Lionhearts
Page 11
“Don’t worry,” the Guardsman smiled again, “we’ll only take a quarter pause.”
Arable would have said more but John’s hand touched her waist and ushered her away. She stared at the Guardsman over her shoulder. Some things were no different, no matter what county or country or world. The Common Guard back in Nottingham was full of ignorant bullies grown into ignorant men, who were given a morsel of power and thought they were the head of the feast. Here, in a tiny parcel like Rutland, even the smallest minds would find nothing but boundaries to push against.
“They’re not collecting it for the king’s ransom,” she hissed. “They’ll take it for themselves and Sheriff d’Albini will never even know we were on his land.”
“I’d say you have the right of it,” John grumbled. “But that doesn’t change none that we have to give it up.”
They started collecting everything they owned, they took stock of every crumb, every blanket, every bit of string. The horsemen loomed over them, grunting now and then when they thought someone might be hiding something, and occasionally being right about it. Their group had long been stripped of their dignity, but to have the last of their meager possessions thrown haphazardly into a pile was the last of it. It was dehumanizing. Arable had to stay mad just to keep the tears away. She wondered if a quarter of them would be expected to strip down naked to give the very rags they wore as well.
Friar Tuck, in a rare display of muted antagonism, gathered a small crowd and read loudly from his Bible. “… and neglect not your hospitality to strangers, for in doing so might you have entertained angels, unaware.”
The Guardsmen ignored him. They poked at the piles and took what they wanted, insulting the paltry offerings. One man tested a knife against a nearby rock and complained when it broke. They were hardly mathematical with their sorting. They took one in four, but only that which was worth taking. Cups, spices, sewing needles—but leaving the clothes that were falling apart and the baskets that could hardly carry them. Arable watched one man mess angrily through her belongings and pocket her only thimble ring, apparently thinking he’d stumbled upon a piece of jewelry. She hated him, hated the violation. She memorized his face, accepting a grudge in exchange for his theft.
“Between the bandits this morning and you,” she sneered at the foreheaded Guardsman, who didn’t seem to find much he liked, “we might not even make it to Stamford. We’d hate to inconvenience you by dying on your land.”
“Look on the bright side.” The man smiled. “If it weren’t for those bandits, we’d be taking even more. As you say, a quarter o’nothing is better than a quarter o’everything, innit?”
“That’s not—”
“Wanna make a fuss of it?” His jovial voice finally turned dark. “Rutland needs to see to its own, too, you know. Last group of refugees from Nottingham looted their way through, and that wasn’t fair much neither, was it? As I say, we’re leading you through, which is more’n generous. We ought to turn you back, so don’t make me doubt mesself.”
It was a queer comment, and Arable abandoned her disdain for the man a moment. “Wait. Why are so many people fleeing from Nottingham?”
“Fewer Robin Hoods down here, I figger.”
It was a solemn drum beat, that name, it brought dread alone now.
Fewer Robin Hoods?
There was only one Robin Hood now, and Will Scarlet had taken that name to Nottingham.
Whatever the Guardsman meant by that comment, it likely boded poorly for Will.
The man chortled at her silence. “Can’t right blame d’Albini for staying in a castle neither, can you, when there’s folks goin’ ’bout killing every Sheriff they come upon. You’re the ones fleeing, you tell me what you’re running from. Naw, don’t, I don’t care. Just thank me, so as there’s no hard feelin’s, girl, or we change our minds.”
She didn’t need any nudging from John Little this time. Arable knew when to surrender, when to become meek, and when survival was more important than self-respect. She hoped that pride had some fat in it, as she’d been made to swallow an awful lot of it lately.
Eventually, to equal parts dismay and joy, they were off again—pushed forward at an uncomfortable jog by the Rutland host. Marion stayed ahead of the group, riding atop her horse beside her knight Amon amongst the Rutland’s vanguard. Too good to walk with us. She did not even come to explain how the “negotiations” went, how she had masterfully cost them a quarter of everything they owned for a single day’s passage. Even without Arable’s complicated history with her, it would be impossible to like Marion Fitzwalter.
Arable slung her sack over her shoulder. It was one-quarter emptier, as was her stomach. She wondered if she was starving. She didn’t know how to differentiate one pain in her body from the others anymore.
“We don’t have enough food,” John huffed. “Enough for a few tonight, perhaps, but practically nothing when split amongst all of us.”
“Then some don’t eat at all tonight,” Arable answered. “And come morning, none of us do.”
ELEVEN
ARTHUR A BLAND
NOTTINGHAM
“GET HER!” WASN’T NECESSARY to shout, but Arthur did it anyway and felt like a right fool for doing so. He launched himself after the girl in the tattered olive surcoat, fairly confident he’d overtake her quickly, forgetting he was at every disadvantage.
Little Bitch—she’d earned the name very quickly—darted in and out of an open stone building, then changed directions behind a hanging rug and clambered over a low wall. Arthur followed her at each twist, but just barely. She knew the streets, while Arthur had to spend half his energy watching out for obstacles. He overshot her when she disappeared behind a square stone column, but he caught himself and saw her trying to walk casually away in the opposite direction. He hugged the wall and backtracked, hoping she might not notice—but the crowd parted and they made brief eye contact, then ran again. She was not so young as he previously thought. Arthur guessed her to be ten or eleven, and damned if she wasn’t a sharp one, and curious nimble.
A dozen yards ahead she slopped noisily into the mud in the middle of a lane, pausing at an intersection to pick her way, second-guessed herself, then plunged down another. It gave Arthur the few precious seconds he needed to gain ground, but his heart plummeted when he made the turn and realized she’d planned it. He nearly bowled into two heavy gords, themselves still reeling from Little Bitch’s flight past them.
“Woah, now!” barked one as Arthur scrambled to a stop, inches away.
“Here’s a man in a hurry, eh?” The other stuck an accusing finger into Arthur’s chest, his breath spewing the stench of onions.
The first gord moved at a casual lope to follow Little Bitch. “That your daughter?” he asked helpfully, intent to join the chase.
“No, no,” Arthur answered, too quickly, missing the opportunity.
“Only two reasons for a fellow to chase a girl down,” the onion gord grumbled, repositioning himself as Arthur tried to move past. “So she’d better be your daughter.”
“No, she—” Arthur didn’t want to contradict himself, but he desperately did not want them to get involved. Down the curve of the side street, Little Bitch paused and looked back smugly, flipped him a crude hand signal, then disappeared. Horsefucker.
“You’d best walk away,” the first gord coughed. “That cunny ain’t worth your trouble.”
“You’re terrible,” the other chided him, grinning onion teeth and thinking some onion thoughts. Arthur should have been thankful those thoughts didn’t involve arresting the obvious criminal in front of them, but he was too preoccupied with a particular little bitch who had his coinpurse. Arthur craned his neck to look past them, but she was long gone. Even if he followed her now, she seemed plenty savvy enough to know how to disappear, and she’d had more than enough time to do so.
Arthur lingered a few extra moments and mumbled an apology to the gords, hoping to become utterly forgettable. Losing hi
s coin was bad, but getting pulled in by the Sheriff’s Guard would probably spoil the rest of his life—merciful short as it would then be.
Fortunately, the two gords seemed happy to move on, and Arthur moved back around the corner of the intersection where the girl had slipped him.
The hawk boy and the bread boy, both looking more shocked than the other, slid to a halt right in front of Arthur and turned to flee back toward Red Lion Square.
So he was running again.
The boys weren’t half as clever as the girl. They ran loudly, slamming into and over obstacles, shouting at each other and anyone in their way. Arthur had little trouble keeping pace with them, bounding through the wake of their clumsiness. These two were improvising and neither seemed to trust the other’s choice. If they had any cunning in them, they’d have split up. He and David had done exactly that back in Sheffield, practiced a dozen ways to separate and help each other if ever they were chased. Instead these boys clumped, and he followed them through a series of shrinking alleys until they ran single file down the crack between two buildings and then tumbled to a stop.
The passage opened up into what was once a small plaza, now blockaded across its length by the backside of a two-story wooden monstrosity. This left them trapped in a squarish little yard with not even a window to escape into, well away from the busy street and its casual eyes. Arthur stood in their only exit.
“Well that’s that,” Arthur laughed, trying to hide his exhaustion. The two boys weren’t nearly as winded as he was, but they were panicked and nervous. They looked around for any opening, then resigned to retreat against the wooden wall. He smiled and ambled forward into the center of the plaza. “First order of court, you’ll be handing me back my coinpurse, fuck you muchly. But second, I’ve got some questions for you, and you’ll answer them, and that’ll be dandy, won’t it?”
The boys looked confused. Perhaps they didn’t speak English.
“Let me try again.” He cracked his knuckles. “If you don’t answer my questions, I’ll reach into the back of your skulls and pull out the answers one by one.” He exhaled harshly, hoping he still sounded intimidating despite his lack of breath. “Either way, this starts with you opening your mouths. So how do you want to do it?”
The two boys looked at him, then each other, then him again, and snickered. They stood upright, offensively comfortable, as if they knew very many things that Arthur did not.
And damn it all if they weren’t right.
“Thought you had the upper, dincha?” The voice came from behind Arthur, thick with sarcasm, and Arthur whispered a little curse. Fuck me. He didn’t have to look to know who it was, but he did anyway. The alley entrance bore the shape of one very cock-heady little bitch in an olive surcoat. Whatever sense of innocence she’d had back at Red Lion Square was replaced now by a confidence that shouldn’t be possible at her age.
“Same offer to you. Let’s talk, girlie,” Arthur said.
“You just want to talk now, causin’ you’re surrounded.” She tilted her head, letting her black hair tumble onto one side of her face. She wasn’t ugly but neither was she pretty. It was as if she’d stolen all her features from various pretty people, but they didn’t quite fit together properly on her skull. “I don’t think you chased me down to have a talk at me, didcha?”
“No, that’s up to you, if you—”
“We’re playing a game!” She lit up and uncurled one of her hands to let something dangle out of it, snapping taut just before it hit the cobbles, bobbing in place by a long thin rope. “The only rules of the game are that you’re not allowed to tell me no.”
She swung the thing slowly, letting its tip just nearly graze the ground.
The rope continued in several loops held loose in her other hand. At its swinging end was a short wooden handle with an angled blade hooking away, just a small paring knife really, but she began to spin it in precise, deadly circles around her own body.
“You’ve already told me no once, which means I get to take something from you.”
She let more slack on the rope, deftly manipulating its direction around and behind her, letting it wrap around one of her arms only to bend its arc and redirect it again. It spun above and below her, sometimes she’d step over its path or spin her own body away, a graceful dance between her nimble little frame and the blinding sharp flash at the end of her whip.
Arthur really wished he had the time to be impressed with it.
“You don’t want to play this game,” he said, stooping to pull his own knife from his boot. But she tugged the rope and flicked it, sending the blade straight at Arthur’s feet, forcing him to leap backward as the dart bit at the cobbles where he’d been standing. A moment later it bounced back into her hand. His heart skipped, and he glanced around despite knowing there were no exits to be found. The two boys, ironically, had climbed halfway up the wooden wall, poised in little crawlholes that had been previously hidden. Each had a handful of sharp rocks that they raised to throw at him, laughing at his instinctive flinch.
“Nowhere to run,” Little Bitch singsonged at him, giving her rope an elaborate twirl that wrapped around her neck and off again. Fuck, Arthur thought. She could kill herself with that thing, but she looks downright bored with it.
“Girlie, this is normally the part where I say I don’t want to hurt you,” he settled into a fighting stance, “but I’m not so good a liar.”
“Sorry,” she whined, “couldn’t hear you since you’re all the way over there. Why’n’cha come an’ whisper that in my ear?”
“Girlie—”
She leaned and let loose on the knife dart’s slack, and Arthur’s bowels ducked before he did. The blade snapped back before it hit him, but it sent him flinching to the ground.
He was on all fours, more than a little embarrassed to be there, and the little bitch was already skipping over her damn rope again.
She cocked her head to match him. “Call me girlie again.”
“Alright,” he sighed. “What do you want?”
“Everything you’ve got.” She smiled. “All the way down to your billies. Don’t worry, I’ve seen them before.”
The thought of undressing in front of an eleven-year-old girl was appalling, and hiding naked in the streets of Nottingham until David rescued him was just about the worst thing Arthur could imagine. His mind started racing for alternatives, but it wasn’t much use in its recently throttled jelly state. All he came up with were flimsy excuses he could later give David to explain why he’d be stark nude.
“Come now,” he tried, but the knife leapt at her command again, straight for his head. He recoiled and fell backward even as he watched its point snap just shy of him, then fly back to her grasp.
“Oh sorry!” she crooned. “Thought you said no! Guess I shoulda been more specific. I don’t have the best hearing. Iffin’ it doesn’t sound like yes, it sounds like no.” She smirked, her face flickering back to the unnerving innocence and wide eyes of a young girl. “Now take your pants off, and stop being a puss about it.”
I’m a grown man, Arthur reminded himself, trying to ignore the heckles from the two boys perched on the wall. He stared at the girl, hoping to find a flaw in her posture, all while untying his breeches until they dropped to the ground in a humiliating heap around his boots.
“Oh my god, he fucking did it!” the bitch laughed, letting the rope skitter to a halt as she buckled over in hysterics. “Look at him—!” She pointed at his legs, burst backward into laughter again, and nearly fell over.
Arthur just bobbed his head, accepting his defeat, not sure if this meant they were done playing with him. He bent over to tug his breeches up, but the girl stood upright quick as a lightning bolt and started another slow circle with the dart. “Those are mine,” she said, eyes on his clothes. She snorted, but managed to finish with a straight face. “Now hurry up with the rest of ’em.”
Arthur slowly bent down to pull off his fucking boots.
A sh
arp whistle broke their attention. “First of all, you should learn how to count.”
The voice came from behind her, down the narrow entrance to the alleyway, and of course it belonged to Will Scarlet. Arthur had never been happier to see him.
“There were four of us you picked back at Red Lion Square, and you only have but one surrounded here. One—and I don’t mean to shock you now—is less than four. That leaves three of us to surround you instead.”
Will’s hands were empty, palms out. He stood in the crack of the alley, just shy of entering the square. Arthur looked for any sign of David or Stutely, but found none. Perhaps they were hidden, or perhaps Will was bluffing. Either option was more strategic than standing around without any pants on.
Little Bitch didn’t startle at the interruption. Instead she swept her leg around in a wide circle to set her eyes on Will, not stopping the momentum of her weapon and the steady whisper it made as it cut through the air. She let out more slack on the rope, giving herself a larger circle overhead to stay Will’s distance.
“Second of all,” Will continued, “you shouldn’t play with your food. Don’t toy with him. Take what he has and disappear. The longer you linger, the more like you are to be walked in on.”
“Stay back,” she warned, but Arthur thought her voice betrayed the tiniest bit of fear. She should be scared, he thought. The things Will has done should terrify her. She increased the speed of her blade’s spin, making it impossible for Will to leave the alley’s gullet. He was safe between the building’s walls, but she made it clear he could come no farther. Arthur’s stomach twisted, and he had to waddle to a corner to stay safe himself.
Fuck. He pulled his breeches up and hastily tied them.
“And third,” Will said, taking a step forward, flush with the alley’s mouth, “that scorpion’s tail of yours isn’t much good in an actual fight. It’s only good for scaring people.”
He took another step in, too close.
“That means it only works on people who are scared of dying.”