by Sue Wilson
"All the more reason you need to be gone from this place," John said with the patronizing patience one reserved for small children.
"But I heard it, don't you see? That and more! The Michaelmas rents he collected-and God knows what else-there's a fortune of tax money here, waiting, not for delivery to the Exchequer, but for Lackland's own purse."
"Here?"
"Below your very feet, John. Somewhere in the castle vaults. I know not where, exactly. This place is honeycombed with passages, and the extent of my knowledge-" She looked around. "Well, as you see, my travels have been somewhat restricted."
"What are you saying, then?"
"It just stands to reason, John. If I learned so much in one brief encounter with a garrulous baron, how much more might I learn from others? The Sheriff himself, to begin with. Somehow I've gained his ear and what confidence the man has to give. And Gisborne, indiscreet bastard that he is. Soldiers. Servants. Lords and ladies the Sheriff entertains. People talk, John, even in Nottingham when their lives are at stake. If I could hear more-their plans for the silver, for example-how and when and to whom it will be transported-"
"Thea-"
"It isn't so impossible. Think of it. One of our own here in Nottingham Castle. In a position of trust-"
"Behind locked doors?"
"That will change. The Sheriff's of a mind to-" She stopped. John did not need to know anything of the Sheriff's mind or his temporary lust for his surgeon. He would whisk her from Nottingham Castle this instant if he even suspected. "Sooner or later he will need me, or one of his soldiers will, or his steward will sicken, or one of his girls from the kitchen-someone-and he will call on me. All I need do is listen-"
"All you need do is spy!" John corrected her with a hiss and a glower of rage.
Thea clapped her hand over his mouth. He quickly tore it away.
"God's bones, have they starved ye senseless? When did you dream up such a fool idea?"
She pushed herself away and turned her back on him, arms wrapped around herself to still her own trembling. In truth, it was a devil of a plan, seeded somewhere between the Sheriff's bold use of her and the light of morning. A dark shadow of insight that became clearer with each sentence she uttered. A way she could help, finally. A way she could make a difference. A way she could make the killing stop.
"It would be what Brand would do," she said softly.
Behind her, John swore under his breath. "Look, Thea, you're a lass with uncommon good sense, for all my finding fault with ye, but the Sheriff has poisoned your mind, has got ye craving a piece of his danger. Brand wasn't the brightest lout, mind you, but still he'd not pull such a stunt. Nor would he want his widow going off on some hare-brained scheme full of risks."
Thea turned slowly and met John's eyes. "He asked me to help. At the end. He asked me-"
"He was raving with fever, lass, muttering nonsense-"
"His last words were clear, John. His eyes sought mine, and there was no crazed madness there. With his last breath he made me promise-"
"He did not make ye promise to sacrifice your life. See here, Thea. Brand did right by us. There's no arguing that. He saw injustice and-ballocks, lass-we were his friends-most of us he'd known since he'd worn breechclouts-but he did only what he could. Fed us when he had food to give. Slipped us a pence or two. Brought us fleece for blankets. Mayhap he'd have fought alongside us if it'd come to that, if he'd lived. But I know as right as reason he'd have yer hide for even suggesting such a notion as this spying, and mine for not stopping ye."
"No, John, listen-"
"You listen, lass. You've done more than Brand ever expected. More than he would have wanted. God's oath, how was it possible the lad wed ye and bed ye and still gained no measure of yer spirit? Be that as it may, I can tell ye straight, he didn't intend his dying words to be all that you lived by. You've done enough. It's time I fetched ye home."
"And if I will not go?"
John stared at her as if she'd lost her senses. Perhaps she had. She still shook with some strange, leftover need for action that had accumulated in her bones. The same kind of pent-up urgency that drove her from her cottage on more than one occasion when she needed to help. The same thrill of being alive, of having all her senses focused when she saved someone's life...when she cut into the Sheriff's flesh and pried the arrowhead out-
She shook her head, chasing the thought away. "It's not my promise to Brand. Not completely. God knows, you are my people, too. You and Much. Cynric and Stefan and Lucan. I birthed Garrett's first-born and buried Merton's last. I stood by and watched as Duncan's wife fed her sons instead of herself, when sickness took half of Edgar's brood, his mother, his father. I would have done anything to spare them, had I not been so helpless. Had I not been so damnably powerless to make a difference! This, John, is something I can do. A plum dropped in my lap by some fortuitous wind I dare not question."
"Then I'd best question it for ye, and I tell you no. You'll not be staying. Think on it, those very people ye mentioned, left without your care and mercy-"
"Mercy? You mean my standing by while those I love waste away? While their lives are snuffed out because I can offer no weapon against hunger or poverty or injustice? Don't you see? You'd be the first to admit it, John. We cannot toil through another harvest only to let Gisborne torch our crops and trample our fields. And I'll not stand by watching another home burned and innocent people scattered to the four winds, forced to hide or swing from the gallows. If my staying here will uncover the Sheriff's secrets, or Lackland's, if we can cut short their tyranny by one week, I will have accomplished more than in four years of so-called mercy."
"Thea, I cannot let you. For the love of Jesus-"
"John, you could go home, to Hathersage. Much could be returned to his parents. Husbands and wives could share the same hearth again. Families could be reunited."
"The Sheriff, lass, have ye fergotten him? Fer all ye think you know him, he rules with the whip, the torch, and the hangman's noose, and he will not hesitate to rule you the same. If he so much as suspects-"
Thea smiled. "He already suspects. It is his nature. And he's done nothing."
"Don't be fooled, lass. Sure the man is turned by a comely wench. He might even fancy your healer's hands rubbing the ache from his overwrought temples, but you'll find the gaol right enough should ye ever become more than just amusement for the man."
"I am not afraid."
"Aye, well, ye should be." John plowed his fingers through his unruly frazzle of hair, and squirmed at the tight fit of the scratchy wool cassock at his throat. "You should be turned over my knee, lass, and walloped good for even suggesting such a thing."
She caught the waver of indecision in his voice. "Then it's agreed. I'm staying."
John wore an expression of downtrodden loss, of grief that was nearly palpable. "I've failed ye, lass."
"No, John, I've failed. Until now. And now there is a way to undo that."
"And I cannot stop ye?"
Thea shook her head.
"You took an errant arrow from the bastard," John said. "If he so much as lays a hand on ye, he'll find my aim more mortal."
"Come to me, when you can, when it's safe-or send someone else-and I will pass on what I've heard."
"And if you're in danger-"
"I'll send word. I promise."
"And you'll stay only for a short time, lass. A very short time."
"Only as long as necessary. Until we know what is needed to put Lackland down."
"And the Sheriff with him."
"Aye," Thea said softly.
John shook his head, capitulating, and already wearing his surrender with obvious regret. "God in His wisdom can't explain you to me, lass. So help me, if harm comes to ye, Much'll be roasting my ballocks fer supper."
He reached out to her, drew her gently against him, and swiped at her temple with a hasty kiss.
"I'll be close," he whispered into her hair. "Send for me."
&nbs
p; "I'll be fine. Somehow, John, I think the Sheriff wants me safe."
He straightened, and without meeting her eyes, stepped away from her. "Then you're in danger already, lass."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the few weeks since Thea had been confined to the castle, August had slipped away and the air outside carried the fragrant chill of autumn. Standing in her garden, she lifted her face to the breeze and let it wash over her, crisp and laden with the wild smells of the season. Slaughtering time had begun, and with it, the continual wafts of spitted pig and boar dripping succulent fat over hot coals and coiling their aromatic ribbons of smoke skyward.
No matter how she craned her neck or how far she crept up on tiptoe against the wall enclosing her garden, Thea could see nothing of the goings-on. Mildthryth had maneuvered a way for her to leave her chamber-a way Thea was still not certain the Sheriff would sanction, but which the castle dwellers did not question.
By tacit agreement, Thea did not test the boundaries of her newly acquired independence. For the old woman's sake, if not her own curiosity, she did not press to be a part of the activities in the bailey. She was grateful enough to be out-of-doors where the sun warmed her face and chased the castle pallor from her cheeks.
The air carried a taste of freedom as much as it did sage and savory and roasting meat, and the demands of the garden were boundless. Weeding and pruning and replanting left her bone-weary at day's end, ready for the bliss of dreamless sleep.
At one time, the leech's herbarium had been an ambitious project. Wormwood, horehound, and lovage grew in profusion, along with betony, tansy, and waybroad. There was mugwort for protection, fennel, whose leaves and seeds boiled in barley water increased a mother's milk, and agrimony for drawing forth splinters. Lemon balm was flowering, clary was coming to seed, and chamomile stole over the gravel paths that separated the beds. Against the high stone walls, hemlock embraced black-berried deadly nightshade on one side and the twisting vines of bryony on the other.
It was paradise, if an ill-kempt one, and Thea lost no time sinking to her knees beside the first raised bed to wield her trowel against the weeds. As the days passed, she measured her progress by the number of neat, rectangular beds, each containing a single species of herb, which emerged out of the chaos of the leech's neglect.
At first, Mildthryth had accompanied her. The old woman chattered away at Thea's side about the various ills of the castle folk and how the leech had cured them with a pinch of this plant or a decoction of that, with a dash of prayer and holy water for good measure. In this way, Thea learned something of the people she had been asked to tend.
There was Hildreth, whose courses were forever late, and Old Darwin, whose eyesight begged for clary, and Donald, the stable hand, who had developed a craving either for warmed wine or the fennel laced through it, which he claimed soothed his rasping cough.
Yet as much as the Sheriff claimed to need her skills for his people, her enforced confinement prevented her from seeking them out, and none came to her. Perhaps they were not wont to place their trust in the Sheriff's new surgeon, who was no more than a village herb woman at best. Perhaps she had made enemies of them by saving him. Perhaps, as she often suspected, she was no surgeon at all, but merely the latest whore to grace the Sheriff's bed. It was the one area of castle gossip about which Mildthryth did not enlighten her.
In time, her maidservant found excuses to be about other work in the castle, and Thea realized she had earned the woman's trust and gained a modicum of freedom. It was a two-edged blessing, for while she reveled in her newfound pursuit, without Mildthryth's banter to distract her, Thea's thoughts kept returning to things and people she would have gladly left behind. There was something about the simple routine of digging the earth, of caring for her herbs, that busied her hands, but left her mind to roam. And all too often, she thought of Nottingham.
It was good he had departed. Good he was not here to see what one night in his arms had done to her. And if he'd left so soon afterward, she told herself, it was nothing more than his pattern, to bear down upon her with his threats and intimidation and unsubtle physical needs, then retreat and leave her to dwell on what she had refused. Likely he was off somewhere, contemplating his next move. No doubt there would be one; he would return from meting out justice to pull another trick from his sleeve, and she would be compelled either to see through the trick or make some jaded remark about its lack of cleverness. And so the game would continue.
Familiarity with his strategy should have made her immune to him. At the very least, the now-higher stakes should have made her more careful. Yet foreknowledge had been no help to her, and determination no match for Nottingham's potent seductive skill. In the end, she had been unable to dodge his amorous sleight of hand. She had found herself on her back beneath him-Mother of Christ, wanting him, begging him, letting him do things to her no one but a pagan, or a Norman, would dare dream up. If he were not sorcerer with his transparent schemes, what he had done to her body was no less than magic.
She told herself it was a spell he had also cast over nearly every woman in Nottingham Castle and not a few barons' daughters, that before coming to her, he had enchanted Agatha, whose name he remembered as well as her ample attributes-and that afterward-well, there would have been someone to give him what Thea had not, a nameless wench whose skirts he'd flung up in the shadow of a serpentine staircase. That was the man she needed to recall, if recall him she must. He was foul and everything she detested.
Yet her mind had turned traitor in his absence, even as her body had betrayed her then. She remembered how, in her bed, he had sworn to some kind of astonishing, if minimal, celibacy, how he had lied in a rare, chivalric moment that he wanted only her. She remembered the taste of his mouth and his slender, lean-muscled weight nestled against body, and in her most private thoughts, she remembered his hard, intrusive presence between her thighs. Worse-yes, even worse than that memory-was the abandon with which pleasure and soft moans had spilled from her at his touch.
She cursed herself for a provincial fool, for being such an easy mark, for wanting him again. Was the man an alchemist that he could make her blood boil with passions she had long forgotten, or never knew? Had he drugged her with his kisses? Plowed her with his hands and mouth and sown her with such longing that she could not resist him until she filled herself with him? And when he returned, as he must-
"Thea."
She spun around at the sound of a male voice, hands swiping at loose hair in her face. Dirt streaked across her cheek and chin.
Gisborne lounged against the garden wall, arms crossed over his chest, sagged into a posture that was as indolent as a cat grown lazy in the sun.
Her heart thudded deep in her chest. With a start of alarm, she knew he'd been standing there, secretly watching her. His eyes narrowed, and an appreciative gleam darkened their flat, colorless irises as he absorbed the sight of her squatting on the ground, skirts tucked between her legs. Thea struggled to her feet, all too aware of the thin linen chainse she wore instead of her shapeless peasant kirtle and tunic, of the way perspiration dampened the vee of her bodice, revealing an immodest outline of her breasts.
"So he's let you out of your cage." Gisborne smirked and licked the corner of his full lips. "Or are you at play only until the cat comes home?"
"You're the cat's cousin," she retorted. "Why are you not with him?"
"Someone must stay behind to keep watch." He shrugged with indifference. "Besides, there is something about shire justice that leaves me cold. I've told him before. It's so much simpler just to plunder the villages. They come across with their tax moneys so readily when their hovels are aflame."
He shoved himself away from the wall, breaking off a stem of teasel as he went and twirling it between his fingers. "He's not taking very good care of you, is he, Thea? Leaving you unattended to plot how you might escape this shabby Eden, free to meander through the castle halls, hoping to hear something you might carry back with
you?"
"Carry back with me?" Disdain dripped through her words.
"To Sherwood." He smiled and brushed the tufted end of the stem across his lips.
"You believe he has not informed every guard between here and the castle gate that their lives are forfeit should I escape?"
"I believe guards can be coaxed to look in the other direction."
"And who would do this coaxing?"
"I might. Perhaps."
"For what price?" she asked, not because she believed him, but because it was expected of her. Another of Gisborne's games: intimidation dressed as an offer of mercy.
His glance drifted from her eyes to her lips to her sweat-wrung bodice, and he sighed as if he could not be troubled explaining what was obviously clear. "For the price you paid him a sennight ago."
An icy vice closed around her heart, and her overly warm memories of the Sheriff turned bitter and tainted by Gisborne's knowledge of what they had shared. She forced herself to look at the man, cold rage keeping her from flinching. "You must think me the village idiot, lieutenant, to pay the price twice for something neither you nor the Sheriff would ever allow me to have."
Gisborne chuckled, the sound wry and bitter, as if he choked on his own laughter. "No, Thea. I don't underestimate your cunning. You make lying an art, weaving falsehoods with the same ease as other women weave tapestries. Truly, I admire your skill, to have snared such a man in the threads of your deceit."
"Then you underestimate your cousin, Sir."
Gisborne's smile dissolved. "My cousin I know all too well. You, on the other hand, are a mystery to me. I thought that by now you would have won your freedom at any cost. I expected some dashing, heroic rescue, your outlaw consorts descending upon the castle, swooping down upon us, deflecting crossbow and sword as if by magic, risking all to return you to their woodland fold."
