“‘Woods witch,’ the lord’s men called her.”
“The more fools they. She was a wise woman, a healer, but they—”
“Her daughter, too, a good child, wishing harm to no one. Yet the four knights rode against—”
“They never meant to kill the woman and the girl, only frighten them.”
“And for what reason? Because—”
“To drive them out.”
“You simpleton, it was for the sake of power, nothing more. No good—”
“They set the thatch afire. And instead of fleeing, the woodwife—”
“... nothing right since. A murrain sickened the cattle—”
“... lay down and cursed the house of Orric and died.”
“—winter so cold half the old people and infant babes perished—”
“Jasper of the Sinister Hand took to drink and—”
“—and then summer so hot and dry the wheat shriveled, the wells failed—”
“Lord Orric’s men marched against Celydon and only half of them came back.”
“—and beat his wife so cruel, he slew his unborn child, and when he saw what he had done—”
“Guy Longhead is a lost soul entirely.”
“And now young lord Hurst and young lord Holt—”
“—ran away half naked. They say he’s starving out there in Celandine’—”
“Hush! Don’t say her name. You’ll bring her dying curse down on all of us.”
All this Rowan heard with her back turned, her shoulders hunched iron hard, her eyes on what was happening among the guards. Go tell his lordship, the captain had ordered them one after another, and each in turn had refused.
“How dare you disobey me to my face!” the man atop the gate was roaring now.
One of the guards replied flatly, “I’d rather beard you than his lordship.”
“You know the penalty! You’ll be flogged!”
“I’d rather be flogged then dead.”
Rowan dropped the reins, pulled herself free of Etty’s arms, swung one leg over the horse’s neck and slid to the ground. Her stiff legs panged like heartache as she landed, but she kept her feet. Wobbling, barefoot, she limped forward to stand before the gates. “I’ll go,” she told the captain of guards.
A gasp rose all around, not least from Beau and Etty and Lionel, for the whole plan had been to keep themselves away from Lord Orric; Rowan’s passion for revenge had never included him, for he had seemed beyond her reach.
Lionel cried, “Are you mad? Ro—”
Her glance stopped him just in time from saying her name. “Even Lord Orric would not smite a girl,” she told him. And, she might as well have said, a cripple. “I’ll go.”
Lionel said, “I’ll come with you, then.”
“No. All of you stay here. And until I return, tell no one where lie the bodies of Hurst and Holt.” This knowledge might be a way to ensure her safety, should she need to do so.
She gazed at each of her comrades in turn, willing them to understand why the plan had changed, why she must do this thing. Lionel returned her gaze with sheerest horror, and Beau with bewilderment, but in Etty’s eyes she saw understanding. Not approval, but acceptance. Etty had taken hold of the bay horse’s reins.
Rowan turned to one of the guards and told him as if she had a right to command, “Show me the way to his lordship. I will tell him of the fate that has befallen his sons.”
Fifteen
Even as Rowan hobbled across the courtyard between the walls and the lord’s central stronghold, the tower called the “keep,” maids and men-at-waiting came running out. And page boys and scullions and even the men-at-arms, fleeing, for alarm spreads as swift as a falcon’s flight among servants. As Rowan’s guide led her up the stairs to the keep, they met a flood of frightened folk pouring down.
Within, a deep voice roared, “What has chanced? Stand and speak, cowardly dogs!”
The guard who was leading Rowan stopped and beckoned her to pass him. “I’ll go no farther,” he whispered.
She nodded to him and walked onward, step by painful step, entering the dim stone-and-timber passageway within.
A few laggard servants scattered past her with wild cries, like quail in flight. Only Rowan faced Lord Orric, striding toward her in the torchlight with his beard jutting, his fierce face much like those of his sons. He had been holding court, it would seem by the crimson velvet that arrayed his tall, powerful body, but there was nothing velvety about the naked sword he bore in his hand.
Rowan looked him in his fearsome face and said in a voice like milk, “I have come to tell you what has happened to your sons.”
He halted, standing almost within arm’s reach, and glared at her. She stared back. She felt the stone cold, cold under her bare feet, but not much else. The chill wind that had been blowing through her heart had seemingly emptied it. This was the lord who had hated her mother, but Rowan felt too weary to hate him. Nor did she fear him. He could brandish his great sword with all his might and she did not tremble. She felt barely alive, so she did not care whether she died.
He barked at her, “Who are you?”
“A stranger who has seen a strange, sad thing.” Her white voice scarcely seemed her own. “I will tell you what I have seen with mine own two eyes. No more, and no less.”
She folded to the floor of the passageway, for her suffering legs would not bear her weight much longer. And as he stood over her, glowering, she told him the story almost as if it were a fairy tale. How two knights had met at a ford, the gray knight who challenged all comers and would not reveal his name, and the other knight who had heard of his renown and come to cross swords with him. How mightily they had battled, each unhorsing the other, each striking the other with mortal wounds. How at the last, as they lay dying, the one had asked the other’s name, and had cried out, “My brother!” How they, Hurst and Holt, had embraced and died.
And how she had promised to bear the news to their father.
As she spoke, she never moved her gaze from Lord Orric’s fierce bearded face, his yellow mouth set in a snarl. And his scowl never changed. But without even clouding, his eyes rained. Tears showered down his craggy cheeks and watered his thorny beard.
And when she had finished and looked down, she saw that his sword hand had sagged to his side. The broadsword’s double-edged blade lay against his velvet-clad leg, pointing toward the ground.
Silence, except for, winging in from a distance, the sweet notes of a harp, the honeyed tones of a tenor voice. Out by the gate, Lionel was playing and singing a favorite ballad:“In hidden glades of wild Sherwood
There lives an outlaw fair and free,
An outlaw bold as gold, yet good
Of heart. Folk call him Robin Hood ...”
From the distance, Rowan would not have been able to make out the words or the tune if it were not that she already knew them so well. She felt the music comfort and strengthen her even as the thought of her father made her heart ache.
Lionel sang on:“... with his maiden daughter, brave and good,
an archer with a healer’s hand
on which there shines a mystic band,
Rowan Hood of the rowan wood.”
Rowan’s heart panged harder. Why must Lionel sing this song here, now, at such a time?
Perhaps in an attempt to charm or soothe the lord? But Orric seemed not to hear the minstrel at all. He stood silent and his hard, wet eyes looked faraway, as if searching for his dead sons. “Hurst and Holt dead by each other’s swords,” he said heavily at last. “This is far more than mere mischance. This is the work of the woods witch’s curse.”
Rowan shook her head. Still speaking with the same milky calm, she told him, “My mother never put a curse on anyone.”
The lord’s narrow eyes seemed to spark like flint. His breath hissed inward between his clenched teeth and his sword swept up as he leapt back. Crouching, weapon raised and stabbing at air, he glared as if Rowan were a viper coiled upon his fl
oor, ready to strike him.
Rowan did not move, did not flinch, did not lift her arms to shield herself. “My mother was a healer who wished all good and no harm to anyone.” Not even her voice rose. “If she were here, the touch of her hands would ease your pain.” A power that had once belonged to Rowan herself, and to her own muted surprise she found herself wishing she still had that power so that she could lay her hands upon the fierce lord’s head to assuage his grief. Odd, she thought, too weary of her own emotions to call herself a mollycoddle for pitying this man. Odd, because he was the one—except for those who had actually set torches to the thatch of Celandine’s cottage—Lord Orric was the one whom she should hate the most.
With her voice still milk in a cup of candor, she asked, “Why did you send them to kill her?”
“I did not!” The denial burst out of him even though he still crouched to strike. “I told them only to drive her away.” Lord Orric stepped toward Rowan, looming with lifted sword. “Why did she not flee from them?” he roared at Rowan as if it were all her fault.
“She could not. She was at one with the cottage and the glade.” It was hopeless, Rowan knew, to try to explain the wonder that had been Celandine to this hard-fisted lord. Hopeless to explain to him the goodness or the rootedness of her mother’s woodsy magic. Impossible to make him see how Celandine had been the breeze in the trees of Celandine’s Wood, the fire on the hearth of Celandine’s cottage, the sweetwater in Celandine’s spring, and could not have lived elsewhere.
Rowan explained it to him another way, also true. “She spent all her power in sending a spell of protection upon me.”
“Aye, and a spell of vengeance to curse my sons for spite. And poor Jasper, out there in the wilderness, running mad. And Guy, gone evil.”
Rowan looked him in the face. “I tell you, my mother cursed no one.”
His wet eyes widened storm wild, his hands shook beneath the heavy sword, the sword quivered as if it would leap upon her of its own accord. The lord’s whole body quaked with rage. He screamed, “No curse, you say? And what do you call it, then, that has sent you, her daughter, here to tell me—”
“You think my mother cursed me?” Rowan shot back. “To have me witness such bloody dealings, such bloody death? And then to have me come here and face you in your wrath? To send me in here as you see me, powerless, weak and lame, a beggar wearing a dead man’s shirt? Whom shall I say has cursed me, my lord?”
Glaring at her, he could not speak, only cried out like a bear impaled on the huntsman’s spear.
“Do you wish to slay me, my lord?” she inquired, gazing up at him, unblinking, blank, a suckling babe.
He gulped, gasped, panted for breath, then stood back and lowered his sword. “Get you hence,” he ordered, his voice as rough and ragged as oak bark. “Quickly.”
Rowan struggled to her feet. “I am sorry, my lord,” she said. But as she turned and pattered away from him barefoot over the cold stones, she wondered at herself. Sorry? For Lord Orric? Weakness, she reproached herself. Weakness and folly. Her only regret should be that she had not yet avenged her mother’s death.
“Why?” Lionel demanded as soon as they had left the fortress and village of Borea behind them. “Why did you go in there?”
To defend her mother’s honor, Rowan wanted to tell him. But she could not answer. Since the moment she had returned to the others from the lord’s fortress, she had been shaking so hard, her teeth chittered. Terrified, now that she was safe, or as safe as an outlaw ever could be. Now that it was over.
Now that, trembling, she was walking with the others, because the distance to Celandine’s Wood was not great. And because Dove, nodding along behind Beau and Etty, remained loaded to her ears with baggage.
Scowling down at Rowan, Lionel insisted, “You could have been killed. Why did you do such an insane thing?”
Rowan wondered if indeed she were insane. Right now she was leading the others toward Celandine’s Wood, yet she could not remember why she needed to go there.
“Rowan—”
“Lionel, hush,” Etty told him, her usually placid tones a bit weary. “When Rowan finds out why, you’ll know it.”
“But mon foi,” put in Beau, sounding puzzled, “is it not obvious? For to look on his face as she told him. For revenge.”
Oh, Rowan thought. Yes. Revenge. That was why she was limping toward Celandine’s Wood, for revenge on the next one, Jasper of the Sinister Hand. Folk said he had sought refuge there.
Yes. That was it.
“Is that it, Rowan?” asked Etty at that exact moment. “Did it do your heart good to see Lord Orric suffer?”
The question was put not ungently, but it struck Rowan like a blow. She flinched, her eyes wincing shut with pain worse than that of her aching legs. Stumbling, she fell to the rocky ground, facedown in the prickly gorse.
Without a word, Lionel picked her up as if she were no more than a child, cradling her in his arms. He strode onward, carrying her quite a bit faster than she had been able to walk on her own.
She should have told him to put her down or she would shave his head with Etty’s sword. But she felt as if she had no spirit left, no defiance of her own misery, no pride. Letting her head rest against his chest, closing her eyes, she allowed him to carry her along as if she were a baby.
No one spoke. In the silence Rowan heard the clopping of Dove’s hooves on rocks and clay, the singing of meadowlarks high in a rain-washed sky.
It had happened on just such a day as this....
Rowan opened her eyes, turned her head and looked. From her sideward vantage all seemed strange, yet strangely familiar. Carrying her easily, Lionel strode up the very slope where she had once gathered coltsfoot upon that fateful day. Edged with rowans, Celandine’s Wood spread like a green flower ahead.
Rowan said, “Put me down.”
“In a minute. Once we’re in the forest.”
“Put me down now. I can walk.”
“That is debatable.”
“Lionel ...” Two years ago, when he had barely known her, he had obeyed her without even knowing why, because of the force of—something in her. But whatever that power had been, it was now gone.
Toads take everything.
Misery heated into frustration, frustration blazed into anger, anger fired Rowan with strength to struggle in Lionel’s arms. “Confound you, Lionel, put me down!”
Last time, he had done so. This time, however, he became stubborn. “In a minute! Once we’re safe amid the trees.”
“That’s debatable,” came Etty’s weary voice from behind. “Safety. Anywhere.”
“Just the same.” Lionel ducked to pass under the low boughs of a rowan at the edge of the woods.
“Put me down,” Rowan told him from between clenched teeth.
“In a minute, my dear little girl.”
Rowan’s temper snapped almost audibly, like a twig. With a wordless cat-snarl she flailed, squirmed, reared in Lionel’s arms, pounded her small fists against his chest.
She truly wanted to hurt him, but she could not, blast it. She was just too weak, and he was just too much bigger.
But she did succeed in slowing his steps and making him grumble, “Ungrateful wench, hold still until the others get here.” Halting under the first tall tree, an elm, Lionel swung around to look for Beau, Etty, Dove.
“Let me go, I tell you!” Rowan struggled wildly, clawing at Lionel’s neck.
“Stop it!” Annoyed, he tightened his grip on her.
From somewhere close at hand in the forest shadows, a man’s fierce voice shouted, “Unhand her, lout! Or I will kill you!”
Sixteen
Rowan landed on her hind end in the forest loam as, utterly startled, Lionel dropped her. Looking up from her sudden seat on the ground, she saw him whip out his dagger, crouching and turning, peering this way and that in search of the unknown enemy.
Struggling to her feet, Rowan snatched for her own dagger, the only weapon she wo
re because, toads take it, all the bows and arrows and swords remained packed and hidden on Dove. The plan had been to leave the things out of sight until mantled in the safety of Celandine’s Wood.
Safety?
Beau and Etty stood just within the shelter of the trees, frozen, staring. Dagger in hand, Rowan staggered two steps toward Dove, toward her bow and arrows, but then she stiffened and stared as well.
At something pale and uncanny.
Out of the shadows of elm, ash and maple sprang a scrawny, bony, nearly naked man—capering. Like a child playing horsie, he galloped on his own two bare feet toward Lionel, flailing at the air with a broadsword that looked as if it had been used to chop firewood. Pulling on imaginary reins, he drew his horse of air to a halt with his left—hand? No, just the stump of his wrist. Perhaps he imagined a hand there, as he seemed to be imagining reins and steed.
His was the unlined face of a young man, yet hair as white as bone sprouted wildly from his head, white hair tangled in elf-knots as thick as a fist, long enough to brush his shoulders. Over a crooked nose that had more than once been broken, his bushy white eyebrows joined so that a single scowling line, chalky against his weathered skin, crossed his forehead. He wore only rags wrapped around his middle.
Woodwouse. Wild man.
Flourishing his battered sword and glowering up at Lionel, facing the much larger youth without any sign of fear—indeed, within arm’s reach—the one-handed man ordered, “Go. The woodwife sleeps in her woods, and I stand guard. No one comes here. Get you hence.”
Lionel sheathed his dagger, lifting both hands in a gesture of peace. But he seemed at a loss for words. “I, um,” he said, “we, um, we—”
“Go, I tell you!” The wild man crouched as if to strike, his voice louder, more threatening. “No one shall trouble Celandine ever again. Get out!”
Lionel took a step back.
Rowan took a step forward and called, “Jasper.”
The wild man’s sword wavered, and his eyes turned to her, widening. Then they narrowed and he shook his head. “You are not my wife,” he said.
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