Rowan Hood Returns (6 page)

“I am going back to my mother's woods,” Rowan told her friends through clenched teeth. “I am going
home.
With you if I may. Without you if I must. Even if my legs fail me. Even if I have to crawl.”

S
urely we will encounter Robin somewhere along the way,” Lionel told Rowan softly as he lifted her onto the pony.

In Dove's saddle, Ro turned to find her face on a level with Lionel's. It felt odd not to look up at him. It felt odd to be seated on a pony, any pony, let alone one rubbed gray all over with charcoal from last night's campfire. It felt odd to see Robin Hood's Dell without Robin Hood in it. It felt odd to look at hazel bushes and oak saplings and fair linden trees that did not look back. It felt odd to be leaving.

Everything felt odd.

But Rowan nodded at Lionel. It was true; surely on their journey they would at least hear word of Robin Hood from some peasant or forest recluse or traveler met along the way.

“Fare well and safely,” Lionel told her. Picking up his longbow in one hand and his six-foot staff in the other, he strode off northward with his quiver of arrows on his back. Ranging ahead of the rest of them, he would scout for danger while trying to shoot something, perhaps a deer, for supper.

Beau slipped out of the hollow oak to stand by Rowan's side, silent for once, listening, waiting.

From the northeast lip of the hollow came the harsh call of a rook. A bit farther to the east sounded the whistle of a mistle thrush. Rook, the rook, was in position and ready. So was Etty, the mistle thrush.

Rowan trilled the warbling song of a wren in reply. Beau grinned up at her, silently telling her,
“Mon foi!
You do that well.” Then Beau walked away. Rowan wondered how she was supposed to make Dove walk; lift the reins, or kick, or what? But no need. Dove followed Beau the way Tykell followed Rowan. There he was now, the wolf-dog, trotting in zigzags near her side.

Rook, who moved like a shadow in the forest, would be on the lookout for Marcus's men or any other danger. Etty, dressed in deerskin boots and a brown kirtle borrowed from Rowan, would do the same; in the woods she walked almost as silently as Rook. Beau would stay with Rowan and help her with the pony. And of course Tykell stayed with Rowan also, to protect her.

Rowan found it necessary to remind herself that she was an outlaw on a quest to avenge her mother's death. She didn't feel like much of an avenger. She felt worthless.

 

By the third day Rowan could tell herself that at least she had learned to balance on the pony and take charge of the reins. Necessarily so. On Dove's back, with her head at the height of Lionel's, Rowan encountered myriad sharp twigs that seemed determined to poke out her eyes, obstacles she needed to duck and steer clear of. Stout branches, also, seemed beset upon sweeping her off her mount. And grapevines, pesky things. If Rowan did not see them in time to push them aside, they caught like ropes around her waist. Once Rowan found herself dangling, head down above Dove's tail, before her grip on the reins halted the pony.

Never before had Rowan found herself so at war with the forest. She hated feeling that Sherwood had turned against her. She felt wretched.

Having never quite enough to eat did not help. Lionel shot meat, and Tykell, impatient with the slowness of Ro's pace, left her side to range about, sometimes bringing back a rabbit or two. Etty gathered greens, fennel and such. But there was little else to forage so early in the year.

Chill gray weather did not help either. It did not rain, but fog and damp shrouded the stark trees, and the sky stayed as gray as poor little Dove, covered with ashes.

And riding did not help—at first. But after a day or two of stiffness and sore muscles, Rowan learned to let her body sway along with the rhythm of the well-bred pony's pace, and then she found herself soothed, rocked as if in a mother's arms. Looking all day at Dove's ears, she found that they talked to her, fox-pricked alert, or angled with worry, or relaxed, or laid back in disapproval. But Dove seldom disapproved, almost always responding immediately to Rowan's gentlest tug on the reins. Ro learned gratitude to the patient pony who helped her struggle around and between the thorn thickets, the rustling bracken, the hanging grapevines. It was not Dove's fault that the oaks and beeches spread their branches too low, that sometimes Rowan had to lie flat, wrap her arms around Dove's neck and hide her face in Dove's soot-blackened mane to ride beneath the trees.

It was not Dove's fault, either, that human dangers threatened. Beau, like Rook and Etty and Lionel, carried a staff with which to test and probe the path, although there was less danger of man traps this early in the spring, when it was difficult for the foresters to conceal them. But the fewer the man traps, it seemed, the more the patrols. Half a dozen times a day the warning signal, a jay's cry, would come from Rook or Etty or both, and Beau would grab Dove's bridle and dart into the nearest thick shelter—evergreen, usually, hemlock or pine or holly or a scrim of ivy—and Rowan would hang on as Dove trotted after Beau, and the holly leaves or fir needles would claw her face. She would sit without moving in the saddle, and Beau would stand by Dove's head, stroking the pony's soft muzzle to keep her quiet, and they would wait to hear Rook or Etty give the cheery wagtail twitter that meant “all clear.”

Usually they saw nothing, and only afterward would Etty tell them whether it had been foresters, or Nottingham's men, or Marcus's men still on the hunt for her. But once, they saw for themselves: bounty hunters, four rough-looking fellows on shaggy ponies, one with an outlaw's severed head hanging by the hair from the saddle. Rowan's heart turned over, for she knew that dead, hollow-eyed head. It had belonged to one of Robin's men.

After the bounty hunters had passed, Beau looked up at Rowan, her long Grecian-cameo face even whiter than usual. She whispered, “I can't remember his name.”

Rowan shook her head. Robin Hood's band had grown to number close to a hundred men; she did not know them all by name either. But that face—now, she would never forget it.

Robin ... Father ... surely no such thing had happened to him?

It was not a thought that could be spoken.

After a moment of silence, Beau whispered, “Dove is an angel pony.” No fake Frankish accent right now. “She could stamp, snort, neigh to the others ...”

Rowan nodded. A single sound from Dove would have betrayed them, but the pony had stood as silent as the fog.

And the same cloudy gray color. Each day Beau rubbed more charcoal and ashes onto the pony.

Beau told Rowan, “Your face is all smeared with soot. And bleeding.”

“Really?” Rowan lifted her hands to feel for the blood, but stopped herself; her hands, also, were black with soot from clutching at Dove. Trying to clean them, she rubbed them against her own hair, pushing it back from her forehead.

“Now your hair is black.”

“So much the better.” Rowan gave matters a moment's thought, then said, “Beau, could you get me Etty's cloak?”

“Mais certainement.”
The Frankish foolery was back. “Instantly.”

Strapped behind Dove's saddle like a blanket, the cloak was ample and deep-hooded, worthy of a princess. Thick, warm, water-shedding gray wool. Meant for foul weather. Etty used it only to sleep under. But when Beau had unfastened it from the saddlebags, Ro put it on. She slipped her bow and her quiver of arrows off her shoulders, laid them in her lap instead and covered herself head to toe with the cloak, pulling the hood forward until it almost covered her face, and she saw the forest through a tunnel of shadow.

“So the twigs don't blind me,” she explained.

“Mon foi,
you look like the death specter on a ghost horse, fit to frighten children.”

For once Rowan found herself not amused by Beau's babble. “Don't talk like that,” she flared.

“Sacre bleu,
I just joking.”

“Well, don't. Don't joke about me and death.”

I
n days to follow, Rowan continued to wear the cloak, which did indeed protect her face and eyes against the forest fingers relentlessly jabbing at her.

The travelers proceeded in the same careful way they had begun. Beau walked beside the pony. Rook scouted ahead to the northwest; Etty scouted ahead to the northeast. Lionel ranged even farther ahead, hunting.

But danger, when it came, beset Rowan from behind.

When least expected. Dove ambled along a deer trail atop a ridge, her head bobbing and her ears at a placid angle. And Rowan rocked along with the pony's soft walk, her face safe within the cloak's hood, her head down, starting to nod, almost asleep—

Far to the south she heard a feral cry, something between a growl and a howl. A wolf? Or Tykell? Ro's head snapped up, and so did Dove's; Rowan felt the pony's muscles bunch to leap in fright. Just in time Beau caught Dove by the bridle, as Rowan twisted in the saddle to look.

From the ridge she could see far between the trees, for bushes and thickets were just budding, not yet in leaf. And amid the bare trunks of distant oaks she saw something moving, something massive and black.

Turning toward her.

A huge black warhorse that seemed to have two heads.

Ro went rigid. “Lady help us,” she whispered. She knew that monster, her mortal enemy, a bounty hunter who rode in armor of black horsehide atop his black horse. The one who had half a dozen times tried to kill her, Robin, Lionel.

It appeared that he had seen her already. But perhaps he had not yet seen Beau behind the pony.

Rowan ordered Beau, “Hide!”

“What? I—”

There was no time to explain. Rowan lifted her foot and booted Beau in the chest, sending her sprawling into a patch of bracken. “Stay down!” she hissed. At the same time she swung her other foot, stirrup and all, over the front of the saddle so that she rode sideward, lady-style, and her bow and arrows slid off her lap to land in the bracken with Beau. Rowan turned Dove away from Beau and urged the pony forward, off the deer trail, down the slope. But not too fast. She did not want to appear to be fleeing. With one hand on the reins she held Dove to a rapid walk. With the other she rubbed ashes from Dove's mane onto her own face and hair, just in case they were not sufficiently smeared already. Then she felt for her dagger, drawing it from its sheath at her belt, keeping it hidden under her cloak.

Scarcely a furlong from where she had left Beau, she heard the hoofbeats of the warhorse closing in at a ramping trot from behind her.

She turned Dove to face her enemy as he rode up to her on his black steed. To face him, and also to place him with his back toward where Beau lay not too well hidden. If he had ridden past the bracken a few paces closer or slower, he would have seen the girl huddled there.

He yanked his steed to a halt with a burly hand gloved in black. All armored in black leather he rode, in the hide of a black horse, and what had been the skin of the horse's head—forelock, ears, mane and all—served as his helm, hiding his face. Glaring through the narrow openings where the dead horse's eyes had been, he towered over Rowan. His war steed towered over Dove.

“Sir Guy of Gisborn.” From within the concealment of her cloak's hood, Rowan greeted him in a high, wispy voice as much unlike her own as she could manage. “Well met.”

He barked, “You know me, damsel?”

“All who dread outlaws know Sir Guy of Gisborn.” Although he was a common, mercenary bounty hunter, she flattered him by titling him a knight. ”Look, riding this lonely forest way, I tremble in fear.” Indeed Rowan's hand shook on Dove's reins, and her voice wavered most pathetically.

But he did not soften his voice. “Who are you? Let me see you.

Twice before, Rowan had faced Guy of Gisborn, but that had been two years ago, when she had been a skinny short-haired boy-Rowan, chin up, eyes defiant. Once since, Guy of Gisborn had seen her as a girl lying captured and unconscious at the edge of two kings-men's camp—but it had been nighttime then, and she hoped the firelight had not shown her clearly. And that also had been a goodly time ago. She had grown since, and not just bosoms, as Etty had teased.

Reaching up to pull back the hood of her cloak, Rowan kept her eyes downcast, her chin tucked to her collarbone, and she puffed her cheeks just enough to change the shape of her face, to make her look babyish and stupid. She drew back the cowl to the blackened front of her hair for barely a moment, acting the part of a timid damsel, careful not to look at Guy of Gisborn.

During that moment there was terrible silence. Far away in the hush Rowan heard a pattering sound, soft at first, then drawing nearer like myriad tiny swarming dooms. Rain coming.

She tugged the cowl forward again and hunched her shoulders to make herself small, cowering.

Guy of Gisborn asked, “Why are there ashes on your face?”

Rowan breathed out. He had not recognized her.

“I go in penance,” she said, keeping her voice high, wispy and tremulous, “all by myself in ashes and penance to beg my husband, my lord, my master to take me back.”

“So you're a runaway bride.” Not the least bit surprised that such a young girl might be married, Guy of Gisborn now sounded more insolent than harsh. With foaming mouth his war steed fought against the curb bit, but Guy of Gisborn held the horse still, lolling in the saddle. “Do you know anything of another one, a wench named Ettarde, on a white pony?”

Rowan felt Dove trembling beneath her, poised to run for fear of the great black steed. She felt her own hand, the one hidden beneath her cloak, clench her dagger hilt. Stroking Dove's shoulder with her other hand, trying to calm the pony, Rowan shook her hooded head.