Outlaw Princess of Sherwood Page 5

  Once again Beauregard reached for his hat as if to sweep it in a gallant gesture. “But you are the very princess of the wildwood,” he said.

  This boy beauty had an answer for everything. Etty studied him, blinking, then glanced up toward Robin and Rowan, seeing the same doubt in both their faces that she felt in her own. There was something unrevealed about this Beauregard.

  Far off in the forest a wagtail whistled. Robin turned his head, and Etty stood up, looking and listening. There came the sound of brush rustling, twigs breaking, distant at first but drawing nearer. With a commotion worthy of a rampaging lion, a tall, top-heavy form appeared, looking like a hunchback because of the load he carried—Etty could see Lionel, she realized, better than firelight allowed. A whisper of light was dawning in the sky. It was daybreak.

  Far more quietly, a tall, green-clad outlaw strode into the clearing that encircled Robin’s spreading oak. Little John, all towering seven feet of him. He gave Robin a nod to signify that all was well.

  Stumbling up to Etty, Lionel eased his burden to the ground. There lay King Solon, glaring pale-eyed over the gag in his mouth, with his beard in a spiky mess and goose bumps on his bare, hairy legs. Etty stared. It was like encountering a strange animal she had never even heard of before. For just a moment she felt sorry for the poor creature, so scared and cold—but then her pity flared into anger. It was her father, and had he felt sorry for her when he had starved her? Had he felt sorry for her when he had sent her off to be married to an ugly old toad of a lord?

  Did he love her? At all?

  A loud groan sounded. Etty stiffened and looked to see who was hurt. Oh. No matter, it was just Lionel. “My back is broken,” he lamented, flopping full length on the ground. “That so-called king looks like a grasshopper, but he weighs like an ox.”

  No one paid any attention, for Lionel lived to complain. They all stood in a circle around the captive, looking down at him. His arms were hairy, too, with goose bumps. Etty no longer noticed his glare, for she had focused instead on his smallclothes. They looked far from white, and needed mending. Imagine, a king with holey smalls.

  “Well,” said Robin Hood after a while, “here’s your prisoner, Etty, lass. Now what?”

  Eight

  With all eyes upon her, Etty blinked at Robin Hood, feeling as if her brain had turned into mashed turnips. In the great oak spreading overhead, thrushes and whitethroats and wrens sang of sunrise and spring, nests and mating and bugs and fledglings. And the chaffinches wondered: What? What? What ho, what? they sang. What, indeed? Etty thought. Robin expected her to take charge?

  True, she had very much taken charge till now . . . but she had not thought much beyond the capture. Her father lay trussed like a cooked goose at her feet, glaring up at her, and—

  And staring back at him, Etty felt her muddled thoughts turn sharp and cold like splintered ice. Turning to Robin, she inquired sweetly, “Have we a cage? I would like to put him in a cage in his smalls and give him bread and water to eat. Let folk stare at him. Leave him there to spend his nights in the cold.”

  Out of the tail of her eye she saw her father’s glare widen into a startled stare. She ignored him.

  Others were staring at her also. Beauregard, Rook, Lionel, Rowan, Robin. Etty realized they had never seen her truly angry—no, more: enraged. Yet she would not shout. She was too much her mother’s daughter to rage aloud.

  “No cage?” she went on just as cooly to Robin. “Very well, we shall chain him to a tree instead. Shackles on his hands and shackles on his bare ankles. But let us shave his beard first—”

  “Etty, stop it,” said a gentle voice, Rowan’s.

  “Why? I am quite serious. We must shave his beard to let folk see what a sorry chin he has under it. Then—”

  Rowan moved to stand before her, laying quiet hands on either side of her head.

  “I don’t want healing! Let me be.” Etty lifted her hands to push Rowan away. But in the next breath she felt—better, blast it all. Tension like a bowstring across her shoulders started to relax. She had not even noticed something buzzing like a thousand locusts in her mind until the noise eased into silence. Under Rowan’s touch, intimations of peace bloomed in her heart. For a moment, Etty really felt the new-day sunshine warming her shoulders.

  Rowan lifted her hands and faced her levelly, gesturing at her father. “You wish to be like him?” she asked.

  “No!” Etty swallowed and spoke more calmly. “No. I don’t. Toads take you, Rowan.”

  The outlaw girl smiled as warm as the sunrise. “I’ll get our guest a blanket,” she said. “He’s cold.” She limped toward Robin’s oak.

  “Have your men unbind King Solon,” Etty told Robin in her normal tone, although wearily, “and let him warm himself by the fire, and give him something to eat.”

  “My curse on all of you!” King Solon raged as the outlaws removed the gag from his mouth. “Get your hands off me, dirty churls!” as they seated him on a heap of soft doeskins at the guest’s place of honor upon the mossy roots of the great oak, with the campfire near his feet. “A pox take you!” as they unbound his wrists and served him venison with mushroom gravy for breakfast.

  Standing nearby, Etty turned her back to all this, feeling tired. Very tired. No wonder. She hadn’t slept.

  “Are you all right, lass?” Robin asked, walking up to her.

  She nodded, wondering hazily what he meant. Why should she not be all right?

  “Well, then, we need to think what to do next. May my yeomen rest, or must I keep them at the ready? How long will it take your father’s retainers to come looking for him?”

  “I don’t know,” Etty admitted.

  An unexpected voice spoke. “It will take them the better part of the day, if not longer.” Beauregard, seated on the ground with his booted feet thrust out, gestured with a hunk of bread in his slender white hand. “The men of our good King Solon, they are grumbling,” he said. “They have not been paid, and the food is poor. The captain is old, the sergeant challenges him at every turn, and the men do no more than they have to.”

  Robin wheeled to peer at him. “How do you know all this, lad?”

  “I heard and saw. Yesterday.”

  Etty found herself wide-awake within a moment. “What has become of your Frankish accent?” she demanded.

  A grin as bright and sudden as lightning flashed on his fine-boned face. His black eyes glinted with fun. “Mes yeux, mademoiselle,” he said. “Merci beaucoup for to remind me.”

  “Please forget that she reminded you.” Robin eyed the page boy thoughtfully. “Master Beauregard—if that is indeed your name—why did the high king send you here?”

  “Ah, it is just a small matter of taxes.” He waved his breakfast languidly. “King Solon has not paid them.”

  “For that, you followed Solon here? To Sherwood Forest?”

  “Oui, most assuredly.” Beauregard grinned again. “The better part of my task is to spy. King Solon is in much difficulty.”

  Etty peered at Beauregard, feeling certain now that the stranger boy liked to rattle the bushes. He meant his foppish clothes and his so-called Frankish accent to annoy any yeomen who would judge him shallowly. Or perhaps he was actually mocking the dandies of the high king’s Frankish court. He was a gadfly, with a kind of nerve new to Ettarde. Intent on him, she moved a few steps closer, so that she looked down at the top of his golden head.

  “You have the high king’s ear,” Robin was saying to Beauregard, “yet you would throw in your lot with outlaws? But you could have risen—”

  “Beauregard,” Etty blurted, interrupting in her surprise, “your hair is as fair as flax, but the roots are raven black.”

  The boy dropped his bread as his hands jerked up, trying to cover his head in the absence of his hat. His dark eyes widened, all their glitter gone, leaving only stark fear.

  And Robin sucked in his breath with a hiss, stepping back as if he had seen an adder. “Guards!” he called shar
ply. Will Scathelock was already standing by. “Much, Rafe, John!”

  “Mon foi,” faltered Beauregard, regaining some of his poise, “a simple potion turns the hair yellow to charm the ladies, what is the harm of that?”

  Etty gawked. He had changed the color of his hair? She had never heard of such a thing. But still, as he had said, what harm—

  “He’s a black-haired blackguard,” said Will Scathelock, as harsh as flint. “He’s one of the foul folk. A Wanderer.”

  Etty stiffened as knowledge broke upon her, truth as sharp as glass shattering. That narrow face like a carving from—from somewhere ancient, Greece, Egypt—that head like a sleek cat’s poised atop a fine neck, those winglike cheekbones, that elegant unbroken line of brow and nose . . .

  “You are one of the accursed race,” Etty whispered, edging back, feeling the knowledge ripple up her back, clenching every muscle.

  “Accursed! For what cause?” Beauregard rose, his black eyes flashing, all his foppery gone. “My race holds no land, makes no wars, sheds no blood. No man of my race holds any other man slave or serf or servant. You call us thieves? It is true we steal sometimes, to survive, but are you not also thieves, O outlaws?” He shot a level look that took in Will Scathelock, Robin, all of them.

  “Silence.” Etty had never seen Robin so stern. “You have come here in disguise, to deceive me—”

  “Have you not also gone about in disguise?”

  Outlaws shouted with rage. Will drew his short sword. “How dare you! As if he were like you?”

  Others cried out. “Bah! You sneaking villain!”

  “You of the wicked race—”

  “Bloody-handed—”

  “Cradle robber—”

  But Beauregard’s flutelike voice pierced through them all. “You think we steal babies? Bah, what for? Who needs more?” He tossed his head, arrow-straight and defiant. “We steal gold, given a chance—but the greatest thieves of all, are they not the kings and so-called lords of your race? Stealing livelihood and soul from common folk, wresting maidens from their fathers?”

  “Enough,” Robin commanded. He turned to Will and the others. “Will, sheathe your sword. Take him within.” Inside the oak, he meant. Its hollow could house a dozen outlaws in a huddle. Robin ordered, “Do not mistreat him, but guard him well, and tell him nothing.”

  Etty watched Beauregard’s proud, straight back, shoulders square under the crimson tunic, as they took him away. “I liked him,” she whispered, shuddering.

  Robin let out a long breath. “Use your head, lass,” he told her gently enough, “not just your heart.”

  Nine

  Etty knew she had to do it.

  With a wavering feeling in her gut, but keeping her face calm, she walked up to the fire and seated herself facing her father. His breakfast, she noticed, lay beside him upon its trencher, untouched. Glaring wildly behind him, as if something might be sneaking up on him, he did not see her sit down almost near enough to touch.

  Firming her voice, Etty spoke. “Father.”

  With a jerk he faced her, his sharp red eyebrows bunched like wings. He opened his mouth.

  “Father,” Etty said before he could start scolding, “you will send orders for Mother to be clothed, fed and released. At once.”

  She saw his face go meat red, dark beneath the carrot color of his beard. But he kept control of his rage, letting it give force to his words as he told her too softly, “Foolish girl, your impudence will be punished. Your mother will die.”

  Inside herself, Etty felt little Princess Ettarde quivering like frog eggs. Papa really did possess the power, legally, to have Mama killed. Yet outwardly, Etty did not tremble, for she was an outlaw now. She said, “Remember what Seneca said, Father: All cruelty springs from weakness.”

  It was her father who had taught her to read and memorize her Latin and Greek. He had provided a whipping girl to be beaten with a dog lash when Ettarde did not learn her lessons, and it had been harder for Ettarde to watch the peasant girl cry than it would have been to take her own punishment. Papa was like that—perverse, somehow cruel even in kindness. And proud, all too ready to show off his wealth or his horses or his learned daughter before his honored guests. A daughter who could read and write, forsooth! But above all, Father was proud of his own learning.

  The only way to defeat Father, Etty sensed, to really defeat him in his heart, would be to conquer him with the weapons he had taught her. With words. The Romans, the Greeks.

  But he always wins the debates! Always!

  Not this time, Etty told herself. Not with the help of the coolness her mother had taught her and the defiance she had learned from the outlaws.

  Seated across the fire from King Solon the Red, and taking care to appear at ease, Etty helped herself to some fresh wheat bread.

  Her father aimed his forefinger at her like a spear. “You munch bread in my presence like a dairymaid? No daughter of mine is a coarse, common—”

  “Argumentum ad hominem,” Etty told him, reaching for some of Robin’s dark, wild honey to go with the bread.

  “You overspeak yourself, ungrateful wench, just because I gave you an education. It is as Socrates said: Once woman is made equal to man, she fancies herself his superior.”

  “In more honest translation, Father, Socrates declared that educated woman is superior to man.” Etty licked honey from her fingers.

  “Have you forgotten how Semonides compares woman to a hairy sow, a braying donkey, a vixen?”

  “And whom would you rather contemplate, Father, Semonides or Socrates? Or Plato? Have you forgotten how Plato and Xenophon argue that the soul is without gender, and woman is therefore the moral equal of man?”

  “But not the legal equal!”

  “Yes, in Plato’s Republic, the legal equal also, to be educated alongside the men, take physical training like men, and share in the responsibilities of state.”

  “Bah. You believe in such a fairy-tale world?” King Solon the Red drew himself up and fixed his daughter with his most stern and regal stare. “Speak truth, girl: Do you consider yourself my equal?”

  Etty had learned to her bones the code of Sherwood Forest: An outlaw is the equal of anyone. Therefore, although her knees trembled under her skirt, it was not too difficult for her to placidly reply, “Absolutely, Father. And in some ways, your superior.”

  His face flushed crimson above his orange hedgehog beard. He stiffened like a barking dog. “Strumpet!” he howled. “Shameless vandal of good taste and tradition!”

  There. He had lost his temper. She had breached his fortifications, at least.

  Etty became aware that outlaws had gathered around the fire, listening, that Robin stood grinning behind King Solon, that Rowan had settled beside her with a quiet smile, and that she, Etty, was almost enjoying herself, enraging her father.

  But she had not brought him here to enjoy herself.

  Or even to defeat him in debate, really. She had broken down his defenses somewhat, but . . . how to find the man inside?

  Had he ever loved Mother? At all?

  Did he ever love me?

  Etty sighed, set her food aside and wiped her hands on her kerchief. She faced her father levelly, inwardly begging him to hear her. She looked into his hawkish eyes—had she ever dared to really look into his eyes before? They surprised her. Hard, yes, but also old and bleak.

  Etty asked quietly, “If I am such a disgrace to you, Father, why do you want me back? Why not leave me here?”

  He replied too quickly, without thought. “Because, in the proper order of things, the father should exercise authority over his family, and the king—”

  A flare of rage took Etty by surprise. “Is that what you call it?” She could not keep her face from hardening as her voice turned ice sharp. “You call it authority, to punish and humiliate your wife, who has done nothing but serve you, whom you should cherish the most—”

  “You speak like a child.” Back in control, King Solon show
ed his teeth in a cold smile. “Have you forgotten your Thucydides? The powerful take what they can, and the weak give what they must. Woman is weak—”

  “Only in the narrowest sense of the word. In other ways, man is weaker.” Confound everything, she had lost her advantage, and he was back on his high horse. Within an eye blink, Etty changed tactics. “Tell me, Father, why are there holes in your smallclothes?”

  She could not have appalled him more if she had spit. He jerked upright and gasped for breath. “How dare you! I—”

  “You lack a few coppers to spend for the making of new ones. Why so?”

  With his red eyebrows bunched fit to fly, he glared at her without speaking. She stared back at him. From the far side of the oak, she heard the laughter and talk of outlaws. A mistle thrush ranted from a high branch, and in the sky overhead, a hawk screamed. But around the campfire, all was silence.

  Etty said at last, “Lord Basil is pressing you hard, is that it?”

  “Aye!” The answer exploded out of him. “If you had married him as I bade you, to ally our families, all would have been well. But since you willfully disobeyed me—”

  “Have you not reared me to possess my own mind? Now should I take poison if you command me to?”

  King Solon ignored this, ranting on, releasing truth at last. “Since you wed him not, all has fallen to ruin. His army is three times the size of mine. Already last autumn he took from me the better part of my lands. And now that spring is here, he will soon besiege Auberon itself.”

  “Oh,” Etty whispered, for she was beginning to surmise what he wanted of her.