Rowan Hood Returns (2 page)

Now, facing the approaching rider with her bowstring drawn back so far that the feathers of her elf-bolt touched her ear, Rowan spoke no threat. She didn't have to. The bow and arrow spoke for her. And Tykell—

But what was wrong with Tykell? He had not growled a warning, and now, when he should have been bristling and snarling and roaring at the stranger, instead he trotted forward with his furry tail sweeping a smile in the air.

And the rider did not even draw rein. “Rowan, it's just me,” he called.

She, rather.

Rowan's hands opened and flew up in the air, heedless of bow and arrow dropping to the ground. “Etty!” she cried.

H
ugging Rowan around the neck, Etty teased, “If you didn't know
me,
you might at least recognize Dove.”

The pony grazing close at hand, Etty meant. Just a white pony in an ordinary brown leather bridle and saddle, with none of the fancy plumes and trappings once worn by the mount of the king's page boy; how was Rowan supposed to know Dove from any other white pony? Confound that teasing Etty, she knew very well that all horses looked alike to Rowan, with a front end that bit and a hind end that kicked and a stinky middle to fall off of.

But Rowan couldn't retort properly. She was crying.

Ettarde let her go and looked her up and down, still teasing, although her perfect symmetrical face under the visorless helm looked as sober as an egg. “You have bosoms, Ro. Finally!”

Ro still couldn't respond, although she tried to smile.

The mischief blinked out of Etty's gray-green eyes. “Ro, is something wrong?”

Rowan found her voice. “I don't know. Not with you.” Knuckling the tears out of her eyes so that she could see Etty properly, Rowan thought that her friend looked well. Not happy, necessarily, and not unchanged, but strong. Perhaps it had been necessary for Ettarde to grow even stronger than before, surviving as an outsider in her uncle's castle.

Etty demanded, “Are your legs still hurting you?”

“Yes, but—”

Tykell growled.

Both girls stiffened, scanning and listening. They saw nothing yet, but in a moment they heard the approaching danger: hooves, many hooves, drumming in the distance. Horseback riders on the Nottingham Way.

“Take cover.” Grabbing her bow and arrows, Rowan fled toward the forest, trying to run. But up the wasteland's rocky slope, the best she could manage was a limping trot.

“Get on Dove,” Etty urged, trotting alongside Rowan with Ro's bag of coltsfoot in one hand, Dove's reins in the other.

“That would take me even longer.”

“But ...” Etty did not complete the thought, only flung the reins over Dove's head so that they lay on the pony's neck, then whacked Dove with the bag of coltsfoot. Startled, Dove sprang away and galloped off, saddle and bridle and baggage and all, into the forest. As always when anything ran away, Tykell let out a joyous “Wuff!” and bounded after. In a moment both pony and wolf-dog had disappeared between the trees.

What in the Lady's name—but there was no time for Rowan to yell at Tykell to stop, demand of Etty whether she had gone moon mad, or do anything except totter onward, her legs aching and shaking. Somehow she had to make it to the bushes and hide before the men on horseback rounded the curve in the Nottingham Way and saw her. It might already be too late.

Etty seemed to judge that it was. “Down!” she commanded in a whisper, pushing Rowan to the ground. Finding herself suddenly flat on her belly, Rowan let bad enough alone, kept her head close to the ground and stayed still. Inches from her, Etty also sprawled on heather and stones, snatching off her shiny helm; her long dark hair coiled out from under it. She slid the helm under Rowan's brown mantle. Hidden only by the bare dun stems of last year's furze, both girls froze like rabbits, watching as the horsemen rode into sight.

Led by two knights in full chain-mail armor, lances in the air, a cavalcade of eight men-at-arms advanced, the soldiers' russet tabards cross-girded with black to form an X across their chests. They raised no dust at this moist time of year; Rowan could see them clearly. The same device, a black X, was blazoned on the knights' shields and the pennons that fluttered like small pointed flags from their lance shafts.

“The mark of Marcus,” said Etty, for there was no fear of being overheard by the men trotting along in a cloud not of dust, but of their own noise: hooves on stone, saddles creaking, weapons and armor jingling, voices. “Those are my uncle's men.” Etty's serene voice sounded as surprised as Rowan had ever heard it. “I hadn't thought they could be so close behind me.”

Any man of Marcus who gave a glance upward might see Rowan and Etty only half hidden by the crest of the slope, two outlaw girls pretending to be brown boulders amid rocks, gorse bushes and coltsfoot.

Barely moving her lips, and not moving any other part of her at all, Rowan asked Etty, “You ran away?”

“Of course.”

“Why of course? They mistreated you?”

“No, not at all. It is just that my uncle cannot conceive of a girl or woman free to come and go.”

“Then your mother—”

“He still thinks of her as his little sister. To be protected.”

“So she has no freedom.”

“No. But she never did, except those few days...”

During the brief time spent with her daughter in Sherwood Forest, Ettarde's mother—queen of the kingdom of Auberon—had relished freedom, Rowan knew.

“She doesn't miss it?”

“I don't know. She would never say so.”

“Is she happy?”

“She is... brave. Mother was always determined to be content with her lot. And proud. She refuses to wear black.”

Black?

The black gown and veil of a widow?

Eyes on the soldiers on horseback trotting toward Nottingham, careful not to move, Rowan kept silence a moment to control her reaction. Then she whispered, “Your father?”

“Dead.”

“I—I'm sorry.”

Etty did not speak. Rowan sensed that she could not speak, or not with safety, not without making some movement that might betray them. They lay silent, motionless.

Rowan let several moments go by before she murmured, “Does your mother know where you are?”

“Yes, in a general way. But not precisely.”

This answer baffled Rowan. She tried again. “You told her where you were going?”

“I asked her whether she wanted to come along. She chose to stay behind, and she didn't want to have to lie to Uncle Marcus, so she wanted to know nothing more. I slipped away with her blessing.”

“Oh.” Rowan lay puzzling over the ways of noble families, wondering whether lovely Queen Elsinor was fond of her brother Marcus and whether Lord Marcus felt affection for her. And how Queen Elsinor could love Etty the way Rowan knew she did, yet could let her ride away. Finally Ro murmured, “You told her good-bye.”

“Of course. I promised you I'd come back, Ro.”

Etty's hand crouched as still as a hiding mouse amid coltsfoot in bloom near Rowan's face. On one finger lustered a serpentine strand of silver, a ring. One strand of the band. Others were worn by Rook, Lionel and Beau. The two remaining strands remained on Rowan's hand. Without looking, without moving, she could feel their presence on her ring finger. The gimmal ring, the six strands that formed one, had belonged to Rowan's mother before she died. Was killed, rather. Now the strands of Celandine's ring had become the emblem of a band. An outlaw band.

Yes, Rowan had expected that Ettarde would return sometime—but alone? Unescorted, in danger and in haste? Etty had ridden hard; Rowan had seen the sweat foaming and crusting on Dove's neck. Chest pressed to cold stones, Ro felt as if the air around her had also turned to stone. Her heart lay clay cold, and not with fear of Marcus's men, who were riding away.

“There's something else,” she said to Etty without moving her head. “I've been feeling it all day.”

Etty lay silent until the last rider had trotted past and the sound of hoofbeats and jingling harnesses had faded.

Rowan was a friend to silence, but this time she could not stand it. “Etty?”

“Wait till we can move.”

When the backs of the riders had grown small with distance, disappearing around a bend in the road toward Nottingham, Rowan turned her head and said again, “Etty?”

But Ettarde didn't answer yet, just stood up. Even though she wore the heavy boots of a youth, Etty got to her feet gracefully, as befit a princess. Reaching down, she helped Rowan stand. But as Rowan faced her, Etty turned away, beckoning, walking toward the forest.

“Dove's too white,” confided Ettarde, for all the world like a princess making court conversation. “Even in the bushes she shines like a full moon rising. There was no time to hide her, but we can track her and find her, I think, if Tykell hasn't chased her clear to—”

“Etty,”
Rowan interrupted.

Beneath the shelter of the first towering oak tree, Etty turned to face her.

Rowan whispered, “What is it that brought you back here, wearing a sword at your side?”

Ettarde took a deep breath, met Rowan's gaze with somewhat less than her usual composure, and answered. “I have learned the names of those who murdered your mother.”

T
he rowan trees had whispered truth that morning. Now, at nightfall, sitting in her accustomed place beside the spring, Rowan heard the rowan grove all around her rustling in the breeze, but she could no longer hear how the trees sighed
Good-bye, good-bye.
Resting her back against the concealing boulders, she heard the trickle of sweetwater in the stone bowl of the spring, but she could no longer hear its gentle grief as it bade her farewell. This morning she had sensed how the very stones, bones of Sherwood Forest, silently lamented of loss:
Farewell, Rowan, fare well.
But tonight she sensed nothing. Stones were only stone.

She gazed into the evening campfire but saw nothing except flames. The others around the campfire, eagerly talking with Etty as they ate their dinner of bread and venison, could not possibly know, but Rowan knew: Her body sat in the rowan hollow, but in spirit she had already departed. No longer at one with her rowan grove and its sweetwater spring, in a sense she was already gone.

I will come back,
she had once whispered to another such spring far to the north: Celandine's spring.
I will come back someday, and I will find out the names of those who set their torches to the thatch, and they will pay. Somehow they will pay.

Rowan Hood was gone, had been gone since the minute she had heard Etty's news. In her place lived a grieving girl Rowan had thought she had left behind: Rosemary, daughter of Celandine.

“... hadn't been in that castle for half a day before one of Uncle Marcus's henchmen tried to back me into a corner and place his hands upon me,” Etty was telling big, ardent Lionel and the others, explaining the sword she now wore. “I seized my quarterstaff and drubbed him till he fell down the stairs. Well! Such an uproar as ensued.” Pausing to slice a neat bite from her portion of venison, Etty rolled her beautiful eyes. “A girl who
fought back?
Every day and every day after that some so-called knight had to have a go at me.”

“But my dear little lady, how appalling!” Lionel leaned forward, his broad shoulders looming over her, his full-moon face distraught, his babyish mouth steepled in distress.

“I'm not your dear lady, little or otherwise,” Etty told him tartly. But she smiled.

“My dear princess! Did your uncle not protect you?”

“Had one of his minions carried me off and ravished me,” said Etty sourly, “surely my uncle would have found it necessary to avenge the family honor.”

“Ettarde!”

“Or if a mere man-at-arms had tried to overcome me and force a kiss, it would have been a serious matter. But a knight, that is different. Might makes right, you know. Even though any jack-in-boots with a horse and armor can title himself a knight.”

“Still, your uncle—”

“Is no worse than any other lord. He has to keep the loyalty of his henchmen.”

“So he let them force themselves on you. My dear princess, did any of them
succeed?”

“Not a one.”

“Mon foi,
good for you!” exclaimed another voice: Beau, sitting atop the rocks with her head resting against Dove's neck, her black hair flowing at one with Dove's white mane. Beau had wept for joy, taking possession once again of the pony that had been hers. She would have brought Dove right into the grove if she could have maneuvered the little horse over the surrounding natural rock wall. But even hugging Dove could not keep Beau silent for long.
“Tres bon,”
she told Etty. “Well done.”

“So then, you see, one of them drew his sword upon me, and I wrested it away and started wearing it.”

“Most dreadful,” Lionel complained.

“The company was not pleasant,” Etty admitted. “At first I spent my days closeted, doing needlework.” Etty made a droll face to indicate that she had not much enjoyed embroidering wimples. ”With my mother, to comfort her.”

Rowan wanted to ask more about Queen Elsinor: whether her husband, returning to his petty kingdom, had ever begged her forgiveness, and how she had learned of his fate. But Rowan could not speak; it was as if the air around her had bruised and swollen to hold her silent.

“Later,” Etty went on, “I began visiting the dungeons.”

“What?” Lionel cried.