by Tim Hall
These echoes pile up, layer upon layer. Here are sounds from more recent times: the wet popping of arrows striking flesh; the schling of steel against steel. Bellows of pain and violence.
Although … these new sensations … so close, and clear. Memories of the past, or events unfolding now?
It seemed Edric Krul had paused in his torture. He was shouting and shaking his claw toward Marian and the burning prison. More of those noises: the zip-zip of arrows; the crack of bone beneath a sword; a piercing scream. Robin shifted his weight, managed to drag himself to his knees.
He understood what was happening: Will Scarlett was here. Will Scarlett and Borston Black and Ironside and Much Millerson and many other outlaws besides. They had slipped down the wooded slope and charged out of the dark and taken Edric’s minions by surprise. Edric’s men were defending themselves, but they had turned their backs on their captives and the young women had retrieved their bows and knives and were putting them to work.
All this came to Robin fuzzily, but it was enough to clear his head and bring him to his senses. He lurched to his feet. Feeling came back into his arms and legs. Surely by now he should be dead …? But he felt the wolf pelt warping, closing over his wounds, knitting his flesh.
He stumbled a few paces to his bow, picked it up. He staggered past Edric Krul, headed down the slope toward Marian. He trained his senses toward her, trying to pick out the two men who had been standing guard at her side. He could smell one of them lifeless on the ground. The other was wrestling with her, trying to plunge his knife into her throat.
Robin ran closer, still unsteady on his feet, disoriented. He drew his bow, trying to sense a clear shot.
Marian twisted, broke free. Her attacker went after her, raising his blade …
Robin let loose, his arrow fizzed, the man fell dead.
Robin stalked onward, hissing between his teeth. There were many more of these lunatic killers—these men who meant Marian harm. His bow sang again—a second body slumped. Another man came at him, screaming, swinging a club. The force of Robin’s arrow lifted him off his feet.
Robin’s rage did not reduce, but grew fiercer. He released two arrows at once and they forked apart and each found a man in the heart. The shadow shard was twisting cold through his muscles and his bones. The shard shook and another man died.
His enemies’ fear and his own rage fed the shadow veins—he heard them sighing, like soil drinking in the rain. Each arrow flew faster, with a sharper killing edge. His next shot removed a leg. Another burst a head, like a berry squeezed between fingers. A third cleaved a man clean open, the way a child tears a leaf down the middle, leaving two halves shaking in the wind. Another man died in the far distance.
He became aware that all other fighting had stopped. Edric’s surviving men were running for their lives; the outlaws had lowered their blades and were standing in silence.
It was over. They had won.
He fought and he fought and he managed to still his arm. He forced his bow down and held it at his side. It’s done. She’s safe.
He stood, and breathed, and the thunder in his heart began to ease. But then a noise behind him—Edric Krul, running down the slope, his claw raised.
“No! I will not allow it … Your purpose is to serve! I have seen to the heart of the world … I stand at the center … You are nothing … Kneel at my feet, give up your skin …”
Robin set his feet, nocked an arrow. He let his mind go dark, sent all the power of the shadow shard into his arms and his chest. He drew, let loose, the arrow thundered through the night. It struck Edric Krul and destroyed him utterly, leaving only pieces scattered in the grass.
Robin’s fury surged, reenergized. He listened for more of these killers to slay. There must be more. Here’s one: a huge man with bloody knuckles. He’d do. This man smelled of blood too.
Robin drew, took aim at the man’s heart. The shadow shard snaked and raged. He almost, almost, let loose. He fought to control his arm, telling himself this was an ally. This was Much Millerson.
But what was the difference? Much was a killer now. A man of war. All these people are bathed in blood.
Here, Will Scarlett, his curved blade dripping with gore; and Ironside and Borston Black, stinking of all they had done in the Sheriff’s name. And these other outlaws, all of them the same, reeking of death. Robin took aim at each of them, one by one, his fingers quivering.
The shadow shard shook and shuddered, ravenous for every one of these lives. Even these young women, bodies slumped at their feet, the taste of murder in their beautiful, silent mouths. The point of his arrow passed across one heart, then another, and the next, the shadow shard raging, demanding he let loose …
Robin fighting, shuddering, gritting his teeth, battling the killing lust …
Finally, fraction by fraction, he managed to relax his arm. He lowered his bow and removed the arrow. The shadow shard gave a final awful spasm before unwinding and dissolving back into his palm.
The flames crackled. A dying man moaned.
The outlaws were silent, staring at Robin. All the young women too. And Marian. She hadn’t moved a muscle.
She was just staring.
If she wasn’t frightened of him before, surely she was now …
For certain this time she would turn and run and leave Robin here.
But when she took a step, and another, it was toward him. She moved nearer, her hands at her side, as if walking in a dream.
Only twenty paces away, then ten, then close enough to touch.
Robin opened his mouth to speak, but no words emerged, all the things he wanted to say building up beneath his tongue—just the same as last time they were reunited, a lifetime ago. Marian too was silent, and still. He listened to her heart, racing fast as a squirrel pup’s.
Finally she put two fingers to her lips, reached up and pressed the kiss to his forehead. Then her hand moved across his face, her fingers searching his cheek, his nose, his lips, as if she was the blind one. Her smell changed minutely and Robin knew there was a tear on her cheek.
“I thought I was losing you,” she said. “After all this time, you’d come back to me, and I thought he was killing you. I could feel you slipping away. Everything I’ve endured, that was the worst.” She wiped at her cheek. Then her fingers went back to searching Robin’s face, and down to probe at his right shoulder. Robin recoiled.
“You must be hurt,” she said. “Let me see, I can help.” There was a dull pain in Robin’s back, but it merely felt like muscles hardening after heavy work. In truth, he had never felt stronger. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It must have looked bad. Are you injured?”
“Just a scratch. I suppose we’ve both been through worse. And there’s more to come, if we don’t hurry. He won’t like what’s happened here. He’ll send an army.”
“I know where we’ll be safe.”
“Yes. Take us there.”
And she locked her fingers with his, and they were turning together and running side by side through the night.
Behind them Will Scarlett was calling instructions to the outlaws: “Borston Black, in the vanguard with me … Blodwyn Kage, Ironside, watch the rear and round up stragglers …” And Marian’s Destroying Angels were forming a procession, hand in hand. And all of them were following, away from the burning prison, back toward Winter Forest.
But to Robin all these other people were gray sounds, muffled smells. Because Marian was here, burning at his side, and nothing else mattered in this world.
“I thought you were scared of me,” Robin said. “I thought you were going to run.”
“Silly goat, how could I be scared of you, of all the people in the world. You’re still you, underneath, I can see that much. I’ve had to change too, but you’re not scared of me, are you?” They were the first words either of them had spoken since leaving the Garden of Angels. They had run, with the others behind them, through hushed villages and silent fields. The moon was bright but
sometimes lost behind clouds—Robin could tell when it was because the footsteps of the others slowed, and then he slowed too and guided their way, the girls holding hands and snaking single-file, Will Scarlett calling instructions up and down the line.
“Did you hate me?” Robin said. “After they took you from that village. Did you really think it was my fault?”
“No, never. I was frightened, and being frightened makes me angry, you know that. But I could never blame you. One man is responsible for all that has happened. He alone did this to us.”
As she said this Robin felt his anger swell. He couldn’t help sending his awareness rippling back, retracing their steps, and back further, to the Garden of Angels. Examining the scene through his forest-mind, he finds many men are arriving there, gathering at the crest of the wooded hill. There must be fifty soldiers, at least.
And there—the Sheriff himself is among them. He is staring down at the smoking remains of his convent prison. Robin experiences a moment of distortion: a deafening smell, a screaming taste. The cause, he knows, is the Sheriff’s anger: It is a monstrous, ravenous thing, howling through the night. It seems impossible Marian has not heard this sound. But in fact Robin knows even the men closest to the Sheriff do not understand the full extent of his fury. Outwardly he is pacific, sitting still and silent, his knuckles white where they grip the pommel of his saddle.
And then the Sheriff turns his head, the workings of his neck twisting, and he stares in this direction. Robin is sure, even at this distance, that the Sheriff is watching him.
And he is staring too at Marian.
Robin’s anger howls, until it could almost drown the Sheriff’s own.
“What is it?” Marian said. “Why are you slowing down?”
Robin wanted to say: We’re going the wrong way. He’s there, in the open. We could end this, tonight. But he managed to hold his tongue, and to keep running. Marian was here, at his side; leading her back into danger would be lunacy.
“What have you heard?” Marian said.
“It’s nothing. We need to keep moving.”
They ran on, the twelve other young women following behind, the mud squelching between their toes, running when the moon was bright, slowing and linking hands when the clouds bunched. Will Scarlett was moving up the line. He reached Robin and Marian’s side.
“We need to rest,” he said. “I’ve got two injured men—I need to see to their wounds.”
Robin thought of the Sheriff, and his mutant anger. “A little farther,” he said. “We can rest when we reach the wildwood.”
“This ground is hard going on foot,” Will said. “A few of those girls look ready to drop.”
Marian said nothing, but evidently she agreed. She led the way into a deserted village. “We’re not stopping long,” she said. “But we need to dry our clothes. We didn’t break free just to die of fever. Minnie, Lyssa, Ena, look for furniture—everything out here is too sodden to burn.”
Some of Will’s outlaws also went into houses and they came back with tables and benches and soon there were two fires burning in the open mouth of a threshing barn.
“Look what I found,” said Ira Starr, returning with her arms full. “The smokehouse is stacked to the rafters. Here’s badger ham and pheasant.”
“Where are all the people?” said Ena Agutter. “Why did they leave all their food, and their belongings?”
“I haven’t eaten for days,” said Elfen Goldacre. “Too nervous.”
“My mother used to make pheasant pie,” said Seren Child. “It was famous, for miles around.”
All the young women were talking now, quietly, as if testing whether all this was real and they could really be heard. Only two of the girls remained silent: Sonskya Luz stood a little way apart, hugging herself, looking into the night; Alice White was chewing her bottom lip and staring at the moon. Marian went to bring Sonskya closer to the warmth.
One of Will Scarlett’s outlaws was approaching Robin. And when this man spoke his voice was a sharp stab from the past. “Robin, it’s me. Jack Champ … Bones. Remember me, old friend?”
Robin said nothing.
“We … we were told you were dead.”
Robin turned and walked away.
“I brought someone with me,” Jack Champion called after him. “Ayala Baptiste. Remember him? He’s become a good man, and a great warrior. We’ll stand at your side.”
Robin moved some distance from the fires. He sat with his head bowed, the wolf hide gathered around him. The color of it had changed, and the texture too: It was now a velvety gray, matching the moonlight through clouds. He felt Jack Champion still looking at him. He sensed too the young women glancing at him out of the corners of their eyes. It made him angry, this feeling of them all watching him—and, even worse, of them trying not to watch him. He got up and went farther off and sat in the shadows.
After a while Marian joined him. “I knew you’d come for me,” she said. “You were too late, as usual, slow goat, but I knew you’d come. In a way you were with me the entire time, just like before. I could feel you at my side, helping me through. I wouldn’t have made it without you.”
Robin remained silent. He couldn’t think of the right words—or he thought of too many words and they bunched up beneath his tongue. He sensed, in the far distance, the Sheriff, still staring in this direction. He battled that lure of vengeance, tugging at him, insisting he travel back there and confront his foe.
He stood. “We’ve rested long enough. Whoever is coming, they need to come now.”
Without waiting for a reply, or even waiting for Marian’s hand, he moved out of the village. And he heard his ragtag band of outlaws getting to their feet and falling into step, following silently and wearily behind.
Robin’s forest-mind is everywhere at once: it is stalking through the castle on feline paws; soaring with the buzzards above the shires; patrolling the coast with the gulls.
He observes a realm gearing for war.
The Sheriff has returned to his castle and he is limping down stone steps into his arsenal and he is ordering the construction of new infernal engines. And then he is journeying deeper, past even his deepest dungeons, and he is overseeing work of a different sort …
At the ports, mercenaries are already arriving. Hundreds of hired swords, drawn to the Sheriff and the gold he has promised. Robin senses these killers step ashore and he knows Edric Krul was as nothing compared to what now approaches …
Other fighters are flocking to Sherwood. A different type of army, ragged and makeshift, from boys no bigger than the axes they carry, to seasoned gangsters of the forest, they are all of them leaving their homes and their hideaways, lifting their blades and making their way here, to the wildwood …
A battlefield. A war roar. Robin’s outlaws and the Sheriff’s army are rushing to meet. They crash together in a thunder of hooves and scattered flesh and smashed steel. The sun is darkened by a swarm of arrows and a great howl rolls across the hills and Robin knows his forest-mind is no longer showing him what is, nor even what was, but what is to come. He feels the earth shudder and he hears the forest erupt in blood and fire, the flames engulfing the world edge to edge, leaving nothing behind but charred bones amid the ashes of ancient oak …
His forest-mind, overwhelmed, crashing back to the present.
Someone standing over him. Cernunnos.
“Was that real?” Robin said. “Is that what I’ve unleashed? How can I sense things that haven’t yet happened?”
Cernunnos knelt with a stick and drew shapes in the mud. “Where the wind passes through grass, the bending of each blade depends on the movement of the last, and will help determine the movements that follow. The past is no different, nor the future.”
He drew one last shape. Robin examined it with his fingers: two snakes, curled head to tail.
“You have barely begun to understand what you are,” Cernunnos said. “You think you are the first to tread this path? You must learn to read
the patterns, before you doom us all.”
The branches shook themselves; the old man was gone.
Robin moved through the forest, heading across the outlaws’ main camp. From above came the rasping of saws and the knocking of hammers: Fortress Sherwood rising amid the boughs.
Will Scarlett came striding across. “We’re setting mantraps at the perimeter, and digging spear pits. All this would be quicker if the White Crows hadn’t refused to work with Aks Arqua’s men. Baphomet’s Horde have taken off by themselves, who knows where. But we’re getting it done slowly. No one wants to be caught unprepared.”
Robin turned away without a word and continued through the broad clearing. He heard Ironside and Borston Black teaching a group of farmers the correct way to grip a spear. Much Millerson and his son were sparring with their fists. Jack Champion and Ayala Baptiste sat apart, talking. Robin felt their eyes on him as he passed.
And here, in a silent circle on their knees, were Marian’s Destroying Angels. Marian was moving among them, addressing each in turn, speaking strange words. She appeared to be making marks on some of their wrists, and it sounded as if she was giving them each a new name. “Pitys … Dryope … Lotis … Syrinx …”
Robin left the clearing and he climbed to a higher glade, where a ring of boulders formed a secluded crown, like a natural hill fort. After a while Marian came to join him. Her hands went to his face, the same way they had before, her fingers searching his cheeks, his chin, his lips.
“It really is you,” she whispered. “I keep thinking I’m imagining all this. But it’s true, you’re really here and we’re together, at last.”
She put her face to his, pressed their cheeks together, then their noses, then their lips. She was kissing him and the feeling was like lying near a lake in the summer shade, the warm breeze shivering his skin, the languid day stretching away forever …
Early autumn and Robin’s cloak was taking on tones of copper and gold and shimmering with silver fork moss. Marian pushed herself into this soft coat and suddenly she was crying, and they were holding onto each other, the same way they used to when they were living in the tower, when the wind would howl and carry nightmare sounds from Winter Forest. Marian cried and they held each other tight, children again for the final time, just a boy from the village and the lord’s daughter. She sobbed until she was almost choking, until finally the last of her energy was gone and she fell asleep.