“But you are Jasper of the Sinister Hand.”
“No more!” It was fey, almost wyrd, the smoothness of this wild man’s face, and there was something wrong, fixed and glittering about the look in his eyes. Fiercely, gaily he brandished his left arm with its stump of wrist. “No more bad hand. I cut it off.”
Rowan felt both her breath and her heart stop for a moment. In that moment she heard Beau and Etty gasp.
“He’s lost his mind,” Beau murmured.
Yes, Rowan knew, it was true. The man was crazed. Jasper of the Sinister Hand ran mad.
“Left hand,” Etty breathed, standing close behind Rowan. “That’s the one he cut off. He is—was—left-handed, that’s all. Dexter means right, sinister means left.”
At the same time Jasper declared, “It must never lift sword or torch again. Never.”
Rowan knew, but did not care, that the man was mad. It mattered only who he was. Her breath and voice returned in a blaze. “You set fire to the cottage thatch!”
“Four of us did. One at each corner.” Again the man looked at her, and this time his face paled, and he staggered, ashen. His heavy sword dropped from his limp hand to the forest loam. He whispered, “You—you are the daughter of Celandine.”
“Yes.” The word far sharper than the fallen sword. To Rowan’s knowledge the man had never seen her before, yet it surprised her not at all that he recognized her. Their meeting felt fated.
“But how does he know her?” Etty cried. “No one in the village—”
Jasper addressed Rowan as if the question had come from her. “Your angry spirit has haunted the grove since the coltsfoot bloomed. Day and night, your vengeful face floating like a shadowed oval moon before my eyes.”
“Lady have mercy.” Etty’s voice had dropped to a whisper.
Lionel murmured, “So that’s what happened to her.”
Ignoring both of them, Rowan gave Jasper of the Sinister Hand a curt nod. Turning her head slightly, to those behind her she said, “Somebody get me my bow.”
Etty answered in a hard voice, “Get it yourself.”
Without fear Rowan turned her back on Jasper to look at Ettarde. The princess met her commanding stare defiantly, without flinching. Rowan looked at Beau, who hunched her shoulders and turned her head away but did not move from the place where she stood.
Lionel remained at guard, towering over the strange wild man, standing between him and the others but laying no hand upon him.
Lips pressed together, Rowan limped past Etty and Beau to Dove—the pony stood browsing on the shoots of young blackthorn. Hanging on to Dove’s mane to support herself, Rowan fumbled one-handed at the fastenings that bound the pack. There were many. The task of untying them took time. Somewhere in the branches overhead a wryneck bird sounded its hissing cry, again and again. Minutes passed, yet no one moved or spoke.
At last Rowan found her bow and arrows. She strung the bow, took a single elf-bolt from the sheaf and limped back toward Jasper of the—Jasper of the woods, now. Woodwouse. Hair white with suffering, coiled with insanity. He stood waiting for her.
Lionel broke the silence, his voice hoarse. “Rowan, no. Don’t.”
“I must. I took a vow—”
“But you can’t just kill a man ...”
“You can’t,” Rowan retorted, for Lionel had refused to hate his murderous father. At the time, she remembered, she had admired his uncanny gentleness. But now she felt nothing but annoyance at his interference. That, and a cold wind blowing in the hollow of her empty heart. And sharp, stubborn anger like a spear point at her back to drive her onward.
The wild man, Jasper, faced her with a wide-eyed, childlike gaze. “You are going to kill me?”
“Mine is the blood right. You killed my mother.”
He blinked, then as if he had not understood, he asked again, “You are going to kill me?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” His eyes glittered, happy. “I am a bad hand. Cut me off.”
“No,” Lionel begged.
“Yes,” said the woodwouse. “I cannot sleep; I hear voices in the moonlight. I cannot eat; I see blood on the grass in the sunshine. I am glad to die, if it is quick. Daughter of Celandine, how will you do it?”
The answer: a single arrow to the heart. But Rowan found that she could not answer. She could not speak. Some invisible, inexorable fist had taken hold of her throat. Scarcely ten paces away from Jasper she stopped, nocked her arrow, leaned into the arc of her bow and pulled the string back to her ear, taking aim at his naked chest.
This was her moment.
This was her vengeance.
This was her right. The blood right.
And they all knew it. No one moved to stop her.
He—the villain—Jasper could have run away. In her pain, Rowan moved slowly. Almost she offered him a chance to run. But he faced her with his mad mouth open in a smile, his eyes wide open and fixed upon her, sparkling like gemstones. “Quick,” he repeated.
No one else spoke. Beau, Etty and Lionel stood mute as stones. Why did they only stare in horror? Why did they not speak? No, Rowan, don’t! they should have been begging. Why would they not help her defy them?
Every muscle and nerve stretched and taut, Rowan trembled with strain. She found her eyes blurring, burning; she wanted to close them and had to force herself to keep them open. Daughter of Celandine, the villain called her? She did not deserve to be so titled, did not deserve to be called Rowan Hood, daughter of Robin, either. She hated herself, her own weakness.
Coward!
Clenching her teeth, Rowan let the arrow fly.
Seventeen
The bolt sprang from the bow.
Singing an arrow’s swift zinging song of death.
But that elf-bolt seemingly trailed a harp string of gold to tear open Rowan’s heart. It was not the arrow’s song, but Lionel’s, that she heard in her mind:“... an archer with a healer’s hand
on which there shines a mystic band,
Rowan Hood of the rowan wood ...”
The instant that bolt flew, while her eyes still met her victim’s, all the goodness that had ever been Rowan Hood rushed back into her. With her whole body, spirit and soul she remembered what it really meant to be the daughter of Celandine, and she would have given her life to have that arrow back in her hand. She remembered what it really meant to be the daughter of Robin Hood, and the horror of what she had done knifed through her with the worst pain she had ever known.
Dropping her bow, she screamed, “No!”
But the arrow struck.
Jasper fell.
“No!” Sobbing aloud, Rowan ran to him and plunged to her knees beside him, weeping so hard she could barely see, could not tell whether he was alive or dead. Blindly her hands felt at his bare, ribby chest, encountering blood, encountering the shaft of her arrow. Pressing there to stop the bleeding, she choked out between sobs, “Is he—is he dead?”
Without waiting for anyone to speak, she knew: No, he was not dead. Not yet. Under her hands she could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, could feel the muffled rhythm of his heartbeat.
She had to save him.
But how? She had no aelfin powers anymore, and not even any of the helps such as an ordinary nurse might use, no healing herbs, no—
Water. It was water she needed most. The magical, healing sweetwater of Celandine’s spring.
There was no time to be wasted crying. Dashing the tears from her eyes with her fists, Rowan leapt to her feet. “Lionel!” she cried to that large personage close at hand. “Bring him, follow me. Hurry!” She ran.
Like a deer she ran into the woodland where she had spent her childhood. She knew every turning, every tussock, every tree, yet all seemed eerie, strange for being so unchanged. And small. Linden, oak, elm, hazel, and then seemingly after no time at all, she burst into the clearing where the cottage had once stood.
Celandine’s glade.
There the grass gre
w velvety thick and green, as it always had. Greensward covered the hummocky ground where the cottage had stood. That, and something more: lilting long-stemmed yellow flowers clustered everywhere, glowing almost as bright as the sunlight, the golden westering light of late day.
But there was no time to look at flowers. Whirling, Rowan saw that, yes, the others had followed her, with Lionel in the lead, the injured man in his arms.
“Does he yet breathe?” Rowan demanded.
“Yes, indeed.” An odd sort of kink choked Lionel’s voice.
“Lay him down gently on the grass. Cover him, keep him warm. And somebody bring me water from the spring.” Rowan pointed the direction toward where the sweetwater flowed at the far end of Celandine’s glade.
“Hurry.” She drew her dagger, snatched up the hem of the long tunic she wore and slashed into it in order to use the cloth for bandaging.
But as she tore the first strip of cloth, she realized: Lionel had not laid the hurt man down on the grass. No one had gone for blankets or water. They were all just standing there.
Rowan glanced up to look at Etty, Lionel and Beau. Three in a row, watching her with an expression on their faces that seemed utterly unfitting.
“What are you smiling at?” Rowan yelled.
Etty said, “We’re glad to have you back.” Tears shone in her eyes—tears of happiness?
“What?” Had they all gone mad? Rowan stamped her foot. “I shot that man. He could die. I need water to wash his wound. Go get—”
“Rowan, take a breath.” The quirk in Lionel’s voice, as if he might either laugh or cry, made her listen to him. “Sir Jasper is all right.” Lionel set the white-haired woodwouse down on the ground as Rowan had ordered, but instead of sprawling there in a faint as Rowan expected, the man sat up, alert and silent, looking at her.
Bewildered, Rowan gawked at the wild man.
“Your touch stopped the bleeding,” Lionel said. “Your bolt had no more than pricked his shoulder. That was the worst shot I’ve ever seen you take.” Lionel’s voice quivered with mirth or emotion. “The arrow fell out on our way here.” Holding it in his hand, he offered it to her—Rowan saw the elf-bolt extended toward her, yet seemed not able to move or comprehend or accept.
“You have already healed yon madman,” Ettarde told her.
And then an unexpected voice spoke. “In body and in mind,” said Jasper, and his was not the voice of a madman at all. “From my heart I thank you, daughter of Celandine.”
His eyes, gazing up at her, no longer glittered, but glowed warm with gratitude.
Vehemently Rowan shook her head. “But I tried to kill you! I don’t deserve—”
“Sacre bleu, Rowan, if we get what we deserve, we all get spanked and put to bed with no supper,” Beau interrupted happily. “That is what Plato—”
“There’s no such thing in Plato!” Etty complained. “Beau, have you ever read Plato?”
“Me? I no read. I make things up. It work just as good.” Not pausing to enjoy the expression on Etty’s face, Beau turned back to Rowan. “Ro,” she asked, all innocence, “tell me, how your legs feel now?”
Rowan gasped, gawked, then screamed and started to cry, but this time her tears were the warm rain of joy.
She felt arms go around her, and she leapt for gladness, jumping and jumping as everyone hugged her. She broke away and flung herself into a cartwheel across the velvety grass thick with yellow blossoms: celandine flowers. Up into the air whirled her legs, then back down to the ground, well and strong again. As strong as they had been before the man trap had broken them.
Eighteen
Well,” Rowan tried to joke, ”as no one has fetched water from the spring, I suppose I had better go get it myself.”
Really, she needed a few moments alone to embrace in her mind the wonder of—of everything. Everything that had happened, and everything that was, glowing in the sunset light, here in her mother’s glade. Where she had left scorched, blackened ground, she now saw lush grass starred with myriad flowers. Where she had piled the ruins of the cottage into a cairn to cover her mother’s body, now there grew more soft mantling green, more sweet flowers: celandine blossoms, Mother’s namesake flower, rayed like daisies but with petals of glossy yellow, shining bright. Their fragrance filled the glade, the air, the golden sky. Never had Rowan seen so many celandine flowers together.
Jasper had said they bloomed there always, even in the winter’s snow.
Perhaps Jasper was still crazed?
Or perhaps ...
Striding away from the others, heading toward the spring with her leathern flask in hand, Rowan considered another possibility, a perchance that swelled her heart with comfort.
“Thank you, Mother,” she whispered to the forest glade. “Thank you for everything.” For sunshine, for celandine flowers, for the wonder of being able to bound along on two sound legs—the same great goodness that had given her the gift of life itself now gave her these things. Rowan lifted her arms to embrace her mother’s presence in the air, and her eyes prickled warm with happiness.
Ahead of her, at the far edge of the glade, she could see the water of Celandine’s spring gleaming in its stone-lined hollow beneath a great tree, an oak almost as massive as the one in Robin Hood’s dingle. In the canted late-day sun rays, the oak cast a sharp shadow, but the water in the spring caught the light and mirrored it back to the sky. Almost as green as one of Celandine’s dresses, that sky, blue overwashed with gold. Almost as green as the grass so soft under Rowan’s feet. She thought she had never seen anything so lovely as that sky, that color, that water.
Kneeling at the roots of the oak, Rowan placed her hand into the sweetwater spring tricking down amid ferns into its pool, letting its cool flow caress her fingers for a moment. “With utmost thanks,” she murmured, “and by your kind leave, spirit.” Then she leaned forward to fill her flask.
The pool tried to warn her.
Mirrored in the water’s surface: an enemy form.
Black.
Lunging.
Just as Rowan glimpsed it, before she could move, before she could even shout to alert the others, a burly hand grasped her by her braided hair and yanked her to her feet. Screaming, Rowan twisted and struggled to her utmost, trying to draw her dagger—but she succeeded only in pulling her enemy a few paces into the open before he wrapped a hard grip around her from behind, lifting her nearly off her feet and pinning both of her arms to her sides. With his other hand he held before her eyes a deer-skinning knife. Ro froze, her gaze fixed on that hand gloved in black leather, that foot-long razor-sharp blade.
“You others,” the man roared across the clearing, “not a move out of you, or I’ll slit her throat here and now.”
With an effort, Rowan shifted her gaze to her friends. Standing amid a mess of gear they had been unloading from Dove, taken as badly off guard as she had been, Lionel and Beau and Ettarde stood helpless. Among them, weak and shaking and white-faced, with a blanket wrapped around his thin shoulders now, Jasper lurched to his bare feet and staggered two steps forward. “Guy Longhead,” he cried in a kind of pleading surprise.
“Mad fool, be silent or I will kill you too.” Guy’s tone dripped contempt.
Rowan felt a searing shock of recognition that burned away her fear for the moment. She spoke calmly. “Guy Longhead,” she said, “and Guy of Gisborn, one and the same. I should have known.”
The setting sun cast his long shadow on the grass, as black as the horsehide he wore, pricked ears rising from its head like the horns of a demon.
“Rosemary, bastard daughter of the woods witch,” he mocked her, “and Rowan, bastard daughter of a thieving outlaw, one and the same. I should have known.”
His harsh voice sounded from above and behind her head. She could not see him, but she could imagine the hatred in his eyes behind his black leather visor.
“It took me less than a day to remember where I had seen that face before,” he growled. “You’ll befool
me no more, wench.”
And he set the blade of his knife to her throat.
Rowan clenched her teeth. I will not scream. She could not help wincing, tucking her chin against the knife, but she forced herself to keep her eyes open and be silent. He can kill me but he cannot make me beg or scream.
She drew one last breath—
“Stay your evil hand, Guy of many names,” spoke a low voice that made Rowan lift her head, wide-eyed, made her heart pound with awe that supplanted her terror—for that voice came from everywhere and nowhere, from oak tree and elm woods and greengold sundown sky and myriad celandine flowers that would stay open all night, that would never close, not even for winter’s snow.
“My kinfolk,” she whispered.
And there in the glade they stood as plainly as she had ever seen them, translucent warrior forms advancing upon Guy of Gisborn, fierce men and proud women wearing helms and bearing shields and swords.
Through their silver moonglow bodies Rowan saw Jasper fall to his knees and hide his face. She saw Beau, swaying where she stood, grasp Etty’s hand for support. But Lionel, who had met the aelfe before, stood tall, and Rowan knew he felt a surge of hope in his heart.
She knew because she felt such hope herself—for a moment. As the aelfe drew their swords, spectral silver crescent swords that blazed like cold fire—
But then she felt Guy’s grip upon her tighten, with no tremor of fear in it.
“Scare-spooks,” he growled, “you may have frightened me once, but no longer. What can you do to me with your swords of air? Go away.”
And Rowan remembered how, two years ago, Guy of Gisborn had been the one man in Nottingham not ensorcelled by the beauty of Lionel’s music. Such mysteries meant nothing to him. The aelfe meant nothing to him.
They did not go away. But they stood where they were, at a small distance from Rowan, and they spoke with a somber, gentle voice. “This is what we feared, Rowan, little one. The other three killers paid on their own for what they had done; such is the way of mortal life. Evil recoils upon the evildoer. There was no need for you to pursue them. But this one—he has paid with his soul, and against him we cannot help you.”
Rowan Hood Returns Page 10
