“Willow and the goats need their feet seen to. Also the cow.” Eluned took the rabbits over by the wash basin and hung them head-down from a hook over it, inspecting them.
Rob gave a curt nod, threw a leg over the bench, then set himself to making silent inroads on the cold mutton and cheese Marion set before him.
“Ha,” Marion said, purposefully light into the silence. “What’s this, then?” She tapped at Rob’s shoulder, then reached down and gave a tug at what had caught her eye.
Gamelyn’s quillion knife, stuck in the back of Rob’s belt next to his own dagger.
Rob snatched at her wrist, clamped down.
“Ow!” she yipped and swatted at his pate. He looked down at their hands, seemed only then to realize what he’d done, and swiftly loosed her.
“’M sorry,” he muttered, turning back to wolfing down his meal—not without twitching the knife back secure into his belt.
There was a bruise starting to blossom along Rob’s jaw. Marion started to speak but didn’t have the chance.
“I’ve need of Willow early this afternoon,” Eluned said, her back still to them.
Rob’s gaze slid to his mother’s straight shoulders, held there, then dropped. He shoved his plate away and stood. “I’m no’ so hungry, after all. I’ll go see to ’t now.”
This from the lad who’d already wolfed down three-quarters of his plate. Marion watched him go, bewildered.
“Leave it, pet.” Eluned was gathering up her basket. That wasn’t unusual—this time of year entailed regular gathering expeditions. What was odd was her demeanor.
“Mam….”
“Give your brother breath, Marion.” The way Eluned said it was peculiar and twofold; it could have meant “give him time,” or “put some life back into him,” but Marion wasn’t sure which.
Neither did her mother expound any further. Eluned merely finished tying her straw hat about her head—the sun was bright when it peered through the clouded sky—and departed.
Marion strolled over to the door, watched Eluned disappear into the east-most copse, and leaned against the door. Not too long after, Rob led the little jennet from the barn and tied her to the fence. Marion watched him set to work, noticed that he did merely that, spent none of his usual affectionate attention toward Willow, and a frown began to gather between Marion’s brows.
Usually she could read her little brother like one of the books Gamelyn brought them. Often it took time, and patience, but she would parse a meaning from it in the end.
She walked over to the fence, climbed up. Sat there, silent, as her brother kept working. Willow put her black nose up to Marion, coaxing a pat that she was plainly miffed Rob hadn’t given, and Marion obliged.
Rob’s belt was conspicuously absented of Gamelyn’s long knife—but then, he’d moved his own dagger to his boot top, common enough practice when trimming hoofs. Likely he’d set it aside, out of the way.
Gamelyn must have forgotten it. He had, after all, nearly forgotten his cloak and the simples. Add that to the bruise on Rob’s face and the black mood, and he and Gamelyn had likely had some set-to. Very likely, in fact, since Rob had been ready to pick a fight with Gamelyn just the previous day.
Marion let it go. She had something else on her mind, anyway, now that Eluned had gone. “Rob. Were you with him?”
Rob jerked, swore. A line of blood welled on his hand where the knife had slipped, and Willow started sideways. She hit the end of the rope and promptly threw a pitching fit.
Marion gave a good curse herself and leapt out of the way, off the fence. Rob was holding his wrist and still swearing. Willow was grunting and hauling backward, her substantial haunches gathered under her, sliding and quivering with effort.
“You waint pull my knot loose, you bloody daft mare!” Rob shouted at Willow, and Marion trotted down the fence line, hopped it and headed for Rob.
“Give me—” she ordered, snatching at his cut hand. “Give me that!” With a roll of his eyes—toward her or the still plunging mare, Marion wasn’t sure—Rob obeyed.
He didn’t loose the pressure on his wrist, and a good thing; it was a nasty slice, bleeding gushes but not, thankfully, in spurts. Marion yanked at the rag tying back her hair and used it to wrap his hand, tight.
“Bloody damn, Marion, that hurts!”
About the time she’d finished wrapping Rob’s hand, Willow gave a great, final heave backward, then lurched forward. As soon as the pressure had left her poll, she stopped fighting, still blowing.
“Daft mare,” Rob said, going over and patting her with his uninjured hand. “You’d think you’d learn. And I canna hobble you and do your feet, y’ git.”
“I think you’d best let me stitch that, Rob.”
Rob shrugged. “At least it ent my better hand. I was nigh finished, t’ boot. But you’d best even her up. I’ll hold the silly bitch so she doesn’t have to be tied.”
They ended up having to take off her head collar and put a rope about Willow’s neck—the knot had been twisted too tight on the fence to be easily loosed. A dutiful Rob followed Marion’s instructions, holding his injured hand upright while Marion took the hoof rasp and sanded down the uneven edges on the mare’s feet.
Marion tried again, when they were inside and she was stitching the finger-long gash closed. “Were you with him, then?”
Rob flinched as the needle went in, audibly gritted his teeth, and stared at his other hand, white-knuckled around the braided ball of rags Eluned kept for just such emergencies. His dagger lay between them, with a charm laid upon it to cut the pain.
“Did you see Will?” Marion persisted, when he didn’t answer.
The sloe eyes rose to meet hers, blinked, then closed. Rob gave a huge sigh, shook his head as if to clear it, then murmured, “Aye. I saw him.”
Marion’s hands trembled; she forced them steady and made another pass with the needle as purposeful and calm as if it were fabric, not flesh. “How was he?”
Rob flinched again, let out a curse that could have scorched the table, then growled, “Did you bother to sharpen that thing, lass?”
“Well, lad, if you don’t tell me how Will was, I might have to bang it point-first against the table then finish my stitching,” Marion growled back.
Rob shrugged apology, his expression turning unpleasant. “How do you think he is? Scared. Alone. He’s been… gah, bugger! Been declared outlaw and his father’s rotting in gaol. It was all I could do to convince him not to go after his da and break him from the Nottingham gaol—”
“Oh, he canna!”
“I know. But it took….” Breath hissed out his teeth as Marion took another stitch. “Took every bit of persuasion I had to make him see… that. I told him Da was doing everything he could for him… bloody fuck!” Rob jerked, threw the rag ball across the room, hard, and so quick her eye could scarce follow, he snatched up his knife and jammed it point-first into the table.
Marion started, but managed to keep her hands steady. “One more stitch. Then y’ can be throwing and stabbing things all you want. I might join you.”
“T’ knife charm wasn’t working worth a good toss anyway,” he muttered and fell silent, jaw clenching, as Marion finished up. She tied off the gut thread, bent and sawed the ends off with her teeth, then packed the wound with Eluned’s powders and set to bandaging.
“Not that owt Da could do’ll matter,” Rob snarled, and his profile was hard, set as stone. “He’s a forester, Marion. A free man, a yeoman appointed guardian to the Royal Wode by king’s warrant. Yet because he’s English, not a bloody Frank, his word’s worthless. His oaths mean nowt. He’s worthless, to likes of them.”
His voice was shaking with such emotion it made Marion’s own heart thud, hard, in her ears. “Rob—”
“Will canna even come here, to this house where we love him, where he should be given sanctuary by right—”
“Cernun forbids outlaws in the covenant.” Even as Marion said it, the defense seemed ho
llow. But she had believed it, once. Understood the reasons for it, the contracts given—and taken—by those of the Shire Wode, the rules and cautions enforced to ensure the safety of not only the covenant, but the common people who looked to them. She had no real right to put aside a belief merely because she had a personal disagreement with it.
Rob reached out, yanked his knife free of the tabletop, and flipped it through his fingers, considering it. “So how does it feel, sister-mine, to moon after something you canna have? What they’d all warn you off?”
The wanton cruelty of that sent Marion stumbling to her feet, gaping down at Rob.
“But then, you never warned me off Gamelyn,” he said, and palmed the knife, looking down. His eyes glittered, red-rimmed. “’Twould have been better if y’ had.”
Gamelyn? It threw her sideways against her own perceptions, shook them and made her reconsider her brother’s mood—and the one meaning amongst many.
Gamelyn this morning, in as foul and flummoxed a mood as she’d ever seen him. Marion truly thought he’d simply gotten up earlier than herself, had been somewhat baffled by her mother’s insistence upon taking the cordial to him, and the cape. Had been somewhat flummoxed herself to find Gamelyn instead making to depart, and that after he’d made so much last night of waiting… worrying… until Rob returned.
It clicked into place, a meaning as hard-hitting, no doubt, as Rob’s realization of Marion’s own feelings for Will.
“I canna stay in here,” Rob muttered, shoving away from the table and lurching to his feet. “I think I’ll smother.”
Marion watched him stumble out the door, was following before she could even think.
He hadn’t gone far—just to where the trees began to thicken. He was wandering in the curtained branches of the old willow where they had played as children. They had braided the willow’s branches, hung from his limbs, climbed as far upward as they could… always, always aware that, even in the willow’s embrace, there was only so high they could ascend.
She approached, held her palms up to the willow’s caress, watched her brother jitter and writhe within his own being. Finally she couldn’t stand it any longer. “Rob. Tell me. What happened?”
He shrugged, but it was more a reflex than a response. “Happened. Something’s… happening, aye. Trying to happen. I thought it was me. But I ent sure, anymore. He’s… it’s… turning me inside out. It’s like I’m walking without my skin but then… after… it didna stop. Even sleeping, it’s there. Just… there, waiting. Not quiet. Like a beating heart, or breathing in the dark.”
“It wasn’t just Will you met in the Green last night.” Marion reached out, brushed the curls back from his cheek, let the touch linger in hope of gentling him. “Was it?”
The cheek beneath her fingers was warm, the pulse point below it lurching and jumping. “We’d shared the mead skin, Will and I. I wasn’t sure”—his gaze slid to meet hers, apologetic—“when I’d see him again. I told him… what you’d asked me to. Then I told him he had to stay alive. For his father. For you.”
She sucked her breath in between her teeth.
“Aye, it wasn’t fair. But it made him listen.” He took the hand she had laid against his cheek, pulled her against him, settled back against the willow’s thick trunk. “He’ll wait, now. He’ll go south into the Shire Wode where none’ll find him. Lie low until it’s all passed. And it will, Marion. They’ll forget. Sheriffs change, and they’ll get their worth out of George’s hide.”
Again, she took in a sudden, shocked breath.
“It’s what George wanted.” Rob’s growl buzzed against her shoulder. “It ent likely I’ll ever sire a child I can lay claim to, but I can understand that much. Fathers should protect their sons.”
There was a bitterness, dug deep, that Marion couldn’t understand. She angled her head so that her cheek was up against his. “Did Gamelyn come after you, then?” She tensed. “Did he… did he see Will?”
“I don’t think so. But I wasn’t thinking very straight, what with the mead and… well, everything. He… Gamelyn… he turns me inside out even sober, and the forest was so alive, last night.” He sounded… lost. “I didna know he was there. It was so easy to just… lose myself.”
Trepidation laid an icy trickle down her spine. “Rob—”
“I don’t think he saw owt. The fireflies, maybe, when I spoke to ’em—”
“Spoke to ’em? You knew he was there, but—”
“I’m not as daft as that!” he snapped, pulling back. “I know that Mam and Da both have forbidden us to show him th’ magic, but I didna know anyone was around and….” He shrugged, and when he spoke again, his voice was flat. “I think I can say that, had he seen me draw down the moonlight, he never would’ve let me near him.”
“So you did get near.” Finally, was all she could think, since you’ve been pining after him longer than you even know.
He nodded.
“Did you lie with him?”
“It’s not always that way, lads with lads,” Rob said, gaze sliding away and his cheek darkening. “It’s not always just the mounting.”
“Well, little brother, it’s not always that way, lasses with lads, either.” Marion couldn’t help the smile in her voice. “Was it nice?”
A small groan escaped him. “It was… until it wasn’t.”
She frowned, remembering Gamelyn as he’d left. Furtive, evasive… unhappy.
“I need him, Marion. I need him, like growing things need rain and sun. When we were lying together, I could See tynged untangling before me, like the wool twirling, long and sleek and fine, on Mam’s spindle. Then….”
Marion waited.
“He turned on me, Mari, saying we’d… we’d made some mistake. Like we’d picked the wrong arrow, or made an ill shot. He kept saying how what we had done was wrong… evil… like something so… so lovely had to be all twisted up into a judgment or game called foul.”
The Church made overmuch grief about “sins of the body,” Marion knew; they were too concerned, really, to assign “evil” to anything that they hadn’t thought up themselves. The only “evil” Marion had witnessed so far was the way the Church’s minions would twist every nature—body, spirit, even the earth about them—from blessed into profane.
She looked at her brother’s hunched-in misery, and for long moments she wasn’t sure whose innocence she mourned more: Rob’s, for thinking Gamelyn would come to him in joy instead of fear, or Gamelyn, for thinking there was no more to pleasure than fear.
“He kept talking about being… damned, just for touching me. About how his god saw nowt but evil in such things. A simple blessing of body and heart, and he thinks it’s wrong. Some of it’s because he’s noble-bred and I’m nowt. That’s no hard guess.” Rob gave a shrug as if the notion wasn’t cutting into him as keenly as the hoof-knife had earlier, as if the words weren’t choked with tears he refused to let rise. “But it’s the touching, the loving… I don’t understand. I don’t. He thinks I’m nowt but… damnation for him. Likely I am. It’s sure he’s nowt but misery for me.”
“Surely that’s not true,” she whispered. That ashen-faced, unhappy lad who had escaped—aye, now she knew it for the escape it had truly been—Gamelyn would have sauntered away whistling if what happened had been as unimportant as Rob thought.
“He thinks it is. He said so. And whatever that means?” Rob flung the forelock from his eyes, finally betraying the glimmer and spill down his cheeks. “I don’t think it means what he thinks it does. I think damnation is what the world was like in that moment he had that look in his eyes—when he wanted… needed… but still turned and walked away.”
“He’ll come back. Surely he has to come to his senses, to realize—”
“I don’t think he’ll come back, Marion.”
“Oh, Rob.”
“Mam will be delighted. She’s never trusted him.”
“She never trusted where he came from.” Marion was gentle. “It’s no
t the same thing.”
“But it means the same in the end, doesn’t it?” Rob’s voice had also turned strangely gentle. “Only now it’s on both of us.”
XVI
HE RODE hard those first miles, a heedless and wonderfully mindless gallop with which a game Much did his best to keep pace. Face hot, eyes bright, teeth bared—and the tears kept coming as if daring the wind to dry them—Gamelyn pushed. And pushed. Diamant showed his mettle by leaning into the pace, leaping over obstacles in their path and lunging around others, surging forward as if his rider’s fury and longing fed into him like heat lightning.
When they did slow, winded and a-sweat, the silence pounded in Gamelyn’s ears, punctuated by the steady clop of iron-shod hoofs on the hard road.
Much kept silence the entire way to Blyth, and took Diamant to the stables with his own rouncey as Gamelyn dismounted.
It was in him to run for the chapel, to unburden himself so his father and brothers wouldn’t see the wickedness surely scrawled—a brand, a mark of retribution—upon his face. Further evil, surely, to bring further weakness into the chamber of an already sick man….
Gah!—that was superstitious nonsense, no more sense to it than to Rob’s blasphemous questions. If the medicine in his bags would help his father, he had no business tending to his own needs before that, anyway.
Nevertheless, he was very glad that the only people he saw were ones who would give him no undue attention unless he asked it of them. Like the servants, sliding through the corridors with lowered gazes and purposefully soft gait.
“But you’re not minding if I tongue your knob, are you? On my knees, like a proper villein…”
“Get out of my head,” he gritted.
“…not one of your villeins, Gamelyn Boundys. Not your property, and if I lie with you it’s because I choose….”
“Shut up!” he snarled, then clapped a hand over his mouth as it rang down the hall. He looked up just in time to see one of those villeins—his serfs, his property, his father’s property—duck his head lower and shoo another into an alcove and out of the way of their obviously ill-tempered lord.
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