by Anna Burke
The realization that she would have to face Willa again brought a rush of terror. Willa had seen her watching. Worse, Marian hadn’t left or spoken when Willa met her eyes, and instead had been . . . what? A part of it? She shivered again. All I did was watch because I was confused, she told herself. Anyone would have done the same.
She repeated that to herself until she almost believed it. By then, her teeth chattered from the cold, and her shivering was entirely a result of the winter air.
“There you are.”
Marian jumped. Willa stood by the door, looking composed and calm and entirely unabashed. Marian, on the other hand, felt her cheeks flame again.
“You’ll freeze out here,” Willa continued in a conversational tone.
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t be stupid. Come on.”
Marian shook her head. She couldn’t go near Willa. Not when her body had suddenly reminded her of everything she had just tried to suppress.
“Emmeline will start worrying.”
“Just leave me alone. Please.”
Willa let the door swing shut and walked toward her. Marian backed away until her foot hit a stone pillar and rain pelted the back of her head and shoulders. Willa moved closer, stopping only when a handsbreadth separated them.
“I thought you might be like me, but I wasn’t sure.”
“I’m not like you.” She wished her voice would stop shaking. It’s the cold, she told herself. Still, she wondered what Willa had seen in her face.
Willa’s lips curved in a mocking smile. “No? Then why did you watch?”
Marian opened her mouth to tell Willa that she was wrong, and that she had only watched because what she had seen hadn’t made sense; she had been confused, not curious, and no part of her had wondered what it might be like to touch or be touched by another woman. She couldn’t bring the words out into the winter air. Willa’s smile deepened in satisfaction, but she moved away, and Marian let out the breath she’d been holding. It hitched when Willa grabbed her hand.
“Seriously, Marian, it’s freezing out here. Come on.”
“Let go of me.” She snatched her hand out of Willa’s and stalked toward the door.
Willa reached it right on her heels. Aware that slamming it in her face would reveal just how much Willa’s words had upset her, she held it open, and so it was that together they saw the nun escorting a messenger in the prince’s livery toward the prioress’s chamber. They exchanged a worried look. There were only a few reasons a messenger would travel through this sort of weather, and none of them were good. Marian and Willa broke into a run and burst into the room just as he delivered his message.
“King Richard has been captured by Duke Leopold of Austria.”
Marian saw Emmeline’s face freeze.
“It is against public law to detain a Crusader,” Tuck said. “Has anyone notified the pope?”
“I assume so, Reverend Mother,” said the messenger.
“And his men? What of them?”
He passed a hand over his damp forehead. His clothes were soaked from the icy rain, and Marian would have pitied him if she hadn’t felt like he’d dumped a bucket of ice over her head with his words. Richard couldn’t be captured. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. He was the king!
“Captive also, or on their way back to England. No one seems to know.”
Emmeline turned her face to the fire. Willa went to her side, leaving Tuck to see to the messenger’s needs while Marian stood with her boots frozen to the flagstones.
“Perhaps captive is better than fighting?” Willa said to Emmeline.
Emmeline stared into the flames with a blank face. “It is not Connor I’m worried about,” she said, naming her husband. She sounded older than her twenty years. “He can take care of himself. But if Richard is delayed for too long, it could mean war.”
The sound of the crackling flames filled the pause that followed her words. War, and worse than that, worse than anything Marian had allowed herself to consider even in the darkness of deep night: the possibility that Richard might not return in time to intervene on her behalf. Prince John favored Linley, and Linley had been all but promised an earldom should John succeed his brother on the throne. Such a rise in station should have pleased her. Instead, Viscount Linley’s face filled her vision: cold gray eyes, patchy dry skin, and lips as thin and bloodless as a rat’s tail.
“There’s no one left to fight,” said Willa. The Saladin Tax the previous year had taken most of England’s able-bodied fighting men, as fighting was preferable to beggaring one’s estate, and all that was left were youngest sons. Marian guessed Willa was thinking of her twin brother, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Alanna would comfort her. Marian had her own problems.
“They’ll turn the country into a convent,” said Emmeline. “There will be only women and children left.”
“Would that really be such a crime?” Tuck placed her hands on Emmeline’s shoulders. “We could start over, raising boys who won’t grow up into their father’s sins.”
Emmeline shook her head and sagged back into Tuck’s embrace, leaning her cheek against the other woman’s chest and closing her eyes. “I would not wish for my son to grow up without his father, but you’re not wrong, Tuck.”
“All will be well. We shall pray tonight, but not, I think, for too long. Prince John will expect you at court soon and that will take some doing with the roads as they are. You need rest.”
Court. Marian twisted the silver ring on her middle finger hard enough to leave a bruise against her knuckle. If she was lucky, her horse would slip and send her tumbling into some bottomless ravine in Sherwood Forest, where she’d grow moss instead of hair and fade into the trees. If she wasn’t lucky, neither God nor all the saints would be able to stop her father’s machinations, and she’d be married to Viscount Linley before harvest time.
Chapter Three
Wind snatched the warmth from the eaves of the thatched roof and whistled through cracks in the walls. The drafts sent sparks up from the hearth as Robyn paced the small room. Gwyneth lay in the bed by the fire with Symon asleep in her arms, swaddled in his rabbit-skin blanket. The quiet unsettled Robyn almost as much as the child’s tears. Both the baby and Gwyneth shared the same pinched, exhausted look, and her feeling of impotency grew with each shallow breath that passed Gwyneth’s lips.
“There must be something you can do,” Robyn said to the midwife, resisting the urge to shake the woman.
“She’s lost too much blood. Her body is weak, and her milk isn’t flowing like it should.”
“So make her stronger.”
The midwife gave Robyn a pitying look. “Find the child a wet nurse. Or a goat.”
“And Gwyneth?”
“You need to prepare yourself, Robyn. If she survives the fortnight, then the odds will turn in her favor.”
“If she survives?” Robyn repeated the woman’s words in a rising voice. “What are you saying?”
The woman didn’t answer right away. Instead, she packed up her herbs and salves and stared at Gwyneth’s sleeping face. “The child was too big for her body. Things tore that should not have torn, and she needs rest and food. Broth and bread, meat when she can take it. And prayer.”
“You don’t understand. I can’t lose them. My brother . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Good meat. Soak the bread in broth and see that she eats it and give the child goat’s milk when her milk runs out. I’ve left you willow bark for her fever. The bleeding has stopped, at least, which is something.”
“I can’t lose them.” All it seemed she could do was repeat words that had already been said. Michael was gone. Gwyneth and the baby were all she had left of him, and if they left too . . . Panic seized her throat.
“Pray, then,” the midwife said as she took her leave.
Pray. When had prayer ever helped her? She continued pacing. They’d been struggling already before Michael’s death.
There was never enough to eat, which was why he had taken the risks he had in the woods, hunting game larger than the rabbits and squirrels Robyn brought down with her slingshot. That meat had turned into food and cloth and medicine, for there was always a market for game.
Now they had nothing. In the dead of winter, the energy she would spend hunting rabbits wouldn’t be worth the meager reward, and leaving Gwyneth alone in the house terrified Robyn even more than starvation. She couldn’t bear the thought of returning to another death.
Symon stirred, and his face reddened as hunger woke him. Robyn scooped him into her arms and cradled him against her breast, rocking him back and forth as she pressed her lips to the fine hair on his head. The song she hummed came from someplace far away. Sleep, she begged him silently. Sleep so she can rest. Sleep so I can think.
Symon whimpered and nuzzled against her, searching for her breast. “I wish I could,” she told him. Her body ached as her nephew’s whimpers turned into frustrated sobs, then subsided. He slept in her arms, but his face remained screwed up in discontent, and she almost woke him up just to hear him scream with her. He slept because he didn’t have the strength to keep on fighting. He slept, and so did Gwyneth, and Robyn wished more than anything that she, too, could close her eyes and wake to a kinder world.
“A goat,” she said, turning the words into a quiet song. “I’ll find you a goat.”
Even if she found someone willing to sell milk to her, she’d have to find a way to pay. She could go to her uncle, the miller, but he had more mouths to feed than there were days in the week. That left the church. The Nottingham priests, however, were in the sheriff’s pocket, and while she could set aside her pride to ask for their aid, she doubted even they had a spare nanny goat still in milk this late in the year.
“Michael,” she said into the down of Symon’s head. “I need you.”
Gwyneth turned against the pillow, her golden hair limp and dark with sweat. Her eyes flickered beneath their lids as the fever rode her dreams.
“There’s more to fletching than feather and wood,” Michael’s voice said from the depths of Robyn’s memory. It had been her twelfth name day, and he’d taken her to a grove of young oaks just past the border of the forest. “You need to know how the arrow will fly.”
“But how . . .” She hadn’t finished her question as he placed a slim bow in her hands. The wood was light, suited for a boy, not a man, and as soft as velvet where he’d oiled it. Robyn thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She had nocked the arrow he handed her with reverence.
“Sight down the shaft. Yes, just like that. You see that tree, twenty paces east, with the burl? The one that looks like Aunt Mildred’s face on market day? See if you can hit it.”
She remembered how clumsy her fingers had felt on the bowstring, the familiar arrows clunky and foreign as she let the first one fly. She’d missed, of course. Everyone missed their first shot, according to Michael, but something had stirred in her blood that morning while her brother smiled encouragingly and the pads of her fingers itched from the snap of the bowstring. She had missed her first shot, true, but she had not missed her second.
“It’s a shame you’re a girl,” Michael had told her as they slunk out of the forest, careful not to attract the attention of the foresters. “I’ve never seen anyone shoot like that their first time. You’re plenty strong. You’ve been holding out on me, little bird.”
She felt the tears on her cheeks as the memory faded. Not the crippling sobs that had racked her body as she’d thrown herself against the crowd, struggling to reach her brother as the executioner led him to the scaffold. These were small tears, just salt seeping from a wound too deep to measure. She clutched her brother’s son more tightly to her chest and watched the fire burning. That same bow waited for Symon, one day, and his small hands would grip the wood where hers had, sweat and spit binding them as surely as the blood that ran in both their veins.
All the boy had to do was live.
“Robyn,” Gwyneth said. Her voice was hoarse and thin, and it cut Robyn further open. She came closer, careful to keep rocking the child in her arms. “When is Michael coming home?”
Gwyneth’s eyes were glassy, and her cheeks unnaturally flushed. More willow bark, Robyn told herself.
“Soon,” she answered. Gwyneth would remember the truth when the fever broke.
“Is it raining?”
“Outside, yes.”
“I hear screaming,” said Gwyneth.
Robyn sat at the edge of the bed so that her body touched Gwyneth’s, hoping the solidity of her presence would soothe her sister-in-law. “I hear it too.”
She’d hear it forever. The sound had flayed her throat as Michael swung, and Gwyneth’s voice had risen in a horrible harmony with her own.
No, she swore. Gwyneth would not die, nor would the child. Whatever it took.
She set out for the Papplewick mill later that afternoon, running past houses dark with rain and streets slick with ice. The wind picked up as she ran and propelled her forward almost as if it grieved with her, shrieking through the winter trees as its hands shoved her roughly toward her uncle’s house.
“Midge,” she said, gasping for breath when she arrived. Her cousin caught her by the shoulders and dragged her inside. Robyn’s bevy of cousins stared at her with open mouths for the space of a heartbeat, and then concern poured out of them all at once.
“Is it Gwyneth?”
“The baby?”
The questions came hard and fast until she held up her hand for silence. “I need someone to stay with Gwyneth.”
“I’ll do it,” said Midge, just as the rest of her sisters burst out with questions about where Robyn was going.
“For God’s sake, will you lot be quiet?” Her uncle’s bellow silenced the room. “Robyn. What do you need?”
Her lungs burned from her journey and her face was numb with cold, but she managed to force out her next words. “I’m going to talk to the sheriff.”
Her uncle didn’t need to shout for silence, this time. No one spoke until Midge said, “I’ll get my cloak.”
“The sheriff?” Uncle Benedict looked down at Robyn with concern. Robyn didn’t try to guess what he was thinking. The sheriff had levied an especially harsh tax on her uncle after Gwyneth had married Michael, carrying his grudge down Michael’s bloodline.
“Michael is dead,” she said flatly. “If the sheriff truly loved Gwyneth, perhaps he will help us.”
Benedict sat down heavily at the table and rested his hands palms up on his knees as if the answers lay within. “Are you sure that is wise?” he asked her at last.
“If he would just let us sell our arrows, Gwyneth would stand a chance.”
“Is she any better?”
Robyn stared at him, unable to answer, and settled for a short shake of her head.
“But he killed Michael,” said Midge.
She’d had the same thought as she ran, each footstep pounding that bitter truth deeper into her bones. “I know. But I can’t let him kill her too, or Symon.”
Her uncle lent them his elderly cart horse and gave Robyn enough coin to stable him in town. It was more than he could afford, she knew, but she was grateful for the speed and the warmth as she and Midge rode double on the gelding’s bony back. It was only early evening, but sunlight failed to pierce the clouds, and they rode through freezing mud in the half-light of dusk, tree branches whipping against their clothing. Midge wrapped her arms around Robyn’s waist and hung on as the cart horse stumbled and righted himself time and again. They both let out a sigh of relief when the lights of Nottingham came into view, and the gate guard waved them through hurriedly before ducking back into the shelter of the gatehouse.
“I’ll stable the horse,” Midge offered as they dismounted outside the shop. The wooden sign with its painted arrow creaked above them in the wind.
Robyn nodded, her throat too tight to speak. Her hand hesitated on the latch as Midge l
ed the horse away. “I was only gone two hours,” she said to herself, and pushed the door open. The shop lay in darkness. Arrows and bow staves cast long, thin shadows on the walls as she walked past barrels of curing wood and piles of sawdust blown about by the storm. Warmth greeted her when she entered the living quarters. The fire had not died, at least, and the dark outline of Gwyneth’s body lay against the glow.
“I’m back,” she said as she fell to her knees beside the bed. Gwyneth’s eyes were open, and Symon nursed fitfully at her breast. Robyn tucked a strand of hair behind Gwyneth’s ear.
“Where did you go?”
“To get Midge.”
“Did you find Michael?”
“No,” said Robyn, swallowing.
“Oh.” Gwyneth’s face slackened. She no longer looked like something out of a minstrel’s song. When Michael had first courted her, Robyn had thought she resembled a wood nymph or a goddess. Now she looked tired and old and heartbreakingly mortal.
“I’m going to get help,” she said. “I promise.”
Midge arrived a few minutes later and hung her soaking cloak by the fire to dry. “How’s my littlest cousin?” she cooed as she peered around Robyn to see Symon. Gwyneth managed a weak smile.
“Can you brew some willow bark tea?” Robyn asked.
“Of course.” Midge busied herself with the kettle.
Robyn said, “I’ll be back soon. I promise.”
She tore her eyes away from the sight of her family and made for the door, shivering in her damp clothes. The wind had redoubled its earlier efforts when she strode into the street. It flung her cloak around her and swiped the hood from her head, catching her hair and snarling it with icy fingers.
What am I doing? she asked herself as she forced her way up the hill and left the narrow streets for the wider thoroughfares of the wealthy. The castle loomed above her with its pennants snapping. She didn’t want to know what Michael would think of her, begging for mercy from the man who had sentenced him to death. She didn’t even know what she thought. That’s not entirely true, said the part of her that knew better. Her nails dug into her palms. If killing the sheriff would bring Michael back and feed Gwyneth, she would do it. If seeing him drawn and quartered and ripped into pieces in the cardinal directions would resurrect her brother, she would watch. She would have watched anyway, the sweet taste of justice in her mouth, but none of it would mean anything if Gwyneth died.
