Rowan Hood Returns

by Nancy Springer

  They swung their steeds around and charged each other once again along the bank of the river, lances aimed at breastplates this time. Both struck so hard that the lances splintered. And the shock of impact hurled both knights to the ground.

  The war steeds ran away, but not far. Stepping upon their own reins, they stopped, snorted, then lowered their massive heads to crop the grass. To those chargers the combat was a matter of indifference now, over.

  But not to the knights. Staggering to their feet, they drew their broadswords.

  “Beware!” bellowed one.

  “‘Ware yourself, hound!” roared the other. Then the swords clanged.

  To Rowan, those metal-clad battling figures seemed barely human, such strange creatures smiting at each other for such unaccountable reasons. More like trolls, if there were such a thing as trolls, with their great hacking swords swinging. Or like lions fighting, if there were really such a thing as lions. Or dragons—

  But then she saw puddles of red on the mud at the riverside, and she knew that blood came from men, not dragons, and she had to press one hand to her mouth to keep from crying out.

  She heard Lionel ask Etty, “Is the one with the white shield a knight of Lord Marcus?”

  “I do not think so.” Ettarde’s voice sounded as taut as a bowstring. “I think one of my uncle’s knights lies dead, and this one has borne away his shield.”

  Although Rowan had known they might really fight to the death, something in Etty’s tone made her close her eyes.

  But it was even worse to hear the clangor, the shouts, the thudding impact of blows, without knowing what was happening.

  “Lady help us all, neither one of them will yield.” Lionel’s voice shook.

  There sounded a battle roar that twisted into a scream of agony. Rowan’s eyes snapped open. She saw the knight with the black shield striking right through the other’s larger shield and into his head. Blood like a red plume ran down from the challenger’s helm, yet he did not fall, but swung at the other one so fiercely that he cleaved his shield as well, and his sword bit into the defender’s arm.

  Rowan turned her face away. Beneath her she felt something shaking, and did not realize it was Dove; she thought the very earth quaked.

  She heard Lionel whisper, “They’re in the water.” Then, “They’re both down! They’ll both drown!”

  Rowan could not help it; she looked. For a long moment, she saw only two shattered shields drifting down the gray river.

  But then, like monsters coiling out of chaos and darkness, both knights surged up to stand staggering under the great weight of their own armor, swaying against the pressure of the current. Their combat had carried them into midstream, where the water ran fierce and swift up to their chests.

  Both at the same time lifted their swords, hacking at each other. Rowan saw the river water turning red. Biting her lip, lowering her eyes, she saw that Beau stood with her arms around Dove’s neck, hiding her face in Dove’s mane. Etty had grabbed hold of Lionel as if he were a tree to support her. When Rowan looked up again, both knights had somehow staggered back to the shore of the river where they had begun, blundering up the muddy bank, barely able to stand.

  “Is it over?” Rowan whispered.

  Lionel shook his head. “I doubt it.”

  And even as he spoke, one of the knights—Rowan could no longer tell which was which—one of the water-soaked, bloodstained, mud-caked warriors, with a great effort, struck the other with his sword.

  The other one heaved up his own heavy weapon and struck back.

  Rowan could not bear it anymore. “Stop it!” she screamed, shoving Beau aside with one hand as she kicked Dove into a wild downhill canter.

  Behind her, the others cried out.

  “Rowan, no!”

  “Are you insane?”

  “Wait! You’ll get yourself killed!”

  Rowan paid no heed. But as she reached the battling warriors, Dove snorted at the scent of blood, shied away from the red pools, whirled to a stiff-legged halt and would approach no nearer.

  One knight had beaten the other to his knees, but he himself staggered backward and fell down. The kneeling one slumped over, barely holding himself out of the mud with his elbows. Rowan saw the sheath at his right side. It was the knight with two swords, the one who had held the ford.

  He called hoarsely, “Who are you, Sir Knight? Never before have I met a fighter who could match me.”

  The reply came faintly. “I am Holt, son of Orric, Lord of Borea.”

  Rowan felt a strange cold storm of emotion blow through her, leaving her chilled to the bone.

  The other one gave a terrible cry. “My brother!” And he fell down, unconscious.

  Cold and hollow to her heart’s heart, Rowan barely noticed as Lionel ran up beside her to seize Dove’s reins.

  Crying out in his turn, Holt Orricson floundered to his hands and knees, crawling through the mud to the other. Jerking at the man’s half-destroyed helm, he got it off.

  Etty and Beau stood by now also, staring at the fainting knight. A savage, bearded face, but bloody, bruised and still.

  “No! Oh, Hurst, no!” The other one tore off his own helm and flung it into the river. Stunned, Rowan stared at his face, much like his brother’s, but with tears cleaving runnels in the blood and dirt.

  Hurst Orricson’s eyes flinched and opened, looking up at Holt. He moved his bloodied mouth soundlessly, then spoke. “We’re cursed,” he said faintly. “You have killed me, my brother, and I have killed you.”

  Lionel placed the bodies of Hurst and Holt, warriors and murderers, side by side on the hilltop. Then he and Beau and Ettarde raised a cairn of stones over the corpses, to keep the carrion birds from pecking out their eyes. It was long, hard, somber work. Rowan labored with the others until her legs would no longer support her, then sat on the heather, whispering the blessing of the Lady over the dead. By the time stones covered the bodies, the sun was setting, casting a red glow on the end of the day as Lionel marked the place with the knights’ two swords, their bloodstained blades plunged into the earth.

  Rowan and the others spent the night in Hurst’s pavilion, on the other side of the river within the poplar grove, all of them silent and subdued despite the great wealth they found under its canvas roof: gold and jewels, but more to their purpose, food, drink, salves, blankets, clothing—all manner of luxury, including soap.

  Traveling onward rather late the next day, freshly washed in the river, Rowan and her companions had horses to ride, and plenty to eat: the knights’ saddlebags carried dried apples, bread, cheese and smoked pork. Ro, Beau and Etty each wore one of Hurst’s flowing tunics draped and girded to serve as a gown. Even Lionel had found among the loose-fitting garments a bright yellow jerkin only a little too small for him, sky blue leggings and a rose-red hat and sash. Decked in his favorite colors, with mismatched colorful trappings on his gray steed, he appeared every inch the carefree traveling minstrel.

  But he had little to say. None of them did. Rowan rode silently behind Etty on the other warhorse, the bay, and Beau just as silently rode Dove, across open, windy moorland where plovers cried.

  Finally, around midafternoon, Lionel turned his head to ask Rowan, “Why did you try to help them?”

  He spoke gently enough, but Rowan clenched her teeth, for she considered that it had been weakness, mollycoddle folly, that had made her forget her vow of vengeance, jump off of Dove, kneel in the mud by the two dying knights and try to bind their wounds.

  Yet Lionel did not sound as if he were teasing.

  She gave him a hard look. “Why do you ask?”

  “I have my reasons.” Reining in his horse to ride closer to her, Lionel asked again, “Why did you?”

  Rowan sighed and turned her eyes forward. “I don’t know. Stupidity.” Hurst Orricson and his brother Holt had died within moments of her arrival. Even if they had not already lost so much blood, they would have died. Each of them bore more than one fatal wo
und.

  As if in cahoots with Lionel, Etty asked, “Would you have saved their lives if you could have?”

  From her seat behind the saddle, Rowan could not see Etty’s face. But Etty did not sound as if she were teasing either.

  Still, Rowan gave no answer. She did not know the answer.

  “La, Rowan, I think it is because of what Petrarch say.” This from Beau, riding Dove at a trot to keep up with the larger horses. She had removed the deerskin wrappings from Dove’s hooves, for what was the purpose ? A blind tracker could have followed the hoofprints they were leaving now.

  Etty raised her brows. “Petrarch?”

  “He say, ‘What the brain forget, yet the heart remember. ’”

  “I don’t recall that in Petrarch.”

  Rowan burst out, “I think it is because I have the brain of a mudhen.”

  “Think you so?” asked Lionel owlishly.

  “Yes. I am a lackwit nincompoop to be doing a favor for my enemieis.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Yes. But it doesn’t matter. We would have needed to go to Borea regardless.”

  “We would?”

  “Yes.”

  “why?”

  “To find the other two: ”

  Jasper of the Sinister Hand. Guy Longhead.

  Knights of Lord Orric of Borea.

  Two years ago, fleeing to Sherwood Forest, Rowan had done so in part to escape becoming a peasant in Lord Orric’s village or a wench in his fortress.

  Hard old Orric of Borea was perhaps the last man on earth whom she would wish to visit.

  Yet by some unaccountable perversity of the Lady, Hurst Orricson, dying in Rowan’s arms, had begged her, “Warrior damsel, prithee, tell our father where we lie.” And looking upon his beaten face, she had thought, This is one of them, one of those who set his torch to the thatch and killed my mother—but the thought had seemed meaningless at that moment, as death rattled in his throat and he had whispered, “Promise me.” Willy-nilly she had nodded. Unshed tears stinging her eyes, unable to speak for pity, she had watched her enemy die.

  As her other enemy lay already dead.

  It was as if the Lady had blessed Ro’s quest for vengeance with the deaths of those two plus the great good fortune of food, clothing and captured horses. Yet in no way could Rowan put the name of blessing to the cold and tangled winds blowing in her heart, the frigid battle raging there.

  Fourteen

  Horses travel far fast,” Rowan whispered in awe as they halted at the northern edge of Barnesdale Forest. Spring had advanced only a little; elms put forth pale green shoots now, and sticky chestnut buds hinted at clusters of leaf to come. Only a few days had passed, and Rowan did not feel ready to be where she was: sitting in a tall steed’s saddle, looking across Lord Orric’s demesne. Before her lay pastureland, then freshly plowed land where beets and barley would grow, then a huddle of huts, and then, towering over the village that surrounded it, the walls of the lord’s stronghold.

  And beyond the stronghold, more strips of cropland where peasants ploughed with oxen, and more wasteland where boys herded sheep and goats, and in the blue distance, a soft mound almost like a low-growing violet-colored flower.

  “See yonder forest?” Rowan pointed it out to the others, trying without quite succeeding to keep her voice from faltering. “That’s Celandine’s Wood.”

  Her home.

  “Would that we were going there,” said Lionel.

  “We are.”

  “If we live.”

  Etty ordered, “Lionel, hush. Seven feet tall and you whine more than the rest of us put together.”

  “Because I know what’s ahead! No wind blows more fickle than a lord. If we just stroll into Orric’s hall and tell him—”

  Rowan said, “We won’t.”

  All eyes turned to her eagerly. Beau exclaimed, “Mon foi, you have changed your mind?”

  “No. I must keep my promise. But there is more than one way to beard a lord.”

  She explained her plan.

  It took only a few minutes to get down off the horses and prepare. Everything that marked them as outlaws—bows, arrows, even belts or shoes made of deerskin—had to be hidden out of sight. Etty still had the cowhide boots she had worn from Celydon, and Lionel wore a pair he had taken from one of the dead knights, but Beau and Rowan slipped off their boots and went barefoot. Weapons, supplies, all clothing of Lincoln green and brown, Etty’s cloak, everything they wished to keep in their possession they wrapped in blankets and strapped onto Dove. The pony’s mane and tail had grown unkempt, and her brown dye had come off in patches, making her skewbald; to anyone who did not study her aristocratic head and neck, she looked like a humble pack animal. Leading Dove by a makeshift rope put together of reins and harness, Beau got up on the gray steed behind Lionel. Rowan and Etty shared the bay steed, but this time with Rowan in front, at the reins, for she knew the way.

  All four of them looked at one another and found no words to say.

  Then they rode out of Barnesdale Forest and across the grazing lands toward Borea.

  Strangers did not often come to this far northern place. Never had Rowan felt so many eyes upon her, upon all of them, as when they rode up to the edge of the village. Men shouted to one another, ploughman to smithy to miller to carpenter; women with spindles dangling from their hands gawked from the doorways of the wattle-and-daub huts; chickens squawked and scuttled, dogs barked, half-naked dirty children jostled either to get away or get closer. Some of these people perhaps had met with Rowan before, when she had been Rosemary, the woodwife’s daughter. But she pushed aside fear that they would recognize her, for they had seen her seldom. Moreover, she sensed how much the years since her mother’s death had changed her.

  Rowan felt the great warhorse beneath her starting to snort and champ the bit, arching its neck, showing off, the vain overgrown donkey. “Toads squat in your ears, horse,” she muttered. Her fists tightened and sweated on the charger’s reins as she led her comrades around the edge of Borea village toward the track that would take them to the fortress.

  There. A dirt road that cleaved the village and ran across earthworks, Lord Orric’s failed attempt at a moat, to the gate. Once she had found the way, Rowan wrestled her horse to a brief halt and beckoned Lionel to take the lead.

  Ro’s horse went along more quietly now, following the gray, and her grip on the reins relaxed. Although her eyes looked straight forward at the lord’s stone and timber walls, she found herself mindful of Celandine’s Wood also, a not-too-distant peaceful presence behind her back.

  And something else behind her back as well. A stir, a murmur, footsteps. She turned her head.

  Beau, looking around also, confirmed what Rowan glimpsed. “La, half the village, they follow us to see what passes!”

  “Who goes there?” shouted a man’s voice from the fortress.

  Rowan’s head snapped around. Let the village folk gaggle like geese if they liked.

  “Halt!” shouted the same voice. “Name yourselves and your business!”

  A guard. The gates stood open, for it was daytime, and folk bustled in and out: washerwomen, scullery girls, a peasant leading a donkey half buried under sacks of seed for planting. But the guards still watched to challenge strangers.

  Three of them, in helms and quilted tabards, barred the way to the gate with pikes at the ready. A fourth stood atop the guardhouse; it was he who had shouted the challenge.

  Rowan and Etty halted at the rear of the small cavalcade. It was Lionel, in the fore, who spoke. “We are travelers bearing dire news for your lord.” The band had agreed that it should be Lionel who dealt with the guards while the rest of them hung their heads and tried to look maidenly.

  “Travelers? Of what nature?”

  “I am a minstrel.” As before, Lionel carried his harp in the crook of one arm. “These are my sisters who accompany me.”

  Someone snickered. “Indeed,” said the chief of guards with a sneer
in the word. “Your sisters. And how do you, a minstrel, come by such various sisters and such fine horses?”

  Taking no offense, Lionel replied quietly to the second question only. “The pony is mine. The two warhorses we have brought here to return to your lord. One of them belonged to Lord Orric’s son Hurst. The other, to his son Holt.”

  A gasp and a muttering went up from the crowd of villagers behind them, and for a moment the chief of guards’ mouth fell open. Then he demanded, “You bear news of young my lords Hurst and Holt?”

  “I do.”

  “Enter.”

  Hearing the command, the three guards with pikes lowered their weapons and stood aside. But Lionel and his entourage made no move toward the gate.

  “Nay,” Lionel told the chief guard, “we’ll proceed no farther.” He vaulted down off his gray steed to stand, a humbler visitor, on the ground. “I respect the lord’s grief, and also I fear his wrath, should I tell him that his sons lie dead.”

  A gasp and a clamor went up all around, such a hullabaloo that the chief guard shouted to be heard. “Dead! How? By whose hand?”

  “They slew each other.”

  “What!”

  “They wore visored helms. They bore captured shields, rode captured horses. They did not know each other as they fought. And ... and they both prevailed.”

  The villagers’ clamor had risen to wails, screams, cries not so much of grief as of fear. “It’s the curse!” some peasant woman keened. “The house of Orric is accursed forever for murdering the woodwife!”

  The shrill words pierced Rowan like an arrow between her ribs, taking her breath away. She tried to turn, to demand of the woman what she meant, but Etty, sitting behind her in the saddle, gripped her with both arms. The strength of that hug warned Rowan not to give herself away.

  But Beau, perched atop the gray, turned to the villagers. “What is this?” she cried with just the right thrill of shock, just the right height of curiosity. “A curse?”

  A dozen eager, frightened voices vied to tell her about it.

  “They slew the woodwife, and her curse—”