by Sue Wilson
"This is what I mean, woman!" he thundered, gesturing to the shroud-filled room. "This, damn you! Not some minor forest mischief! See what they have done? See what vengeance they have heaped upon these innocent men? Better yet, drag your herbs and instruments to the stable. See if you can put back the life of two-thirds of my horses. Chimera-" His voice broke. He could not continue.
Thea bowed her head, unable to meet his eyes or speak.
The simple motion angered him even more. It would be like her to retreat from the truth, even when she carried the bloody evidence smeared on her hands and face.
He warred with the instinct to blame her, for although he could not hold her responsible for the actions of his attackers, it was equally true that she had stumbled into an alliance with these outlaws, and who else but Locksley and his brigands could have accomplished this night's sly, ferocious attack?
She thought what Nottingham and his men had done to bring the fugitives to justice was harsh and cruel. What could she say now that she had seen violence loosed from the very bows she swore were used merely for hunting the king's deer? This was cruelty! This was barbarism! Tonight they had added eight men, perhaps others, to a list of victims grown too long to remember.
Not one, but two enemy archers lay dead in the dungeon, their bodies pierced several times over. A third was in Gisborne's hands, and for once Nottingham did not care if his cousin indulged his every sadistic whim.
The murderous bastard would be thrown from the battlements at dawn, but the mere snapping of his neck was far too fast and easy an end. Let him feel the fiery pain of irons and whips that flayed the skin with fire. Let him regret he had not fallen with his comrades. Damn it all, let him confess to the location of Locksley's secret camp while he yearned for the oblivion of death!
The Sheriff looked at Thea, anger bubbling thickly within him. He should never have let her return with him. These feelings she caused to steal over him were dangerous, not to be trusted any more than she was herself.
His jaw tensed. He had let his desire for her soften his convictions, had permitted her to cut through his resolve like a blade through warm butter. Damn it all! The Sherwood felons must be stopped, and he knew of only one way.
Thea knew. Their names. Their camp. Probably more intimacies about their forest lives than he cared to dwell on presently.
He had never pressed her, not really. She was and always had been his unseen advantage, yet he had protected her, exempted her from obedience, even from professing loyalty to him. And now he had let her become an impediment to him. He could not allow himself to be encumbered by his longings and this mad turn toward tenderness that had afflicted him of late. Thea was his to use, and far too rare a chess piece to be wasted on carnal pleasure.
He did not look at her, in fact, could not look at her. The very thought of her stirred the nest of vipers in his belly to writhe and strike at him with a gentle response he could ill afford.
Vehemently, he pushed the barrage of memories from his mind, memories of her touch, her taste, her sweet, eager willingness. She would talk, he vowed. The secrets she kept would spill from her lips as easily as the muted cries of pleasure he had wrung from her earlier.
Deliberately, he snatched her arm, the pressure of his hand so intense that she dropped her blade to the ground. "Leave Godwinson to the priest," he said between clenched teeth. "There is more you need to see. Below."
He could see that she was far too confused to challenge him. "My lord?" she asked, with bewilderment born of exhaustion.
"Perhaps you can be of use to me yet," he muttered. With sickening satisfaction, he noted the change in her features: the way her slim brows drew together in worry; the way her eyes darkened as she searched his face for an answer he was not about to give; the way her lips parted to begin a question, then pressed together as she prevented herself from asking.
She was afraid, the Sheriff realized, more afraid than she had been even staked and burning on the stable floor. Finally. After what she had seen today, and what she would see below, maybe she would realize how dangerous her alliance with Locksley was, and how lethal could be her silence.
He said nothing more, but jerked at her arm with a viciousness that tore through his shoulder. He covered the grunt of pain, and with raw determination, propelled her out of the barracks and through the deep, cavernous tunnels that led beneath the main keep, to the gaol.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was a silent, ominous journey, furiously paced. The Sheriff pulled Thea behind him past a blur of storerooms and ale cellars, down the steep, narrow flight of stairs that curved around a high, central supporting column of stone and mortar. As they descended into the underbelly of the keep, any remnant of dawn's frail light disappeared. The pale, orange auras of weakly glowing torches, set in widely spaced cressets along the corridors, left them in darkness more often than not.
Nottingham's eyes were accustomed to the dimness; his feet knew every worn step and plank along the way. He grabbed Thea's hand, ignoring the desperate clutch of her fingers, and shoved her ahead of him through the tunnels and down a final plummeting corkscrew of steps to the nadir of the keep.
A group of guards scrambled hastily to their feet, upturning the table around which they gathered with their game of dice. All eyes fixed on the Sheriff, and there was no sound other than the hollow, sporadic echo of water dripping far off in some unseen corner.
"Where are they?" he demanded, stirring the silence.
The cluster of soldiers parted, inviting entrance to their bleak, subterranean domain. A firepit glowing blue-hot issued forth a spiritless spiral of smoke that hung over their heads, draped across the motionless air like cobwebs and nearly obscuring the high ceiling of arched beams.
The Sheriff urged Thea ahead, feeling reluctance in her fear-stiffened posture and hesitant step.
"Cousin," Gisborne greeted him, diverting his attention momentarily from the man chained, spread-eagled, on a bloodstained table. Overhead, ropes and chains hung like tangled vines, interspersed with a malevolent assortment of implements.
Thea turned her head aside and covered her mouth. Even the Sheriff grimaced, sickened by the too-familiar pungency of burned flesh.
"The dead," he said brusquely. "Where are they?"
Gisborne inclined his head toward a row of cells on his right. "Not that they'd escape," he said dryly. "I'd say their siege was ill-fated from the start. Dreadfully undermanned." His laugh was a bitter, choked sound in his throat.
The Sheriff's gaze darted to Thea's colorless face as she braved a glance at the cells carved into the bedrock foundation of the castle. Low, whimpering moans implored from the confined darkness; skeletal hands reached between the iron bars of the cell doors, snatching at her skirt as she passed.
The cell Gisborne indicated showed no movement at all, save the faint scurrying of rodents.
"Open it," the Sheriff ordered.
From behind Gisborne, the turnkey stood, a giant column of bronze flesh looming over the Sheriff's cousin. The man was stripped to the waist, and the muscles of his sweat-slicked chest and arms knotted with grotesque definition. He lumbered toward the Sheriff, pulled a ring of keys from his leather belt, and fumbled one into the lock. His massive hand closed around an iron bar, and the cell door creaked open.
The airless cubicle was dank and musty, but the stale odor that assaulted them was nothing compared to the stench of straw soaked in the filth of human waste. The Sheriff ducked beneath the overhanging stone and peered into the darkness of the cell, then backed out again.
"Bring them out," he ordered. He turned to Thea. "I want to know who they are."
He did not expect her to flinch, nor did she. Her chin lifted in that brave, defiant gesture he knew so well, and one slender brow arched with quaint dignity that struck him like a lance in his gut. He held her spite-filled gaze until the gaoler had deposited the bodies at their feet.
Thea's eyes broke with his, and by degrees her glance d
rifted down to the floor. The dead men wore the same homespun tunics and cross-gartered leggings of most woodsmen. Black-red circles of blood marked the entrance wounds of arrows too numerous to count, several still embedded in chests, backs, thighs. Nottingham pushed one lifeless arm with the toe of his boot.
"Friends of yours?" he whispered.
Thea shuddered and collapsed to her knees, a small cry bursting through her lips. For a moment, her hands hovered helplessly over the dead men as if she wanted, or needed, to make some last gesture to save lives that had already been ripped away. Gingerly, she pulled back the woolen hood that covered the face of the man nearest her.
Behind her, the Sheriff froze, every muscle in his body contracted into granite stillness. Before Thea moved to the next slain attacker, Nottingham pushed past her and barreled his way into the center of the room where Gisborne and the turnkey bent over their living prisoner.
"Damn you, Gisborne! That is no woodsman. Do you not know these men?"
Swinging arms out wildly, he cleared his cousin and the gaoler out of his path. Viciously, the Sheriff's fingers dug into the prisoner's upper arms as he hauled the man up from his prostrate position on the table. The man groaned and his body sagged in the Sheriff's arms, his head rolling limply on his shoulders.
Gisborne nodded in acknowledgment. "Roger Dunstan. Late of this very garrison."
The man lifted his head and glared out balefully from pain-glazed eyes. Depleted of strength by untended injuries and those more purposely inflicted, he struggled weakly against the shackles that bound him, wrist and ankle. His cheek bore the imprint of hot irons, and a stream of blood washed down from a wound in his scalp. Trembling with effort, the prisoner shot a scathing look at the Sheriff. His body turned rigid as he worked his dry, cracked lips together soundlessly, and spat.
The Sheriff held the ragged waste of a man in mid-air for a moment longer, then let him drop upon the table. Turning slowly on his heel, he wiped the spittle from his cheek with the tattered black silk of his sleeve.
"And the others?"
"Deserters. I've checked the roster. These three accompanied you to Sherwood in August-the day you were ambushed and left to die. They were missing, presumed dead."
"Not nearly dead enough," Nottingham muttered. "Were there others?"
Gisborne paused. "Not that we caught."
The Sheriff rubbed his smoke-bleary eyes with his hand and turned away, pacing the length of the dungeon. Not woodsmen, although disguised well enough. Not even peasants. Soldiers. Satan's blood-his own men!
"Why?" he asked, turning back to the prisoner.
Gisborne tossed Nottingham a pouch, heavy with the ring of sterling. "They were paid, and handsomely. Undermanned, as I said, but this was a well-conceived plot, Cousin. Had you been less lucky-"
He broke off, cleared his throat, and began again. "There is more silver here than these turncoats could make in a year. In two years. They were well-funded, well-supplied."
Nottingham upended the pouch, spilling the coins into his palm until the pile grew too large to contain and silver coins fell through his fingers to the floor. "Not Locksley's men," he said in a shaken monotone.
"Doubtful," Gisborne replied sourly. "Without his father's finances, young Robin hasn't this kind of wealth to spare."
"He's stolen enough from my own treasury to hire a legion of men-"
"If they weren't flocking to his side out of loyalty alone." Gisborne scuffed his boot heel through a rancid puddle of water. "No, my guess is that Locksley would've taken you on personally. The cocksure bastard craves a confrontation."
"No less than I," Nottingham said. Abruptly he nodded, then thrust the pouch and its contents into Gisborne's hands. "As I feared, our enemies are more than one. And closer yet than Locksley's camp. I charge you, Cousin, to bring them in. Nothing less than splintered gullets for the lot of them."
He glanced at the surviving prisoner. "I'll hang this bastard myself."
Myriad conflicting feelings swirled within him, as if his world had been turned upside down and shaken soundly. He walked over to Thea, who still knelt beside the dead men, and offered her his hand. "Come," he whispered.
She glanced from his face to his hand and back again, her lips hard and angry, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears and horror.
"Come," he repeated more forcefully, and extended his hand farther.
Slowly, she gathered her burnt, bloody skirts about her, and laid her hand in his. He pulled her up off the floor and led her quickly to the upward swirl of steps. He did not look back, nor did he speak until they were well away from the gaol. Only after they made the turn down the last tunnel that would lead them back to the keep did the Sheriff stop.
Bracing himself against the coolness of the stone, he let the darkness of the corridor cover his exhaustion. His knees gave way slightly; he corrected the small lapse and stood straighter, concentrating on the solid feel of the damp wall as it lent strength to his back.
He had not expected to be so affected by confronting his would-be murderers. He had thought it impossible to feel more rage than he directed at the criminals in Sherwood, but he quaked with a new anger that surpassed even that.
His mouth filled with bitter bile as he thought of the prisoner now in Gisborne's hands. It was bad enough to be hunted like human prey by Locksley. Now his own men had turned against him.
The turncoat was a fool, of course, a hotheaded, money-driven idiot without reason or caution or purpose, and a poor archer at that. The woodsman's disguise was his only stroke of genius, and not nearly enough to save him. Nottingham's fingers spasmed into claws as he imagined his hands around the man's neck. A hanging was far too swift a death. He hoped Gisborne took his time with the questioning.
A faint movement at his side wrested his thoughts from the attempted assassination, and he looked down to see Thea, her face a pale oval in the darkness. Suddenly, he was reminded of their whereabouts and the painfully tight grip he had on her forearm.
He did not share his multitude of concerns with her; it was enough that he had been wrong, stupidly, unforgivably wrong, that he had trumpeted his errors of judgment loudly for her to hear.
He looked at her, for the first time without concern for his men or the prisoner below or his own skin and pride, and felt the atrocities of the day reflected in her stillness. She seemed too quiet, too small, as if the events of the hours' passing dwarfed her with the immensity of their import. Angry, yes, she was that, but now she seemed too fragile as well.
The flames had spared little of her delicate shift, licking the skirts with blackened grime and ash. The bodice was ripped, the rolled up sleeves soaked in blood. Smears of greasy soot streaked her cheeks and forehead. When the shock of it all wore off, she would feel the taut throb of fire in those cheeks and along her leg where he had smothered the flames against her.
His own injuries were insignificant. There were no scars that would show amid the crosswork pattern already emblazoned on his shoulders, and the pain, if not the memories, could be doused with sufficient ale. But Thea!
What had he done to her? How quickly his own fear and distrust had trampled his yearning for her! How easily he had forfeited every hope of something new and noble with her, and cast aside whatever small goodness she saw in him in favor of old hatreds and suspicions.
He asked himself for the thousandth time who she was, and the only answer his mind allowed, maybe the only answer there could be, was that she was a village herb woman. A healer first. Always.
John Little and Locksley sought her out, it was true, but so had he when the need arose, and now he pressed her into a service far more gruesome than any in her simple country life.
Was she ever more than a woman with simples and a steady hand? A birther of babies? A speaker of charms who spent her days gathering plants for her harmless potions? Old men with toothaches, runny-nosed children with sore throats, a mother without milk-these were her people. Not soldiers with ghastly arrow w
ounds and faces burned beyond recognition.
Fatigue tempted him, and the telltale portents of a headache throbbed in his temples, blurring his vision. He found himself favoring his damaged shoulder; his left arm lay useless at his side. A trickle of blood from his wound caressed his palm before forking between his fingers to drip on the floor, but the physical pain meant nothing. His mind strayed in circles of chaotic thought, anything to keep the emotional bedlam at bay. His eyes drifted shut, blotting out the world.
"My lord," came her soft whisper, softer than he deserved, "you've seen to all but yourself. If you will but come with me-"
His eyes opened, the pounding behind them knitting his dark brow into a weave of furrows.
She reached out as if to touch his sleeve, then let her hand drop to her side, her red-stained fingers curling into a fist, as if she did not trust her own impulse or the indeterminate period of calm that had fallen over him.
The haunted look in her eyes told him she had found no pleasure in seeing Locksley and his companions proved innocent. Then he found he could not look at her at all-not at the smudged face, not at the blood on her hands, not at the remnants of the gown he had crushed to himself in a brief, splendid moment when neither of them had thought or care for enmity, let alone violence.
She had seen too much. Far too much. Worse, he had been unable to protect her and could give her no oath of safety now, if ever. He should send her back to her cottage, to Edwinstowe and the trivial injury of common folk, to Sherwood and safety.
If only he could.
"There are still other matters," he said with forced harshness. "See to yourself. See to Simeon. There is nothing I have suffered that won't improve significantly when I've stretched that bastard's neck."
He spun around and retreated into the shadows of the corridor, thundering through the passage that would return him to the living quarters of the keep.
~*~
Thea paced the barracks, pausing to hold a ladle of cold water to a soldier's lips. The night had ended without word from the Sheriff, but still she waited, her thoughts torn between him and the men whose needs she tended to in a dazed rote.
