Hooded

by H. J. Mountain

  “Because I was not born with lace and silver?”

  “Because your mind is shut.”

  He snorts. Crosses his arms. “Because I am not a fool taken in by a face. And anyway I have seen your mother. She was very much alive.”

  I startle at this. Until I realise he is of course talking about Lady Ariel. “She is not my mother.”

  He frowns.

  “They took me in, the Gisbournes. After I lost her.”

  Will considers this. He leans into the table. “You say these men killed your mother?”

  “One of them, yes.”

  I stare at him. I expect him to apologise. It would be the right thing to do. But Will Scarlett is not that kind of boy.

  “Then what is it you seek here? To save this girl you speak of. Or vengeance?”

  The question, phrased so, disturbs me. “I mean to save her.”

  “Yet you wish also to strike down these men, don’t you?”

  My blood stirs. The Visitor’s tall shadow on the wall of my childhood home. My mother’s scream as she is struck. I crawl away through the mud. I am older. I am the same. I cower in the shadows of the chamber. A strand of dark hair falls from the sack Sara is held in. The master’s curved hands dig at the flesh within.

  “If I am able,” I whisper. “Who would not?”

  He raises his chin, coming to his point. “But if you must choose. Which prevails?”

  “Do you take some pleasure in this?” I ask, though his face is hard.

  “That is no answer, Brya.”

  “Then here is one. Tomorrow I hope we will have parted ways forever, Will Scarlett.”

  He hunches back into the pew and nods. “To that, I’ll drink. Princess.”

  *

  Little John and Murphy return with a tray laden with flagons of frothy ale and small loafs of warmed bread. Little John slides in next to me: a welcome bulwark between the rest of the tavern and myself. I tear into the bread, tossing half down to Wolf under the table. It is delicious to my ravenous stomach. I sip at the ale too. It is thick and heady as soup. It works a slow conjuring on my wounded body and my vision. Softening the dark. Brightening the faces of my companions. I refuse to look at Will so I focus on Murphy. He has very long and knotted fair hair, a hooked nose, and a scar-like curl in his upper lip. Somehow it all adds up to an oddly appealing face.

  “So, m’lady,” he says, having swigged half his beer in one go. “How fares your sister – the blonde with the eyes?”

  In spite of everything the image of Beatrice with Murphy tickles me. They are like silk and rope. “Her name is Beatrice. She is well. But for being robbed, I suppose.”

  “Tis a dangerous land out there,” Murphy says, with graveness that I do not buy one bit. “But a lovely name for a lovely lass. Shame I did not get chance to speak with her.”

  Little John sets down his ale. “I’m sure she is kicking her heels too. Wishing for an honest fellow like you to come calling.”

  “I’m honest enough. I says what I am and am what I says!”

  “Ai, that’s the nub,” Little John replies. “What you are is a thief and a bandit.”

  “Ai. But I’m honest about it!”

  Will is not listening. His eyes remain fixed past Little John and I, even as Murphy launches into a story about his and Tucker’s brilliant bargaining with the smithy. I try to follow it but I cannot help glancing back at his maroon eyes, trying to guess the thoughts behind them. He barely touches his bread or beer. Then, like that, a slight change marks his features. His gaze tightens. His lips harden. He pushes forward into the table.

  “There,” he says. Low. “O’er toward the fire.”

  I turn. Through the tavern gloom and huddled shapes of men, my gaze locks onto one. He is a hunched-over figure. Shuffling slowly. Something pained, damaged, in his progress towards a deserted stool and table to the side of the fireplace. Bent over, he drops onto it like a bag of bones.

  “Are you certain?”

  In the murk I do not know how he could be so sure. But Will is already to his feet. He slides past Murphy, taking his beer with him. I ask Little John to let me pass. Will holds up a hand – stay – as if I were Wolf. But I will not sit here and wait, not a moment longer. Not when I am close to finding out about who has taken Sara. Where she may be. Wolf tries to follow but I order him back. He lowers his tail but retreats under the pews.

  The huddled man does not seem aware of our approach. Even after we have taken up stools across from him, his face remains down, shrouded in long sheaths of hair drained of all colour. Finally Will leans in and speaks his name, “Harvole.”

  The head tilts up.

  Only in the very young, as in Mutch two days ago, have I seen such fear. It is disturbing to see it in the face of one so aged. His face is a bearded knit of grey-white hairs and gaunt pink flesh. Spidery wrinkles slit his bloodshot eyes. They blink like the wings of a moth as he peers out at us. As though we were murky shapes that mean him some grievous harm.

  Is this the foolish braggart Will spoke of? It does not seem right. For one thing, the man is silent. Worse, he is stupefied with horror. I am compelled to reassure him.

  “Sire, do not be afraid,” I whisper over the din of the tavern. “My friend and I, we only wish to ask you something.”

  This does not help. The opposite: the old man tries to push up from the stool. He is too weak. Will catches him at the arm and directs him back to the seat.

  “Harvole, you must recall,” Will says, in a tone cool but insistent. “Some months back you told us a story about a nobleman you served.”

  The old man hunches down. Shrinks. His head, low, shakes fiercely, as though an earwig has found its way in and its tiny claws are wreaking havoc in the flesh of his mind. Something is very wrong with this man.

  Will senses it also. His frown cuts deeper.

  “Here.” He nods toward the beer he brought over. “Maybe that’ll help?”

  Harvole continues to shake. But one tortured eye observes the ale with a thirst that is sorrowful to behold.

  “Must you?” I say to Will.

  “Some men’s medicine,” he says, before turning back to Harvole. “It’s yours, but first you need to tell us about the noblemen. You said they wore the Black Lion…”

  Harvole lifts a quivering hand to the side of his head. He makes a gesture like wings or smoke flitting away. I understand it as: it is gone…

  “Please, sire,” I say. “Whatever you can remember will help.”

  He stares longingly at the beer. I have an idea. I place on the table between the three of us the cloth bearing the lion’s head. Its dust glistens in the near illumination of the fire.

  “Tell me, do you know this?”

  Harvole’s reaction is violent. At the sight he recoils and emits a groan: a strangely animal sound, like one Wolf might make with a thorn buried in his paw. The old man lurches forward. I think he might come for us. But he has a different target in mind. He seizes the beer as though it were the elixir of life. Will moves to stop him but changes his mind. Goes dead still. For a moment I do not understand why.

  Then I see it myself.

  Harvole’s bearded lips open as he raises the flagon to drink. My stomach knots itself. A wave of sickness fills me up. And sickly fear.

  The inside of the old man’s mouth is blackened. Blistered. He has no tongue.

  **

  “Who did this to you, old man?” Will demands.

  With his eyes sewn shut, Harvole rubs his lips together, still wet from the ale. He does not offer any answer. But even if he wished, could he? The shock and horror of it peels over me again. I follow the old man’s eyes as they crawl open. Glazed from the ale. But they hold some dim light, buried within. They flit toward the lion’s head and away again. Back and forth: a moth to the candle. Drawn to the flame…

  Conviction crackles in my bones.

  “It was He, wasn’t it?” I burst out. “The Burnt Man did this to you!”

&n
bsp; Harvole’s slit eyes widen. He begins to shake his head furiously.

  “What are you talking about, Brya?” Will says.

  “Who is He? Tell me where I can find Him, sire!”

  Harvole reaches out for the flagon. But it is empty. His eyes droop. He looks beyond ancient: a ghost in human skin. His lower lip falls and I cannot but see again the awful scorched flesh in his mouth. The Burnt Man took his tongue. Yet let him live. Why?

  The only answer I can fathom leaves me cold as winter. It is a warning. To him but also to others. Do not speak of us. Do not dare. For the master does as He wishes. He killed my mother. He will do the same to Sara.

  The flesh in my neck throbs. The bruise-blue marks feel swollen with blood. For a moment I grow faint from it. Dark. Then my mind races back to something Little John said in the forest: Them gathering on the darkest night…I turn in to Harvole, who is bent forward, his hands knitted together.

  “Sire, you told them that these men, they came together on the darkest night. What does that mean? Midwinter night?”

  Harvole lifts his face. He is harrowed, but some part of him hears me. Understands me. His head quivers. No.

  “Then what, sire? Please. He has taken a girl. She is in danger, isn’t she?”

  Harvole shifts on his stool. After a long breath, he strains to raise an arm – a bone wreathed in hairless flesh. He cannot lift it beyond his neck. There, his gnarled fingers clutch into a ball. He makes an odd gesture. His fingers break slowly apart. They curl into a hook, before they go flat, and he drops his arm to his lap.

  Will and I exchange a look. Harvole’s gesture: neither of us knows the meaning. The old man’s face droops, as if the effort has winded him. I think of faces changing: of shadow – and darkness – and also of light from above. My spine tingles as it comes together. The night Guy and I returned to Gisbourne House after the clearing. The sliver of moon in the sky as I sat with Mutch, his tiny body trembling as he tried to tell me about the shadow that stole away his sister. The moon had been thin. But it had been cut again in Sherwood Castle, when Guy spoke those words of love to me, and I left him standing there. The moon had nearly left us all.

  The darkest night…

  The hairs on my neck stand up on end. “The new moon.”

  Harvole looks up. That buried light in his eyes.

  Will licks his lips. “The new moon is the night after this one.”

  I gasp like I have been punched in the chest. It is worse than I feared. I have almost no time left. Desperate I take out what I stole from Prendergast’s home: the parchment map.

  “Can you show me where the castle is, Harvole? Is it on this map? Please, look, sire.”

  Harvole’s bloodshot eyes linger on mine before they drop to the parchment. One of his hands – lumpy with purplish veins – touches the edge of the paper. His breathing turns cagey. His fingers quiver as they run over it. They linger and drift, seemingly aimless, around the jotted lines of Nottingham. He does not know. Does not remember, with the ravages of time and ale and terror. But then his fingers begin to move. Surely. Northward. They pass over a fork of streams, onto a great wood that reaches towards hills. There is a cluster of shapes. Circles. Here, Harvole’s fingers stop. They shiver over this final place.

  Will looms over the map. His mouth is tight. He doesn’t try to hide his doubt. “The weeping wood. I’ve ridden that country before. There is no castle in them lakes.”

  We look up to find a hideous grin sprouted on Harvole’s face.

  “Why are you lying?” Will says.

  But I do not think the old man is. “How far is it, this weeping wood?”

  “A day’s hike. Maybe longer.”

  “Then we go now.”

  Will lifts a dark eyebrow. “We?”

  I have forgotten myself. Or rather forgotten again my companion. “I will pay you.”

  His expression hardens. “There you go, princess.”

  “Is that not what you seek, Will?”

  Harvole grasps at the empty flagon. The endless thirst shines his gaze. With his other hand, he taps the map again. Over those circles, the lakes.

  “What is it, sire?”

  “He wants ale,” Will sighs.

  “There is more to this.”

  “Ai, more ale.”

  Harvole makes a whistling sound. He stabs at the map.

  “Then we will get him one and find out.”

  “Must you?” Will says, mimicking me.

  I stare at him. He pushes up from his stool. Before he leaves for the bar he leans into me. A whisper at my cheek.

  “Take a good look at what they did to Old Harvole. If this castle even exists, if you somehow find it, princess…these men will kill you. You know that right?”

  My hand finds his wrist. To my surprise, part of me is desperate for him to believe. Believe that I can save her. Somehow. But it is asking too much. When I do not quite believe it myself.

  “I know that if I don’t try,” I say, “they will kill her.”

  Will shrugs and goes and I am left with Harvole. His hands slip back into his cloak. His eyes flit between me and the bar, awaiting his ale. So many things I want to ask. But he cannot answer any of them.

  “Sire, can you write at all?”

  He emits a throaty grunt. I rack my mind for how else we may communicate. How he may tell me of these men – this order of alchemists. When I look up, Harvole’s face has frozen. Rigid. The tavern, too, is changed. Turned eerily quiet. I follow the old man’s gaze. Mine falls on the face of a crouching figure. My throat shrinks. The crouched man, whose face is pink and sweaty, with tawny hair that spikes in horns from the sides, is looking straight at me. I have seen him before, a short time ago: the younger Prendergast. The one I saw hurrying from the back alley. He has with him men. Guards. They wear the red-and-blue of the Lord Sheriff of Nottingham.

  He points at me. Men pour forward. I leap from the table but the foremost guard is swift. He grabs me at the elbow. He is a stout, mole-faced man, strong as a bull. Kept to the stool, I do the next thing that springs to mind: I gather up the lion’s head cloth. The dust seems to soak my palm. Ripple over my flesh.

  I am looking toward the fireplace when, from the tavern doors, a voice calls out: “Let her go!”

  I know without turning. It is the voice I trust most in this life. It belongs to Guy of Gisbourne.

  12.

  I lose him amid a rush of bodies and my breath seizes. More of the Sheriff’s men press into the darkened pub, their purpose yet unclear, and the tavern-folk rise from their stools, anxious like a spooked flock. Some try for the doors. The guards hold them back. Guy is swallowed up in the melee. Then he breaks through. His face, by the firelight, is stricken with worry. But his eyes are bright. Unmistakably they hold hope and relief. My heart fills with the same, even as guilt prickles my chest. For what he asked me in the castle and how I left him there. What must he imagine?

  Guy shouts at the mole-faced guard who has my arm. The man grunts, mutters, “sire,” even though Guy is half his age, and steps away. I leap into Guy’s arms. In the embrace, the sureness of his hold, everything else falls away: the tavern, the shoving men with their angry, drunken murmurs. There is only him. His scent like I am back in the fields of Gisbourne House and we are about to shoot our arrows at the scarecrow and it annoys me how he hits the stuffed straw body every single time. I had not known how much I missed him.

  “Are you harmed?” he whispers into my hair.

  “No.”

  “You swear, Brya?”

  “I swear. I am unhurt. Are you?”

  “Thank god.” He pulls away to look at me. The muscles in his jaw beat as he surveys my face within my hood, the cut down my jaw. “What is this? What happened?”

  I dare not tell him yet of Vesilly and the Burnt Man. Nor of the wounds that are wriggling down my back. He is a coil: I can feel the tension in his arms and shoulders. And I am the cause. I must begin with the dance. I must start there.
/>
  “I am so sorry. I meant to return, to find you, but…”

  He frowns in reflex. “Where did you go, Brya? I have been beside myself. Beatrice and father too. Marian of Satherowe is missing too!”

  “She is in Sherwood Forest. But she is safe.” Even as I say this, I wonder, thinking of Pelaw’s raging temper.

  “What happened?”

  “It was in the castle. Last night.”

  “Tell me.”

  All the guards near us: the Sheriff’s men. I think suddenly of Harvole’s story: an Order of men who follow the alchemist. Could these men belong to it?

  “Not here.”

  Guy looks around, as if taking in our surroundings for the first time. “What are you doing in this of all places? The men in here, Brya!”

  His eyes search mine. I swallow. Try to find the right words. “It is about Sara.”

  “The girl from the clearing?”

  “There is a man here. He can help us find where she has been taken.”

  I turn to Old Harvole. But his stool is empty. He is not anywhere to be seen. Before I can explain to Guy, men are shouting after him.

  “Gisbourne!” It is a very tall man in the Sheriff’s colours. He points at the bar. “O’er here!”

  A new and very different flash of light enters Guy’s silver-blue eyes. It is sharp as a blade. I see why. Will.

  “It was he.” Guy’s voice thickens. “He took you here, didn’t he, the knave?”

  “Guy!” I grab his forearm, suddenly fearful for what may happen here. “It is not as you think!”

  He does not hear me. He tells the mole-faced guard: “Stay with her, keep her safe!” Then several things happen at once. Guy charges towards the bar – towards Will. I shout after him but it is useless. His blood is high. His blade is drawn. So is Will’s. He spins with the speed he used against me on the Sherwood road. Their swords meet in a metallic shriek that sends a tremor of panic across the tavern and turns my insides to dust.

  I lurch against the guard’s grip. It is unexpected enough that I pull him over. Still, he holds on and together we fall to the floor. Stone slaps my cheek. I see feet. Running. The old man too: Harvole crawls under a table. Two guards spot him. They grab him by his legs. Drag him out. One of them spits at him. The other kicks him in the side of the head. The mole-faced guard is almost on top of me. His weight makes the burns on my back sing. I struggle under him. Rank breath beside my ear. He repeats the same word, over and over: “Heel. Heel. Heel…”