by Anna Burke
Midsummer loomed on the horizon, and with it everything Marian dreaded. Emmeline had regained some of her good humor, though she still brooded over Willa and Alanna’s absence. Without the minstrel and her quarrelsome lover, however, there was little to distract Marian from her future. She missed Alanna’s soothing voice, and even Willa’s temper would have brought a welcome relief from the monotony of sunlit afternoons. The darning needle in her hand slipped, piercing her finger, and she winced and sucked on the bright bead of blood.
She had too many unanswered questions. What had the exchange between Robyn and her father meant? What did the widow have to do with anything? She wished there was someone she could ask, but she did not know any of the men who worked for her father well enough to pry, and court gossip hadn’t carried any news to Harcourt.
Robyn wanted her father dead. That was another thing. How could she accept that? How could she reconcile the woman who had saved her in the woods with the hate-filled archer on the Sherwood road?
Her finger ached where she’d pricked it, and she set down the dress so as not to bleed on it. The heady smell of roses washed over her as she stood and accidentally jostled the blossoms behind her. I can’t even speak with Emmeline. She stared at the courtyard walls. Never before had Harcourt felt like a trap. I shall go mad, she thought, and she understood with a sinking feeling how Willa had mustered the courage to leave everything behind. It wasn’t courage. It was desperation, a bone-deep, feral need to run that made her marrow itch and the air come too quickly to her lungs.
I could fake my death like Willa. Or pretend I’ve run off to France with a nobleman’s son or gone to sea with a merchant. She could do it. A note, a carefully placed word in the right maid’s ear—her father would rage, no doubt, but at least he would not come looking for her in the woods. And then what? How long could she survive in Sherwood? How long could any of them? Winter wasn’t that far off, and even if they survived this winter, or even the next, there was no future. She’d seen outlaws brought to justice after years of rough living. Ragged, lice-ridden, filthy men and women weak with hunger and barely able to protest the noose.
I am not like Robyn. I cannot wield a sword or shoot a bow. I can embroider and spin and run a household, but I have only rarely plucked a chicken and I have no brother’s clothes to steal away in. I am my father’s daughter in all the ways that might have made a difference, and in none of the ways that would have made me happy.
Emmeline found her then. Henri’s small hand was in hers and dust stained his knees. When she saw Marian’s face, she scooped her son into her arms and limped toward her. Henri’s weight offset the hitch of her gait.
“Shall we go for a ride?” she asked, rubbing small circles on the boy’s back. “This one is ready for a nap, and I’m covered all over with horse already.”
Marian nodded, mutely grateful for her friend’s quiet understanding.
They were mounted a short time later. Late summer opened its arms to them as they cantered down the manor lane, the fields burdened with waving sheaves of wheat and the pointed peaks of haystacks. Laborers stopped their work to wave as they rode by, and they passed a wagon full of firewood coming back from the forest. Harcourt owned a scant few acres of woodland on the borders of Sherwood, just enough to keep the fires lit all winter and to supply the manor’s building needs. Emmeline made note of the trees, slowing her horse to a walk to examine a large chestnut. Some of the spiny, green fruits were opening, the dark red shell of the nuts inside gleaming in the sunlight. Soon, they promised, and Marian’s mouth watered in anticipation.
Fat squirrels scampered in front of their horses’ hooves. The road was wide here, the banks sloping upward into roots and trees and sprays of grass and brambles. Ivy tumbled here and there, attended by mosses and pale yellow flowers. Some of the panic ebbed away as she breathed in loam and soil.
“Emmeline,” she said, reining closer to Emmeline’s horse. “Do you ever wish you could leave everything behind? Just, I don’t know, run away? Not forever. Only for a while, until things felt more . . . manageable.”
Emmeline gave her a sad smile. “Oh, Marian, we all feel that way. No, I don’t mean to chide you,” she added, seeing Marian’s face. “It is a terribly lonely feeling. I think my husband felt that way before he left. Perhaps, I’ve often wondered, that was why he left. It is harder for us to run. A man can find work. But a woman . . .” She trailed off, gazing into the forest. “We have children, and if we don’t have children, we have husbands, fathers, or brothers to think of. Too many people need us.”
“I think about Willa a lot,” Marian said. The truth hovered at her lips, jostling like horses at the starting gate. “I wonder if she got away.”
“I like to think that she did.” Emmeline bowed her head. Her blue eyes rested on the pommel of her saddle. “It makes it easier to bear the rest of it.”
“If we could find her, help her in some way, would you?”
Emmeline did not look at Marian directly. She kept her eyes first on her saddle’s pommel, then on her horse’s mane, and then at last on the road ahead. “You know very well I would, Marian.” Marian shifted uncomfortably at the weight of Emmeline’s words. Do you know? Do you know how much I’ve hidden from you, despite all you’ve done for me?
“Sometimes I think I see her hawk,” Emmeline continued. “When I’m hunting deep in the woods. I know it cannot be. There are a hundred birds like hers, but still we always look for signs of the people we’ve let go. It doesn’t get easier with time, Marian, but you learn to bear it, and the joys are greater too when tasted with the bittersweet.”
Joy. She rolled the word around in her mouth, sampling it carefully. When had she last felt joy? Sometimes out in the fields or riding with Emmeline she’d feel a great swooping in her stomach as the colors of the sun and wheat and leaf and grass went to her head like wine. Those moments always felt fleeting, changing as quickly as a spring day and impossible to hold on to for long. She thought she might have felt joy that day with Robyn beneath the willow, but now the memory twisted like a knife.
“What if I cannot learn to bear it?” she said, half to herself and half to Emmeline.
“You will. And if you don’t, the pain will become your companion, and there is comfort to be found even there.”
I want more than that. She tasted the words in her mouth, keeping them locked behind her teeth, but Emmeline heard them all the same. She reached out across the space between their horses and clasped Marian’s hand with hers.
I’m here, the gesture seemed to say.
For so many years, that had been enough. Now, though, despite the dearness of her friend, she searched the forest for another pair of eyes.
Chapter Thirty-One
Robyn chanced upon their new camp by accident. She’d climbed a tree to get a better view of the hills and had instead seen the fall of rock on the far side of the river. Her body tensed like a sight hound about to give chase. Rock did not bear the imprints of boots, and while she could see little past the thick layer of leaves, the land looked promising.
John came with her to explore.
“It’s a hard climb,” she said, eyeing the moss-covered boulders. “Impossible on horseback from this approach at least.”
“And close to the Meden river.”
They scaled the rockfall, weaving through the gnarled trees that had put roots down in the inhospitable ground, until they came to the bare stretch of rock Robyn had seen from her tree. Stone towered above her and rose into the sky.
“I don’t think we need to worry about anyone coming on us from that direction,” she said. John gave a grunt of assent and ran his hands over the rocks at their feet.
“It would be too much to ask for a cave, I suppose,” she said, scanning the trees. “But we might find something. An overhang, at least, to keep off the rain.”
They split up to search. Robyn leapt from boulder to boulder, noting the depth of some of the narrow ravines she crossed. Goo
d hiding places for weapons, she found herself thinking, among other things. The moss felt springy beneath her feet. Kneeling, she peeled some of it away, and a heavy scrap of verdant carpet came off in her hands. Easy to cover a trail.
“Robyn.” John’s voice jerked her attention away from the flora. She replaced the moss and picked her way back, using her staff for balance.
“John?” she called out. She didn’t see him anywhere, and the familiar dread uncoiled in her belly.
“Here.”
She studied the direction his voice had come from. Still nothing.
“Here,” John said again as he stepped out from behind what had looked like a solid wall of rock. A huge grin split his face. “It’s not quite a cave, but it will do just fine.”
Robyn pushed past him. What had looked like solid rock concealed a cleft that curved back in on itself, open to the sky but nearly invisible until the viewer came directly upon it. The cleft was only five feet wide, but it wound back into the cliff for a good thirty feet before it narrowed. Her mind immediately set to work. They would cut branches to create a roof and thatch it as best they could before the winter rains set in. Nothing would be as dry as a cave, but they had time, and they could store firewood here, and game. Midge could build an oven out of nearby stones . . . she stopped herself. Midge would never see this place. But she, Robyn, could build an oven, pounding leached acorns into flour and baking flat, brittle bread.
This cleft was life.
“It’s perfect,” she said to John.
“I know. Closer to Siward than I’d like, though.”
“Then we lie low for now. We have a lot of work to do before winter, and I don’t want anyone taking risks. I’ll do as much of the hunting myself as I can. The sheriff will be happy with me if I’m caught, and he won’t go looking for the rest of you.”
“And Siward?” John asked.
Robyn paused, her argument with Will fresh on her mind. “We keep out of his way and hope for the best.”
“You don’t think there’s any merit to Will’s plan, then?”
The casual way he phrased the question didn’t escape Robyn’s notice. “I am not bringing Marian into this.”
“I agree. Blood wins out, and he’s her father. We don’t have to do it Will’s way, however.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“I might have something.”
“Then I’ll hear it.”
John tapped the solid wall of the cliff before he spoke. “I’ve been thinking about Tuck.”
“I bet you have,” Robyn said, raising an eyebrow suggestively.
“We could hide you in a nunnery, if it came to it. You, Will, Alanna, Midge, and Lisbet.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be fine. Tom and I could draw the sheriff away from you. What I’m thinking, however, is that he and I could go back to Siward. I could tell him I was captured and released, but that I heard a few things.”
“And how will you hear those things?”
“Alanna’s right. A minstrel can go places the rest of us can’t. Inns. Taverns. Markets. She doesn’t have a memorable face, either. She could ask questions without raising any.”
“Fair enough. Tom isn’t going with you, though. I am.”
“You know the risks.”
“And I got us into this. If I had just let him ride past—”
“You should have. But he killed your brother and hunted your sister-in-law. I don’t think any of us would have acted differently.”
“He’s Marian’s father.”
John put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
Robyn pressed her forehead against the cliff. A real wall, solid, enough to keep the wind away. They’d start the roof at the narrow end, sloping it down. Water would run off toward the opening, where they’d collect it in the wooden buckets sealed with pitch they’d make over the next few weeks. They’d build the fire in the narrow end, too. Smoke would rise up the natural chimney of the cliff, dispersed by the wind, and they’d trap heat from the fire with hides and willow hurdles. Over time, perhaps they’d even reinforce the cleft with timber and stone, chipping shelves out of the rocks and building cots and chairs to prop around the fire.
Over time. Time that she needed to buy for them with human lives, for all that the thought made her ill.
“What if he doesn’t have to die?”
“Who?”
“The sheriff.”
“I don’t follow.”
“What if we can make him believe I am dead?”
“How?”
“If he thinks I’m with Siward.”
“That could work.”
“But?” said Robyn, hearing the unspoken word in his voice.
“But you need to be prepared for the fact that it might not. And if it comes to that, it will be his life or ours.”
• • •
It took less than an hour for them to remove all evidence that they’d ever been at the old camp.
“Well,” she said, looking around the gentle bowl between the hills that had sheltered her for the better part of two months. A mound of freshly turned earth, covered by leaves, was all that remained where their fire had burned. Tom and Alanna had made short work of the latrine, and John, Will, and Robyn had removed all the caches of food they’d squirreled away around the clearing. “You can come down now, Lisbet.”
Lisbet dropped to the ground with a muted thud. It unnerved Robyn how quickly the girl had taken to the forest. She’d make good on her promise to craft the girl a hunting bow once they got settled into their new home. Home. An odd lump rose in her throat. Home had been Gwyneth and the baby and the shop, not open woodland and the company of strangers, and yet she felt an ease out here she’d never experienced in Nottingham.
“Time to go.” John slung an arm around her shoulder, but like her he seemed reluctant to leave. Not strangers, she amended, leaning into him. And, of course, there was Midge.
“Midge won’t be able to find us,” she said quietly enough that only he could hear her.
“I know.” He squeezed her. “But we can find her when it’s safe.”
“You don’t think she’ll come looking?”
“Oh, I’m sure she will. And if she tracks us down, we’ll know we still have a lot to learn about hiding our tracks. Come on. We need the daylight.”
They followed the Rainworth river, crossing back and forth where it allowed to further disguise their trail, until they came to the place where it joined the River Maun. There, eyes darting around the trees, they forded it downstream of the main bridge, and emerged, soaking but unseen, into the forest on the far side. Their clothes dried as they walked on. This time, Robyn did take down an unwary pheasant, and Lisbet gathered mushrooms and greens as Robyn had shown her while John and Tom collected firewood. Will and Alanna brought up the rear, keeping an eye out for pursuit.
The climb up wasn’t any easier this time around. Robyn and John had scoured the hillside looking for the gentlest routes, but they’d been forced to conclude that the gentlest route was the one that ended the most quickly, regardless of the incline.
“This better be worth it,” Will said from the back of the line. She bore the largest of their pots on her back, a great, hulking kettle that Midge had dragged into the forest for them earlier that summer.
“Just wait.” Robyn paused to extend Will a hand, noting the new calluses as she hauled the other woman up. Will shot her a grateful smile, which faltered as they both remembered their earlier argument.
Lisbet, to no one’s surprise, made it to the top first. John followed, and after a few more scrambling moments the rest of them stood on the rocky stoop outside the cleft.
“This is it,” John said. Robyn schooled her expression, letting him have his fun.
“This?” Will looked around, sweat pouring down her face. Alanna held her own counsel as she surveyed the scene.
“Come off it,” said Tom, a hesitant grin on his lips, as if he
suspected there was a joke in here somewhere, but wasn’t sure enough to bet on it.
“First one to find it doesn’t have to haul water,” Robyn said. She and John stood back and let the others poke around. “My money’s on Lisbet,” she told John.
“Mine would be, too, if she were going in the right direction.”
Robyn watched Lisbet scale the rock wall. “If she finds a better cave up there, you’re hauling water until spring.”
“Deal.”
They shook on it as Will let out a shout of triumph. Lisbet slid down the rock face and into her brother’s arms as they filed into the cleft. It didn’t feel quite as large with the six of them inside, but there was still plenty of space to move around.
“I wish I was a mason.” Tom ran his hand along the wall in admiration.
“We wish you were too,” said John. “One less blacksmith around the place.”
“And masons get to go wherever they please,” added Lisbet.
“Next time we’re out recruiting, I’ll be sure to put out a call for masons.” Robyn set down her satchel, which contained a poorly wrapped bundle of hides, her cloak, and the fishing nets they’d deemed worth saving. “Let’s get a fire going so we have something to eat. Who wants to go down to the river?”
An ill-fated game of stones left Robyn with the task. She collected the waterskins and the kettle and made the descent, already hating this new addition to their routine. John and Lisbet accompanied her, leaving Will, Alanna, and Tom to look for wood for the fire. Robyn set Lisbet to gathering rushes for the floor.
“We’ll build proper beds later on. Plenty of willow down here, and while we don’t have sacking, we’ll make do with hides and leaves and dried grass.”
“Might be clay farther up the bank, too.” John let silt from the riverbed run through his fingers. “Good for the roof. We don’t want to harvest too much of anything close by, though. Which means we’ve got some climbing ahead of us.”
“The more we climb, the stronger our legs, and the better chance we stand.” Robyn rubbed at her calves as she spoke, doubting the wisdom of her own words.
