“Hardly the act of an innocent man,” said the sheriff, complacent again. “Captain Guilbert, you will secure the accused in the dungeon until all is ready for the ordeal by water.”
“What does that mean?” I grabbed James’s arm, just to stop the feeling that I was being swept downriver and tumbled over the rocks all over again. “Is it like waterboarding?”
James kept his outward calm, but he was pissed. No, outraged. He had to unclench his jaw before speaking. “It means the accused is weighted and lowered into a pond, where God will judge his innocence.”
“You mean if I drown, I’m guilty?” For half a second I could breathe again, until the full sentence assembled itself in my brain. “Hang on. Weighted? Like, with weights on?”
James put up a quieting hand. “Calm down. Let me just—”
I didn’t let him finish. Guilbert had come up on my other side like he was actually going to escort me to the dungeon. “You’ve done this,” I said.
He remained cold, but his jaw shifted like he wanted to say more than “It’s the law.”
“What is wrong with you people?” I couldn’t wrap my head around how much trouble I was in, which somehow made it easier to reject this decidedly no-win scenario. “What about a trial by jury?” I asked James.
“Only if the sheriff grants it,” he said, then glanced at Guilbert before lowering his voice. “There’s only one way to avoid this. You need to ask His Honor—respectfully—for a trial by combat.”
“Trial by combat?” I hissed. “Are you nuts?”
“Were my instructions somehow unclear, Captain Guilbert?” asked the sheriff. He looked at the sergeant, who looked at his soldiers, but before he could order them forward, Guilbert gestured for two of his rangers to back him up, and I looked covetously at their bows. Not that I could shoot my way out of the castle, but when you have one particular skill—
Like a magician’s rope trick, the snarl of my panicked thoughts pulled straight. Suddenly I had the clarity of the firing line and something almost like a plan.
“Your Honor,” I said, “if I can’t have a trial by jury, I want a trial by combat.”
There was a collective sort of inhale, and then the courtyard was full of sound—laughter from the soldiers, exclamations from the townsfolk. Guilbert let out a curse, and the sheriff pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. Beside me, all business, James took his gloves from where they were tucked into his belt and started to put them on.
“Now, listen,” he said in that low, quick voice. “I have not seen Guilbert fight in years. I’m not absolutely sure I can best him. If I can’t…”
“What are you talking about?” I figured it out before I finished the question. “You think I want you to fight for me?”
His look didn’t allow for argument. “Regardless of what you want, this is what has to happen.”
That was not my plan, and when I glanced at the sheriff, I could see from his sulky scowl that it wasn’t his, either. Only my ignominious end would save face as far as he was concerned.
Guilbert wasn’t nuts about James’s idea, either. “Are you certain you want to take this course, James?”
James raised a brow in a good parody of Guilbert’s favorite expression. “Are you saying you’d rather cross swords with this…” I thought he was going to say fille, but he went with “…fledgling?”
Guilbert’s answer was spoken through his teeth and exceeded my vocabulary of French curse words. They were talking over my head, in voices not pitched for the public. Another glance at the sheriff showed him getting impatient as well as annoyed. My plan relied pretty heavily on his mood, so I took my chance. Raising my voice, as if I’d been part of the discussion all along, I called out, “Whoa. No. Anything but that.”
James and Guilbert shut up, with weirdly similar expressions. James stared at me, baffled, and Guilbert looked worried I might be contagious. I stepped past both men and addressed the suddenly attentive sheriff. “Your Honor, please allow Sir James to stand champion for me. Don’t make me do as the captain wants and compete with a bow and arrow against one of his men. I’ve heard how good the rangers of Sherwood Forest are.”
“What’s this?” asked the sheriff, sitting straighter as he noted the murmurs from the crowd.
“My lord,” said Guilbert, his confusion sliding into suspicion, “I am not certain that this idea is—”
The sheriff snapped, “You don’t have to be certain, Captain. You merely have to do what I command.” He eyed me, calculating. “How do I know you would not be a challenge against even Guilbert’s best shot?”
“It’s just that…that…” I looked around desperately for a clue how to finish the sentence. I landed on James, and prayed he really would be my champion and come up with some divine inspiration right about now.
“It’s just that…,” James began, looking at me like he was still fitting puzzle pieces together. “Sir Henry insists that Rob here shoot the bow that…”
He threw the lifeline and I grabbed it. “That Sir James brought back from the Holy Land!” I said, a little too excited. I tried to turn it to indignation. “Have you seen that thing? It’s massive.”
“Much too big for someone his size,” said James, gesturing to me.
Guilbert stared at us like James had caught my crazy, which was fair and true. “Your Honor,” he said to the sheriff in a reasonable tone that was about to ruin everything. “I don’t know what—”
“I won’t do it,” I said over him. “You can’t make me.”
Finally. I saw the flash in the sheriff’s beady eye. “You won’t?” he echoed. “It’s not for you to say what you will or won’t do.”
“Massive!” I repeated, holding my bound hands as far apart as I could to punctuate this fish story.
“Let me see this monster bow,” His Honor commanded.
James gave me a dark look, but he whistled, his horse obediently ambled over, and he untied the bow from his saddle, unwrapping it as he took it to the sheriff and handed it up without comment.
I held my breath, scared I’d blow the whole con, worried it was totally obvious how much I wanted to get my hands on that instrument. The sheriff weighed the length of smooth yew in one gauntleted hand, but I could tell he didn’t know what he was looking for. He handed it to the commander of his soldiers, who examined the bowstring attached to one end, then flexed the wood experimentally. The commander looked at me, sort of snorted, and said, “This is too much of a bow for him. It would be a contest just to string it.”
“Set up a target!” ordered the sheriff, and half the courtyard sprang into motion.
Holy crap. That actually worked.
I wiped a cold sweat from my face with my cloaked arm, ready for James to lay into me because my plan was possibly as insane as diving off the castle bridge. When he closed the distance between us, though, all he said was “Are you unwell?”
“Of course I’m not well,” I whispered. My thighs trembled like I’d run the stadium bleachers. Twice. “But at least I’m not tied to a rock and praying for a miracle at the bottom of a pond.”
Taking hold of my wrists, James deftly cut me free with his knife. “I wouldn’t have let that happen,” he said, leaving out that he had, after all, volunteered to champion me.
I rubbed the circulation back into my hands and looked up apologetically. “We made a pretty good team, though,” I offered.
He slanted me a look that might have been amused if it wasn’t so disapproving. “I cannot decide if you are madly reckless or simply much craftier than I first thought.”
Was that a compliment or a criticism? “I’m not crafty. I’m just…desperate.” And he didn’t know the half of it. I was stuck in the Middle Ages, and I’d just taken my strategy from a cartoon rabbit. That gambit had been one part reading the sheriff correctly, and nine parts dumb luck.
Two soldiers came to herd me away from James. “You should find Much,” I called before we were too far apart.
“You should worry about yourself,” he answered before I lost track of him.
The soldiers led me to one end of the court, where the crowd had been cleared so I’d have a lane to shoot in. Captain Guilbert waited for me with the longbow and a cold black stare. “You are a lucky fool, Master Hudson. For your sake, I hope you are the archer that you say you are.”
I gave him my Iron Ellie game face. “I seriously doubt you care one way or the other.”
He didn’t deny it, just handed me the bow. “If you can’t string that thing, this is going to be a short trial.”
Oh my God, finally. The longbow was a thing of beauty as well as function, a smoothly polished curve, the striations in the wood like artwork. The yew—the best wood for a longbow—had been cut so the sapwood was on the outside and the heartwood on the inner bend, giving it flexibility and strength. Unstrung, it came to my shoulder.
I ran the bowstring between my fingers, checking for any fray or wear, ensuring it was secure over one end of the bow. I placed that end on my foot and leaned my hip into the curve of the wood, using my weight rather than my arms to bend it. A six-foot longbow could have a hundred-pound draw weight, and though this bow wasn’t nearly that heavy, I couldn’t have strung it by brute force. An archer would know the trick of it, but the sheriff wasn’t an archer.
I slipped the other loop of the bowstring into its notch, then grabbed the bow at the center, feeling the balance. The grip was wrapped in leather, dark from the oils of an archer’s hand. The hand of James’s friend.
One of Guilbert’s rangers handed me a quiver with only three arrows. I assumed I’d be shooting against him, but he offered a surprisingly genuine “Good luck” and stepped back.
A straight-up target shoot? The sheriff wouldn’t make it that easy, no matter how impossible I had made the longbow sound. I cast around and found him on the dais. He wore a smile, and I felt sick before I even knew why.
I looked for the target. At the far end of the court, I saw Much, his hands still tied in front of him like mine had been, with thin cord that cut into his wrists. It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t just standing there—he was bound to a post directly down range from me.
A roar started in my head, and it wasn’t the cheer of a crowd. Everything had faded away but the sheriff, Much, and the solider who carefully placed a turnip on the boy’s head.
“Are you kidding me?”
“The jest is over.” The sheriff of Nottingham stood to pronounce his sentence. “Here is your trial: shoot the target, and you are free to go. Miss three times, and await a traitor’s fate in the Nottingham dungeon. Shoot the boy…” He preened with his own cleverness. “Well then, I’ll let you live, and the boy’s body will hang over the castle gate as a warning of what happens when someone tries to make a fool of the law.”
The ground seemed to lift under me like an ocean swell. The only reason I stayed on my feet was Much and his expression—equal parts fear and trust. He shouldn’t trust me. Look what I’d done to him.
I didn’t have to find Much’s family. I could hear a woman crying, and the commotion of contained protest. I wasn’t surprised when James shouldered past the guards and into the firing lane. “Sheriff, I object. The miller’s son isn’t on trial.”
“Ah, but he is,” said the sheriff. “Inciting a disturbance in…it doesn’t matter what village.” He was really enjoying this, and it was getting on my nerves. “The accused had best get on with it or the sun will be setting in his eyes.”
I hadn’t missed that. Part of me was already noticing things like the angle of the sun and the thirty feet to the post, with a downward angle of about five to eight degrees. The turnip—securely set in Much’s wild thatch of hair like a golf ball on an overgrown green—was as big as my fist, bigger than the bull’s-eye on a standard tournament target.
Without quite planning to, I took the three arrows from the quiver. Iron bodkin points, gray goose feather fletches, straight and well balanced, but heavier than I was used to. Figure in the unfamiliar bow and the fact that I would have to break a lifetime of safety conditioning.
“Can you do it?” asked James. I hadn’t seen him come to my side. He searched my face for the answer, and his voice was level but taut, as if stretched between the choice of saving Much or saving me.
That was my question to answer.
I handed all my incapacitating emotions over to Iron Ellie, letting her hold them for me so they wouldn’t get in the way. I stuck two of the arrows, point down, into the ground, within easy reach. “Relax. Easy as pie,” I lied.
James stepped back, hands in a defensive “I was only asking” position.
The third arrow I laid across the bow and nocked as I checked downrange, my eye on a second wood post beside Much, with a ten-point-sized knot in the grain. Excellent.
The shaft of the arrow lay in the V formed by the bow and my knuckle. My competition bow had an arrow rest, stabilizers, vibration dampeners…everything short of a cup holder.
The unfamiliar weapon should have been awkward, but a funny sort of calm settled over me as I lifted the bow and drew it in one smooth motion, my left arm pushing out, the right pulling back, my core tight, keeping everything steady. The full draw came exactly to the corner of my mouth, as if the bow had been made for me. With my eye on the target, I savored the burn of effort between my shoulder blades, the pinch of the string on the pads of my fingers before I loosed the arrow. I finally felt a little bit at home.
The shaft flew true but slightly high, just above the knot I’d been aiming for. Much jumped, and the turnip rolled off his head. The spectators erupted into excited noise, but I only heard the roar in my head.
“The first arrow is a miss!” His Honor the sheriff announced. The nearest soldier put the turnip back on Much’s head.
James accused me quietly. “That was no miss.”
I grabbed the next arrow from where it was stuck in the ground. “That was a practice shot.” The arrow had stuck a few finger widths above where I’d wanted it to go. And it stuck deep. If that had been someone’s head, it would have impaled it like a melon.
Guilbert lurked in my peripheral vision. “If you wanted to simply lay your head on the executioner’s block, you could have saved us all a lot of trouble,” he said, sounding bored, or faking it well.
James asked suddenly, “How many practice shots do you plan to take?”
“As many as required.” Three shots would free Much. I wasn’t a martyr, I just couldn’t think of a better idea. As I readied the next arrow, I whispered, “You better rescue me before my head comes off.”
I drew and loosed. The point embedded itself directly below the knot; I’d adjusted my elevation a bit too far.
“By God!” shouted the sheriff, coming out of his chair, his face red with anger. “You will not make a mockery of the law. Guilbert, cut that archer’s throat if he deliberately misses again.”
The sound of steel on leather erupted all around me. James drew his sword in a swift move to defend me, but just as quickly the guards had weapons ready to skewer him, me, Much, and God knew who else. Then I could hear nothing but the drum of my heart in my chest as Guilbert’s blade came to rest gently on my shoulder, the edge against the side of my neck, so sharp it felt more like ice than steel.
“You have no more road on which to run, archer,” he said. “Aim and fire.”
In that measured, word-by-word command, I didn’t just hear a threat. I heard Dad saying, “Focus.” I heard Mom chiding, “Don’t stall, Eleanor.” And, louder than them both, Rob telling me, “You’ve got this.”
I made shots harder than this just for a warm-up. I knew the weapon now, had a feel for the arc of the wooden arrows and their iron tips, had tasted the weight of the draw in my muscles.
Guilbert lifted his sword off my shoulder as I bent and plucked the last arrow from the ground, and laid it across the bow shaft. My fingers brushed the fletching as I fit the nock to the string. No fiberglass or Kevlar
, just wood and hemp and goose feather. But the familiar action struck like flint in my cold, tight chest, igniting a steadying warmth.
“Much?” I called across the forty paces between us.
“Yeah?” he called back, both scared and trusting.
“Don’t move.” I wiped the salt of sweat from my face onto my cloaked shoulder and put my eye on the target. Then I raised the bow.
Drew the string.
And loosed.
It split the turnip like a kebab and kept going. The crowd of villagers went wild. Much opened his eyes, realized it was over, and sagged against the ropes that bound him. Over it all I heard Guilbert shout, “Release the boy and retrieve that arrow!”
James put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed, then ran to Much, elbowing the sheriff’s soldier aside to cut the boy free himself.
I stayed where I was. I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt sick.
“Not celebrating?” asked Guilbert. His sword had already gone back in its scabbard.
“I made the shot. But I did what the sheriff wanted.”
Guilbert folded his arms and looked implacable. “He wanted you to kill your friend. I suggest you take your victory and leave Nottingham while you can.”
A soldier handed the arrow with the turnip on it to the sheriff, who gestured for me to come stand before the platform. I did, with the shadow of Guilbert beside me.
“Robert, son of Hood,” announced His Honor as he held the turnip kebab up like he was going to knight me with it, “you are found innocent, and you are free to be on your way.” With that, he dismissed me and tossed the spitted vegetable to a soldier. “Feed that to the pigs.”
The sheriff stalked off, his cloak swinging a little less majestically behind him. I turned and found Guilbert frowning at my throat. I reached up, in case I had a horrible medieval spider on me or something. But no. Maybe he was just feeling homicidal.
“Keep out of the forest with that bow,” he warned by way of goodbye. About fifty feet away, he stopped to address two of his men, gesturing to me, nodding toward the gatehouse, and looking back to make sure I got the message.
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