Rowan Hood Returns (3 page)

“Sacre bleu!”
exclaimed Beau.

Rook asked, “Why?”

Etty beamed at him. “Rook, you haven't changed so very much.” Even though she had barely recognized him at first with his black hair smooth and clean, the rest of him clean and dressed in shoes and sheepskin leggings and a jerkin Beau had dyed rusty red for him. “You still speak short words straight to the point.”

He said nothing, but he smiled. Likely, Rowan thought, never until that day had Etty seen Rook smile. But her heart ached too much to allow her joy in the thought.

Lionel asked Etty, “You went to take food to the prisoners?”

Trust Lionel to think first of food,
Rowan thought, but again she could not smile.

“Sometimes, yes,” Etty said, “although my uncle Marcus is not unkind to his captives. Chiefly, I went to the dungeons because no one would think to look for me there, and because men behind bars could not attempt to put their hands upon me. Perforce they had to talk with me instead. Later, after I had won some of them over, they instructed me in the use of this.” She tapped the sword lying close beside her.

“Oh,” said Lionel, his mouth an O, round.

“And I whiled away much time by listening to their conversation among themselves. Most of them had been captured when their lord, Orric of Borea, had tried to invade my uncle's domain. They were knights being held for ransom, or to keep them from turning their swords against my uncle again, or both. Generally they bragged of feats of combat, and excuses to challenge one another, as if fighting and killing were fun. You know the sort, Lionel.”

He grimaced, presumably remembering his days as Lord Roderick's son. “I know all too well.”

“But sometimes they spoke of their families, their homes in Borea, things that had happened there. And then came a day I heard one of them mention Celandine's Wood, and I asked whether they knew aught of the woodwife Celandine.”

Pushing her dinner aside, Etty leaned forward to lessen the distance between her and Rowan, her gray-green eyes consulting Ro across the width of the stone hollow. Rowan saw the question there.

“Go ahead and tell them,” she answered aloud. She had already gathered the gist of the story from Etty during the day, piecemeal, as if gathering up the bones of her mother's dead body.

“I don't like to speak of it if it hurts you.”

“But one of us has to.” Those who wore the strands of Celandine's ring shared their troubles. What affected one of them affected all. “Better you.”

So Etty spoke on. “They told me that four of Lord Orric's knights had ridden to Celandine's Wood, bearing torches in the daytime. Torches not for light to see by, but torches for fire. To burn down the cottage of the one they hated and feared.”

“Woods witch,” the castle folk had called Rowan's mother, disliking the power of woodsy magic and healing, power that had threatened their own. All dwellers in the forest—wolves, outlaws, the invisible spirits of trees and water, the ageless aelfe of the hollow hills, wild boars, wild men—all who dwelt in the forest gave uneasy dreams to Orric, Lord of Borea. Including—no, especially—the one whom the peasants called “the woodwife,” practitioner in salves and herbs and spirit lore, the half-aelfin woman who cottaged with her wild brat of a bastard daughter in the wilderness the common folk called “Celandine's Wood.” Naming the place in the witch's honor, as if she were of the nobility.

Etty was saying, “So, pretending a lazy sort of curiosity, I asked Orric's men who the four knights were who had done this deed. And they named them to me.”

Ettarde, scholar that she was, had written down the names on a vellum she had rolled and thrust down her tunic, carrying it over her heart. Rowan, who knew nothing of reading or writing, had no need of such a scroll. The first moment Etty had read them to her, those names had branded themselves in her memory:

Guy Longhead.

Orricson—that meant “Orric's son.” The lord's sons.

“Orric's henchmen whispered the names as if it would be ill luck to speak them aloud,” Ettarde was telling the others. “And even though these were warriors, supposedly braver than peasants, still, they made the sign of the Lady as if they feared a curse. Then they fell silent and would say no more.”

A similar silence fell on those seated around the campfire. In that silence Rowan could hear nothing of the soft voices that usually spoke to her, only a scream somewhere in the forest night; a mouse caught in the talons of an owl that had swooped down as silently as a ghost?

Rowan shivered, then got up to place more wood on the campfire. It seemed to her sometimes that she was always the one who saw to the fire, the one who took care of the others. Muttonheads, why couldn't
they
notice sometimes when the flames were dying? Kneeling, Rowan started to whisper thanks to the spirit of fire as she usually did, then faltered to a halt. The sticks fell from her hands.

“Are you all right?” Etty asked.

Rowan heard her friend's voice as if from a distance, like the rustling of bracken as deer walked. At first she did not respond. But again as if from a distance she felt them all staring at her, big softhearted Lionel, Etty, Rook, Beau—even Tykell, the wolf-dog, looked at her as if waiting for her to speak.

Rowan muttered, “Fire killed my mother.”

After a single breath of silence, the others spoke too quickly.
“Mon Dieu,
not
this
fire,” said Beau.

Lionel burst out, “But my dear Rowan, evil men killed your mother with fire. It's they who are to blame, not the...”

“It's my fault for telling you,” Etty said. “I should have let ill enough alone.”

Rook alone remained silent. Instead of speaking, he reached over to pick up the sticks Rowan had dropped, but he did not feed them to the fire. He stacked them to one side.

“Mother told me not to meddle.” Etty's voice sounded stretched and hollow, like a drum. “She said it would be kinder to let you forget—”

“I'd never forget!” Rowan's voice beat taut like a drum too—a battle drum. “My mother is dead.” Celandine the healer, Celandine the good, Celandine the flower of the woodland, cut down. Burned. Dead. “I am going back there.”

The words seemed to hover over the fire like a red specter, with everyone, even Rowan, staring at them. She had not planned to speak them; it was as if her mind were wounded and the words had bled out of it.

But they were true.

“I have to go back,” Rowan affirmed more quietly.

“Rowan, don't be hasty.” Etty lifted a dove-white hand, appealing, “Wait a day or two. Sleep on it.”

Rowan just looked at her good friend. Couldn't even shake her head. It was as if a padlock had snapped shut in her. “I can't wait,” she said. “But you don't need to come with me if you don't want to, any of you. I—”

“Sacre amour
of the toad, Rowan,” Beau burst out, “you talk stupid!”

“Of course we'll go with you,” Lionel complained. “If you
must
go. It shouldn't take longer than, what, a year?”

Etty put all her plea in a single word. “Rowan ...”

Rowan still heard her as if from a distance. And in the same way, she heard Rook's gruff voice speak up. “Whether you go or not, your mother will still be dead.”

Rook spoke good common sense, always.

But Rowan shook her head. “The four who set their torches to the thatch remain alive. And I know their names now.” Once again it was as if words issued out of her like blood from a wound. “It is up to me to make them pay.”

She reached for the sticks Rook had set aside and she fed them to the fire.

S
leep on it, Etty had kept saying.

But Rowan couldn't sleep.

At the chillest hour of night, when even the embers of the fire huddled dark under a gray blanket of ashes, Rowan softly pushed back her own blanket of wool and stood up, silent in her soft deerskin boots. She had dozed only a little, and then her dreams had been of huge, shadowy stallions fighting. On her feet now, Rowan breathed deeply the good brown-green smells of Sherwood Forest, hearing with relief the quiet sounds of night: twigs ticking, her comrades in the rowan hollow stirring as they slept, rock doves murmuring in the tall oaks that stretched their branches, fatherly, over the shorter rowans.

Father,
Rowan thought.

She needed to speak with him. Tell him where she was going. Maybe
he,
at least, would understand. Robin Hood, outlaw and many times the avenger of the innocent—maybe he would see why she had to return to where her mother had died. No one in the band seemed to comprehend. Not Rook on his favorite sheepskin, curled in a corner of the hollow tonight instead of in his cave. Not Lionel, sitting like a monolith atop the rocks, upright yet asleep, snoring when he was supposed to be on watch. Not Beau, her blanket in a mess and her long limbs wildly sprawling, or Etty, tidily bestowed within her mantle's wrappings, the perfect lady even in repose. Etty, after having risked her uncle's wrath to bring Rowan those four names, understood perhaps least of all.

But Rowan did not question her own decision. What troubled Rowan was the dark emptiness inside her where her heart should have been. Was this the way vengeance always felt?

Picking up her bow and her quiver of arrows, she slipped silently out of the hollow. Lionel snored on. The big oaf, she should have snapped him on the ear with her fingernail, but she let him slumber. No one saw her go. Not even Tykell, for at nighttime the wolf-dog hunted on his own, and Lady only knew where in Sherwood Forest he had gone.

Sliding her feet rather than lifting them, testing the ground, step by silent step Rowan walked into the darkness on her own.

She did not feel afraid. Not yet. In the distance she heard the hunting song of a pack of wolves chasing deer. She had feared wolves when she had been a little girl sleeping near her mother's hearth, but now she was herself a forest dweller and she feared them no more. Twigs brushed her face, not always gently, not too much like a mother's touch, but they were just the forest fingertips of the Lady, nothing to fear.

Rowan felt her way across familiar ground, out of the rowans and through the oaks, then upslope between hemlock and holly, turning her mind this way and that like a red deer turning its head as it tested the air for scent.

Father?
Rowan questioned the night, seeking with her mind in every direction.

But she sensed no answer.

The forest, like the rowans and the sweetwater spring, was not speaking to her anymore.

Now Rowan felt fear.

Still she could not feel his whereness.

It could just be a vexed night, a troubled mind, Rowan told herself. Powers were quirky in her. All such gifts, legacy of her mother's aelfin blood, had bloomed in her late and slowly because she had been—well, afraid.

Afraid that she would become a woodwife like her mother.

Afraid that she would live her life alone. Like her mother.

Afraid that some lord's henchmen on horseback would come to kill her. As Lord Orric's henchmen had killed her mother.

Now she had become an outlaw, not a woodwife, and she was not living her life alone. During two years in her rowan hollow with her outlaw band, her powers had waxed like a crescent moon growing full, while her fears had waned like a decrescent one, almost forgotten. But now—this was a shrouded night, no moon, no stars, and Rowan began to feel those old fears twitching in their sleep, awakening to join a new one: that something was wrong with her, that she couldn't—

“Toads and stinky toads,” Rowan muttered to herself. Given the perverse way her powers flooded and ebbed, she would get nowhere, trying to find her father, if she doubted herself or tried too hard. Also, she muttered of toads because her legs hurt. They always hurt where they had been broken in the man trap two winters ago, for there had been no healer to help them knit properly.

Perverse, again, that the healer could not heal herself.

Sighing, Rowan sat down where she was, upslope of the hemlocks. Black night was turning faintly gray with the twilight of earliest morning, before dawn, before daybreak. Nottingham Way wound like a pale stream amid the darker forest below, widening into a ghostly pool, a clearing, Fountain Dale, upon which floated little dark boats.

As dawn lightened, the little boats grew slender legs and turned into deer, fallow deer drifting toward the verge of Fountain Dale to disappear into their thickets for the day.

Rowan closed her eyes, listening to the gentle overlapping rhythms of her own heartbeat and breathing, waiting for fear to ebb in her and calm to return. She did not want to return to the rowan hollow and face the others until she felt steady in her resolve. She would just sit with her eyes closed for a few minutes.

 

“Seize her!” shouted a commanding voice close at hand.

Rowan's eyes sprang open and her head snapped up—much too late. Daylight blinded her; already the sun had risen into the treetops. All was a confusion of sunbeams and shadows and hands—hard hands that sprang out of hemlock and holly to grasp her by the arms, hauling her to her feet. More hands grabbed hold of her wrists, giving her no chance to snatch for her bow, her arrows, her dagger. Strong warrior hands. Rowan fought to break free, flailing and squirming like a trapped ferret. But it was no use. Like a fool she had fallen asleep, and now she had been fairly taken off guard.