Wild Boy (2 page)

“Get your foul hands off of me!”

The boy should have remained silent. His voice cracked and squeaked. The outlaws laughed anew. Chuckling, Robin joined Little John. “Now, be careful,” he told him, owlish. “Do be careful, Little John, lest yon fierce warrior take offense at your foul hands.”

“Ay, by my poor old body, we can’t have foul hands touching a Nottingham.”

The two of them untangled the boy and lifted him off the horse as he thrashed and windmilled and struggled against them. “I do not yield!” he cried. He wore a short sword but did not think to reach for it, just squirmed and flailed like an eel. “Let me go!” he yelled. “You let me go, or my father will kill you all!”

“Spitfire!” Robin exclaimed, grinning, as they laid the boy on the ground and took the sword away. “What are we going to do with him, merry men?”

Outlaws yelled suggestions, some of them more serious than others.

“Dance a reel on him!”

“Give him a shave with a blunt arrowhead.”

“Spank him and send him back to his papa.”

“Hold him for ransom.”

“Hold him hostage.”

“Give him a Sherwood Forest welcome.”

Then spoke a different voice, a thick panting voice Rook barely recognized as his own, although he felt it bursting like a wild boar out of the sharp, tangled wilderness in his chest. “Kill him.”

Robin Hood swung around, crouching to flee or fight, his face a pale, startled oval. The other outlaws snatched at their bows. For a heartbeat there was silence like a scream.

“Rook, lad,” Robin said almost in a gasp. “You took us unawares. Put a feather in your cap for that.” He stood tall again, and the ruddy color returned to his cheeks. “If you ever wear a cap.”

Rook paid Robin no heed. All his thoughts were for the Sheriff’s son. He felt the skinny, freckle-faced boy staring up at him from the ground, could almost hear him thinking the scornful thoughts of an aristocrat:
He’s filthy, he smells, keep him away from me
. Proud son of Nottingham. “Kill him,” Rook repeated, his voice as dark and clotted as the brambles in his heart.

“What, Rook, do you think we’d kill a child? To eat, perchance?” Robin recovered his grin. “Nay, there’ll be a feast in his honor tonight. Tell Rowan and the others, will you?”

Rook said nothing, only glared at the boy on the ground. The boy stared back at him, his narrow face white and hard. A child? Rook himself stood no taller, no older, no stronger, but he knew himself to be no child. He was an outlaw, and like a wolf he could be killed by anyone who cared to carry his severed head to Nottingham for a reward, and like a wolf he would kill. He would kill this freckled, snotty brat if he got a chance.

T
hat night, fresh ember-baked trout tasted like wood to Rook. Instead of eating, he leaned against the stones that formed a natural wall around the rowan hollow, watching as the others ate. Watching Rowan, who seemed to think always of the others, lay her portion aside to place more wood on the fire. Watching Lionel, the overgrown lummox, gulp his dinner, bones and all. Watching Beau, the newcomer, pick at her food and talk. Beau loved to talk. “
Mon foi
, this is a stout trout,” she declared to no one in particular. “A trout
femme, n’est-ce pas
?”

“Only you,” complained Lionel, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, “would want to know whether your dinner was a girl trout or a boy trout.”

“
Mais quel dommage
, a shame if one cannot tell,
oui
?”

Beau still wore the crimson tunic and yellow leggings of the high king’s page boy. Many had not known she was a girl. Soberly Lionel turned her joke against her. “Sometimes people just can’t tell, Belle.”

Beau straightened, her black eyes flashing. “You no call me Belle!”

“But my dear Belle,” protested Lionel with round-eyed gravity, “we know you’re not really a boy. Just as your fair tresses are not really yellow.” Although Beau’s hair still hung golden to her shoulders, its black roots had grown out almost a hand’s width. “Fair hair once yellow, Belle, O!” Lionel sang as if he were thinking of composing a ballad.

“No Belle, I tell you!”

“But you are a girl, mademoiselle, and
femme
for
Beau
is
Belle
.”

“Bah! Stop it. Sounds like ding-dong.”

“Goodness gracious.” Lionel’s moon face lighted up, his baby blue eyes angelic. “Very well, how is this? You stop talking with that annoying phony Frankish accent, and I’ll stop calling you Belle.”

“I talk how I like. Go milk yourself.”

Sitting quietly in her wilderness hideout with her wolf-dog at her side, Rowan took no part in the bickering, amusement showing only in her
warm eyes. In the firelight’s tawny glow her grave face seemed to float in the night, spiritous, like the
aelfe
, woodland denizens who were her kin. On one finger she wore the two remaining circlets of the many-stranded ring that had belonged to her half-
aelfin
mother. Lionel wore his strand on a silver chain under his tunic. Beau’s strand shone on her hand, greasy from eating fish.

Lionel protested, “But, my dear little Belle—”

“Clodpole, make silent the big mouth or I stuff my fist in it.” Tossing a trout head at him, Beau grinned as if it were a treat to be teased. Lionel had always teased Ettarde too, calling her “dear little lady,” which she had hated. Ettarde would have laid her fish on a dock leaf, dissected it as if it were a logic problem, then wiped her hands daintily with the kerchief she kept tucked in her sleeve. Remembering Ettarde, Rook reminded himself that he did not miss her, just as he was sure she did not miss his dirty face or his black hair tangled worse than a moorland pony’s mane. Even as a runaway, Etty had remained a princess, and Rook detested aristocrats.

But even worse he hated the Sheriff of Nottingham, a commoner who gave himself the airs of an aristocrat.

Rowan glanced at Rook across the rowan hollow and gave him one of her rare smiles. Did she sense his dark thoughts? Perhaps. Rook had been silent tonight, but Rowan knew silence was Rook’s custom. He seldom spoke unless it was necessary, and it was not necessary now. He did not have to smile back at her either. Rowan was wise. Rowan knew that a wild boy did not smile.

Consigning Rook’s father to die, the Sheriff of Nottingham had smiled.

Rook’s hands clenched at the thought. A growl formed deep in his throat. But at that moment Tykell, the wolf-dog, lifted his gray-furred head and growled aloud. Someone was coming.

In one swift motion Rowan stood, arrow-straight in her green kirtle, hearkening. Beau scrambled to ready her new bow and arrows, and even that great slug Lionel alerted, one hand on his quarterstaff. On his feet like Rowan, Rook reached for the dagger he wore at his belt.

Tykell’s growl quieted. He wagged his plumy tail.

Within the next eyeblink, without a sound, not even the scrape of a deerskin boot on stone or the rustle of leather against a rowan leaf, Robin Hood slipped over the boulders and leapt lightly down to stand in the hollow.

“
Sacre bleu
,” said Beau, “it’s a dastardly scoundrel if I’ve ever seen one.”

Robin kissed Rowan on the side of her head, smoothing her brown hair back from her face. “Daughter,” he greeted her. Whatever the business was, Rook knew, Robin could have sent a messenger, but as usual he had come himself for the sake of seeing Rowan. The next moment, his eager blue glance scanned the others. “Scoundrel yourself,” he told Beau with a smile. “No mischief for me here? Hast seen aught of the Sheriff’s son?”

Lionel and Beau and Rowan exclaimed in unison, “The
Sheriff’s son
?”

“Fire-spitting youngling on a horse too big for him.” Robin’s gaze caught on Rook. “Didn’t you tell them?”

Rook only growled, his eyes narrowing to slits.

Rowan answered for him. “Tell us what?”

“Why, you were all invited for dinner, lass, to give the Nottingham lad a Sherwood Forest welcome.” Robin’s eyes glinted with fun as he turned toward Lionel. “We traded the horse for a goatskin full of milk and a whole wheel of yellow cheese—”

“Cheese?” Lionel yelped, lurching to his enormous feet.

“—and a dozen loaves of white wheat bread.”

“And
bread
?”

“But it doesn’t matter,” Robin went on, “because the imp has given us the slip.” Robin said this with a certain admiration. “First he refused to tell us his name, then he cursed my ancestry and threatened that his father would hang us by our heels from our own oak tree, and then while we passed the mead around, somehow he befooled us all.”

“
Mon foi
, he got away? From
you
?” Beau’s dark eyes sparkled with mockery to remind Robin that she herself had once gotten away from him and his merry men.

But Robin seemed not to mind. “He got away clean as a whistle.”

“You hadn’t tied him up?” Rowan asked, soberly teasing.

“Why, no, lass, he’s just a bit of a boy.”

Bit of a boy? Rook felt emotions like blackthorn bristle in his chest. He felt himself starting to tremble with rage. But no one seemed to notice.

Serious now, Rowan thought aloud. “He’ll bring Nottingham down on you like a hornet’s nest.”

“If he can find his way home! But I’m more afraid he’ll come to harm.” Robin’s hands flew up like startled doves. “He’s afoot, he has no idea where he is, and how will he fend for himself in the woods? He’s likely to starve—”

“Let him starve!” Rook burst out, fists clenched like his heart.

Every head turned; every face stared at him. “Goodness gracious,” Lionel said.

Robin asked Rook, “Lad, what has the Sheriff’s son ever done to—”

“He’s devil get!” Rook matched Robin Hood stare for stare.

But he felt Rowan’s gaze on him. She said slowly, “Rook, I’ve often known you to speak good sense, and I’ve never known you to waste breath in anger.”

He turned his head to face her, but said nothing. His reasons for hatred were his own.

With a low, worried note in his voice, Robin asked, “Rowan, lass, what if the lad comes here? I was hoping he might see the light of your fire….”

“He’ll come to no harm here.”

She spoke firmly, as was her right. She was the healer, and her spirit inhabited this rowan hollow; nothing evil could happen here. Still, she looked to Rook for his promise.

Rook nodded to her. He, too, wore one strand of Rowan’s silver ring on a leather thong slung around his neck, so that the circlet rested over his heart. Until he gave it back, he was a member of Rowan’s band.

But it was not for her to say whether the Sheriff’s son would come to harm on the tors where Rook denned like a fox in a cave. Rook met Rowan’s gaze for only a moment more before he turned and strode away, his bare, hard feet carrying him surely into the night on his own.

A
t daybreak, Rook sat cross-legged on a crag near the top of a steep, rocky tor. He had not slept much, but then, wild things seldom did. From his rocky vantage, he watched Sherwood Forest awakening like a living being, breathing its morning mist, steam rising white between the deeply green oaks as they stretched their limbs toward the sun. But no sunshine would caress them today. The sky brooded leaden gray and low, heavy with rain.

Rook noticed that Rowan and Beau and Lionel were up already, even before the thrushes and wood larks. He could not see them through the lush leaves of early summer, but he saw hints, movements. And he saw other such intimations throughout Sherwood Forest, shadows flitting beneath the trees, thickets stirring even though no breeze blew. Those shadows and stirrings were Robin Hood’s outlaws on the hunt. Evidently the Sheriff’s son had not yet been found.

Let him be lost. Let him starve and die
.

As if she heard him thinking, Rowan slipped into view through the feathery foliage of the rowan grove. In her oak-green kirtle, with her dark hair pulled back in a braid, she did not so much walk into sight as appear like a spirit of the forest, soundless in her soft deerskin boots, her bow and arrows riding like wings on her back. She looked up at Rook, and although she was too far away for him to see her warm glance of greeting, he felt it. Then she looked downward at her footing and started climbing the rocky slope toward him.
Too slowly
, Rook thought.
If only she could heal herself
. He could see that Rowan’s legs, broken in a man trap the autumn before, still troubled her. There was no telling whether she would ever be strong again.