Hood

by Jenny Elder Moke

  “You ruined everything I worked so hard to build,” she hissed at Isabelle. “That soldier should have struck you down instead of putting you in that pathetic potato cellar. I told Sir Roger he was weak.”

  Isabelle drew back sharply. “You set the soldier on me?”

  “You and your mother left me no choice,” Sister Catherine spat. Her eyes cut to Marien, hatred pulsing like a heartbeat in her words. “I found one of your disgusting letters in Rosamund’s things after she died. I knew all about your shameful, traitorous past. I warned her the night you showed up at our door, with child, that you would bring nothing but trouble to our sacred priory. But of course she did not listen, and instead she allowed you to poison our community with your treachery. When you forced us to open to the villagers—allowing strangers on our hallowed grounds!—it was too far. I was the only one brave enough to stop you.”

  “By bringing a murderer to the priory!” Isabelle exclaimed, heat rising within her. “My mother did not poison anything, it was you who poisoned the sisters. Against her, against me, against everything the order is supposed to stand for. The villagers needed us, they needed our healing, our food, our care. But all you cared for was yourself! For too long you have stolen joy from every possible moment of our lives, but I am not afraid of you. You are small and cruel, and your cruelty has no place here.”

  Sister Catherine glared at her. “How dare you, you impudent little—”

  “Isabelle is right,” Marien said, her voice tired but firm. “I have tried to look past your constant attempts to undermine my work as prioress, to try and find the good within you. But you have buried it too deep. Or perhaps it was never there to begin with. But you no longer have a place at Kirklees, Catherine.”

  “I no longer…” Sister Catherine lurched back from the table, drawing herself upright. “I was here long before you, and I will be here long after!”

  Isabelle drew up her bow even as Sister Catherine raised her arm, the knife clutched in her white fingers. It arced away from her as the arrow hit her square in the chest, but Isabelle could only hear the sister land with a muffled thud as Robin pushed her out of the way, the knife slicing between them and clattering to the ground behind her.

  “Isabelle, are you all right?” he gasped, sounding truly terrified.

  “Are you injured?” her mother asked, her face appearing over Robin’s shoulder.

  “Yes, I mean, no,” Isabelle said, her hands shaking. “I am all right. I did not mean to…she was going to hurt us.”

  A burble of laughter sounded from the other side of the table, and the four of them moved forward to where the sister lay in a spreading pool of sticky blood. Foamy red spittle bubbled up over her lips as she laughed again, her chest spasming with the effort. She looked to Marien, her dimming eyes full of hate.

  “An eye for an eye,” she wheezed on another laugh. “A lover for a lover. The blade was dipped in hemlock. It needs but one cut.”

  Isabelle frowned, turning to her mother, but Marien was no longer looking at Sister Catherine. The color drained from her mother’s face as she lurched forward to catch Robin before he crashed to the ground. They crumpled in a heap together, Robin’s weight dragging Marien down as Isabelle dropped to her knees beside them.

  “Father!” she said, hands fluttering over his face and neck. “What is it?”

  “Robert, no,” Marien said, her voice a hush of horror at the thin red line of blood welling up on his neck.

  “The knife,” Isabelle said, her mind skittering to a halt. What had Sister Catherine said about the knife? Dipped in hemlock. “Hemlock! Mother, the knife was poisoned with hemlock.”

  “I know,” Marien said, cradling Robin’s head in her lap. Her voice was distant, her hands smoothing his brow.

  “We must do something!” Isabelle cried.

  “What can we do?” Adam asked. “What do you need?”

  Isabelle shook her head, trying to remember the distant, failed lessons with her mother. “Hemlock, what does hemlock do? Something about the liver? No, is that henbane? It is the muscles. The heart! Hemlock stops the heart! If we could find something to…I do not know, to keep his heart beating, or make it beat faster? Mother, please help me! I cannot…I am not the healer. I need you.”

  “Isabelle,” her mother said. She looked into her daughter’s eyes, her own glittering like the infinite deep of the seas, and it was in that abyss Isabelle knew. There was no cure.

  “Marien…my love…we were so close,” Robin wheezed.

  Marien smiled, tears coursing down her cheeks. “We always were, my dearest heart.”

  Robin’s skin had paled considerably, and his chest shuddered with each labored breath. His eyes drifted to Isabelle, and he used what little control he had of his facial muscles to twist his mouth into a wry smile. “Oh, Isabelle, I am so very sorry.”

  Isabelle shook her head, her throat closing and her eyes burning. “No, Father. I will not let you leave me. Not after all it has cost me to find you.”

  Robin’s eyes drifted closed, and he lifted them again with effort. “I do not regret a single thing in my life that has brought me to you. The love I have carried for both of you has sustained me through all these hard years. You have made me Robin Hood.”

  Isabelle took his hand, the tendons tight and brittle. “Father, please. Please, do not leave me.”

  Robin dragged a labored breath in, his eyes drifting shut again. The lids fluttered, but stayed closed. “You must know…how proud…you have made me.”

  She squeezed Robin’s hand as a sob rose from her core, his pulse jumping erratically under her fingertips, slow and then fast and then painfully slow again. She squeezed his fingers as hard as she could, as if she could infuse her own life back into his flesh and open his eyes, hear his laugh one more time. Marien bent down and pressed her lips against his, her tears falling down his cheeks.

  “Goodbye, my love,” she whispered.

  Robin took a ragged, shallow breath in, the air sliding out of him on a sigh. Isabelle waited as a hollowness opened in the center of her chest, threatening to drown her in its darkness as the seconds stretched out into eternities. But his chest did not rise again.

  The day of Robin’s burial dawned leaden and somber, the clouds hanging low as the sky wore its own mourning in swaths of gray against the pale sunlight. Isabelle slipped out of the hidden door of the chapel, still swept open from the Merry Men’s hasty escape the day before. The Merry Men had routed the mercenaries from the premises just as dawn broke, their cheering turned to ashes in their mouths as it fell to Isabelle to share the news of Robin’s death. She had sat vigil through the night with her mother as they wrapped Robin’s body in clean linens with the help of a few of the sisters who offered, and laid him out on a simple wooden litter.

  Fatigue like a deep well pulled at every part of her so that each thought and action moved with the thickness of honey, the weight of them suffocating. She walked on silent feet into the orchard. The oak tree held court in the far corner, the wide leaves already taking flight on the late-autumn wind for far-flung destinations. Isabelle pushed the branches aside and stepped under the protective canopy of the tree, the branches twisting around one another above. The heavy wool of her habit shielded her from the bitter cold of the morning, though her feet were numb. The branches of the oak scratched at her shoulder as she approached the trunk, her heart as numb as her limbs.

  Nestled in a shallow hollow of the trunk was a collection of small wooden figurines, each crafted with a keen eye and a loving hand. Knights on horses with lances raised in triumph, ladies with billowing skirts waving brightly colored favors, jesters pulling hilarious faces. Baubles gifted to her from a batty old peddler, always passing through, always knowing exactly what she needed to cheer her most. The sisters were not allowed personal possessions, so she had tucked them into the hollow of the tree for safekeeping, away from the prying eyes of those loyal to Catherine, who would gladly have turned her over for an extr
a glass of wine with their supper.

  They had been her companions through the lonely passage of childhood, these exquisite figurines, telling her stories of the greater world. A world of color and joy instead of chores and piety. Only now did she know they told her a different story entirely, of a father’s love and longing for what he could never have. For what she would never have again.

  She wanted to scream, but her throat was too raw, her eyes too hot, and her lungs too heavy. She closed her fingers in a tight fist around the figurine of the knight and smashed it against the tree, her knuckles bruising and the skin breaking as she pounded her fist against the trunk over and over, growling through her teeth as she tore her fingers. The tip of the lance bit into her palm, embedding itself deeper with every blow.

  “Why?” she cried out to the oak, her hands opening and dragging along the bark as she sank to her knees. The figurine rolled to the ground, the knight helpless on his side.

  She dropped her forehead to her thighs, curling in a tight ball as if she could compress the pain raging through her. Here in this magical spot where she once dared to dream she now allowed herself to grieve, sobbing into the rough wool of her robes. The cold ground numbed the pain of her bloodied knuckles, and she dug her fingers into the dirt.

  “I am so sorry,” she sobbed, shaking. “Take me, please. Take me instead.”

  But the magic of the oak floated away with its leaves, leaving nothing to answer Isabelle’s plea.

  Marien took Isabelle by the hand as Little John, Allan A’Dale, Little, and Adam took up the stretcher and carried it through the priory toward the orchard. She said nothing of the blood crusted over Isabelle’s knuckles, only held her fingers gently in her own cool hands. The Merry Men crowded the spaces between the trees, their faces pale as their master passed. Isabelle felt the weight of their gazes, for the moment crowding out her own thoughts as they passed out of the orchard into the woods.

  The men stopped at the edge of the clearing, lowering the litter as Helena and Patrick stepped from the crowd to meet them. Helena looked small and fragile for the first time since Isabelle had met her, her black hair unbound and flowing down her back, in a simple dress of green wool belted at the waist with her short swords. Even with her weapons belt, the flowing lines of her hair and the dress lent a softness to her features.

  Helena held out a longbow to Isabelle. She took the smooth wood in both hands, the bow surprisingly light for its great length. It stood taller than her, shaped for Robin’s height and arm strength. A tremor rippled through her hands as she touched the string, as if the last vibration of its former master passed through her. Patrick presented her with a single arrow, fletched with snow-white feathers.

  For a moment she could only hold the bow in one hand and the arrow in the other, as if her mind could not put the two objects together. They felt so foreign, the bow much larger and the string carrying more tension than she was used to. What right had she to wield it? She turned to her mother, holding them out.

  “You should shoot it,” Isabelle said, her voice small.

  Marien took her by the shoulders, pressing a kiss to her forehead. She blinked back a wave of tears, one trembling over the edge of her lashes to course down her cheek. “He would want you to do it, dearest. I have faith in you.”

  She turned from her mother to face the great expanse of trees ahead, the deepest wells and thickets of her childhood within their depths. She nocked the arrow to the string and lifted the bow to the unblemished expanse of the sky, her arm trembling with the force required to draw the string back. The arrow arced out with a great hum, tearing across the heavens and piercing the deep green of the woods in the distance.

  “To the west, Merry Men,” Little John called out in his deep voice.

  The sun had risen to its apex in the murky sky by the time they reached the arrow. It landed in a small clearing, the trees parting just enough to allow the sunlight to dapple the brittle grass beside a trickling stream. It was a beautiful and fitting spot in Isabelle’s estimation, quiet and far removed from the town and the priory. The men set about their task of digging Robin’s grave with a solemnity the sisters would have envied, their spades biting into the earth in a rhythmic harmony.

  Marien looked almost fragile in her grief, her eyes bluer and her long blond hair paling in the week since Isabelle first fled Kirklees. Isabelle had rarely seen her without a veil covering the long locks, and it shocked her how much they were like her own. Deep lines etched around Marien’s eyes and mouth, and though she looked calm, Isabelle knew her mother well enough to see the dull edge to her energy as she waved away the men’s offers to find her a comfortable place to sit.

  Despite the similarities in their hair, Isabelle didn’t imagine she looked anything like Marien at the moment. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d washed her face, and dark circles of insomnia pressed under her eyes. Her fingers were cold and stiff, a sure sign of impending rain. She felt as if she’d aged a hundred years in a few days and her brittle bones would snap in a breeze.

  The men finished digging and took up the litter, standing over the deep hole. Allan stepped forward, intoning a prayer as they lowered Robin’s body into the ground. Each of the men took a handful of dirt, standing at the four corners of the grave with their hands extended.

  “To my greatest friend, Robin,” said Allan, “who gave me purpose when I thought I had reached my end. Most of us came to this life as desperate men, fleeing the law and abandoning what home we had for a cold dirt bed and an empty belly. Robin took us in and forgave us our pasts, and in turn made us better men than we could ever have been on our own. He inspired us to inspire the people, and for that I’ll always be grateful.”

  He opened his hand, the black earth crumbling over the white sheet in little patters. Little John cleared his throat.

  “Robin was a blustering, maddening, brilliant bastard,” he said, and several of the men chuckled in agreement. “He could get blind drunk and shoot straighter than anyone, he always found the last cask of wine in the high sheriff’s stores, and I never saw him pass a mother or child he didn’t give a coin to if he had one. And if he didn’t have one, he bloody well remembered their names and brought two round later. To Robin, the true king of Sherwood.”

  He dropped his dirt into the grave, bits of the earth sticking to his palm as he lowered his hand.

  Adam held out his hand, struggling to hold back the emotion rippling over his features. He swallowed once, forcefully, before speaking. “Robin saved me when I thought I was beyond it. When I thought I was beyond anything. I was only alive before him, not really living. The Merry Men have given me a purpose I didn’t think I deserved. May you have tricked your way through the pearly gates, Robin.”

  Each of the men stepped up to deliver their own wishes for their fallen master, filing past Isabelle one by one. A dozen of them, and then a dozen more, until Isabelle lost track of their individual stories and they blended together in a tapestry of love and loyalty and loss. The grave was nearly filled when the last of them had paid their respects, the earth soft and loamy. The men piled rocks over the fresh grave to keep out foraging creatures, the rectangle of stones the only marker for the great man who lay beneath them.

  When the last of the stones had been laid, Marien gave Isabelle’s hand a squeeze before letting it go to kneel before the grave. She whispered a few short words, the moment so intimate that many of the men respectfully turned their eyes from the scene. Isabelle found that she could not look away from her mother’s bowed head, her curls glistening with a fine mist that had begun to fall. When she rose again, it was slowly, her hand still lingering low as if to keep touching the earth forever.

  Several moments passed before Isabelle became aware of the press of dozens of gazes on her, the attention of the men turned toward her expectantly. She looked from her mother to the others, at a loss for what she should say or do. What did they expect of her? What could she say that would heal the wound she had
caused? She stepped forward, lacing her fingers together to keep them from shaking.

  “I find myself at a loss for words, which may surprise some of you,” she said, glancing at Adam, who gave her a tilted smile. “You all knew Robin so much better than I. All I had of him were a few precious moments. And now they shall have to last me a lifetime.”

  The words stuck in her throat, lodged there like a dam that protected her from a flood she couldn’t bear to face. She swallowed hard and continued.

  “But what I did learn from Robin in those moments was that we do not have to let the constraints of our past define our future. My father was born a nobleman, but he rejected power and wealth and chose instead the earth as his bed and the stars as his roof. He fought for those oppressed by men he once called peers.” She took in a shaky breath. “He gave up his life to protect those he loved. I could not possibly live up to such a legacy, but it is the very least I owe him to try. Whatever the rest of the country may think of him, I am proud to be his daughter.”

  She stepped forward, laying her hand on the stones covering his grave. “I love you, Father,” she whispered.

  When she straightened, Allan was there beside her, holding out the great curved horn Robin had carried. The last time she had seen Robin blow it, he had raised the Merry Men to save her from the Wolf. How many lifetimes ago did that feel now, only a day later?

  “You must blow the horn, Isabelle,” Allan said, and for a moment his tone was so gentle, so like her father’s, that it pierced her through.

  “Why me?” she asked.

  “Because you are his kin. It is your right.”

  She reached fearful hands out for the polished surface, taking it from Allan. It was heavier than she expected, the curved sides thick and smooth and narrowing as they curled around toward the mouthpiece. She lifted it to her mouth, taking a deep breath before closing her eyes and wishing her father on to the afterlife as she blew with all her strength.