Hood

by Jenny Elder Moke

Sister Catherine’s eyes went wide in shock, then narrowed. “You insolent little bastard.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” Isabelle said. “Such language from a sister of the order.”

  “I always knew you were no better than a common gutter rat,” Sister Catherine said. “Resorting to violence to get what you want.”

  “I do not want to hurt you, Sister Catherine,” Isabelle said. “But I will, if I have to. I need to find my mother. Where are they keeping her?”

  Sister Catherine drew her robes in around herself. “Why should I tell you anything?”

  Isabelle took a deep breath, willing herself to be patient. “Because you can have the priory as I know you always dreamed. I only want to see my mother safe, far away from here. Please.”

  It stuck in her teeth, begging this horrible woman for help, but she would get on her knees and tear her hair out to save her mother. Sister Catherine eyed her up and down.

  “I do not think well with a knife thrust in my face.”

  Isabelle lowered the blade. “I am sorry. Please, Sister Catherine. Please help me. Where is my mother?”

  The sister tapped her fingers against the beads of her rosary once more, her eyes flicking toward the door and back. Isabelle wasn’t sure she really could harm the woman if she tried to call out for help, but she hoped she would not need to.

  “It is no use trying to free her,” Sister Catherine said, though her tone had turned thoughtful. “They keep her under lock and key all hours of the day, with more of these foulmouthed savages guarding her.”

  Isabelle pressed her eyes closed, praying she was not too late. “Where?”

  Sister Catherine sighed. “In the cellarium.”

  Isabelle shivered involuntarily. Anywhere but underground. “Can you get me there?”

  “Of course not,” Sister Catherine said, horrified. “And if I were caught aiding you, what would happen to the sisters then? What would happen to me? I would rather be stabbed.”

  Isabelle pushed her annoyance back. Sister Catherine always got under her skin in just the right way, but she could not let the woman cloud her judgment now. She needed to get to the cellarium.

  “Where are you storing the apple harvest?” Isabelle asked.

  Sister Catherine looked confused. “In the cellarium, of course.”

  That is how I will reach her. Isabelle looked about the room. “Do you have a spare habit?”

  “Only my old one,” Sister Catherine said slowly. “Why?”

  “I need to borrow it,” Isabelle said.

  “What for?”

  Isabelle wouldn’t dare to reveal her plan to the sister, especially not when she barely trusted her not to call out to the guards at any minute. “Because it is my only way of getting out of this room without raising suspicion from the guards patrolling outside. If they catch me in here with you, it will be both our heads in the hangman’s noose.”

  Sister Catherine paled considerably before moving toward a trunk in the far corner of the room, digging toward the bottom to locate the habit. She probably hoped never to wear it again, Isabelle thought. No doubt she jumped at the opportunity to take Mother’s place when the Wolf arrived. But she had no time to consider Sister Catherine or her petty machinations, and so she accepted the garment gratefully.

  She donned the habit, agonizing for only a brief moment before setting her bow and quiver aside. She could never pass as a sister carrying such a weapon, despite how vulnerable and empty it made her feel to have them out of her possession. She tucked Patrick’s knife back in her boot, which would have to suffice for now. It took some wrangling to pin Sister Catherine’s wimple in place, but she hoped it would obscure her features enough that the guards would not bother with her.

  “It really is no use trying to rescue her,” Sister Catherine said, watching Isabelle dress. “They have several men on guard at all hours. How would you possibly get past them?”

  “That is not your concern,” Isabelle said, adjusting the belt around her waist. “You will stay here when I leave, then return to the dormitory without a word to the soldiers.”

  “Without so much as a ‘please,’” the older woman sniffed. “I see your manners have deteriorated further in your lawless absence.”

  “Sister Catherine,” Isabelle said, hesitating beside the candle that was now close to guttering. “I know we have not always seen eye to eye in the past, but I appreciate your help. And I am sure my mother appreciates your efforts to protect the sisters in her absence.”

  “Of course,” Sister Catherine said, lifting her chin. “It is my sacred duty.”

  Isabelle slipped out the door, keeping her head down as she made for the shadowed arch. The two men on guard were still gone, which she hoped meant they had moved to another location and not that they had fallen prey to Helena’s sword. She dodged between the pillars again, avoiding the guards’ attention as she made her way to the stairwell. She could not see Adam and the others in its shadowy depths, but she gestured in the direction of the cellarium and held up a hand, hoping he would understand the signal. She cast one glance back at the chapter house doors, but Sister Catherine did not emerge. She might not be a great help, but at least she wasn’t raising the alarm.

  Isabelle bowed her head and stuck to the shadows, pressing her hands together and murmuring Ave Marias over and over. They were half meant as a means of disguise, and half meant as a very earnest plea to the heavens. She passed two guards on rotation, but she lowered her head and prayed harder, the veil obscuring her face. The men did not stop, and she reached the kitchens on a quick exhalation of gratitude to the Virgin.

  Sister Catherine was right; they had six men stationed around the kitchen, two on the door outside and another four lounging within, guarding the doors down to the cellarium. Isabelle hovered around the corner, watching the bored men as they picked at their teeth and cleaned under their nails with the wicked ends of their knives. It was possible her plan was madness, but she had no better idea for reaching her mother. She took a deep breath, smoothed her hands down the rough skirts of Sister Catherine’s habit, and stepped into view.

  “Evening, good sirs,” she said in a soft voice, keeping her head lowered and her eyes on the ground.

  “No one allowed down there,” said a man in a bored, flat tone. “You know the rules.”

  “Yes, I…Yes, of course. It is only that…Sister Catherine has sent me? To begin the preservation of the apple harvest?”

  The man grunted. “Why would the prioress send one of you in the dead of night?”

  Isabelle gritted her teeth at the man’s tone. “We always do our preservation at night, sir. The cooler weather makes for sweeter apples. We have only just completed matins laud. I could come back with Sister…with the prioress, if that would help?”

  “Not that old bag,” another of the men muttered. “Go on, then, let the girl pass. What’s one sister going to do?”

  “We have our orders,” said the first soldier, but he didn’t sound as if he felt strongly about them.

  Isabelle’s heart pounded, and she had to move her tongue around her mouth to keep it from going dry. “Please, sir, if we do not start the preservation soon the apples will rot, and we will lose our entire harvest. There are many poor souls in the neighboring towns who depend on our apples for their sustenance through the winter.”

  “Just let the sister pass,” said another of the mercenaries, with a thick scar where his eye should have been. “Come on, I fancy a game of bones. I’ve got the coin. Who’s in?”

  “I’ll take that play,” said another of the men, producing a set of dice carved out of ivory.

  The first man sighed, rolling his eyes as the men laid out their coin to start the game. “All right, sister, do your harvesting. But be quick about it, yeah? No talking to the prisoner.”

  It was jarring to hear her mother referred to as the prisoner, and she couldn’t imagine what it had been like for her, buried in this cellar for so many days now. She had spent less than
a night in her prison cell, and it still gave her nightmares. She would get her mother out of there, even if she had to fight through every mercenary in this place to do it. Which she hoped would not be the case.

  Isabelle nodded and the man fished a key from his tunic and unlocked the thick chains around the cellarium doors. Isabelle willed her hands to stay by her sides as he unwound the chains slowly, every muscle in her body wanting to rip them free and throw the doors wide. He drew the last of the chains out, the hinges creaking as he pulled the door open.

  “Go on, then.”

  “Thank you,” she said, ducking to descend the short flight of steps. The door clanged shut behind her as she reached the hard-packed earth of the cellar floor, making her jump with fright. For an irrational moment she wanted to spring back up the stairs and throw the doors wide to breathe deep of the outside air, but she would not let fear get the best of her.

  “Who goes there?” came a gentle but suspicious voice, one so familiar it brought tears to Isabelle’s eyes. She turned away from the steps, her heart soaring.

  “Mother?” she whispered.

  “Isabelle?”

  Something bumped her and Isabelle startled before grasping for her mother. Marien’s hands fumbled blindly but found their way to her shoulders and then her face, pausing over the wimple and lightly brushing the tip of her nose. Her mother gave a strangled cry before drawing Isabelle into her embrace.

  “My dearest, dearest daughter,” she murmured, her voice a thick confusion of emotions. “My Isabelle.”

  Isabelle melted into her mother’s embrace, burying her face in her neck and letting the worry and tension of the last week slip away, just for the moment. Despite all the Wolf’s efforts, her mother was still alive, her scent of lemon verbena and mint rising above the musty atmosphere.

  “We are going to get you out of here,” Isabelle whispered.

  Marien drew back sharply, and though Isabelle couldn’t see her expression, she could feel the tension in her hands.

  “You cannot be here, child,” she said, her tone urgent. “You must go, now. Before they know you are here.”

  “It is all right, Mother, I borrowed a habit from Sister Catherine and told them I was here to preserve the apples. They suspected nothing.”

  “Sister Catherine? No, Isabelle, you do not understand. They are expecting you. You have to go. Now.”

  “Expecting me?” Isabelle echoed, just as the chains rattled in the door, the click of the lock loud and clear in the cellar.

  “No,” Isabelle whispered, flying through the darkness toward the doors, her fists pounding against the surface. “No! Let me out! Please! Don’t lock me in here! Let me out!”

  She screamed it over and over, but if they heard they did not care. They were probably laughing, just as the soldiers who captured her laughed when they threw her in that potato cellar. The walls pressed in, her fists against the wood loud and close and the air wet and stifling, her breath coming in ragged bursts as hot tears coursed down her cheeks.

  “Please!” she screamed, raking her fingernails against the door. She tore off her borrowed wimple, the neck threatening to choke her. “Please let me out!”

  “Isabelle!” her mother said, dragging her back from the door. “Isabelle, stop! You will hurt yourself. Please, my darling, stop.”

  “They have to let me out!” Isabelle cried, clawing at her mother to free her. “I cannot stay down here. I will die. I will suffocate! Let me out!”

  “Isabelle!” her mother said sharply, her voice cracking across Isabelle’s panic like a whip. “Stop that this instant.”

  Isabelle turned into her mother’s arms, sinking against her in a sob. “They cannot leave me here,” she said, the panic threatening to surge up again. “It is like being buried alive. I cannot stand it, Mother. I cannot stand it!”

  “I know, child, I know,” her mother said, her voice soothing, her hands smoothing down her hair. “But you can stand it, and you will. You must be braver than you feel.”

  “I tried, Mother, I tried,” she said, feeling suddenly helpless and small in her mother’s embrace. “I tried to be brave and strong like you, like my father. But I have only made things so much worse.”

  Her mother stiffened slightly. “What do you know of your father?”

  Isabelle drew back, trying to take in a full breath of the musty air. “I know everything. I know about Sir Roger, and Robin, and the fire. I know that the Wolf will hang you if I do not bring him my father.”

  “Sir Roger is not going to kill me,” Marien said with surprise.

  “Of course he is,” Isabelle said. “He told me himself in Lincoln. He said if I did not bring Robert of Huntingdon to him by the end of the week, he would have you hanged.”

  “Well, he might have threatened to do so, but he has no intention of killing such a valuable bargaining chip,” Marien said. “He plans to use me to force my father to give up Rochester Castle.”

  “What is Rochester Castle?” Isabelle asked, her confusion pushing the panic aside.

  “Rochester is a key port location, and King John needs it if he has any hope of beating the rebel barons in a war. My father currently controls Rochester Castle, but Sir Roger hopes to force him to turn it over to him by using me as ransom.” Marien sighed. “These sorts of political tiffs are why I was happy to give up the nobility all those years ago.”

  “Your father, Robert Fitzwalter,” Isabelle said slowly, trying to put the pieces back together. “Leader of the rebel barons.”

  “I see someone has been giving you a history lesson as well,” said Marien.

  “Yes, it has been an edifying few days.” Isabelle shook her head, though her mother could not see it in the dark. “But why would Sir Roger tell me he was going to hang you if he intended to use you as bait?”

  “I assume to lure Robin here as well,” Marien said. “Which, thank goodness, reason at least prevailed with one of you.”

  Isabelle hesitated. “Well…”

  “Do not tell me,” her mother said, her voice threaded through with irritation.

  “He is here as well.”

  Marien gave an exasperated sigh. “That man, always insistent on rescues in silly costumes. We could have settled this years ago if he had simply accepted the Scottish throne as his father intended and dealt with King John then. He would rather play king of the outlaws.”

  And though there were far more pressing matters at the moment, Isabelle could not help but ask the question that had been weighing on her for days. “Why did you not tell me who I was? Who my father was? Why did you not trust me to know any of this?”

  “It was never about trust, dearest,” her mother said. “Look at the danger to your life just this past week. I would not have put that on you for the past sixteen years. I know you are cross with me now, but someday you will have children of your own and you will understand the lengths you go to for their protection.”

  “Yes, and we see how that has turned out.”

  “You have grown far too much like your father, and in such a short time,” her mother said in a sharp tone. “How does he fare, the foolish man?”

  “He is…” Isabelle struggled to fit the swelling of emotions filling her chest into words. “He is a constant surprise. Clever yet caring, boisterous yet contained, a man of the people and a man apart. And did you know he visited me all these years in disguise? Dressed as a peddler?”

  “Ah, the peddler. My least favorite of his characters. Always banging about with his pots. I preferred when he would play the wayward knight.”

  “What is the wayward…You knew it was Father? All those times he brought me gifts, made me my first bow, you knew it was him? And you never said a word?”

  “Of course I knew it was your father. Did you honestly think I would let a stranger teach you how to hold a bow? Although I should never have let him give you your first lesson—I have not been able to get the slouch out of your stance since.”

  “Mother!”
she sighed, but in that moment she could understand what had drawn her parents to each other, all those years ago. The spark that flew between them, even after years and miles apart.

  “I have a great many questions,” Isabelle said. “After we are free from this wretched cellar.”

  “I do not doubt it,” her mother replied. “I have many myself, including whose foolhardy plan it was to attempt my rescue in the first place. Your father should know better than to expect Sir Roger to leave anything to chance. If he lured you here, he had a good reason for it.”

  “What possible reason…” Isabelle drifted off as all the pieces finally came together, each link in the chain locking her up tight. “Of course. I was a fool. A complete and utter fool. How could I be so blind? With both of us captured, he has everything he needs to force Father to surrender to him now.”

  She dropped her head into her hands on a helpless moan. It was the Wolf who had set the trap for them, and she had stepped so willingly into it. A flush of shame washed over her. What had she done?

  “Your father is as clever and resourceful a man as there ever was,” Marien said, her voice fierce in the darkness. “Whatever Sir Roger has planned for him, he will be more than a match for it.”

  “We must escape,” Isabelle said. “We have to warn him, before it is too late.”

  “I have a great many skills, Isabelle, but breaking through locked and chained doors is not one of them. I already searched for weapons and there is nothing here. We are defenseless.”

  Isabelle reached down to her right foot, giving a sigh of relief as her hand found the hilt of Patrick’s knife. She crept along the line of apple crates until she found the cellarium door. On impulse she pushed against the wood, but it did not budge, faint cracks of light showing through where the edges of the boards did not quite meet. A sliver of someone’s back blocked the view through the cracks. She could see no one else besides the single guard.

  “It looks as if they have left us only one guard,” she said, retreating from the door. She could not allow herself to worry about where they had sent the others now. She laid her hands on the edge of a crate, the crisp sweetness of apple floating up. “If we can get him down here, we could overpower him and make our escape.”