“Magic isn’t real.”
Old Soldier raised his eyebrow. “Want to ask your mother about that?”
Robin said nothing for a long moment. “If those swords have magic symbols that make you steal children…” He shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”
“Believe that you saw two of the king’s men trying to take your sister. You know King Richard—strength of character is one of his staunchest requirements of service. The soldiers he left behind wouldn’t try to steal a child. Not without a revolt in the ranks.”
Robin looked at the symbol again. “Magic.” He shook his head.
“Could be.”
“We tell no one about this. If anyone comes by to ask, we never saw soldiers.” Robin pulled himself to his feet. “And we do NOT show my mother that symbol.”
Little John spoke up. “What if they try for your sister again?”
“We’ve got a lot of land, and a lot of places to dig holes.” Robin looked in the direction of the house. “I’m going to check on Ruth. Work’s done for the day.”
“Good enough,” Old Soldier said.
Robin turned away from the two men. They watched him go.
“If he hadn’t cut through the woods, we could have stopped him from killing those soldiers.”
“If I weren’t old as this dirt and you big as this field, then we could have arrived to do more than watch.”
Little John rubbed his face. “The viciousness of what he did…”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Have you done worse?”
Old Soldier considered his words before answering.
“Not with a shovel.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The woman kept crying. It shook her entire body as she huddled around herself, hands digging into her arms and shoulders. She rocked, the chair beneath her creaking with each movement. Her wailing filled the small home, swirling around the air like a wasp digging its way into the ear, burrowing its way deeper.
“Stell, pull yourself together!” her husband barked.
If Stell pulls herself together any more, Alan-a-Dale mused, she will fold like a sheet. He didn’t smile at the thought, holding his face blank. Instead, he touched the man on his shoulder, long slender fingers barely brushing cloth.
“Let us step outside and give her a moment.”
The man nodded and Alan motioned him toward the door. Together they picked their way over the objects littering the floor. Broken dishes, keepsakes, books, all pulled from the shelves by uncaring hands. The only chair on four legs was the one on which Stell still huddled. She stopped rocking and watched them leave the house, her eyes red and raw.
Alan ducked under the lintel and stepped out into the small garden. He had passed by this home just a week ago, and the front had been a riot of color so beautiful that he’d had to stop and compose a short verse. Now it was a churn of mud and crushed petals. He kept the verse in his heart. It would be cruel, not comforting, to share it with Stell and her husband now.
He looked at the stout man who turned in a small, slow circle. A tear tracked down his face as he studied the wreckage.
“Mayhap it will help to tell me what happened,” Alan suggested.
“The bastards took my property! In the name of that false king that Richard left behind!” The man’s voice was raspy, but loud. It carried out past the small wooden fence that surrounded his home.
Alan looked around sharply.
“Advice, friend,” he said. “Keep your voice down with words like that.”
The man glared at him. “Are you going to report what I said? If so, then good! Tell that imposter on the throne and his lapdog Locksley,” he roared out at the sky and shook his fist. “Terrify my wife, take my things… I’ll kill someone.”
Alan stepped back from the man, who whirled at the movement.
“They’ve already come to my shop and demanded that I make armor and swords for fifty men, all as a tax! I’m expected to shoulder the cost of the ore, pay the assistant, and do the work. Richard already took almost everything I had on his fool chase across the ocean, but at least he paid for his. This black-hearted brother… that arsehole… just threatens.” He spat on the ground
“And I did it. I made his damned armor and swords and I made them good, put their custom marks on each, even though they demanded them in a time that meant I had to sleep by the forge. But that was my tax. That was my due. Then they come here, take my personal property, destroy more than they took. It’s not right!”
“What did they take?” Alan asked.
“They took my dignity.”
“What property did they confiscate?”
The smith looked up at nothing, thinking. He began listing things and counting on thick, calloused fingers.
“The gold left from Richard’s payment, one third the food in my larder, a pair of new boots I was saving for the Christ mass, all the books my wife had, and an arm ring my dad took off a raiding Northman he killed.” He closed his counting fingers and shook the fist they made. “And what they didn’t take, they broke.”
Alan-a-Dale nodded, letting the man vent his anger.
“I suffered through an apprenticeship under Smythe to learn this trade. Ten long, hard years of doing whatever that bastard wanted, all for scraps of bread, a bowl of water, and the ability to learn my craft. Ten years! I’m a craftsman. A free man. This is unholy, what’s happened to me… and not just me, but all the shopkeeps in the marketplace. This so-called king is a greedy pigsuckler!”
Alan stood in the late afternoon sun beside the blacksmith in his destroyed yard and his upturned home. His heart lay heavy in his chest for the man and his wife, but it sank like a stone in the sea when the man looked up at him with tears cutting tracks through the grime on his cheeks.
“How will we survive this winter?”
* * *
The air in the hallway was stifling. The stones beside him radiated heat. It was midday and this was an outside wall. Sweat rolled under his brown woolen robe, skimming along his body until it soaked into the coarse fibers.
We should put in some windows for ventilation. He knew that it would never be done, however. The hall was too low for them to remove stones to allow the air to pass—that would compromise the integrity of the wall itself. Take out even one, and the outside wall became exponentially more likely to crumble under an attack.
An attack. The thought took him back. He still remembered being a child, early in his coming to the service of the Lord. He’d been at a monastery in the highlands held siege by the Sea Wolves, a motley, savage band of raiders and reavers come from the icy north to steal gold and rape women. The only things that saved his life—the lives of all the brothers there, and the lives of the villagers who hid with them—were the walls. Like these they were stout and thick, made of stones pressed tightly together.
The Sea Wolves had howled outside for ten days, drinking their wine and screaming for the monastery to send out the women and the gold. Do that, they said, and they would leave.
With sunrise on the eleventh day they had disappeared. Out of wine, out of food, and out of the berserker madness, they’d silently climbed back in their longboats and sailed away, possibly in shame but probably to hunt for easier prey down the coast.
A noise pulled him from the memory. Voices, and something else. He quickened his steps until he reached a hall that opened into an anteroom. A handful of brothers crowded around a door. The ones not under a vow of silence spoke in a murmur. Each man’s face held a similar expression of horror.
They were gathered at the entrance to the monastery’s library. The hubbub masked the sound of his approach. He stopped an arm’s length away from them.
“What is going on?” he demanded. “Why are you all meandering about?”
As one they jerked around, puppets on the same string. Brother Dobbson moved close. He spoke low, his voice thready with anxiety, his words as halting as a newborn colt.
“Friar�
� I don’t know… I…”
“Spit it out, man!”
Impacts sounded from inside the room.
Brother Dobbson’s mouth opened, then closed, then dropped and hung open. Finally he could take it no longer.
“Move aside and let me see.” Friar Tuck’s wide hand fell on the man’s arm, pushing to the left. Shoving forward he barreled through the group. As the last one stepped aside, he saw what had them in an uproar.
The library was in shambles. The handcrafted shelves were near empty, the floor littered with books and scrolls and parchments in oilskin sleeves. All of them were ancient. His eyes found pages torn from their bindings, leather older than the monastery itself cracked and broken from being dragged off the shelves and hastily tossed aside like garbage. These were the collective written knowledge of the order, each book meticulously scribed and bound. Many of them were singular, the only copy of that text anywhere in the world.
They were irreplaceable.
In the center of the room the bishop pulled another book from the shelf, flipped its pages through his fingers, and tossed it unceremoniously to the floor with the rest of them. At the sight of him treating the books so callously rage boiled inside Friar Tuck, and his guts went all greasy and hot. Before he could think he was across the room and his hands were curled around the lapels of the purple robes. Spittle flew from his mouth as he lifted the bishop off his feet and shook him. Fabric tore under his grip.
“What do you think you are doing?” he roared.
“Unhand me, barbarian!” The bishop kicked out, feet bouncing off the friar’s thick midsection. Tuck shoved the man against an empty bookshelf. The wood cracked under the impact.
“Some of these books are priceless,” he growled. “What gives you the right?”
The bishop’s fists hammered down on Tuck’s arms, striking a nerve on the left. Pain mixed with numbness and shot to the end of the monk’s fingers. The bishop’s feet touched the ground, and he swung his head forward.
Tuck jerked back, avoiding the impact of the bishop’s head against his mouth, but catching some of it on his chin. Stars flared across his eyes, sending the room dark for a moment.
He dropped the man altogether.
Landing on his feet, the bishop lunged forward. Hands up and ready to fight, he tried to punch Friar Tuck in the face. The monk stepped back and the bishop stumbled over a small pile of books on the floor. Tuck winced as the sound of tearing cloth rose up from the man’s feet. His hand snarled in the bishop’s purple robe, pulling it tight.
The bishop cried out in pain as Friar Tuck swung back a meaty fist with every intention of trying to separate his opponent’s head from his shoulders.
“Enough!”
The voice rang into the room. They turned to see the cardinal filling the doorway, lit from behind and radiating righteous anger. The other monks peered in from the doorframe, each struggling for a better view. He strode forward, cassock whipping around his legs as if it were driving him. Tuck’s heart surged. Here he had an ally, someone of higher authority who wouldn’t be afraid to challenge the bishop’s position.
The cardinal glared at Friar Tuck.
“Have you lost your mind?”
The words were a dash of cold water against his face.
“Let him go,” the cardinal growled. “Now.”
Tuck opened his hand. The bishop fell, stumbling back. He caught himself on the wall. Pushing off, he pointed at Friar Tuck.
“The scourge!” he cried. “I want him scourged for daring to lay his hands on me.”
The cardinal ignored his words, peering around at the destruction of the library. Then he fixed the bishop with his eyes.
“What are you looking for?”
“That’s nothing with which you should concern yourself.”
“My family donated the vast majority of these works,” the cardinal replied. “I am very concerned.”
“This is a library, and I am looking for a book,” the bishop said, refusing to give ground. “That is enough for you to know.”
Behind the cardinal’s back Friar Tuck seethed. He glared at the bishop. What sort of a book could he be looking for that would warrant such destruction? Then a sudden sick feeling twisted his innards. He thought of the artifact brought by Alan-a-Dale. Surely he was wrong, though. How would the bishop even know of its existence?
As he stared at the man, his eyes caught a slowly spreading patch of darkness on the bishop’s garish, purple robe. It was a mark, a series of lines that intersected in a weird way. His eyes began to water as he watched the purple linen turn dark, fiber by fiber. Then he glanced down at his left hand.
Wet red slicked his fingertips, already drying into a dark rust color.
He looked closer.
The symbol grew and his head began to pound, an incessant marching of soldiers inside his skull as the symbol grew solid. It lay on the bishop’s forearm. Anger leeched away as he studied it, committing each line of it to memory even as his eyes began to feel as though they would leap from his skull.
“…I said, to your chamber.”
The cardinal’s voice jolted him from his reverie. He looked up at his mentor. Francis’s face had gone gray, the crow’s feet by his eyes now carved deep as if by knife point.
With one last glance at the symbol, Tuck turned and left.
* * *
Alan-a-Dale followed the path, feet moving but his eyes not watching, traveling with a mind that churned like a river flowing over falls. His time with the blacksmith and his wife had marked his soul, mostly because it echoed what he had seen in other people who’d been visited by Locksley’s tax brigade.
Brigands, more like.
He thought of the grimness that had settled on the land, starting first with the people who had been victimized, and spreading like a pox to their neighbors who simply waited with the dread of when they would receive the knock on their door. The hearts of the people had been bruised and left bleeding.
He pushed the thoughts from his mind, unable to dwell on them any longer, and focused on the one thing brought up over and over again by the homes he’d visited.
They were looking for a book.
No one knew what kind of book, but the thought of it made his shoulders tense. He’d not long ago brought a book into the care and keeping of Friar Tuck. Prince John arrived directly after, and now with force of arms he sought a mysterious tome. Alan was no believer in coincidence.
His dear friend Tuck had much to explain.
* * *
Friar Tuck couldn’t sit still. He tried to lie down. He tried praying. He tried drinking from a bottle of brandy. Nothing took the edge off the anger that shimmy-jolted under his skin. So instead he paced the small chamber. Four strides from one side to the other, back and forth, again and again and again, each step a nail pounded into his rage.
The bolt on his door bounced against the wood door as someone tried to enter. He turned and reached out, yanking it open. It slammed against the wall.
“What?” he bellowed.
Cardinal Francis pushed in, barreling the stout man back.
“Shut your mouth,” he said firmly.
Friar Tuck looked up at the taller priest, breath pounding out of flared nostrils and clenched jaw.
“Or what?” he said. “You would strike me, Francis? Be prepared for me to respond in kind.”
“Then get it over with, if it will calm you,” the cardinal said and he leaned back, arms stretched wide. “If not, then stick your head in a bucket.”
For one blind moment Tuck almost did strike out. He could feel the impact of his fist on his friend’s chest, feel the ribs compress inward, giving way under the force of his blow, collapsing from his strength. For one long moment temptation dragged at his very bones.
Then he looked at Francis’s face.
The cardinal’s eyes held no anger, no reproach. Instead they were filled with a simple sympathy, a love that made them soft around their edges as they peered
into his soul and understood him.
The eyes of Christ.
He was forgiven before he could strike a blow.
Exhaustion fell on him like an avalanche, all the rage and anger crumbled into dust inside him. The cardinal put his hands on Tuck’s shoulders.
“It’s all right, my son.”
“I’m sorry.”
The cardinal chuckled. “No, you are angry and noble, and the two drive you to the same end. One is the horse, the other is the carriage.”
“I try to pray it down,” Tuck protested. “I truly do.”
The cardinal leaned in, his voice a whisper so soft it was almost just a breath. “Don’t,” he said. “The prayers of a righteous man availeth much, but we may have need of the anger of a righteous man before we finish our time here.” He stepped back. His finger moved up, pointing at his own eye, then reaching out to point at Tuck’s. “You know you did wrong.”
Friar Tuck touched his ears, and the cardinal nodded. Someone could be listening—the small monk’s cell wasn’t big enough to keep the sound of their voices from carrying.
“It’s true,” he admitted. “He was destroying things that were irreplaceable. I lost my head.”
“He wasn’t doing that.” The cardinal’s voice was stern. “He was searching for a book, for Prince John. You should not have interfered.”
“I know. I am truly contrite of heart.” Friar Tuck reached to a shelf, pulling down a parchment scrap and a thin piece of charcoal. Placing the parchment on his bench, he wrote, Did you see the symbol? Then he held it out. The cardinal shook his head, and Friar Tuck nodded.
“You will have to be punished,” the cardinal said.
“I submit to your judgment in this.” He quickly sketched the symbol on the parchment. As his fingers moved the charcoal they began to tingle. The lines wavered, squiggling on the thin sheet as he pulled them. His bowels churned, threatening to let go as he pulled the last line and thrust it toward his mentor, wanting it away from him, wanting the foul taste gone from his mouth.
“You will scourge yourself for five Our Fathers.” The cardinal’s eyes dropped to the scrap in his hand. His face paled, blood draining down his skin and leaving a chalk-white pallor, and he looked as if he was about to retch. He swallowed hard, folded the scrap, and buried it in his pocket.
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