Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 02] (21 page)

He ran, ducking and dodging, swinging around saplings, rolling and bouncing up if he fell, always moving, always cutting an unpredictable course through the trees. He was absently aware of hair being snagged and yanked out of his scalp; of broken boughs stabbing into his legs; of leaves and limbs slapping at his face, against upraised forearms; of the burning in his chest. But he ran.

A creek . . . he splashed through, attempting to stay atop rocks but not succeeding: his boots now were wet. Damp hosen clung clammily to his legs. Slick mud on the other side slowed him briefly, but he leaped free, struck dry soil and grass again, and went on.

He crossed a deer track and took it briefly, using its beaten ground to gain him footing and time, but he did not stay on it. A track offered no protection; better he stick to shielding foliage.

A second arrow rattled through nearby branches. He threw himself aside, rolled through fern, came up, barely dodged a thornbush, swung under a low limb, heard an echoing shout of frustration from lengthening distance. He dove through foliage, fetched up painfully against a lightning-shattered trunk, and lay there, winded, for some time, breathing. Listening. Around him nothing moved. All was still except for the heaving of his lungs.

There were no more shouts, no cursing, no humming of arrows loosed from too close, no rattle through the trees. Only silence.

And then a bird began to sing from a branch over his head, answered by another a few trees away, and he knew he was safe.

Robin sat up slowly, wincing against small wounds now making themselves felt. The knife in his boot had shifted; he pulled it out, resettled it in the other boot; grimaced displeasure in the feel and weight of cold, soggy leather.

Now he had time to sweat. He wiped it from his face with a sleeve, then stood up. Sherwood enclosed him. No man but one who knew the forest intimately would find him, so long as he was very still, or very careful.

Robin nodded, catching his breath, then set out again at a far more decorous pace than his former headlong flight. He blessed the Godsent sense of direction that never failed him—he was “lost” as a child only when he wished to be—and headed toward the Nottingham road. He needed badly to get to Locksley, and stood a better and faster chance if he sought transport on the road.

Even if he were forced to steal another horse.

 

Early in the morning, not long after dawn, the sheriff was awakened by a servant pounding on his door. DeLacey, struggling up from under linen and confusing dreams, was less than pleased. He called out crossly for the servant to go away, until the servant explained that his soldiers had caught one of the outlaws.

Whereupon deLacey shot out of bed, snatched up a robe, thrust arms into sleeves, and tore open the door. “You’re certain?”

The servant bobbed his head. “Aye, my lord. The soldiers brought him into the hall. He’s below.”

Below. By God, they had
caught
one of them! DeLacey spent a moment hunting up house boots, ran a hand through his hair, then took himself out of his chamber and strode rapidly down to the hall, anticipating all manner of punishment, where he was greeted by the grimy, gasping, blood-smeared face of Much, the miller’s son, gripped firmly between two soldiers.

DeLacey stopped short. “The others?”

“No, my lord,” one of the soldiers said.

He bit his tongue on a sharp retort. “This is the
only
one you caught?”

“Yes, my lord.”

He glared at Much, then shifted attention back to the soldiers, who were clearly tired and as clearly wary of his mood. They had spent more than a day searching for five men and had only caught a boy. “Where are the others?”

“In Sherwood, my lord.”

Sherwood.
Damn
Sherwood, who swallowed men whole and almost never gave them up. Anticipation turned to ash in his mouth. He had hoped for Will Scarlet, who had murdered Prince—now King—John’s men, and whose escape had embarrassed the sheriff deeply; or for the minstrel, whom he had decided to have castrated while his daughter watched. But the miller’s half-wit son was the least of them, and not worth waking up for

“Throw him in the dungeon,” he ordered, gesturing dismissal, and took himself back to bed.

Robin slipped down through the trees, jumped a ditch by the side of the road, stopped long enough to get his bearings—Nottingham yet lay ahead, and beyond that Huntington Castle—and set out at a good pace for Locksley Village, which lay beyond Huntington at the edge of the forest. He did not walk long; ahead he saw a cart full of cut and bundled wood hitched to a slow-ambling mule, praised Allah before he remembered it was permitted again to thank God in perfectly common English, and broke into a jog.

The woodcutter, persistently hailed, looked over his shoulder, considered, and obligingly pulled up his mule. Robin arrived, markedly less winded than he had been on his race through the forest, and requested a ride. A cart was not so fast as a horse, but was swifter and decidedly more comfortable than feet which were rapidly blistering inside still-wet boots.

“Going to Nottingham,” the woodcutter said.

Robin was not. But that was closer to his destination than where he was currently. “I’ll hop off at the turning,” he said.

The woodcutter shrugged and jerked his head toward the back of the cart; Robin boosted himself onto the back as the mule was told with a slapping of reins and muttered command to move along again.

After several pokes in the back, he rearranged a portion of the piled wood and sat more comfortably, legs and feet dangling off the back. He considered removing his boots to see if there was remaining water to empty out, but decided against it lest his feet protest having wet leather put back on. Instead, he occupied himself picking tangles and twigs out of his hair as well as tree sap, working thorns free of his clothing, and inspecting several scratches on his forearms he didn’t remember getting.

Then he heard hoofbeats.

He looked up sharply. The approaching horse and rider were bound the same way as the cart, likely to Nottingham, and therefore Robin, riding on the back and facing the way they had come, had an unobstructed view of the oncoming rider.

He thanked God this time in Saxon, Arabic,
and
French, just to be certain the Deity understood.

Robin grinned. With tangled hair, torn and stained clothing, mud-and dirt-soiled hosen, he was hardly the picture of an earl’s heir, a knight, or even a minor landowner. No one would think to find him perched upon the back of a woodcutter’s cart, idling his way along the Nottingham road, even a man the sheriff might otherwise have ordered to arrest Robert of Locksley. And perhaps had.

He waited until the rider and his horse were even with the cart and very close, paying no attention to the lowly peasant woodcutter and his disheveled apprentice, and then Robin stood up in the back of the cart.

“
Gisbourne!”
he bellowed into the steward’s right ear.

Gisbourne started visibly. Before his mount could react, Robin flung himself bodily from cart onto horse, straddled the rump quickly, yanked the knife from his boot, slung one arm around Gisbourne’s chest to grab the reins, then quietly set the blade at the steward’s throat.

“Gisbourne,” he said, “I need your horse.”

“I am a
knight!”
the steward cried, who had not had time to see anything more of his assailant than a leaping body.

Robin grinned. “So am I.”

Gisbourne stiffened, then hissed at the touch of the knife. “You? I think not. Knights don’t ride with woodcutters, hold knives at other knights’throats,
nor
do knights steal other knights’ horses.”

“They do if they need them more than the other knights do. But you are not truly a knight, Gisbourne, just a man whose family bought him the title and sent him into the world, where he became a lapdog to William deLacey.”

Gisbourne was outraged. “Who
are
you?”

Robin ignored the question, asking one of his own. “Has the sheriff arrested anyone at Locksley Village?”

“Locksley Village!”

“Answer me, Gisbourne.”

“He sent soldiers there.”

“Did they arrest anyone?”

“They haven’t come back yet.”

He relaxed minutely. Perhaps there was still time—But Gisbourne, who felt the lessening of tension, abruptly sank his spurs deep into his mount’s sides.

The horse, being told to run in the most emphatic of ways, and being told to stop in an equally emphatic way as Robin sharply reined him in, proceeded to do the only thing left for a horse to do.

He reared.

Robin, sitting bareback atop a slick and abruptly vertical rump, slid off unceremoniously, dragging Gisbourne with him, and landed flat on his back as the horse swung around in alarm. Gisbourne landed atop him. The horse, no more content to have two bodies sprawled against his front hooves than giving him conflicting orders about going or not going, attempted to leave. Immediately.

Like all horsemen who preferred to ride than walk, Robin had not released the reins. The horse, employing far greater weight and power than the man at the end of the reins, backed up frenziedly, dragging him in his panic out from under Gisbourne’s body.

As the horse moved, Robin flipped over, doubled up, and dug in his knees, but was pulled flat again onto his belly with an
oof
of expelled air, then onto his side as the horse, responding to the weight that still clung to the reins, sashayed abruptly sideways. Fortunately for Robin, he sashayed sideways into the startled woodcutter’s equally startled mule, which responded to the offense by reaching out a gaping mouth to grab a hunk of the horse’s shoulder.

Robin, muttering imprecations at the horse, used the distraction to scramble to his feet, whereupon he leaped to grab the bridle and unceremoniously jerked the horse away from the mule.

Gisbourne was on his knees. Robin, standing at the stirrup of the snorting, rolling-eyed and quivering—but newly submissive—horse, suggested he stay there.

The steward, getting his first good look at his assailant, stared at him with mouth agape, patently astonished. “Locksley!”

Robin said lightly, “From one knight to another, I still need your horse.”

“That’s
stealing!”
Gisbourne shouted, but by then Robin was in the saddle and departing at a gallop.

 

DeLacey waited as soldiers brought the boy up from the pit dug below the floor of the dungeon. It required the unlocking and peeling back of an iron grate from the stone floor, and the lowering of a crude wooden ladder that the prisoner was required to climb in order to get out, thereby putting himself into the waiting arms—or at the waiting end of sword or pike—of the soldiers fetching him out.

Much was nimble coming up the ladder; he was a cutpurse and quick with hands and feet, so the sheriff knew better than to take no precautions. The boy was grabbed and yanked up at the lip of the hole, shoved unceremoniously against the wall, where his hands were tied behind him. Then he was hauled upright again and positioned before the sheriff, bent elbows clamped in the hard grips of soldiers.

“Tell me,” deLacey said.

Much stared at him from beneath lank hair, vacant-eyed.

The sheriff smiled. “Boy, you may be a half-wit, but the
other
half undoubtedly understands questions. Tell me where they are.”

Much made no answer.

“Where did they go?” deLacey asked.

This time when Much said nothing, the sheriff brought the back of his gloved hand across the boy’s face. Blood burst from his mouth and spilled down his face to drip onto his tunic. He gasped in shock, eyes shying away as if he were cornered prey; and deLacey, who rather considered himself the predator, repeated his question.

Bleeding, Much said nothing.

DeLacey sighed, then struck again. He felt the fragile bones of the nose break. Much stared wild-eyed a moment, and then the pain swamped him. He moaned pitifully, began to cry, and sagged in the soldiers’ grasp.

“My men took you near Locksley Hall,” deLacey said. “They went into the forest, found you, and took you. The others must have been nearby. I want to know where they went.”

Much continued to cry.

“Boy, I can do more than this. I can break every bone in your body. Is that what you wish?”

Great gouts of blood painted Much’s face, dripping steadily onto the floor. He was taller now than the sheriff recalled, but quite thin. It would be nothing to shut a wrist into larger hands and snap the bones.

But he had hoped it would not be required.

“Where?” he asked again.

Much, trembling, with tears carving runnels in the blood and grime, said through the blood in his mouth: “Forest.”

“
Where
in the forest?”

“Forest!”

DeLacey shut gloved fingers upon one of Much’s ears. “Boy,” he said, “I can rip this off your head.”

“Forest!” Much shouted.

“
Where
in the forest?”

“Don’t know! Don’t
know!”

Which was entirely possible. Questioning of the soldiers who had caught the boy suggested the outlaws had fled all at once and with no apparent direction in mind. If they had believed themselves safe at Locksley Hall, they might not have thought beyond a roof and a meal.

“Where?” he asked again, pinching the ear more tightly.

Much sobbed. “Ran,” he said. “
Ran.”

DeLacey opened his mouth to ask another question, but heard footsteps on the stairs. He waited, watching the boy tremble, as the soldier came down.

“My lord, the Lady Marian FitzWalter is here.”

DeLacey released Much’s ear and turned sharply. “Marian?”

“Yes, my lord. She insists on seeing you at once.”

The sheriff entertained the brief but perversely satisfying image of having her escorted into the dungeon to meet with him, but decided against it. She had been in the dungeon before, had been in the pit before, and likely would not be much intimidated.

Instead, he glanced at the bleeding boy, then stripped off the one glove. “Put him back,” he said, and as the rope was cut from Much’s wrists and he was shoved unceremoniously toward the ladder, deLacey climbed the stairs. Smiling, he murmured aloud, “I believe Gisbourne delivered my message.”

Marian had been in the great hall of Nottingham Castle countless times. But the last visit had been no more pleasant than this one; Robin and the sheriff had engaged in a deadly swordfight. Then the hall had been thronged with Prince John and his entourage, with soldiers, with Scarlet, Little John, Tuck, and Alan, with the castle servants, while everyone watched in perverse fascination as a lord high sheriff attempted to kill a king’s knight.

That one of them had not died was attributable only to the timely arrival of King Richard, ransomed home from imprisonment, whose appearance ended the fight as well as Prince John’s plans to take and keep the throne. But the Lionheart, unaccountably jovial in view of his brother’s plot, had in short order forgiven that brother certain follies, pardoned Robin and his friends from whatever crimes deLacey insisted they had committed, and declared Marian no longer a ward of the Crown but a free woman with a manor and lands of her own.

Now William deLacey, whose arm she had broken five years before in front of all those people, was trying to take that manor and lands away from her.

She paced. The groin-vaulted ceiling arched high over her head, balanced upon massive stone pillars marching the hall’s length like a line of faceless, limbless soldiers. Rushes snagged at the hem of her chemise and summer-weight mantle until she kicked them out of the way, cracking bones the dogs had missed beneath the soles of her shoes. She scowled at the dais with its trestle table and high-backed chair, where the sheriff sat to pronounce sentence upon such people as he declared criminals, subject to punishment. Some men died. Some lost hands, and homes. Some men languished in the dungeon cells. Others were turned out upon the roads to fend for themselves, often becoming outlaws in order to live. And all of their women and children lost a provider, no matter the means.

Marian wondered if outlawry or begging was what deLacey expected of her, stripped of her manor and lands.

“No,” she said aloud, kicking away another bone.

“No?” It was deLacey’s voice. He came into the hall from a side door, pleasant smile upon his face. “And what are you denying, alone here in my hall?”

“You,” she said. “Your efforts. Your attempt to ruin me.”

He strolled casually to his chair upon the dais and paused there a moment, one hand resting lightly upon a carved finial. “But I understood you were ruined some time ago, when a certain murderer abducted you from the fair. Then, of course, you further ruined yourself by taking up with a pack of outlaws and a disinherited knight.”

“They were—and are—far more honorable than you.”

“And do you reward them for it?” He arched brows in delicate implication. “All of them? I had not believed Locksley the type to share his whore, but perhaps your appetite is such that he must.”