thick shelter—evergreen, usually, hemlock or pine or holly or a scrim of ivy—and Rowan would hang on as Dove trotted after Beau, and the holly leaves or fir needles would claw her face. She would sit without moving in the saddle, and Beau would stand by Dove’s head, stroking the pony’s soft muzzle to keep her quiet, and they would wait to hear Rook or Etty give the cheery wagtail twitter that meant “all clear.”

  Usually they saw nothing, and only afterward would Etty tell them whether it had been foresters, or Nottingham’s men, or Marcus’s men still on the hunt for her. But once, they saw for themselves: bounty hunters, four rough-looking fellows on shaggy ponies, one with an outlaw’s severed head hanging by the hair from the saddle. Rowan’s heart turned over, for she knew that dead, hollow-eyed head. It had belonged to one of Robin’s men.

  After the bounty hunters had passed, Beau looked up at Rowan, her long Grecian-cameo face even whiter than usual. She whispered, “I can’t remember his name.”

  Rowan shook her head. Robin Hood’s band had grown to number close to a hundred men; she did not know them all by name either. But that face—now, she would never forget it.

  Robin ... Father ... surely no such thing had happened to him?

  It was
not a thought that could be spoken.

  After a moment of silence, Beau whispered, “Dove is an angel pony.” No fake Frankish accent right now. “She could stamp, snort, neigh to the others ...”

  Rowan nodded. A single sound from Dove would have betrayed them, but the pony had stood as silent as the fog.

  And the same cloudy gray color. Each day Beau rubbed more charcoal and ashes onto the pony.

  Beau told Rowan, “Your face is all smeared with soot. And bleeding.”

  “Really?” Rowan lifted her hands to feel for the blood, but stopped herself; her hands, also, were black with soot from clutching at Dove. Trying to clean them, she rubbed them against her own hair, pushing it back from her forehead.

  “Now your hair is black.”

  “So much the better.” Rowan gave matters a moment’s thought, then said, “Beau, could you get me Etty’s cloak?”

  “Mais certainement.” The Frankish foolery was back. “Instantly.”

  Strapped behind Dove’s saddle like a blanket, the cloak was ample and deep-hooded, worthy of a princess. Thick, warm, water-shedding gray wool. Meant for foul weather. Etty used it only to sleep under. But when Beau had unfastened it from the saddlebags, Ro put it on. She slipped her bow and her quiver of arrows off her shoulders, laid them in her lap instead and covered herself head to toe with the cloak, pulling the hood forward until it almost covered her face, and she saw the forest through a tunnel of shadow.

  “So the twigs don’t blind me,” she explained.

  “Mon foi, you look like the death specter on a ghost horse, fit to frighten children.”

  For once Rowan found herself not amused by Beau’s babble. “Don’t talk like that,” she flared.

  “Sacre bleu, I just joking.”

  “Well, don’t. Don’t joke about me and death.”

  Eight

  In days to follow, Rowan continued to wear the cloak, which did indeed protect her face and eyes against the forest fingers relentlessly jabbing at her.

  The travelers proceeded in the same careful way they had begun. Beau walked beside the pony. Rook scouted ahead to the northwest; Etty scouted ahead to the northeast. Lionel ranged even farther ahead, hunting.