Outlaw Princess of Sherwood (3 page)

Her boots left a plain trail in the frost. Etty did not care, for being in motion eased her heartache somewhat. She wanted to run, leap, fly to her mother, but she made herself walk slowly, silently, drifting like a deer between the white-fingered rowans and oaks and blackthorn. She would decide when she saw her mother whether to give herself up. Until then, she would be an outlaw a little while longer.

Noiselessly she made her way along the ridge, where the day's first watery sunshine touched the stones, melting the frost so that it soaked her skirt and boots worse than dew. When she judged that the clearing lay below, she began to edge her way down the wet, rocky slope. Sunlight trickled through bare branches onto fern fiddleheads and green spears of wake-robin pushing up through last year's leaves. And coltsfoot. In the poor stony soil between rocks bloomed the first flower of spring. Looking down at the shaggy little plant with its hoof-shaped leaves and yellow sunburst blossoms, Etty remembered that Rowan had strewn coltsfoot on her mother's body.

It had been exactly a year since Rowan's mother had been killed.

All that talk of mothers last night, yet Rowan had not said a word of her own mother, the half
-aelfin
healer put to death by the lord's henchmen.

The thought hushed Etty's crying heart as she ghosted downslope between rifts of stone and holly and hemlock to the rich valley where mighty oaks grew. Morning lay silver and still on the forest. The oaks, their buds just blooming into tassel, hung silent. Etty heard no sound except the sleepy twittering of sparrows, and her own breath, no longer white; the day was warming slightly. As she slipped between giant, mossy tree trunks, her feet made no sound on loam and wet layers of old leaves. She began to hurry her steps, for there, ahead, rising above the hazel thickets she could see the cage.

And there, far closer, standing against the trunk of an oak, a guard.

He stood in full view, facing her. He had to see her. Etty's breath stopped and she froze like a hare, her heart pounding fit to split her chest open. A full stricken moment passed before she realized he was asleep on his feet, at attention with his eyes closed. He would be flogged if he were caught.

Breathing again, taking one slow step at a time, Etty inched behind the nearest tree and pressed against its rough bark until her thudding heart quieted and she could think what to do next.

She knew she should steal away. But she couldn't. Her mother . . .

And guards set by her father, who expected her to do just what she was doing. Not all the guards would be asleep.

She listened. Looked around her. Then gathered her skirt and moved, creeping her way on hands and knees toward the hazels.
Please
, in her mind she prayed to the wise and ancient spirits of hazel as Rowan had taught her,
please shelter me, please let me not be seen.

She wormed her way deep into a copse of hazels, wincing when a branch rustled—but no cry was raised. Lying flat on cold, sodden ground between the roots, Etty breathed hard for a moment before easing her head up to look.

There. Mother.

Queen Elsinor of Auberon. And before her marriage, Lady Elsinor of Celydon. Had Mother ever gone a day of her life till now without a silk petticoat and a velvet gown and slippers of softest kidskin for her feet?

Hunched in the middle of the bare cage, Etty's mother hugged her bare knees with her bare arms, her bare feet huddled together like puppies, blue with cold. The sight squeezed Etty's heart like an iron fist. It was as she had expected: Her father had allowed her mother no blanket for covering against the frosty night.

Looking upon what her father had done, Etty felt herself burn like iron in a forge. With white heat she hated, hated, hated, hated her father, hated him more for her mother's sake than she had ever hated him before. When he had starved her, Ettarde, it had been because she had defied him. But what had Mother ever done but bear his children and bow to his slightest whim?

From her hiding place, Etty could see heads through the bars of the cage. Four guards surrounded it, north and south and east and west. Three of the heads nodded, either sleepy or dozing. And the guard who stood closest to Etty was clearly asleep, leaning on his spear to drowse.

Etty felt all of her muscles bunching like a cat readying itself to spring. She would run to her mother, thrust her mantle into the cage and run away again before the guards could rouse enough to catch her. No, confusion take it all, they
would
catch her, but it didn't matter, if they would let Mother out of the cage and put her in it instead. Confound her father, devil shave his pointed beard, blast everything, he could do to her what he liked. Nothing mattered except helping Mother.

In the cage, Queen Elsinor lifted her head suddenly, her tarnished-silver tresses stirring on her thin back. She looked at the sleeping guard. She scanned the edge of the clearing with shadowed eyes. Then in a voice as clear and trembling as a dewdrop, she began to sing.

In the dawn hush, her voice fluted like the call of a mistle thrush. The guards straightened, turned their heads, peered at her. Etty sank back to the ground and swallowed tears, remembering her mother's silver voice singing her a lullaby when she was little, her mother's slender hands tucking the blankets more firmly around her chin. This melody she remembered well, but never before had her mother sung to her these words.

When Etty looked again, her mother stood like a lonesome spirit in the cage. In the chill dawn, Queen Elsinor sang on:

“Stop it!” roared a voice Etty knew all too well. Out of the largest tent burst her father, his boots unlaced, his tunic awry, his beard pointing in all directions like a thornbush. Etty stared, for she had never before seen him in such disarray.

From the cage Mother sang, “Fly, fly far away—”

“Shut your mouth!” King Solon the Red strode to the cage with menace in his shoulders. Not that he would strike her. But a blow would have been kinder than what he was doing to her.

“My singing displeases you, good my majesty?” inquired Etty's mother with the greatest ladylike courtesy. Because the floor of the cage raised her, she stood taller than he did.

“None of your games,” he told her, as grim as a black-hooded executioner.

“Games? But my lord and master, I remember when you loved to hear my voice lifted in song.”

Etty felt her mouth open in soundless wonder. There had once been love between her mother and her father, then? She had never thought to ask, had always assumed her mother had been married off to her father for the sake of a political alliance, in just such an arranged wedlock as Father had tried to force upon her, Ettarde. After all, Mother had been only a girl of sixteen. But—had Father courted her, then?

Apparently so. And even the empty memory of love seemed to give Mother heart. Facing the angry king of Auberon, Queen Elsinor shivered no longer. She smiled down on him as if she were receiving a garland of roses from his hand.

“Bah!” The sound exploded from Etty's father like a curse. He raised his clenched fist. “No more, I tell you, or I will have them bind your mouth.” He turned his back on her and stormed away, back to his tent.

Queen Elsinor stood as encaged as before. Yet somehow, Etty sensed, her mother had won.

E
tty blew her mother a kiss, then set her jaw and started worming her way out of the hazel bushes and back through the forest to the safety of the rowan grove.

The trumpeter had blown his bugle for morning, and King Solon's encampment seethed like an anthill now with sleepy men-at-arms stumbling out of tents, getting campfires started, tending horses, going out to relieve the sentries. Flat on her belly behind the first big oak she reached, lifting her head above its roots to watch guards take their positions, Etty began to feel safer. She knew where the relief sentries were positioned, and a little bit of brush rustling would not be heard amid the morning hubbub. She rose to her feet.

“I have her!” barked a man's voice.

It struck like a thunderbolt out of the clear sunrise sky. Etty gasped and turned. There by a great elm stood a man-at-arms with his bow drawn and his honed steel arrowhead leveled at her.

“Don't move,” he told her. He lifted his voice. “I have the princess, I say!” Answering shouts sounded from the camp.

In that same thunderbolt moment, before Etty could think beyond fear, there sounded a meaty
thwok
. Etty saw first the man's surprised face, then the feathered shaft jutting from his chest as he folded to the earth.

Her feet moved far more quickly than her thoughts. Yanking her skirt above her knees, she ran like a deer up the rocky slope toward the ridge.

Where had that arrow come from? She had never even seen it fly.

It had been a clothyard shaft fletched with gray goose feathers. It must have been shot by one of Robin Hood's men. Yet she saw no one.

From the valley behind her sounded shouts. “He's dead!”

“He said he had her and now—”

“She killed him!”

“Not
her
, lardhead! Look at the length of that shaft!”

“Outlaws!”

“This forest is crawling with—”

And then came her father's roar. “Fan out, cowards! We know she's close at hand! Find her!”

Sprinting as fast as she had ever run in her life, almost noiseless in her soft stagskin boots, Etty plunged over the ridge. Then her mind began to take charge, and she veered away from the rowan grove. Let them chase her all they wanted; she would not lead them back to the rowan grove and the others.

Her breath rasped in her throat, burned in her lungs. Her heart pounded. Her pulse roared in her ears. Panic roared in her mind, a lion, a crying baby, panic too much like the fear she had felt that other time she had run from her father. Rowan and Lionel had rescued her then. But she was going to have to fend for herself now.

The
crack!
of a breaking branch jolted Etty like a blow, sent her leaping forward.
Snap, crash
, close behind her men blundered through brush. Deep voices cursed.

Too close. In a moment they would spot her and be after her like hounds. And panting, with her ribs aching, Etty realized she could not run much farther. Wildly she scanned the trees, but they could not help her. Not enough leaves yet to conceal her if she climbed. If her father's men-at-arms had the sense to look up, they would see her. But she had to find somewhere to hide!

Like a hunted fox, she must go to ground. Too late she realized she should have headed for the crags after all, for there were many hiding places among the rocks. Here in the belly of Sherwood Forest there were only trees—

And fallen trees. Deadfalls everywhere.

There was not much time. Slowing to a lope, Etty looked around her, silently begging the forest,
Lady mother of us all, please, help me . . .
And there, at a small distance she spotted a likely deadfall screened by bracken. It had once been a mighty oak, its girth more than great enough to hide a skinny girl. Etty darted to the rotting oak, in pieces now, and crouched by the largest section of trunk to heave one side of it off the ground. Yes. Yes, Lady be praised, rot had hollowed it to a half shell. Straining to hold the heavy thing up a moment longer, Etty flopped on her side and squirmed underneath it. The log gave her just barely enough time to lie in its hollow before it fell back where it had been, covering her. Only then she thought to pray,
Sweet woods Lady, please, for the love of mercy, no snakes
.

It was so dark under there that a viper could have coiled by her nose and she wouldn't have known. The rotting wood pressed against her back, flattening her against sodden loam and perhaps worms, grubs, spiders . . . Etty tried to stop thinking about what might be under there with her. She tried to quiet her own breathing. The bracken would rustle if anyone came very near, but she had to be able to hear—

“I swear I heard someone up here!” shouted a man's voice near at hand.

Etty stiffened, breaking into a sudden sweat. Had she left tracks? Did the bracken show where she had run through? Was the skirt of her kirtle sticking out from under the log?

“Bah,” said another man's voice. “She could be anywhere.”

“We'll be feeling King Solon's wrath unless we find her.”

“I don't care. You saw what happened to Brock. I don't fancy an arrow in my gut.”