The Last Arrow RH3 (51 page)

"What?"

She tried to turn her head but he stopped it and raked his hands deeper into her hair, curling his fingers into her scalp and winning instead a small shudder of relief.

"Will could always show them if you are not up to it, but Robin and I thought the lesson would be more effective coming from you."

"Lesson?"

"They boast of having the best archers in England in their midst. We thought they might like to see what they could do with a real weapon in their hands."

"Why would you not show them?"

He ran his hands down her slender arms and up again. "Because you would be far more convincing."

She bowed her head forward, obeying the gentle command of his hands. The tugging and kneading of her hair and scalp was having the desired effect: the bludgeoning faded like magic and she could actually feel her blood tingling with new life. Unfortunately, it was also starting to tingle in places not intended, like her breasts, her belly, her loins, and she found herself sighing with each stroke, bemoaning the helplessness of it all.

A word, a look, a simple touch of his hands and she was lost. Even worse, he could sense it, feel it through his fingertips, and he tilted her head back, drawing it against his shoulder as he brought her mouth around to his, kissing her with a thoroughness that completed the work his fingers had begun on her body.

"Now you know how I felt that first night at Amboise, Margery," he murmured against her lips. "All oiled and warm and ready to come out of my skin every time your hands skimmed down my body."

She slid her hand up and around his neck and pulled him back, her mouth parting beneath his in a lush invitation.

The gentle rolling motions of his tongue matched those of his fingers and she would gladly have come out of her clothes had he not tempered her eagerness with a soft, husky laugh.

"Unfortunately, Robin is waiting. But do not drink any-thing stronger than water with the evening meal," he warned with lusty menace. "We will have a bed beneath us tonight, by God, and a long afternoon ahead to plan best how to use it."

He kissed her again, then helped her to her feet.

The ravine, when they stepped outside the hut, was spackled with darting points of sunlight, brightening the camp more than she would have expected from remembered first impressions. It seemed as if more men had arrived and the common bustled with activity. There were more fires scattered around the encampment, filling the air with lazy fingers of smoke. More women in evidence, too, and even several children who ran screeching from an outlaw dressed in a deerskin robe, imitating some forest ogre.

Alan and four of his henchmen were seated under the Major Oak with the knights from Amboise and while it was surety everyone in the stronghold was anxious about their animated conversation, the outlaws all went about their normal business, trusting they would be privy to the results in due time. Some were staging mock fights with staves and broadsticks. Others were practicing with slingshots, with bow and arrow. Brenna was starting to feel guilty over being the only one to sleep away the morning, until she saw the red creases in her brothers' faces and and the bloodshot veins in their eyes that suggested they had only just been roused themselves.

Robin acknowledged her arrival in their midst with a slight frown as he finished what he was saying to Alan a' Dale.

"Gisbourne will be expecting you to ambush them on the forest road, as has been your habit thus far. While his troops are in the forest, therefore, they will be as alert as bloodhounds, with every conceivable defense at the ready."

"So, you are telling us it is impossible for an attack to succeed."

"They have only to move in a tight pack, with their shields raised, and your efforts will go for naught," Will advised.

"The men-at-arms will flush you out of the trees and the knights will ride you down and those of you who survive will likely be hanged alongside your Friar Tuck to save them the trouble of soiling their donjons."

Alan spread his hands. "Then what do you suggest we do?"

"The very last thing they would expect you to do. Attack them in the open, on a meadow or a field. It would have to be the right meadow or field, of course, preferably with hills on either side and a small stand of wood to conceal us before the attack, but..."

"Attack Guy of Gisbourne's forces in an open field?" The outlaw stared at Will as if he had suggested doing it naked as well.

"They will be even more shocked at the improbability," the younger man promised. "And because they will have left Sherwood behind, they will also have eased their muscles enough to let the sweat run out of their sleeves. They will have shouldered their shields, unwound their crossbows, even spread themselves carelessly along the road to applaud their courage against your cowardice."

Alan shook his head. "We are successful because we can move like ghosts through the trees. We can strike and run and disappear into places the king's men would never dare venture near. These men are all as brave as brave can be"— he looked around the camp, his face reflecting the agony of leadership—"but we have no more than a dozen swords among us and not half that many who can use one to any good effect."

"But you have archers by the score," Robin pointed out excitedly. "And archers are most effective and most deadly from one, two hundred yards away."

"From two hundred yards away," Alan retorted dryly, "our arrows would bounce off their armor like drunken maybugs." Robin smiled. "Not if you use these." Littlejohn came forward at his invitation and produced a large leather pouch bulging with twice-tempered arrowheads.

"Unlike the softer iron broadheads your men use, these will pierce through mail and bullhide like a knife through cheese."

The outlaw fingered the bright, sharp arrowheads but still looked dubious. "At fifty yards, maybe ... and if every one of my men had the strength of Littlejohn in their arms."

"Would you dispute the fact that my sister is by far the smallest member of our party?"

Alan shrugged, not knowing where the question was going. "She is a woman, not overlarded to be sure."

"And therefore likely to be one of the weakest?"

All of the outlaws seated at the table exchanged glances and nodded warily.

"Choose a target," Robin said, and took up one of the longbow staves that lay on the table in front of him, handing it to Brenna.

"Do not make it too easy a mark," Dag cautioned, "or she will choose her own and it may come as a painful surprise."

There was a tree standing at the mouth of the southern end of the ravine, a distance of some fifty yards. Someone had been gathering acorns and a small pouch of them hung from one of the lower branches.

Dag shook his head and gave the outlaw who chose it an I-warned-you look, but Brenna nocked an arrow, raised the enormous bow and drew back on the string, firing all in the same fluid motion.

The outlaws' heads swiveled and saw the acorns jump violently as the arrow struck, pierced clean through the sack, and tore it off the branch, carrying it another twenty yards or more into the stream, leaving the foresters gaping at the weapon in her hand.

Geoffrey LaFer cleared his throat to break the stunned silence and pointed casually to an oak high on the lip of the ravine. "Perhaps a more challenging target?"

The tree had been hit recently by lightning and had one half of its trunk split to one side. Some bird or animal had chewed through the charred bark and opened a bare patch of raw wood. It was smaller, perhaps, than the painted eye of an archery butt placed a similar distance away—at least two hundred and twenty yards—but with the sunlight gleaming on the peeled wood, it made an acceptable mark.

The outlaws—two of whom could not make out the spot even though they squinted and shielded their eyes against the glare of the sun—balked and declared that such a shot was a good joke but impossible to make.

"She can make it six times," Griffyn said quietly, "in under a minute."

Brenna looked at him, and he looked back with his best, seductive smile, and the outlaws were quick to pull out their pennies to match the ones Dag tossed to the center of the table.

Brenna selected six long ashwood arrows and checked the vanes of the fletching for any breaks or flaws. Five of them she stuck upright in the soft earth at her feet; the sixth she nocked carefully in the string. She stood with her head cocked a moment to follow the gliding path of a hawk overhead and to gauge the currents of the wind where

they blew stronger at the top of the ravine. She drew the fletching slowly back to her chin, then further still to her ear as she sighted along the shaft. With a snap of her fingers she loosed the arrow and reached for a second one, nocking, drawing, and firing before the first had struck its mark. The four remaining shafts followed the first two in awe-inspiring succession, but it was the shrill echo of a distant scream that brought the outlaws surging to their feet.

Brenna's smile froze, half formed on her face, and for one dreadful moment, she thought she had missed the designated target and hit another, for at the last possible second, a round elfin face had popped out of the foliage beside the charred oak to spy on the assembly below. It had disappeared again, his scream ricocheting off the opposite wall of the ravine as he dove into a cradle of cracking branches and flying leaves. One after another, almost without a break, the six arrows thudded into the trunk of the tree, narrowly missing the mop of curly dark hair by a mere hand's width—a shockingly slim margin of error that brought Sparrow tumbling down from branch to branch, vine to slithering vine until he landed like a bat-winged squirrel in the midst of the startled encampment.

Several of the foresters scrambled for their bows, many more scattered behind the sheltering trunks of trees as the bandy-legged seneschal stalked over to Brenna and stood before her, his hands planted on his hips, his cap askew over one dark, accusing eye.

"See you this ear, Missy? I have grown fond of it over the years and would like to keep it thus, pinned to the side of my head! If you wanted me to come forth, you could have called my name and I would gladly have joined you!

There was no need to throft me hither by the skin of my ballocks!"

"I swear, I did not know you were there," Brenna gasped, her hand covering the laugh that refused to be contained.

"It was Geoffrey who chose the target."

Geoffrey, prudently, was not in his seat when Sparrow whirled around to confront him. He was making haste to put the trunk of the Major Oak between himself and the red-faced woodsprite, who set off after him with a quarrel drawn and nocked in the string of his arblaster.

Alan a' Dale signaled his men to lower their weapons and resumed his seat, scratching his head over some distant memory as he followed the farcical pair running around the

tree. "I thought I had only imagined seeing a gnome that day in the forest of Angers."

"Sparrow is very real," Robin assured him. "And so is the power of the longbow."

Alan cast an eye in Brenna's direction with a new gleam of respect kindling in the midnight-blue depths. She, in turn, saw the wisdom of Griffyn's caution back at the turnip-farmer's cottage, especially when the outlaws quickly made room for her on their bench and asked if they might try pitting their strength against the bow.

"Do you have bowyers among you?" Robin asked. "And fletchers?"

Alan nodded and indicated several wide-eyed foresters edging closer to the table to have a better look at the Welsh weapon. "Though in sooth, will it not take more time than we have for my men to learn how to use one of these things?"

"We have a dozen bows with us. Pick your best archers and give them over to Will and Brenna for the rest of the day. They may not be able to make as fine a shot as you have just witnessed, but certes, they will be able to hit one of Gisbourne's fine fat coystrils from a hundred yards away. If we can cut down half the knights while they are blinking the confusion out of their eyes, the rest will scatter and run before your arrows like hens in front of a fox."

For the first time, a glimmer of real excitement touched Alan a' Dale's eyes. "Then we have a chance?"

Robin lifted his cup of ale. "With God's good luck, we have an excellent fighting chance ... if we can find the right place along the road to set up our attack."

One of the outlaws looked up from the bow he was admiring. "Hills on either side, you say, and a wood nearby?"

"Do you know of such a place?"

"Aye. An hour's walk beyond Sherwood—the Witch's Teats, we call it."

"Could you show me this place?" "Aye, could do."

The Last Arrow 385

Robin reached out and snagged Sparrow by the fringe of his collar as he chased by. "Enough fun, Puck. We have much work to do over the next two days. Saddle the horses," he said to Timkin, who was lounging nearby with a dozing Fulgrin. "Hopefully we can find this place and be back by nightfall."

Richard whistled low to catch his attention. "Rob?"

He turned to follow his brother's gaze and saw Marienne coming across the common. There was a young boy walking by her side, no more than ten years old to judge by the smooth face and wide, innocent blue eyes. He was not very tall, nor very broad across the shoulders yet, but there was promise in the long, easy stride. The promise of a future king.