Outlaw Princess of Sherwood Page 7

  “Because I’ve been using my brain, as someone once said I should.” She gave him her most serene glance, reveling in the look on his face, as she went on. “Why would a page boy, a favorite of the high king, chuck it all to be an outlaw? I’ll tell you why.” Her voice softened. “Because soon her body will start to betray her. Already, maybe, she has to bind her chest. When her hips widen, or her voice fails to change, someone will guess.”

  She kept her eyes on Beauregard, but those dark eyes showed her nothing.

  “And why would a page boy with a message follow a wayward king clear to Sherwood Forest?” she asked Robin.

  It was a rhetorical question, and he did not answer it, but Lionel did. “Because he, I mean she, had heard about a certain runaway princess . . .”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Etty said. “Why stay away from the common latrines and the tents of the common soldiers? Why insist on staying in the most private—”

  Lionel finished the thought. “In your father’s pavilion, behind the draperies. When it must have taken a lot of insisting. Yes.”

  Ettarde added, “Sleeping fully clothed, with her boots on, just in case she had to flee.”

  Nodding, Rowan asked gently, “Beau?”

  Silence, except for the forest sounds: breeze whispering in the budding branches, trickle of springwater somewhere under the loam, songbirds warbling, crooning, piping, and the cry of a falcon in the high sky. Ettarde studied Beau’s face, as fair as a cameo, while Beau scanned each outlaw in turn. Finally Beau turned her gaze to Etty.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “You mean aside from logical thinking?” Etty shrugged. “Because you wear such exquisite clothes.”

  “Mon foi, that is one reason I left my people, because I wanted not to wear black and black and more black.” Like a flower bursting into bloom from under a stone, Beau’s irrepressible grin blossomed. She turned to Robin. “Which is worse, O Prince of Thieves, that I am of the accursed race or that I am a girl?”

  Robin stared back at her, his eyes gray, cloudy—but then it was as if the sun came out from behind the clouds. He smiled. “By my poor old bones, fooled by a girl again,” he said as if being fooled were a great treat. “You’d think I would learn.” His eyes shone, as blue as clear skies. “All right, Beau. Stay here with my welcome.”

  For once Beau did not give forth a flood of words. She just nodded.

  “Judge a tree by its fruit, I have been told.” Shaking his head, Robin turned to Etty. “Euripides,” he added, round-eyed. “Good my young philosopher, what are we to do with your father?”

  The question hit her like a cudgel, fit to knock her breath away. She sat speechless, for she knew all too well what she should do: go home to Auberon with her father and her mother, marry Lord Basil, prevent a war and save her father’s kingdom. Surely this would be the noble course. Surely this was her duty as a princess, to save the common folk from suffering.

  Surely she was a coward for not wanting to do it.

  Yet what else could she do, now that she understood how peasants would cry and flee their burning huts and starve and die? What to do with her father, indeed? Kill him in cold blood?

  Etty groaned and curled up to pillow her head on her knees.

  “Lass, I forgot you’ve not slept. We can keep him another day.” Robin sounded as gentle as a mother.

  Mother.

  She had not yet asked Mother what to do. And surely Mother would know. Ettarde lifted her head, stumbled to her weary feet, nodded to everyone and trudged off to seek Queen Elsinor.

  Twelve

  Dearest, I wish you had never known of our problems at Auberon,” said Ettarde’s mother. “It is a hard choice your father has given you. You have been happy here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so. Such freedom. And how beautiful everything is!” Walking through Sherwood Forest with Etty, Mother gazed all around with shining eyes.

  Etty blinked, looking anew at the satiny silver boles of beeches, the great oaks with their leaves just budding and the moss growing like green velvet on their northern sides. And mushrooms like great pearls pushing up through the loam, and the first violets just opening, while all around, the honey-golden notes of wrens and wood thrushes dripped down.

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s lovely here. Mother, what am I to do?”

  “I will not tell you what to do, darling.”

  “But—”

  “I must not. You must decide. What if I tell you wrongly? You would grow to hate me.”

  “I could never hate you.”

  “Just the same, you are not a little girl anymore. I cannot tell you what you should do.”

  Etty’s shoulders sagged as she walked on between the shadowy tree trunks. From every tree echoed the melodies of the birds. They sang so bravely, Etty knew, because it was their time to couple. Already some of them were building their nests. Why could it not be so sweet and simple for her?

  Then Etty heard another silver thread of song, even sweeter:“All you maidens, hear me sing,

  Let no man put you in a cage.

  Little songbirds, take to the wing

  and fly, fly away—”

  Etty turned to smile at her mother. “How did you know I was there,” she asked, “the morning you sang that?”

  Mother’s tender mouth curved just a little at the corners. “Dearest, I sang it a hundred times a day.”

  They walked between looming oaks where jays scolded and rock doves cooed. Their path turned downward, into a green-shadowed ravine. Thrushes and wagtails and linnets and wrens sang of spring, love, eggs, nesting. Through their tapestry of song, Etty idly noticed the notes of a cuckoo.

  “There are few enough choices for a woman,” Mother said as if no silence had intervened in their conversation. “I never considered that I had any. I cannot make this choice for you, my daughter.”

  “Cuckoo,” Etty murmured as the sleek gray voice kept calling. Outlaw bird that had no nest. “Backdoor bird.” But where was the back door for her now?

  At Etty’s request, the four who wore the strands of the silver ring gathered in the rowan grove. Ettarde hoped that the ancient green magic of that place could somehow calm her and help her. And she hoped that the others could give her an answer. No, that was presuming too much, but she hoped that by voicing her thoughts to them, somehow she would find her way.

  Sitting in a circle around the everlasting spring, they talked till twilight and got nowhere.

  “Sleep on it, Etty,” Rowan said at last, reaching out toward her.

  “I can’t sleep.” Ettarde twisted her strand of the ring on her finger. “I ought to just give this back and go,” she mumbled. “I am such a coward.”

  Lionel turned on her. “You’re no coward! I’m the coward here, and I will allow no others.”

  “Oh, certainly.”

  “What have you done that entitles you to call yourself a coward?”

  “I left Rowan in that man trap—”

  “Very sensibly so,” Rowan declared. “Moreover, that was last year. Each year we start anew. What have you done lately to claim cowardice?”

  “Just kidnapped her father,” Lionel grumbled, “and engaged him in scholarly debate, and rescued her mother from an armed camp, and stood up to Robin for Beauregard’s sake.”

  Ettarde blinked, feeling a hazy revelation dawn: Perhaps there was some courage in her after all?

  “Speaking of Beau,” Rowan was saying, “she can’t stay with Robin.”

  Lionel arched his owlish brows. “Don’t you think Robin will come to accept her?”

  “Yes, surely. I think he already has. But a girl among the merry men?” Rowan rolled her eyes in a rare show of impatience. “Have some sense. It would never have worked for me, and it won’t work for her. Shall we take her into the band if she wishes it?”

  In his usual gruff way, Rook spoke a single word. “Yes.”

  Lionel said, “I don’t kno
w. Not just because she’s one of them, you know, the accursed race,” he added hastily. “We’re all outcasts here. But that blasted fake accent of hers drives me batty. You know she does it just to annoy.”

  Rowan smiled, agreeing. “She’s worse than Robin.”

  “And not only that way. She’s such a trickster, she may make an uncomfortable sort of comrade. I’m not sure of her yet.”

  Rowan nodded. “Etty?”

  Worry and weariness had clotted Etty’s mind until she felt as if her head were stuffed with nettles. Trying to think about Beauregard, she could summon no intelligence, only impressions and vignettes: Beau crying peevishly to the guards, “Radish-head, what you think? I sniff the night breezes, non?” Beau asking, “I search for you the key, oui?” Beau patting his white pony, then helping Mother onto the saddle. Beau flaring defiantly at Robin Hood, “The greatest thieves of all, are they not the kings and so-called lords of your race? My race holds no land, makes no wars, sheds no blood—”

  Etty sat bolt upright, gasping, “That’s it!”

  “What?” Rowan and Lionel blurted together.

  “That’s it! Back door,” explained Etty as lucidly as she was able. “I am an idiot.” Greatly relieved, she lay down where she was and fell asleep within a moment.

  She awoke at first light, her mind as clear and calm as the dawn. Quietly, trying not to disturb the others, she whispered an apology, as Rowan always did, to the spring, then dipped water. Usually she would have bathed in the stream that ran out of Fountain Dale, but now her father’s soldiers camped there. Etty took her waxed leather buckets of water into the woods for privacy. Morning mist veiled her in white steam as she washed herself thoroughly with bear’s-grease soap. She washed her hair, also, and checked it for nits, then combed it and braided it in a crown around her head. She cleaned her teeth, put on a fresh doeskin kirtle, and hung the dirty one over an oak limb to air. Songbirds were piping loud when she returned to the rowan grove, and the others were stirring.

  “Rowan,” Etty called softly, “I’m going to check on the state of things at Fountain Dale, then to speak with my father.”

  “Wait a bit and we’ll come with you.”

  “I can’t wait. I’ll be all right.” Walking away barefoot on the soft loam, with mist rising in ribbons all around her, Etty tucked the year’s first violets into her hair.

  There was a friendly panting sound, and fur tickled her leg. Tykell. His plumy tail waving in the air as he trotted beside her, he gave her a wolfish grin. She smiled back at him. Good. He could help her spy out the guards.

  But treading softly to the verge of Fountain Dale, she found no guards. Although the sun was up now and had taken away the mist over the meadow, although a thousand birds were singing, Father’s men still lay sleeping. Standing boldly behind the hazel bushes to survey the camp, Etty frowned in wonder. The tents had been knocked down, even her father’s pavilion. It lay in a red-and-white mess on the ground. The men slept in the open on the grass, some at one end of the meadow and the rest at the other end. Halfway in between them, the cage had been battered into a pile of gold sticks. Clothing and cooking gear and oddments of harness lay strewn everywhere. Etty saw no bloody bodies, but even so, the place looked as she imagined the aftermath of battle.

  Tykell lifted his head, looked over his thickly furred shoulder and gave a low woof, barely more than a grunt. Etty turned just in time to see Robin Hood slip between young oaks to join her. And right behind him, almost as silently, walked Beau, hatless, a borrowed brown mantle hiding her vivid clothing and yellow hair.

  “Well met, lass,” Robin murmured to Etty.

  She stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek, then gave Beau an inquiring look. “Are you Robin’s apprentice now? Following him?”

  Beau gave her a devilish grin. “Mais oui, I am his apprentice in being an outlaw, and he is my apprentice in being a nuisance.”

  “Indeed she is,” Robin agreed, a smile teasing at the corners of his mouth. “You came to see what your father’s men might be doing, lass?”

  “Yes,” she said, matching his mock-sober tone, “to see whether they might be at the point of rescuing him anytime soon.”

  Robin’s smile widened as he scanned the chaos in Fountain Dale, and his blue eyes glinted. “It would seem not.”

  In tones of utter disgust Beau put in, “The captain and the sergeant, they each have their followers; they have their own little war.”

  Etty gave her a curious look. On Beau’s fair face she had seen a sneer similar to the one she had sometimes directed at the Wanderers. How odd, yet how very just, if the Wanderers scorned Ettarde’s folk in like manner. “Do you despise us, Beau?”

  “War I despise. So stupid.”

  Etty had been raised to consider war the proper and noble pursuit of well-born men. But look at Lionel, whose lordly father had tried to force him to be a warrior when all Lionel wanted was to play his harp. Imagine if the music had been beaten out of Lionel’s hands by war’s steely blows. And imagine what would happen to the folk of Auberon if Lord Basil made war upon the town.

  Yes, war was fit to despise. Etty nodded.

  “But despise you, no. I like not to despise people.”

  Beau had an accent of her own, Etty noticed, when she was not being Frankish. Maybe the fake Frankish accent had been to cover up her real one in the king’s court. Or maybe . . . maybe it was Beau’s way of covering up other aspects of herself. Feelings, perhaps?

  Beau’s brilliant grin softened to a smile. “Wanderers despise folk who stay in one place like toadstools—but I have left my people. I try to despise no one.”

  Somebody at Fountain Dale blew a few sleepy notes on a horn, signaling sleepers to awaken. It was time to disappear. Etty turned and slipped into the forest. The sun had not yet cleared away the mist there; it still swirled in white tendrils around Etty’s bare ankles. The others followed her as she picked her way up a steep rise amid ferns and bracken, under forest shade draped with grape and ivy, bound toward Robin Hood’s oak.

  She needed to have one more talk—she hoped it would be just a talk—with her father.

  Thirteen

  She wanted to speak with her mother privately first, but there was no chance. Her father spotted her the moment she stepped into the clearing. There under the giant oak he sat, clothed in the borrowed jerkin and leggings of a common yeoman but as imperious as ever, despite being flanked by outlaw guards.

  “Daughter!” he roared across the shady hollow at Ettarde. “Have you yet seen your clear duty? Might we depart from this accursed wilderness?”

  Her father’s shouting still made her tremble. But she kept that reaction to herself, forcing herself to reply in tones that were quick, loud and cheery, like the song of a mistle thrush. “You may go when you like, Father. Where’s Mother?”

  “Here!” came a silvery call, and her mother hurried toward her from the other side of the oak, still barefoot and in her chemise, but with an outlaw’s cloak wrapped around her for warmth. Etty hugged her and felt her mother’s embrace like a blessing. Many times in the past day she and her mother had embraced, but still not enough.

  Father bellowed, “What mean you, daughter? Approach me!”

  Ettarde gave him a blank stare and sat down where she was, near the cooking fire. Mother sat also, across from Ettarde, at the farthest possible point from King Solon. At the edges of her attention, Ettarde was aware of Beau and Robin standing by, listening, and other outlaws going about their business in silence unusual for them.

  Ettarde helped herself to one of the scones that lay near the fire to warm. She took a big bite of the warm bread and chewed it well before she told the king, “What I mean, Father, is that you may go where you will when you will, and I will stay here.”

  “What!” His glare seemed to pierce Etty like a sword, as always, and he seemed huge to her, his wrath swelling him like a toad. But she kept herself from shrinking back as he ranted at her. “What impudence is this
? Thoughtless wench, do you care nothing for the brave men who will perish unless you—”

  “But the folk of Auberon are your subjects, Father, not mine.” Etty made sure to speak clearly and calmly. “And the fault will be yours, not mine, if they die.”

  It was as if she had thrown cool water into hot oil. Her father sputtered, his temper in such a boil that he could barely speak. He could only flare, “Impudent hussy—”

  “It is up to you, Father. And peace is within your power. No lives need be lost.” She spoke slowly, each word a chessman to be moved so that maybe her father would notice, would hear her—or so Ettarde hoped, although in her heart she knew better. “All you need to do is leave the gates of Auberon open for Lord Basil. Let him in. Give the holding over to him.”

  In the instant of silence that followed, Etty tried to sit solid like a rock and not cringe. Keeping her eyes on her father as he gawked, still she felt Robin’s stare, her mother’s wondering glance. She heard a cuckoo singing and knew that most folk would think her crazy. She felt Beau’s eyes upon her and wondered if the stranger girl knew it was from her, Beauregard du Fleur Noir, that Ettarde had learned this back door: War was not a necessity, but a choice men made. King Solon the Red could save his own people if he really wanted to.

  She braced herself for his response.

  He seemed to struggle for breath at first. Then he burst into abuse. “Fool! Simpleton! Lackwit girl! Can such a goose girl be a daughter of mine? Senseless—”

  Etty remarked, “ ‘When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.’ Cicero.”

  “Argument?” roared King Solon. “Argument? There can be no argument! The kingdom of Auberon is my right, my inheritance, my destiny! I—”

  “ ‘Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation,’ ” quoted Ettarde, “ ‘and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul?’ Socrates.” Growing aware of sparrows chuckling in the spreading oak overhead, of smiles spreading among the listeners, Etty kept her face under control and her eyes steadily upon her father.