Lady of Sherwood

by Molly Bilinski

  She was no stranger to sleepless nights. She’d had a slew of them when Robert had passed, and she’d been having them more frequently as the date of Rhiannon’s wedding drew closer. Her conscious mind knew her decisions to be sound, but her deeper thoughts evidently still had doubts.

  A tentative knock came from the corridor.

  “Enter,” she called, pulling her robe more tightly around her.

  Charlotte opened the door only wide enough for her to slip through. “Begging your pardon, my lady, but Ro—Rhiannon is missing.”

  “And what of her servant?” she asked.

  “Jemma is missing as well. Ro—Rhiannon’s bow is gone, too.” Charlotte wrung her hands together, clearly hoping to be dismissed.

  “I wish to know the moment she returns.” Sabine turned from Charlotte. “Understood?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  Rhiannon, Jemma, and the bow were missing. Gone, most likely, to the damn field she and Robert had frequented during Rhiannon’s younger years.

  You’ve fond memories of that field, too, the little voice in the back of her mind whispered. Nights under the stars, his hand upon yours.

  She breathed deep and could almost smell the wild flowers Robert had woven in her long hair as they sat pressed side to side in the grass. He’d loved her dearly, right up until he’d passed into God’s hands. She had no doubt he still loved her, even from heaven.

  There was no doubt her own heart still loved him as fiercely now as it had then.

  Shouts and screams echoed from the corridors. She turned sharply on her bare heel. Footsteps drew closer, and the door flew inward, smacking loudly off the stone wall.

  “Everyone is to gather in the great hall,” the first of two guards said harshly. He took hold of her arm and tugged her into the hallway, despite her struggles and a snarled, “Unhand me this instant!”

  The manor was in chaos.

  Servants cried, dragged by soldiers. Tapestries had ripped, and paintings were broken. Sabine was frog-marched down the stairs and into the great hall. The household staff immediately quieted upon her arrival, and they looked at her with hopeful eyes.

  She tugged herself free and said, with all the imperiousness she could bring to bear, “What is the meaning of this?”

  “The Lady of Lockesly at last.”

  With a shudder, she whirled until she found a smug Guy of Gisborne. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I’ve lost my patience, instead. I’ve come for Rhiannon. There’s no need to delay the wedding any longer. Why give her another chance to defile herself?”

  Sabine’s blood ran cold. “How do you know of that?”

  “I have eyes and ears everywhere, Sabine. Do you not think I wouldn’t keep a watch on my future bride?” He leaned in. “Did you not think I wouldn’t watch what is rightfully mine?”

  “You killed the boy,” she murmured.

  Guy smiled. “He touched what wasn’t his. You promised me your daughter, Sabine.”

  “In marriage. Not by armed intrusion in the night like some common vagabond bastard. Not like this,” she added, teeth bared.

  “You said she would be mine. Exclusively. I’ll not wait for her to whore herself out again. Where is she?”

  Silence descended upon the hall.

  “Where is she?” Guy yelled.

  Several of the servants flinched. Sabine stood tall. “She is not here.”

  “I know that. We’ve searched the grounds. You, out of everyone, would know. Where is she?”

  To the field, to mourn her broken heart. “I’ve not a clue.”

  “Liar!” He slapped her across the face.

  She licked blood from her lip and calmly said, “Go to hell.”

  Guy wiped his knuckles against his breeches. “Tell me where she is, Sabine. Tell me where she is, and I’ll make it quick.”

  “I would rather spread my legs for the devil himself.”

  He smiled thinly before bellowing, “Search the grounds again!” He strode from the hall, his men falling in line behind him.

  Sabine swallowed thickly as the doors were shut, and the sounds of the bolts being turned from the other side echoed through the stillness. Some of the younger girls began to whimper again.

  “Charlotte!”

  The servant approached, lip trembling though she tried to appear unafraid.

  “Keep them calm,” Sabine said as the acrid scent of smoke began to seep into the hall. “Gather them close, and keep them calm.”

  ***

  It would have been funny, as though God had played a joke on them. If it had been star-crossed lovers or long-lost relatives reuniting, she would have laughed. She’d always loved those sorts of near misses and coincidences.

  Except this one. This one was particularly painful. They’d gone after Gisborne the same night he’d gone after her. The inn he and his soldiers had stayed in was both quiet and empty. A sleepy stable boy had told Jemma what she’d needed to know, and they’d raced home to Lockesly to find a scene straight from the deepest of her nightmares.

  The village slept while the manor burned.

  “Kitty! Charlotte!” Jemma burst through the gate at the side hedge. “Ginny!”

  “Mother,” Robin screamed. “Mother!” She nocked an arrow and ran for the yard by the kitchen door.

  A handful of soldiers—and Guy himself—milled about. Robin dropped two before they realized they had company. The girls’ shouts were swallowed by the inferno behind them.

  “Arms! To arms!”

  Robin cleared a path with her arrows, focused solely on Guy. He moved to draw his sword. She put an arrow in his arm, and another in his leg, bringing him to his knees.

  She slung her bow over her shoulder and drew another arrow, gripping the shaft tightly. Her left hand jerked him upright by his hair, and she pressed the arrowhead to his throat with her other.

  “I am not a thing,” she whispered in his ear, intimate as the lovers they would never be. “I am not a prize to be won. A trophy. I am none of those things.”

  “Then what are you? A coward or a whore?” he spat.

  She tightened her grip on his hair. “You took my love from me. My sweet, sweet Marcus. Why shouldn’t I take your life as recompense?” Robin dug the arrowhead further into his neck until the flesh gave way, and the coppery scent of blood was sharp in her nose.

  “Do it, then. Do it and make yourself an outlaw.”

  Robin had thought about it. She’d thought about killing him, watching him bleed out. But he wasn’t supposed to know she did it. She’d wanted to kill him in his sleep, so he’d never wake to another morning.

  Her mind said one thing, and the world presented her with something vastly different.

  Gisborne laughed, low and cruel. “Can’t do it, can you? Coward.”

  She twisted the hand in his hair sharply. “I’m the coward? You sent two trained soldiers to kill an unarmed boy. Where is the honor in that?”

  His response was drowned out by Jemma’s scream. Robin’s head jerked up to see her caught between two of Gisborne’s men, both of them trying to bear her to the ground.

  “Jemma,” Robin yelled, momentarily distracted.

  Gisborne twisted. Robin slashed her right hand across and down, and then dropped the body in the grass. She slung her bow around, nocked, drew, and fired in the space of a breath.

  Jemma had climbed shakily to her feet, stepping over the outstretched legs of the dead men when Robin got to her and wrapped her arms around her.

  “Oh, God. Oh, God, oh God, oh God,” she murmured over and over.

  “Shhh, love. I’m safe. You got to me.” Jemma stroked her hair where it had come loose around her ears. “I’m right here. Right here, Robin. Listen. Breathe and listen.” She pressed Robin’s ear to her chest, and then slowed her own breathing.

  It took long moments for Robin’s shoulders to stop heaving, and her eyes, though overly bright in the firelight, were dry when she stepp
ed back. The heat from the blaze was oppressive, and she turned her back to it, eyeing the edge of the woods.

  “Where are they? Mother? Charlotte? Ginny?” she called, a chill running down her spine. “Mother?”

  “Lady Robin? Miss Jemma?”

  Robin flinched and reflexively drew an arrow, although she didn’t nock it.

  “Ainsley?” Jemma wandered a few feet away to pick up her staff, and then leaned on it.

  A slender girl of about fourteen peeled away from the shadows. “Much. You can call me Much.”

  “The miller’s daughter,” Robin said, sliding the arrow back in her quiver. Much was about as likely to attack as a daisy.

  “Aye.” The girl smiled briefly. She looked over her shoulder and beckoned to the hedge behind her. “Come on out—it’s just Lady Robin and Miss Jemma. The others are gone.”

  The others are dead, she thought, unobtrusively reaching out with her foot to prod the leg of the nearest prone soldier. She needed reassurance. He didn’t move.

  Other girls—some of the youngest ones from the kitchen—came from the brush. Smoke clung to them like a shroud, and tears had run in rivers down soot-stained cheeks. Ginny, the youngest at six, ran to Jemma and attached herself like a limpet to the older girl’s legs.

  “Where is everyone else?” Robin asked, glancing between them and then back at the flaming manor. “Where is—where’s—” Her face heated even as the rest of her body grew chilled, and she stuffed her first in her mouth to muffle her scream.

  “We are the only ones.”

  Robin looked up at Kitty, surprised to find herself on her knees in the damp grass. She curled her shaking fingers into fists, and then rested them on her thighs. “How—what happened?”

  “That man,” the girl went on, absently twisting her skirt in her hands. “The one who’d been courting you… he came for you in the night. When he couldn’t find you, he gathered everyone in the great hall.”

  “Except you lot?” Jemma inquired.

  “He was hurting her.” Kitty’s eyes took on a glossy quality. “He had Maggie by the hair, and he was hurting her. She had Ginny behind her, protecting her. I—I hit him over the head with a candle stand.”

  “We went through the old tunnel,” another voice piped up. Maggie slipped her hand into Kitty’s. “Me and Kitty and Ginny.”

  “And my—my mother?” Robin took a deep, shuddering breath.

  “She kept her secret. We heard ‘im, shouting. He wanted to know where you was.” Ginny, this time. She wandered away from Jemma, and Robin opened her arms for her to nestle into. She’d helped Jemma look after the younger servants on the sly for years. Whether they’d been orphaned at birth or left to the streets, Jemma had brought them each back to the manor, and she’d given them a home and a hope the rest of the world didn’t offer. “She didn’t tell, Robin. She didn’t tell him where you was.”

  “I heard Charlotte say you were gone,” Maggie said quietly. “She’d gone to your mother’s chambers to tell her. Miss Jemma was gone, too, and so was your bow.” She shrugged, a delicate lift of her shoulders. “We all thought you had gone to the field.”

  “And she said nothing?” Robin’s heart beat hard against her ribcage.

  “Lady was very brave,” Ginny murmured.

  “She was,” Robin agreed. “Like you are. You all.” She looked at each of the other girls, who stared back, clearly waiting.

  It hit her then—they were waiting for her. With the only survivors of the manor in front of her, and her mother dead—God rest her soul, God hold them all in His hand—it occurred to her in that moment. She was the Lady of Lockesly.

  “Jemma,” she croaked. She gently dislodged Ginny from her side and stood. “Jemma, I promised you something.”

  Jemma’s eyebrows rose. “You what?”

  “I promised you I would free you when I was made Lady of Lockesly.” She straightened her spine and looped her bow over her shoulder. “I am the Lady of Lockesly, and I—I free you. No longer a servant or a slave.” She rounded on the others. “You, too. The manor—I don’t have one anymore, and—and you’re free of the binds and duties to Lockesly manor.”

  It sounded flat to her own ears, but Jemma beamed bright as the sun. Kitty, on the other hand, blanched.

  “Where will we go?” Maggie asked softly.

  Her shoulders dropped. “I don’t know.” Robin glanced over her shoulder at the still-crackling remains of the manor, not quite sure where she was going to go. “I don’t know.”

  “Come with me.”

  They all swiveled to look at Much, who reeled a bit from the attention. She swallowed, seemed to gather herself, and added, “We have a barn. You can stay there for tonight. Maybe tomorrow night.”

  “Your father won’t object?” Jemma asked, even as Kitty took Ginny by the hand to guide her.

  She shook her head. “He’s somewhere along the road to London. It’s just my brother and me for right now, and he’s, well… He won’t be back until mid-morning.” She glanced at Robin, and then looked away, mildly uncomfortable.

  “Ah,” Robin said after a moment of tense silence. “He’s having a roll around with one of the village girls, then.” It was a bittersweet reminder of the one and only night she’d been able to spend with Marcus. She wilted briefly under their combined stares, and then shrugged.

  “Aren’t you supposed to wait for your husband? On your wedding night?” Maggie asked.

  “Link hands and make a train, so we don’t lose anybody.” Jemma herded them into a line after letting Ginny climb up on her back and loop her skinny arms around her neck. “Hold tight, Ginny-love. Don’t want to lose you.”

  Robin reached back for Maggie’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “Sometimes… sometimes you don’t get to wait for your wedding day. Sometimes it might never come, and you take the happiness when you can.”

  Maggie nodded. She whispered, barely audible over the snaps and crackles of the manor behind them, “You loved him, didn’t you?”

  “With all my beating heart.” Robin’s smile wobbled, and she turned around, prodding Much in the calf with her foot. “Lead on, Much, the Miller’s Daughter.”

  The barn was small, and it smelled strongly of cow. Above the three stalls—only one of which contained said cow—was a half-empty hayloft. It was there, straw carefully moved aside for the two lanterns with gutted candles, that the girls huddled together. Kitty had made a little nest for Ginny, and the girl was sacked out with her head resting in Kitty’s lap.

  Robin leaned her shoulder into Jemma’s as Much passed around a hunk of bread and a lump of cheese for them all to share.

  “Should I wake her? See if she wants to eat?” Kitty asked.

  “Let her sleep.” Jemma rubbed at her eyes with her fingers. “She’ll eat when she wakes.”

  “Where are we going to go?” Maggie turned her piece of bread over and over. “We—we can’t stay here. We’ve no family anywhere else.”

  “I’ve an aunt,” Kitty said quietly, not looking up as she absently stroked Ginny’s hair. “In Nottingham. She might take me in. Most likely won’t, but I can try. She didn’t like my mother,” she added, voice no louder than a whisper.

  “Nottingham,” Robin repeated. “It’s bigger than Lockesly. Should be work there.” She looked at each round and earnest face, all of them so young. “You’re smart girls. You’ll do well.”

  Jemma jerked and leaned away from Robin. “And what about you?”

  “You’re coming with us, aren’t you?” Maggie demanded, squeezing her bread tightly enough that it seeped between her fingers.

  “I—I’m an outlaw,” she said. “I went to kill a man in his own bed. While he slept.”

  “He killed Marcus.” Maggie uncurled her fingers when Much tugged at them, and she allowed the other girl to take her crushed bread.

  “That doesn’t make it any less a crime,” Robin protested. “I might not have killed him in his sleep, but I—it happened. He’
s dead.”

  “Is he?”

  She buried her face in her hands for a moment and bent forward, scrubbing her cheeks. When she straightened, she found them all staring at her in the half-light from the candles.

  “I had an arrow at his throat,” she said slowly. “He—he called me a coward. I asked him where his honor was, sending soldiers after an unarmed boy.” She stared into the middle distance, temporarily lost in the heat, flames, and chaos from the manor yard. “And then—then you screamed. Jemma, you screamed, and they had you and—I—I think I slit his throat.” She shook herself, reaching for Jemma’s hand. “I cut him. That much I know for certain. How badly… he wasn’t moving. I dropped him, and he didn’t move.”

  “You did it for Marcus, and you did it to save Jemma,” Kitty said softly, reaching across the circle to briefly rest her hand on Robin’s knee.

  “That still makes it murder. It doesn’t change that. Nothing changes that.”

  “You’re an outlaw, then.” Maggie shrugged. “You’re the Lady of Lockesly. You’re a warrior woman from the old tales. None of those things mean we don’t want you to stay with us.”

  “You came back to the manor,” Kitty added. “You came back for us. To find Gisborne and protect us. You could have abandoned us.”

  Robin’s expression morphed into something stricken, and her eyes widened. “Why would I have done that? You’re—you’re family. You’ve always been as much family as my mother.” True, Jemma was the sister she’d never been gifted with, but the others had a spot in her heart all the same. One that was rapidly growing by the second.

  “Then come with us.” Maggie’s tone said she wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Be an outlaw, but come with us. Even outlaws need friends.”

  “I’m an outlaw, same as you,” Jemma murmured when Robin looked meaningfully at her. “I went with you to kill him, and I attacked his men.”

  Robin locked eyes with each girl in front of her and she found nothing but tempered steel staring back at her. All of them might have been younger than her and Jemma in physical years, yet they showed a resilience and a courage born from the night’s events.