by Sue Wilson
"But if he's stopped-"
Mildthryth's brows lowered. "I'll not be hearing of it. Do you think I don't know where your sympathies lie? Aye, you're a strong woman, with strong enough sentiment, to be sure, and, sweet holy saints, 'tis no doubt you are bold, but-" She sighed. "You are no warrior, lamb. You're a healer. A peacemaker. Surely you would rather bind up the wounds of this land than to tear it further apart."
"I have bound the wounds of this land for more years than I care to count, Millie. Bound them with the best physic I know, only to see them rent open again because the hatred goes deeper than any herb or charm or prayer can heal. What have I done here, or in Sherwood for that matter, but take wasted, half measures?"
"You have loved him," Mildthryth said quietly, "and in a way that has taken his heart, made him new and whole again."
"Nay, truly, I fear I have not."
"You have given him strength when he could not find it on his own, helped him bury the worst of himself along with the memories that nothing else could erase. You have taught him gentleness. Honor."
"Have I? He seems so willing to forsake it."
"You must trust him."
"Trust? In the Sheriff of Nottingham? Oh, God, that I could!" Thea wanted to cry. The old woman was as deluded as she. She returned to the hearth and sank forlornly to the floor, laying her head on Mildthryth's knee.
"You must, lamb," Mildthryth said, tenderly stroking Thea's hair. "'Tis the very beginning of love. Without it, all that you have, all you hope for, will crumble and die."
Thea reached out and took Mildthryth's hand, gently rubbing the gnarled, callused fingers. Age had dimmed neither wisdom nor patience in the serving woman's eyes. "Oh, Mildthryth, don't you see? It's because I love him that I must stop him. If someone does not prevent this plan, more than England's monarchy is at stake, more even than the fate of all those who have toiled to provide King Richard's ransom. What will become of the Sheriff of Nottingham if Prince John has his way? Even if Nottingham were to challenge the prince and Lord Gisborne to retain his sheriffdom, what price would they demand? The very honor you said I taught him? Think, what notorious name will he earn for himself if he casts his lot with traitors to betray his true king?"
Mildthryth squeezed Thea's hand in return. "What choice does he have, lamb? The prince is not a man to cross, and the barons have weapons and hired soldiers enough to take Nottingham Castle if 'tis not surrendered. What way out of this do you have in mind that the Sheriff has not thought of twice over?"
"There is a way," Thea said in a hushed voice. "But a way he would never consider."
"Sweet saints, and what would that be?"
"I would need your help," Thea said tentatively.
Mildthryth was already shaking her gray head, plump jowls wagging about her small, pinched mouth.
"You'll help me leave the castle tonight-"
"Nay, lamb, I won't."
"Not an escape, Mildthryth," Thea promised quickly. "A delivery. To the inn at the base of the castle rock."
"The Trip to Jerusalem? The place is crawling with Nottingham's soldiers, any one of them likely to recognize you! Come morn, you'd find yourself in irons for sure, or worse, used or murdered by the Norman bastards. Nay, you'll not be leaving here, not while there's breath in my body."
"Then-"
"I'll go myself, if 'tis such a thing you must do."
Mildthryth wrung her hands in her tunic, and Thea could see her struggle with the division in her heart, could feel the tearing of the woman's loyalties as she had felt her own allegiance shredded in the past few months. "Mildthryth-"
"I'm an old woman, aye, but I've graced the presence of the Trip before, hauling my Warrin home by dawn's light." She sketched a cross at her ample bosom. "Bless his soul."
"Mildthryth, I cannot ask you-"
"And I cannot let you risk yourself on some fool mission when so much is at stake. Besides, I could use a pint of the Trip's finest to chase the chill of winter away. And-" The old woman paused, her gaze lowered to the spinning she'd left idle in her lap, and her voice dropped to a serious whisper. "And I love the man, as a mother loves a wayward son she cannot quite lose hope for. Few enough know that, save yourself. Fewer still would understand. But the Sheriff was good to me and my Warrin, and I cannot stop praying for him, knowing in my heart he is worth saving. If your plan will do that-"
"Save him?" Thea shook her head. "Nay, Mildthryth, Nottingham must do that for himself. All I can do, possibly, is prevent the tax silver from going to Lackland. The Sheriff may still harbor some malevolent intentions in his heart, but if he is prevented from carrying them out in deed, at least there will be no treachery done here."
Recognition sparked in Mildthryth's eyes, but if the woman disapproved, she offered no censure. "'Twill involve your outlaws," she guessed.
"Aye."
Mildthryth nodded solemnly, then drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders. "Tell me then what I must do."
To argue with the woman was useless, and to thank her-? Mildthryth would brush such words away as heedlessly as she brushed the lint from her lap as she laid her yarn and spindle aside.
Thea stood and took up her journal. She leafed through the pages until she came to the last entry she had made the night the Sheriff had come to her cottage, the night all of this had begun. She tore out the first blank page of parchment, found quill and ink, and drew a single glyph: the Locksley cross. Folding the paper several times, she placed the message in Mildthryth's hand.
"Deliver this to the inn, to Alan, the minstrel, who takes his evening meal there. Tell him your mistress is in want of a Yuletide song, perhaps with accompaniment."
Mildthryth's gaze drifted up from the note, her eyes unreadable. "And then?"
"He will know what to do." Thea drew an uneasy breath, trying not to think of the fair-haired lad with the lilting voice whose name she had just divulged. If she did not get word to Sherwood, far more lives would be forfeit than his. And if he failed, or if Mildthryth became suspect-nay, she could not allow herself to think such a thing.
Mildthryth had already heaved herself from the chair and donned a heavy woolen cloak, pulling the hood close about her face for warmth and secrecy. Thea rushed into her arms and held the woman fast, grateful beyond words. Hastily, she dropped a kiss on Mildthryth's worn cheek. "Go with God, Millie," she whispered.
~*~
The Sheriff dismissed the guard stationed on the rampart and waited as the ring of the soldier's nailed boots died in the night. Shivering, he wrapped his mantle tightly about him against the night air.
Below him, Nottingham and its environs had adopted a carnival atmosphere associated with the prince's arrival. Even in this desolate cold, the streets were clogged with merchants who hoped to use the occasion of Lackland's visit to fatten their purses. Wagons and stalls of vendors crowded the pathways even more thickly than on market days, and the Trip bulged with guests already celebrating the royal visit with food and drink.
Beyond the walls of the city, the hills bloomed with campfires. Tinkers and farmers, mummers and tellers of portents, the ever-present pickpocket or ten, and the priests sent forth by the abbey to convert them all had assembled well in advance of the prince himself. Tomorrow, come cockcrow, the aroma of meat pastries would fill the air, mingling with the calls of peddlers hawking their wares. No doubt, Gisborne would have to dispatch extra troops to keep the people from erupting into the chaos that always followed on the heels of too much excitement and freely flowing ale.
The Sheriff wondered if he should bring this to Guy's attention, as his cousin had become restive, if not agitated, as the time of the prince's arrival drew nigh. His mind had been increasingly on his unwilling role in his father's scheme to secure the sheriffdom on his behalf; if he truly coveted the position, and Nottingham did not fool himself into believing that it had not crossed Guy's mind, at least he had the good sense to hide it behind a facade of anxiety and continued ineptitude. But then Not
tingham's own role in this charade became foremost in his thoughts.
Over the next fortnight, he would be confronted with every man who wanted his undoing, in one way or another. The Sheriff dragged the wintry air into his lungs and expelled the breath into the frosty night. From his vantage point, the division of horizon and wood was an indecipherable blur, as hazy and unfocused a panorama as his own life's course had become.
He had not seen Lord Gisborne in twenty years, yet memories of living under his boot, under his whip, forever indebted to the miscreant for every morsel of food he took in the manor house and every thread of clothing he wore on his back still rankled him. What the lord had done in rescuing him from a life in the stable, he had done only for Guy's sake, and not a day had passed that Roger deGisborne had not found occasion to remind the young stable boy of the cost of that charity.
He had tasted the fruitfulness of life as a nominal noble, but he had also suffered the ceaseless insults and cuffs to the head when he was slow to learn, the boxing of his ears for daring to lift his chin in Lord Gisborne's presence, and the whip for growing into a body and mind that put his cousin in a dimmer light. Harsh punishments to body and soul, but they were childhood injuries, a fading stain on a long ago past he had almost forgotten. DeGisborne, however, had never forgotten.
Twenty years, and the man had clutched tightly to his hatred, let it grow like an unchecked contagion, nurtured it until it had sprouted a feasible reprisal. Nottingham knew deGisborne had managed to turn a sizable handful of the barons against him.
Odd that this sheriffdom meant so much to him now, and yet, without it, without Nottingham, who was he? A war-weary soldier, struggling through one inglorious skirmish after another, living beneath the muck of the earth and the blood of his slain men? A rogue champion of the lists, spending his youth to win horse and armor, seeking with each lance thrust to gain the respect that had always eluded him? A stable boy, nameless save the epithets the master flung at him, lonely, dirt-covered, without a mother's love or father's pride, without notion of belonging to time or place or family?
If he was not Sheriff, what was he? Did not his miserable, useless life distill into something more notable when he slipped the chain of office over his head and felt its weight across his shoulders and chest?
Roger deGisborne be damned, he would not relinquish that!
He was the Sheriff of Nottingham. God's blood, he was that, if nothing else. He owed his title to no man, and no man would rob him of it.
An icy gust of wind blew the hair back from his forehead and bathed him with the spatter of wet crystal fragments. Sleet. In an instant, the sound drew him back to the night he had spent with Thea. The steady bombardment of ice against the shutters as they had stormed together in their own tempest. He remembered how firelight danced off the sable furs and sheepskin and the dusky bare flesh of her shoulders; candlelight and the steam of the bath swirling from her fingertips as she caressed his face; her kiss-swollen lips reaching for his; the spirals of her hair, gilded and unloosed, dragging across his body like streaks of flame as she mounted him; the exquisite tension that swelled between them, that drove them together in an inexorable rhythm.
The frozen whip of air across his face lashed at the images in his mind. Oh, God, the cursed irony of the greenwood! To have supplied him with a creature who tormented his mind and his vitals and his very soul. What had Thea done with her innocent visions of justice and peace but erode the baneful will that had kept him loyal to Lackland? What had she done to him with her naïve nonsense to make him believe in the unlikeliest of possibilities? Crave her as he did, she was the most dangerous of all his obstacles.
Slowly Nottingham looked upward. Behind the cover of clouds, the night's stars struggled to break through, a silver spray of wealth in the heavens. Silver enough for any king's ransom, if only he could reach it, net it somehow, and drag it back to earth.
He shuddered and quickly closed his eyes. Thea demanded too much. He was just a man-no god with superlative strength or unwavering goodness. It was easier to reach where he could: the barrels and trunks of silver in the dungeon vaults.
A crime, true, but no more or less a wrong than any he had committed since coming here. It was, as well, the only way to gain back the favor of the man who would be monarch of England.
Lackland was en route; there was no turning back. Inevitably, the prince would arrive, expecting warmth and drink, raucous revelry, and a wench to lie on either side of his royal flesh. Demanding more. Demanding the silver of every estate in the shire, the life's blood of every serf, Richard's one hope for freedom. Demanding the sacrifice of Thea's illusion that he, Nottingham, was anything more than the monster Sherwood had made of him.
Demanding treachery.
~*~
"Look, Mistress Aelredson!"
Thea followed the length of Simeon's arm as the boy pointed through the open shutters. A ripple of wind feathered his hair back from a scrubbed-pink face, and the child laughed with anticipation.
"I've never seen a prince before! Have you, Mistress?"
"Nay, Simeon. Only a king. Once. And then from afar." Thea smiled with the memory of how she and Brand had stood for hours along the road from Edwinstowe, waiting for a glimpse of Richard, of being rewarded only as the sun set, gilding the king's hair like a crown, turning the crimson caparisons of his stallion to violet. How proudly he had ridden, his nobly chiseled chin just slightly aloft with royal dignity. She had held her breath in her throat as he passed, understanding something of the mystery that led the young noblemen of the shire to flock to his Crusader's banner. The king embodied a certain presence, a magnetism that shone as palpably as his armor in the golden light.
Nothing like the man she saw now, as she raised herself on tiptoe and peered out the castle window over Simeon's raven head. Horsemen carrying the Plantagenet banners distinguished him more than stature. Small and squat in his saddle, Lackland all but disappeared in the midst of his entourage.
Prince John appeared to have brought every soldier at his beck and call, and his ranks were swollen further still by the households of Nottinghamshire barons who had sworn him allegiance. Thea saw Baron Monteforte's gray gelding plodding spiritlessly behind the prince and his retainers, the baron swiping at his nose with an ermine sleeve. A full score of armored knights followed; behind them, the banners of another titled lord, his knights, his lady and her waiting women, then another lord, and another, ending with a full contingent of the Sheriff's soldiers guarding the rear. The procession stretched the length of the unpaved road through Nottingham Town and beyond.
Thea found her breath trapped in her throat again, not unlike the time Richard had passed and she could scarce curtsy, her heart was pounding so. Only there was no excitement now, no awe, no glee. This time she could only see the sheer number of soldiers, the watery sun's pale glint off steel swords and lances. There were so many of them, armed, and every one with a traitor's heart.
Reluctantly, she looked back at Lackland and the tall, dark figure of the Sheriff, who rode beside him. The two appeared to be engaged in conversation, and even from this distance, Thea could tell their talk was animated, jovial, full of laughter. Her heart sank.
"Simeon, we should not be here," she whispered, and moved to close the shutters.
"But you promised! My Lord Sheriff promised! He said as long as he was below-"
"Sh-sh, child." She ruffled the boy's fine hair, then laid her hand on his shoulder. "The Sheriff promised you could stay and look only if there was no work to be done. And from the size of the prince's retinue, there'll be horses trampling over one another to be watered and groomed and bedded for the eve. Come. They'll need you in the stables, and I'll not be chided for keeping you from your tasks."
Simeon scowled, his full lower lip thrust out in disappointment, and Thea winced at the edge in her voice. She had not meant to admonish the lad so, certainly not for the exuberance he could contain no better than any seven-year-old getting his
first glimpse of royalty. If only it had not been that royalty, that awful wood-slime of a man who held his dagger at England's purse strings, at his brother's back. At the Sheriff's throat. Prince John hardly deserved the child's unabashed admiration.
"The scoundrel does not even sit a horse properly," Thea muttered under her breath. "All slumped over like the spineless thing he is-"
"Mistress?"
"Never you mind, Simeon. Perhaps if you're lucky you can tend to the prince's steed. Come now. They'll be through the gates any moment."
Simeon hurried out ahead of her, but Thea paused at the window, gazing out a moment before she latched the shutter. The snowy hills were scarred with the muddy ruts of torn earth, as far as the eye could see. She looked past the hills, to the rise of the forest, and frowned, her lip caught between her teeth.
Mildthryth had succeeded in locating Alan, the minstrel, and delivering the message, but in the interval that had passed before Lackland's arrival, no word had come from the wood. Thea had waited, patience fraying into anxiety, jumping at each knock on her door in anticipation of seeing John disguised in his too-short priest's garb.
She missed him, she realized. Try as she might, she could not erase her staunch defense of the Sheriff and their awkward parting the last time they had met in Sherwood. Nor could she invent the words now that would explain her change of heart in terms John would understand. How, after all, could she tell him her decision to intervene in Nottingham's scheme was but a way to demonstrate her love for the man, to prevent him from sealing a fate that would forever link his name with villainy? She could not even explain it to herself.
Now she feared their breach had been too final. Had she damaged their friendship irrevocably? Had John abandoned her? Had Robin? Was she even now anathema to them because she had dared speak on the Sheriff's behalf?
Her fingers trembled on the shutter latch, as her gaze combed the countryside a final time.
By God's holy oath, where were they?
