No Good Deed

by Kara Connolly

  “If you follow us,” I warned, “I will shoot you.”

  Will gave a disbelieving snort. “You’d kill a man over a goat?”

  “You think I can’t shoot you somewhere that won’t kill you?” I backed toward the path, trying to look as brave as my words. I kept my eye on Will, with the rest of the outlaw outpost in my peripheral vision. “Don’t make me do something that will get blood on your fancy clothes.”

  Will finally frowned, and Little John’s laughter followed Much and me out of the camp. My knees stayed wobbly long after we cleared the sentry.

  —

  Much and I headed vaguely Nottingham-ward until we were sure we weren’t being followed, then took a “thataway” heading back toward Mapperley and the priory. It made for a long walk through the woods, but it was a pretty day for it—the morning clouds had scattered, and the sun lit the canopy of leaves like a green glass awning. A lazy rustling underscored the melody of Much’s buoyant chatter, punctuated by the soft footfalls of the priory’s lone surviving goat.

  “Why are you so downcast?” Much asked suddenly. “We pulled away the plan, didn’t we?”

  “Pulled off,” I grumbled. I didn’t want to harsh on his mood, but failure made me cranky. “We pulled off one-third of the plan.”

  “The sisters will have milk tomorrow where this morning they had none. Isn’t that good enough?”

  There’s no such thing as good enough. There’s ten points and there’s try harder.

  My mood sank even lower. “They had three goats before, and now they have one.”

  Much was silent for a second, then said simply, “One goat is still better than no goats.”

  He was right, and rationally I knew there was nothing I could have done differently. The time it took to find the camp was the time it took to find it. Much had come back last evening with several areas we could look; we’d prioritized based on our best information, and set out at first light, while James was still bunked in at the chapel with Father Anselm. Quick-Draw Ellie was just pissed at Iron Ellie for letting James persuade me—us—not to run willy-nilly into the night. But she—I, for God’s sake—shouldn’t have taken it out on Much.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I know,” he said, forgiving me as simple as that. “But if we’d brought that roast back, we’d be up to one and a half goats. I wish I’d thought of that.”

  “I wish I could just go into Nottingham and buy the sisters another goat.”

  “Except you’d get arrested. And you have no money.”

  “Don’t trouble me with details, Much,” I said, and he laughed. I was going to miss him a little when I went home.

  “Serious question, though,” I added, dropping back so that we walked side by side while the road allowed for it. “In the woods, is there any place that’s known for people, um, sort of vanishing? Like they go in and don’t come out?”

  “Well, sure. Thieves’ Wood.” Much drew one finger across his neck with a graphic sound effect.

  Grim, but not exactly what I meant. “No, I mean like a cave. Or a stone circle.”

  He knitted his caterpillar brows and chewed his lip. “I’ve got an aunt who says her husband was carried off by the fairies, but most of us think he ran off with the butcher’s wife.”

  That wasn’t really helpful either. Much was my best hope for mining the local lore or, even better, recent rumors. Ones that didn’t involve butchers’ wives.

  Much stopped so suddenly that the goat butted right into him. I heard the sound too—the jingle and clop of a harnessed horse approaching. We were on a track between villages, not on the main road, which made it way too likely we were about to see a forester on patrol.

  Without exchanging a glance, Much and I split. He swerved to the right and I dove into the brush on the left. As I went I slipped my bow from my shoulder so it wouldn’t catch on the branches. I loved this longbow, but it was not a weapon for being stealthy in the woods.

  I peered from under a shrub and saw that the goat was being as stubborn as a, well, goat. The more Much pulled on her lead rope, the more she screamed like she was being murdered. Much stopped and straightened, and I realized the rider must have come into view.

  “Boy!” snapped a man’s voice in French. Not a forester, then. “Quiet that animal immediately.” The goat did shut up, I assumed because Much had stopped trying to pull her where she didn’t want to go. “Where are you going with that goat?”

  There was a pause, during which I pictured Much’s blankest look, and then the rider repeated the question in impatient English.

  Grateful for the soft spring leaves, I slipped an arrow from the quiver, holding it where I could nock it quickly if Much sounded like he was in trouble. But he answered in his most easygoing voice, “I’m bringing her back home, good sir.”

  “I’m bringing her back home, my lord,” corrected the rider.

  “You don’t have to call me my lord,” said Much, so perfectly disingenuous that I almost busted an eardrum holding in a laugh. “I’m only a villager.”

  “And I am a baron, you…” The description challenged my grasp on Old French, or Norman, or whatever, but was along the lines of “filthy, ignorant Saxon peasant,” only with words they don’t teach in French class.

  I risked a peek—he had some kind of heraldic thing going on with his fancy tunic, and a gold ring on just about every finger. His horse was nice at first glance, too, but from where I lay on the ground I could see she was knock-kneed. “All show, no go,” as Rob would say.

  “Begging your pardon, my lord,” Much said, when the baron took a breath. “We’ll just be on our way, then.”

  “Stop there!” He switched back to a language Much could understand. “I am on my way from York to Nottingham, and have heard tell of a bandit who stole a number of goats from the sheriff—livestock taken in the name of His Highness Prince John.”

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” I whispered. You’d think that goat had golden freaking fleece. Jason and the Argonauts were going to show up next, and I wasn’t sure it would surprise me.

  “That’s not me, my lord,” said Much, in the same equable voice. “See, in the next village, they have a ram, and we don’t. So once a year we bring Nanny here over so they can—”

  “I know what they do,” snapped the baron. “But I have only your word, so you’ll surrender the animal to me, and the sheriff will decide who is guilty.”

  Blah blah blah habeas corpus. I didn’t wait for the rest but instead sprang up. Before the lord could turn my way, I let off a half-drawn arrow and pinged his knock-kneed horse in the butt, meaning to send it bolting off. It did, but not before rearing and dumping the baron onto his back in the middle of the road.

  Shit!

  Much stared at me, slack-jawed and wide-eyed. “You just shot a lord!”

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  The lord lay there, making beached-fish noises and flailing his arms, the hood of his cloak covering his face. “Fils de putain! I’m blind!”

  “Don’t move,” I warned, pushing through the brush and onto the road while nocking another arrow. Wheezing profanity in two languages, Lord Curse-a-Lot reached to push the hood off his face, and I put a shot into the ground next to his leg. “What did I just say? Leave the hood.”

  “Imbécile! Dégénéré!”

  “Shut up,” I snapped, because I couldn’t concentrate. If he described me to the sheriff, or worse, Guilbert, my sanctuary would be revoked, and good luck finding a way back home from Nottingham prison. I’d leapt without looking again and now was calculating like mad to control my fall. “Facedown on the ground.”

  His face was only visible from the chin down, but a red tide of outrage spread up from his neck. “Va en enfer! You’ll hang for this, crétin!”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard that before.” I managed to sound threatening, not at all like I was totally freaking out inside. Much hadn’t moved, but was still staring at me in horror and awe. The nanny
goat still didn’t give a crap about my problems.

  “Give me a length of that rope, boy,” I ordered, meaning Much.

  “Do you know who I am?” the baron spat when I stepped over him holding the bit of the goat’s tether Much cut off for me. “I’m the baron of Leas. I am a member of the royal court. The sheriff of Nottingham is—”

  With a note of realization, Much said, “You’re the one who got Sir Aethelstan’s land.” He met my questioning look, and I saw the grim answers in his eyes. “I heard how you treated the old baron’s tenants.”

  “Saxon peasants. Prince John charged me to clear away those as traitorous as their late lord and master—”

  “Shut up,” I said coldly. The baron let out an “oof” when I grabbed his wrist and twisted until he flipped over onto his stomach.

  “Coward,” spat the baron, wriggling on his belly like an eel. “Give me your name, you treacherous cur, so I can dig up the graves of your mother and father and piss on their bones.”

  “Good luck with that.” I focused on the knots at his wrists, not the growing twist of anger and loathing in my chest.

  “I will give their bones to my dogs to gnaw,” he spat, “and their skulls to the kitchen to serve my soup. And then I will find that goatherd in whatever poxy pigsty village—”

  His threats became so filthy that even the few words I caught made me sick. I planted my knee on his backside, finished binding his hands tight, then took one of my arrows and stabbed the point through his hood into the soft ground so he wouldn’t be able to easily lift his head. His squawk of alarm was more satisfying than I wanted to admit. He’d crossed a line I didn’t know I had.

  Outrage was my kryptonite, and I pushed it down. I was left with its cousin, moral high ground, but I abandoned that pretty quickly, too.

  “You’re good at threatening the dead and the young,” I said in French, so he would take me more seriously than the peasants he didn’t care about. “Why don’t you lie here and have a think about helplessness.” Unless he was completely inept, he’d be able to roll over and gain his feet and start walking toward Nottingham. “Eventually.”

  And then the same devil on my shoulder that had kicked moral high ground to the curb pointed to all the rings the baron wore. Just one would buy enough goats to keep the sisters in mohair and chèvre for a long time. And he had eight, one for each knobby finger.

  I left him with seven. The large gold nugget on his index finger slipped smoothly over his knuckle and into my palm. Let him complain to his buddies, Prince John and the sheriff of Nottingham.

  “Voleur!” howled the baron, trying to throw me off.

  “This isn’t a robbery.” I tucked the ring into the pocket of my jeans, hidden by my tunic. “This is a profanity tax.”

  The moment was somehow unreal and reckless at the same time and yet also weirdly inevitable. As we left the scene of the crime, I felt a little sick and wobbly, like when you get off an airplane and have to get your legs back under you. Which I did quickly. Much hadn’t caught on to the theft, and I was glad, because I had a vague idea of not corrupting him. Or maybe just not disillusioning him. I did feel guilty, but only about not feeling guilty.

  Much and I split in opposite directions, him to the priory and me to the hermitage. I approached from the woods and climbed over the wall behind the chapel. That way no one would have to admit they’d seen me leaving or returning to the church grounds. Instead of going straight to the hermitage, I circled to the front of the chapel, drawn by a rhythmic sound, which turned out to be James tamping dirt around a new gatepost for the churchyard. Father Anselm was letting him know the post wasn’t straight.

  I remembered Rob telling me in a Skype call that putting in fence posts by hand was a job with no shortcuts. As I approached, James paused, wiping his face on the sleeve of his linen shirt. Sweat kept collecting in the hollow of his throat. “I see you and Much made yourselves scarce while there’s work to be done,” he said.

  I held up my bow. “You didn’t see me practicing in that empty stretch behind the chapel?”

  “No.”

  “It’s good you’re here, my son,” said Father Anselm. “Now you can help James, and I can rest these old bones.” The priest gave an exaggerated stretch with his hands at the small of his back, then toddled toward the rectory.

  “Hold this plumb, will you?” said James, nodding to the gatepost. Pushing the post vertical, I found a sort of level with a string and a weight attached. I kept it aligned while James went back to tamping the soil in tight around it so that it would stay that way.

  “I take it the Marian Sisters will have fresh milk tomorrow?” he said.

  “Hmm. How serious were you about not wanting to know anything you’d have to swear to under oath?”

  “That answers my question.”

  I’d already decided to either give the ring directly to Isabel to use however was best for the maids Marian, or to send it to her in a package via Much. James, from everything I’d seen, liked to work within the rules. Isabel hid a feather bed on her monastic cot.

  James put another shovelful of dirt in the posthole and began packing the layer down. I could see what Rob was talking about. It was all arm and shoulder work, and James’s sweat-soaked shirt stuck to his skin. For a swordsman, he had lean, efficient musculature made for endurance, not the powerhouse bulk of a—

  “Careful! Keep it straight.”

  “Sorry.” I’d gotten distracted for a moment.

  Be honest, Ellie. You’ve gotten distracted for a lot more than a moment.

  I was letting way too much stuff come between me and the target. None of this was getting me any closer to home. If anything, it had gotten me further off track. What did I think I was doing? I was a college freshman from Indiana with one specific skill. This wasn’t a Hunger Games movie. I couldn’t even shoot a rabbit.

  The sound of the shovel had stopped, and James was saying “Eleanor” like he’d said it a couple of times before. “What’s troubling you?” he asked, when I finally focused on him.

  “Maybe it’s that I have thirty-nine days to figure something out before Captain Guilbert skewers me with a freaking broadsword, and I’m standing here literally holding up this post.”

  “That’s true,” he said, with his maddening composure.

  “And you’re not going to get much spying done while digging holes, either,” I said, just to shake him up.

  He looked at me a bit longer, then stuck the blade of the shovel in the dirt and left it there. “Let’s sit for a moment.”

  I left the gatepost and flopped onto the bench next to the churchyard’s big oak tree. James picked up a leather canteen from the ground and took a couple of long swallows of whatever was in it. He offered it to me, but I shook my head.

  “I wondered how much you’d pieced together from what you heard the other day.” He dropped onto the other end of the bench, setting the canteen between us. “You’re right. I met the prior of my order at Rufford Abbey, and he suggested my sabbatical here.”

  “I knew it!” Being right always cheered me up.

  “There’s no need to boast.” James leaned with his elbows comfortably set on his knees, and for a long moment he let the quiet of the afternoon sink in. If he was trying to torture me, he was doing a pretty good job of it. “I told you a truth,” he said. “Now it’s your turn to tell me one.”

  “I just want to go home,” I said, which was honest, even if it wasn’t complete.

  He nodded. “And I take it you can’t go back the way you came?”

  “Right.” I fidgeted with the hem of my tunic. The temptation to unburden myself was huge. The problem was, I couldn’t remember if they were burning witches this year or hanging them. “The thing is…I’m not really from Wales.”

  Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t for James to laugh. Certainly not a head-back, stomach-shaking guffaw that stayed with him even after he’d collected himself. “Eleanor, I’m not a superstitious man, b
ut I have lain awake at night considering all sorts of things you might be. Angel, demon, sorceress, changeling…I don’t know what you are. But I definitely know you’re not Welsh.”

  I supposed he wouldn’t be laughing if he thought I actually might be a demon or a sorceress. I glared at him anyway. “That’s not funny. I don’t want to be hanged as a witch any more than I want to be hanged as a goat bandit.”

  “Good point.” But there was still humor in his eyes as he went on conversationally, “Let’s leave it at that you are from West-of-Here.”

  “I have to find a way back. I have parents who need me. And a tourna—”

  Dang it, Rob, maybe a gold medal never helped dig a well in the desert, but I believed that sports could transform a life and that my accomplishments could inspire other women. And maybe it was hokey, but I believed in the Olympic spirit, too.

  “I have things to do,” I finished. “Things that are important in their own way.”

  James gazed at me thoughtfully. “What if you have things to do here, in England, in Nottingham. Things that only you can do.”

  “I don’t believe in fate,” I said. Which didn’t mean I hadn’t considered that there was some purpose to my switch to Medieval Relative Time. I was an archer in Sherwood Forest. I’d be an idiot not to theorize there was a pattern here. “What about free will?”

  “If I fall into a well, whether I’m fated to or not doesn’t matter. I have the free will to try to climb out, or to yell for help, or to lie down and die. Which, if any, of those things will result in my escape—”

  “Stop,” I said, holding up my hands. “I don’t want a philosophical debate, I just want to go home.”

  “Why do you think it’s one or the other?” James said reasonably. “You don’t know how to get home, and you don’t know what, if anything, you are meant to do here. Maybe they’re the same thing.”

  That didn’t help at all. Even if there was a pattern I was meant to trace, I was at ground level and couldn’t see it. I was building a house from the inside out with no plans, and with the feeling that if I put a nail in the wrong spot the whole thing would collapse and change the future as I knew it. The pressure of all that made me fold over and rest my forehead on my knees with a groan.