I gave him as tart a look as my pained head could manage and began an unsteady climb to my feet. “Your accent isn’t exactly BBC standard.”
He may not have understood the reference, but he got my point. He rose from his crouch, and good Lord, there was a lot of him. I thought that people were smaller in the Middle Ages, before vitamin-enriched breakfast cereals and whatever. The knight was a head taller than me, broad-shouldered and fit. Then there was all the chain armor and the leather and the way he took my hands and pulled me up as if I weighed nothing at all.
“We don’t have time for nonsense,” he said. “If you can banter, you can answer my questions.”
“I doubt that.” I couldn’t even answer my own questions.
He frowned—he had a face that looked good frowning, all strong angles and steely eyes—but before he could reply, the sound of a large animal moving through the trees stopped me, and I grabbed the knight’s arm.
“What’s that?” It sounded like a bear. Or a wild boar. Hell, it could have been a dragon, the way my day was going.
The knight tactfully peeled my fingers from his biceps. “That is an ally, which is fortunate, since you’ve attached yourself to my sword arm.”
I let go. Weaving through the trees was a sturdy pony. Astride it was a skinny boy with a wild thatch of hair and eyebrows like caterpillars. Not exactly the kind of ally I was expecting.
“Sir James! You caught him!” The knight’s name was the only useful thing I got from the barely intelligible gush of words that came next. I grasped about a third of it—as opposed to the half I got from everyone else—and filled in the rest from context. “I’ve never seen anything like that dive from the castle bridge. We saw you from the road, and I thought for sure you’d dashed your brains out on the river bottom.”
Sir James gestured to the boy. “This is Much…who told me he could move through these woods without so much as disturbing a deer.”
“That was the pony making noise, not me. And I was in a hurry. The reeve’s soldiers are riding out from Nottingham.”
“How many?” asked the knight, in a grimly tactical kind of way.
“All of them, I think.” The boy gazed at me with a mix of awe and…awe, mostly. “What did you do?”
“Nothing.” I’d protested my innocence so often, even I was starting not to believe it.
Sir James, all business, asked the boy, “How far away?”
“They just left the town gate and are staying on the road. But the rangers are cutting through the woods.”
The knight exhaled the way most people would curse. “You should have started with that, Much.”
The kid finally looked chastened. “I’m sorry. I’m just a miller’s son. I’m new to this. Well, not new to evading the reeve’s men, but—”
I had a billion questions, but I broke in with “What’s a reeve?” just to have a place to start.
“The worst thing that ever happened to this shire,” said Much, so vehemently that a thatch of his hair flopped into his eyes and sprang back up again.
Sir James gave a more textbook answer. “The shire reeve administrates for the crown—collects taxes, enforces common law, oversees trial by combat or ordeal…”
Shire reeve. I ran it together like he’d said it—shirreve—a few times and then bam—I got it. “You mean, the sheriff? Of Nottingham?”
“That’s what I said,” said the boy, in his barely interpretable accent.
I laughed, slightly hysterical, and gestured to the woods around the river and the clearing where we stood. “Then I suppose this is Sherwood Forest.”
Much gave me a suspicious side-eye. “Where else would we be?”
I rubbed my forehead. The pain cleared some of the fog. Nottingham and Sherwood Forest were real places. The shire reeve, or sheriff, was a real job. Mom had said so…maybe an hour ago, maybe hundreds of years from now.
The thought brought on a twist of fear and loss, like homesickness. Whatever was happening to me, my subconscious had recognized that I was, one way or another, far, far from home.
The knight’s horse looked up suddenly, ears pricked, nostrils flaring. Sir James and Much exchanged a look.
God. The ride wasn’t over. The roller coaster had only leveled out before the next drop. Every instinct said to bail. Adieu. Godspeed. It’s been surreal.
Sir James must have read my mind, because he caught my arm when I would have taken off blindly. “Don’t run. They’ll have dogs.”
His matter-of-fact tone made the image of rabid teeth tearing my flesh even more coldly vivid. Plus, where would I go? All I had on me was a tube of lip gloss and my BritRail pass.
“I’ll jump back in the river if I have to,” I swore. I would take my chances in the water over what passed for justice in Head-on-a-Spike-Land.
Sir James swept a tactical glance over me. Whatever factors he was weighing, he quickly came to a decision. “Much, keep a lookout.” The boy didn’t hesitate, but rode to the edge of the clearing and tied his pony to a low tree branch, then scrabbled up into the boughs. To me, Sir James said, “Adjust your garments. And don’t speak if you can help it.”
“Why?” Indignation rallied me a bit. “Because I’m a girl?”
“Because your speech is deranged.” With that, he turned to his horse and started unbuckling saddle things.
He had a point. I quickly wrung the foul water out of my soaked sweater, stretching the knit so that it hung loose and covered my hips as well. Good thing I was more a Diana than an Aphrodite. My hair was short, and I was so covered in muck my own mother wouldn’t recognize me.
When the knight turned back, he ran another quick eye over me and nodded as if it would have to do.
Much’s face appeared in the foliage above the riverside clearing where we stood. “It’s Guilbert and his men, coming from the northeast. They’re not even trying to be quiet.”
I could hear the sound of dogs and horses, but the trees dispersed the noise so it seemed to be coming from every direction, like my panic.
Sir James stepped into my line of sight. A pair of gauntlets were folded over and tucked into his belt, which rode low on his hips, pulled down by the weight of his sword.
A freaking broadsword. The scabbard and the leather-wrapped grip were dark both with use and careful maintenance. The weighty-looking pommel was stamped with the same equal-armed cross that he wore on his chest.
I didn’t know why that was the pivot point. Maybe it was the weapon, and the way it seemed so natural to him, like how I carried a bow. Maybe it was my options: bad and worse. Maybe it was because, looking upriver, the way I’d come, I could see the castle atop its sheer rock face, surrounded by woods and hills instead of Victorian town houses and modern football stadiums. Above it was a gray-blue sky without a power line, cell tower, or vapor trail in sight.
Suddenly, I was shaking. My soaking-cold clothes had triumphed over body heat and adrenaline. Shock crept numbing fingers between my ribs, making it hard to breathe. I focused on the man in front of me, staring at the intricately linked chains of his mail shirt. The tidily mended hole in his linen surcoat was more vivid than the memory of what I’d eaten for breakfast that morning.
“Is this real?” I whispered, not sure who I was asking.
The knight answered, hands bracing my shoulders, “You are in very real trouble. Let me help you. We will sort all else out later.”
“Okay,” I said, and then, with more conviction, “okay.” This was happening—however it was happening—so I’d better pull myself together and deal with it.
I picked up the arrow I’d left on the ground. The fletching was caked with mud, but it didn’t need to fly straight, it just needed to remind me who I was on the competition line.
Six riders dressed all in brown and green and black came out of the trees. It looked for a moment like the woods were closing in around us, trapping us with our backs to the river.
The riders were expecting me, but not the knight.
Before they had even arranged their horses—and their three pony-sized dogs—to loosely pen us in, every one of them had eyeballed Sir James from the top of his close-cropped hair to the spurs on his boots, and none of them missed his hand resting nonchalantly—but not accidentally—on the hilt of his sword.
Leading them was the captain from the bridge on his performance sports car of a horse. He was dressed for business—sword at his side, leather jerkin with a padded tunic beneath it, and suede breeches to guard against branches as he rode. His men were outfitted the same way, except most carried bows and had knives on their belts. They looked keenly formidable, much more so than the lumbering castle guards.
My game face was totally wasted on them. The captain’s sharp-eyed gaze checked me off his roll call and noted Much’s riderless pony, but his attention was focused on Sir James. I was the one-point circle. The knight was the bull’s-eye. I tried not to be offended.
Sir James smiled, which nobody, including me, expected. “Henry Guilbert,” he said, with a note of discovery. He used the French pronunciation—Geel-BEAR—and continued in French, or close enough to it that I could follow. “I’d heard that a Guilbert was chief forester, but I didn’t know it was you.”
I sensed a weird undertone, like Sir James wasn’t as surprised as he let on, and Henry Guilbert…Well, the guards had addressed him as Sir at the castle, when they weren’t calling him Captain, but Sir James hadn’t used either title. Guilbert took in the emblem on the knight’s chest, then his deeply tanned face. Abruptly his confusion cleared, and he shifted back in his saddle. “James? I had no idea you were back from the Holy Land.”
“Just barely. I haven’t even seen my family yet.” Sir James glanced at the riders surrounding us. “Has the sheriff got you and your rangers chasing down waifs and strays?”
Guilbert didn’t like that. He had a game face, too, but it didn’t go deep. “Only when they trespass on a royal castle and attack Nottingham’s soldiers. I should thank you that we didn’t have to pull this half-drowned cat out of the sewer.” He finally gave me his attention—me and the arrow in my white-knuckled fist. “What are you planning to do with that?” he asked.
“I’m going to put the point through anyone who tries to put my head on a spike.”
One of the rangers—my translation was slippery, but that’s the word I was going with—turned a laugh into a cough. The captain arched that brow. “You mean you’re going to try.”
“Give me one of those bows and I’ll put the point through anything I want.”
It was a statement, not a boast, though the riders took it as one and dismissed the threat. Guilbert, on the other hand, didn’t look so sure.
Sir James clapped a hand on my shoulder. His manner was composed, but there was a warning in his tightening grip. “You must forgive my friend,” he said, nodding to me. “He was kicked in the head by a horse.”
I pressed my lips together to keep in any more ravings, and touched the warm trickle on the side of my head, producing a very real wince. Then I held up my bloody fingers and wiggled them. “Nasty horse.”
Captain Guilbert gave me a narrow-eyed look that transcended eras. “So you know this…person, James?”
“We met recently on the road,” the knight said smoothly. “I’m sure you noticed his foreign speech. He went ahead of me to Nottingham town and became lost. Isn’t that right, er…lad?”
“Yes.” “Lost” was the understatement of whichever century I was in.
Guilbert’s expression turned drily doubtful. “So lost that you ended up in the cellars of the castle?”
I had no idea how I ended up in the cellars of the castle, but that didn’t stop me from coming up with an answer. “Well, I did say that I was looking for a friar.”
“A friar?” Captain Guilbert laughed. “Are you trading your Templar shield for a monk’s habit, James?”
Sir James acknowledged the jab with a wry half smile. “I am weighing every option, now that I’m home from the Crusade.” It sounded like an honest admission. “All you and I wanted as boys was to become knights, but the sword grows heavy after it’s tasted too much blood.”
The bleakness beneath his calm kept him from sounding melodramatic. These guys said nothing without silent layers beneath; I was having to translate twice, once from French, and once from subtext. It was exhausting, and made my head pound even harder.
Guilbert’s mood shifted at James’s words, becoming stiff and prickly. “We all have difficult duties to perform.” His horse sidled restlessly, conveying his tension. His men felt it, too. Saddle leather creaked as they awaited orders. The captain raised his voice and spoke in English. “You can start by telling your friend to come out of hiding or my men will shoot him out of that tree.”
I immediately looked toward where Much was hiding because I have no game except on the sporting field. One of the archers nocked an arrow. It was a short bow, easier to ride with, but it would put a shot into the tree well enough. When the knight didn’t speak fast enough, I grabbed his arm. “Don’t call his bluff.”
Sir James gave me a look like I’d just told him not to put beans in his ears. I dropped my hand, feeling stupid, and he called up into the tree, “All right, Much. You heard Sir Henry.”
After a lot of rustling, the boy emerged and dropped into the crook of the tree trunk, looking very puckish with twigs sticking out of his hair. Guilbert looked from him to James. “It seems you’re the one collecting waifs.”
“Perhaps because Nottingham seems to have become a dangerous place for them.” His tone was unmistakably critical.
Guilbert didn’t deny it. “A lot has changed since you’ve been gone, James.” He sounded cynical and resigned, or maybe just bored. “Strays don’t just wander in and out of Nottingham Castle without answering for it. I’ve orders to seize the trespasser so he may supply those answers to the sheriff.”
“But I don’t have any answers,” I protested.
Guilbert switched back to French and spoke directly to me. “That’s not my concern. My men are saddle-weary and hungry, so I am motivated to keep you in one piece so that the sheriff can ask his questions and be done with it. If you’d rather wait for Nottingham’s soldiers to find you, they won’t care whether you’re in any condition to respond to interrogation.”
His tone conjured images of racks and thumbscrews, of the tattered flesh of the bodies hanging outside the castle. I stopped worrying whether this was reality or a delusion. The smell and nausea and fear were real. The pain was real. The rest was just existential nitpicking.
I hadn’t realized I’d taken a step toward the river’s edge until Sir James caught my wrist, gently but firmly pulled me to his side, and didn’t let go. “He’s already in no condition for an interrogation. Let me attend to his injury and then I will bring the boy to Nottingham.”
Wait, what?
A soft and wordless protest squeezed through betrayal’s choke hold on my throat. I felt like I’d plummeted from the bridge all over again.
Guilbert’s scoff was almost a laugh. “My orders are to bring the accused to the shire hall with all due haste.”
The rangers and Much were watching the conversation avidly, even though it was in French. Maybe because I was trying to decide which Sir I was going to stab with my arrow first. That needed no translation.
Sir James still had hold of my wrist, and I almost missed the subtle tightening of his fingers, like he was trying to tell me something. “You wouldn’t want the boy to succumb to a brain fever and die before he can answer the sheriff’s questions, would you?”
Oh. The boy. I see what you did there.
Guilbert gave him a long, measuring stare. Then he gave me the same. Finally, tight-jawed, he held out one hand with an imperious flick of his fingers. At the motion, his riders all came alert, and I heard the resettling of their weapons. Sir James let go of my wrist, freeing his sword hand. The captain was the only one at ease. He raised that brow, expectant, and I realized I wa
s supposed to turn over the arrow in my hand.
I painfully uncurled my cramped fingers, stiff with cold and tension, and offered my surrender.
Guilbert nudged his horse forward and took the arrow. I stayed still somehow as he reached down with a gloved hand to lift the sodden flop of hair from my forehead and look at the knot on my skull.
“Kicked by a horse, was it?”
“Something like that.” I tried to look like I might expire from a brain fever, but without being too obvious about it. It wasn’t hard to look faint, though. The horse was big and restless, the captain was armed and…intense. So was his inspection.
With a swipe of his thumb, he wiped a track clean on my cheek, frowned, then flicked the river muck away with distaste. “There is the winning argument. I wouldn’t inflict your smell on anyone in my command.”
What an asshole.
He spoke in English then so the rangers could understand. “On your honor, Sir James, I release this prisoner into your charge, where the boy will appear at the shire hall in Nottingham by dusk today to answer for the charges of trespassing.” His tone turned almost droll. “Barring death by horse hoof, of course.”
“See you then.” Sir James nodded, as unruffled as if he were dismissing the captain instead of the other way around. Guilbert shot him a look, gathered his men with another gesture, and led them away at a canter.
I exhaled fully for the first time in ages, feeling like I’d dodged a bullet. Or maybe…I slid a glance toward Sir James…like someone had yanked me out of its path.
Then Much crowed in victory and I nearly jumped out of my skin. “That was amazing!” he said. “No one but the sheriff ever tells Sir Henry Guilbert what to do.”
That raised a good question. “What is it the sheriff tells him to do?” I asked. “Because I doubt anyone has to tell him to be a jackass.”
Much’s mouth dropped open, and his eyes popped almost as wide. Then he laughed so hard he nearly fell out of the crook of the tree.
“Much,” chided Sir James. Then to me, in the same tone, “Try not to corrupt him, if you please.”
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