Robin: Lady of Legend (The Classic Adventures of the Girl Who Became Robin Hood) (7 page)

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Robin soon discovered that it took completely different muscles to wield a sword than it did to bend a bow. She dropped the hefty weapon with a groan, rubbing her aching arms and flexing out her back.

It was never this difficult when I was learning with sticks
, she reflected wearily. If only she could remember everything Will had shown her! She had not been allowed to attend his lessons, of course—she never was—but after he had finished the two of them would go to the stables and he would show her all that he had learned, eagerly demonstrating the latest pass or riposte. Laughing, they would leap over stacks of hay, startling the horses with their clacking staves and stopping only when their weapons broke or when the hostlers came to chase them off. They had been very young.

That all ended the day Robin’s father entered just in time to see her knock Will’s stick from his hand and level her rod at his throat, crowing triumph. Tight-lipped with anger, Lord Locksley had taken them inside the house, whipped them both, and forbidden Robin to ever touch a weapon again. Then he had broken her practice bow in front of her. Robin did not speak to her father again for nearly a month.

“It is not fair,” she had complained to Marian, picking up chips of stone from their bedroom floor and flinging them at the horn-covered window. “Father did not care when Will taught me to shoot. Why should he care about us crossing sticks?”

Marian, no more than eight at the time, just stared at her sister with large, limpid eyes. Darah answered instead.

“A lady may take up shooting for sport, or for the good of her figure,” the housekeeper said, sniffing her contempt. Clearly she did not think that such pastimes suited young ladies, in spite of society’s permissiveness. “No woman has any business picking up a sword, or pretending to. That is what men are for. Your father was quite right to punish you.”

A handful of pebbles hurled in Darah’s direction illustrated what Robin thought of that reasoning.

For three weeks, Robin refused to go outside and play. Instead, she watched from her window as Will practiced his archery—something the law required all boys to do once they reached the age of seven. Jealousy colored her vision; whenever Will came to visit, she refused to see him.

To add salt to her wound, Darah saw in Robin’s prideful confinement an opportunity to reinstate her lessons in ladyship, and undertook the task with enthusiasm. Robin, however, had no desire to be polished and at best ignored her attempts, and at worst actively sabotaged her plans.

One day, after handing the girl an embroidery frame and coming back an hour later to find it still untouched, Darah had announced in resignation that if Robin would only devote as much time to her finishing as she had to her archery, she would be the finest lady in all of England.

The next day, Robin sought out her father at breakfast.

“What is it?” he asked gruffly, peering at her over an upraised pasty.

Robin took a deep breath. She was uncertain what she would do if her father refused her proposition—she dared not think that far ahead.

“I want you to let me practice archery with Will again,” she explained in one explosive breath.

Lord Locksley’s brows knit together and his expression darkened. Robin plunged on: “I will do everything that Darah tells me to do. I promise I will learn how to be a lady and the duties of a housemistress and such—I will not even tease Darah about it—if you will just let me practice again.”

Lord Locksley frowned. In truth, he had almost forgotten about the “swordfight,” and he disliked how the situation was reasserting itself. Robin was only twelve, and the precocious bravery a boy would have shown in facing him thus had no place in a woman. However. Darah
had
been nagging him for years about the girl’s inclination for the longbow and her distressingly poor progress in the art of running a household. As long as Robin did not bother him, he did not care much what she did, and he routinely told Darah as much. Of course, finding her practicing swordplay was another matter entirely.

Yes, the girl had grown too wild. She needed to be taught her place in the world—a place devoid of quivers and bowmen’s staves. A little lesson in humility would not go amiss. Even if she passed his test, the bargain he had in mind would please both Robin and Darah, and either way his world would return to the quiet norm he was accustomed to and liked . . . .

 Robin’s hands clenched into fists, but she hid them within the folds of her skirt. She wished that her father’s face showed what he was thinking. Hers was like an open book, but her father’s furrowed features were stoic and unreadable.

At last he spoke, his words startling Robin so that she had to work quickly to recover her aplomb.

“Very well. On one condition—you beat me at this craft of yours. Three arrows. 100 paces. If you win, you may recommence your archery practice. But win or lose, you begin lessons with Darah immediately and without complaint. Is that satisfactory?”

“Yes,” Robin said in a voice faint with disbelief. “Oh, yes.”

Out on the archery range, Robin watched nervously as her father inspected his arrows with careful attention. Covertly, she wiped her sweaty hands on her skirt and then rubbed at her bow, trying to keep it warm. Since her father had broken her old bow, the practice stave she was using was unfamiliar to her. It was oak, rather than elm, and slightly too firm for her—she would need all her strength just to draw it.

Her father thrust the heads of his arrows into the ground and took up his stance. In a blur of motion he shot. All three arrows landed so close to the center of the target that from a distance they blurred into one.

“Oh my,” Robin said faintly, before she could stop herself. She would never have guessed that her reclusive father possessed such fine aim. Indignation quickly replaced disbelief—her father had tricked her! Well, she would show him what Robin Ann Locksley was capable of!

Swiftly, she plunged her arrows into the ground. Taking careful aim, she shot her first shaft; it landed in the middle of her father’s small cluster. Her second arrow also landed within that clump. As Robin raised her third arrow, her arm began to shake. The strain of bending the bow back a third time was incredible, and it took all of her strength to keep her aim steady. When at last she let go, she knew that she had shot wide. Not by much, but enough.

Without looking at her, her father walked off. Robin slowly sank to her knees, the longbow clutched convulsively in her fingers. It was all over.

The next morning at breakfast, Robin stared glumly at her lap rather than risk meeting her father’s eyes. She did not even look up when the servitor came in with their food. Only when Will nudged her to eat did she reluctantly glance up and see that rather than the plate of stew she had been expecting, the servant had brought the oaken longbow instead.

“I–I do not understand,” she stuttered. “I lost.”

“I am aware of that fact,” Lord Locksley said dryly. Robin quickly shut her mouth. “You will keep your end of the bargain?”

“Oh, yes!” Robin cried. In that moment, she could have hugged him, but he had never permitted that sort of thing before. She gave him a blinding smile instead.

Lord Locksley looked at his daughter, puzzled. “I cannot understand why this means so much to you, Robin. But you have always asked for little enough. Keep your promise, and I shall keep mine. Mayhap you will grow out of this foolishness. One can hope, anyway.”

Robin did keep her promise. She endured Darah’s lessons, if not enthusiastically, then at least with good cheer. Some of the lessons, like how to sew a wound, she even found interesting. Who knew that embroidery could be put to such use? In time, she even became what some might call accomplished, although she never thought of herself as such. Becoming a lady was just the price she had to pay for the hour of freedom at the end of the day, when she could take up her longbow in her hand and send arrow after arrow whistling through the air like a redbreast’s sweet song.

She had never played at swords again. Until now.

Robin gazed at the blade in her hand. Welts were beginning to form along her fingers and on the pad of her hand; their angry red stare mocked her. The sword was simply too heavy—it was meant to be wielded by a man, not by an eighteen-year-old girl. Well, a twelve-year-old girl had not been meant to wield her old longbow, either, but she had learned. She would learn this, too. Ignoring the way her muscles seized up as she lifted the sword once again, Robin got back to work.

* * * * *

The deer Robin had killed lasted her for half a week, and would have lasted longer if not for the warmth of the day and various unwanted scavengers, which rendered it unfit for consumption by the fourth day.

By this time, however, much of Robin’s strength had returned, and she had begun to explore her surroundings. One of the first places she examined was the rock cliff leading down to the stream, which turned out to be pocketed with various caves that stayed very cool, even on the hottest of days. These hollows would be better than a larder for storing her food, and a few rocks placed over the entrance would protect her meat from any interested creatures.

So when Robin killed her second deer, rather than simply slicing away enough meat for a single meal, she proceeded to gut and carve the deer . . . or rather, she tried to. It soon became apparent, however, that while her arrows and sword were capable of removing small amounts of meat, they were entirely unsuited to the intricate task of carving. After an hour or so of trying, Robin finally cast the shaft she was using aside and resolved to make herself a dagger.

She found a nice, oblong river rock that fit comfortably in her hand and was long enough to provide a decent blade. The stone she had chosen was even pretty—red, with cream-colored bands running through it. The harder boulders of the cliff face served as her whetstone, and after an afternoon’s labor, Robin had a dagger that was sharp enough to slice a scion from a tree; she felt inordinately pleased with herself.

Reprieved of their meat-cutting duties, Robin turned her arrows back to their natural task of archery. She practiced in the fog-lit mornings, and in the bright afternoons. She practiced in the windy evenings, and in the dead of the night when her targets were nothing more than wisps of shadow. Soon she could strike her mark no matter what the conditions.

She devoted just as much time to her sword, rehearsing half-remembered lunges and parries for hours on end. Once she grew strong enough to lift the blade with one hand, she began to fence against the trees. At first, she worried that the thick wood might damage the sword; Will had paid to have the blade etched with silver dragons and fairies and other fantastical creatures, and he would never forgive her if she marred the splendid detailing. But the trees did not appear to do the etchings any harm, and after a while Robin forgot that it had ever been a concern.

When she grew weary of practice, Robin would gather the saplings she had slaughtered and carry them back to the clearing. By lashing them together with strips of deer hide and by filling the chinks with bark and river mud, Robin was able to construct the walls for a shelter. The door she fashioned from shoots and branches, and the roof from the reeds that grew by the river, padded with fronds. The result was a hut with no windows that was barely big enough for her to stretch her arms out twice in either direction . . . but it was hers.

* * * * *

As summer started to wane, Robin began to take long walks through the forest. At first, she had to stop often to let her feet rest, but within a few days her blisters turned to calluses and her legs ceased to ache at all. Soon the muscles in her legs hardened into slender sinew, to match the weapon-wrought thews in her arms and back. This sleek strength pleased Robin, though she felt certain that anyone else would have found such brawn in a woman distasteful.

During these initial wanderings, Robin was careful to notch every other tree with her dagger in order to ensure that she could find her way back; but after a while, she no longer needed to mark the trunks in order to keep her way. By the time autumn struck the Sherwood and the leaf-casting trees turned their blades to lacquered gold, Robin knew the forest paths as well as she knew her yew bow.

Most of the time her walks passed in silence, and her thoughts turned often to her cousin and her sister: she wondered what they were doing, and if they were thinking of her. But such musings only served as painful reminders of the life she no longer had, and she did her best to push them aside, as she pushed aside thoughts of her future.

Occasionally, the silence would be broken not by chittering wildlife, but by the carefree voices or the measured steps of man. Whenever this happened, Robin would duck away into the bracken until they passed, thus avoiding their dangerous notice.

Then one night as she made her way back to her refuge from an evening expedition, she stumbled upon two men sitting by a fire, singing softly into the dark. Rather than melting away again, Robin found herself creeping forward to listen to their melodic chorus of gallant knights, of loves lost and won, and of bravery nonpareil. As she listened, she found herself thinking of another campfire, and of the two unburdened souls who had once sat around it. It was only when the singing stopped and the two men prepared to go to sleep that she found she could break away. If there were tears in her eyes as she made her way home, she blamed it on the smoke.

* * * * *

One bright September afternoon, something transpired that would forever shatter Robin’s routine. The azure sky that day had a touch of briskness to it that teased of the coming winter; it filled Robin with a strange invigoration, and she found herself roaming farther afield than she ever had before, clear to the edge of Nottingham. She had just turned to head back home when she heard raised voices, and a low muted scream.

Robin paused. Part of her wanted to ignore the shout and hurry on her way; the other part demanded that she investigate.