Lady Thief: A Scarlet Novel (3 page)

My hand ran quick to it, covering up where I thought I had done. “It’s not—” I started, but Thoresby shook his head.

“You don’t owe me any kind of explanation.” He looked to Rob. “We all want to see these people safe and protected, Robin. And evidently, we all fail in our own ways.” He sighed again, tucking his hands round back behind him. “Use the barn as long as you like.”

Thoresby left, and the children laughed at something John said.

Rob turned and slammed his foot against the nearest stall door. It wrenched with an awful noise, and the whole thing shattered, throwing chunks to the ground and leaving rough pieces hanging on the hinge. Thank God there weren’t no horse in there, or Rob would have been kicked something awful.

The children stopped laughing.

“Go on home,” Much said to them. “We’ll be back again, when you see the ribbon at the well. Be careful.”

John started herding them out, and I crossed my arms. Rob snapped another bit of wood, color moving ’cross his face, wild and harsh. He bent down to grab another piece, and I cursed at him, rushing forward.

I hit the wood from his hands and pushed him, pressing him up against the wall, my hands on his shoulders. It weren’t a fierce grip, not like John might, but it were enough to stop him. “What are you doing?” I snapped.

He pushed up, using my grip against me and moving me back with his shoulders in my hands, powerful and strong but gentle. My back nudged the other wall and he pressed closer, leaning against me. His breath were rough and hot and puffed over my cheek, my ear, my neck.

My hands curled slow around him, drawing him close to me, tight against me. “What are you doing, Rob?” I whispered.

He tucked his face into my shoulder and drew long, shuddering breaths. “We’re not going to make it through this, Scar. Not another sheriff. Not another nightmare.” His voice dropped, and if it weren’t for the way the words slipped along my skin, I would have doubted he spoke them. “I’m not going to make it through this again.”

I sighed against him, trying to think of the right thing to say. “Someone tried to hurt Missy,” I told him soft. He went tense, but I twisted my fingers through his hair to keep him still and silent. “She fought him off. She saved herself.” He looked at me, a tendril of hope like a deep current in his eyes.
“
We
will make it through this, because you aren’t alone. I’m with you, the lads are with you, and now the town is with you. If Missy Morgan can fight a man, we will make it through this.”

“What happened to Missy?” John asked, scowling into the horse stall where Rob and I were twined up against each other like ivy run wild.

“Nothing, and that’s the point,” I told him, pulling from Rob gentle.

Rob caught my hand and held it, tipping it up and pressing a kiss into the palm. He ran his thumb over the big vein there on my wrist, and it rippled through me like a shock.

“I’m going to go to the castle,” I told them. “Thoresby said the prince is coming.”

“I’ll go with you,” John said.

“No, I’ll be well enough. Place is bare guarded now.”

“Save for the knights,” Much said.

I shrugged. “They’re lazy.”

John stared hard at me, even as Rob nodded. “You’ll be all right. Go on so you’re back before nightfall.”

I broke John’s gaze at that.

“Bring us news of the men,” Much said.

Nodding, I said, “You lot headed back to the monastery?”

“You go. Much, will you help me tidy up a bit first?” Rob asked.

Much went to it, and I went for the door.

“You’re not coming back before nightfall, are you?”

Lifting a shoulder, I saw John behind me. “I’ll be back, John.”

He met my eyes, dark and heavy. “Don’t hurry.”

I nodded, swallowing though it hurt my swollen throat. I went out the door and off for the castle, stealing myself some precious time to be alone and think.

Even if the forest had turned, cold and dark were two things that still had love for me, and by the time I made my purposeful slow way to Nottingham Castle, both had fallen around me like a cloak.

The snow made climbing the castle wall a bit harder; sometimes the rocks were slick where I couldn’t tell, and my hands slipped and tore from the rocks, red and raw and sore. I didn’t mind it much—it seemed the one thing that were still simple, that if I went slow and steady I’d still get what I were after. Like much of the winter in Nottinghamshire, it had tricks up its sleeve, but it weren’t beyond my reach. On the wall, in the wind, high above the earth, I still knew myself and what I were meant for.

Cresting the wall, I felt the cold wind rush over me like a victory song. I sat there for a moment, surveying the three
baileys at once. Three stacked, fortified courtyards; each one led to a better-guarded, higher part of the castle, surrounded by nothing but the sheer rock wall meant to keep armies out. The upper bailey were dark and quiet cold; it hadn’t been much used these long months. After the day when life flipped on its ears, when the lads and I set explosions to crumble the Great Hall and the sheriff died and I earned myself a shiny reminder of my bond with Gisbourne, the castle had been empty. More than half of the middle bailey had been impassable from the wall what Much and John brought down, and the bailiff, the only person left to run the castle, moved his quarters to the lowermost bailey.

Then the knights had come. More than a month past, the knights had trotted up from London on the orders of the prince, to rebuild the castle under the charge of the bailiff, a man who didn’t much want to hurt anyone. The knights took men from the towns to do the work, and food and drink besides to feed themselves; they were allowed to do whatever they pleased until the wall were finished and a new sheriff were appointed.

And so they occupied the low bailey, filling one set of barracks with their ranks and the other barracks with the men of the county. Including most of the men of Edwinstowe and Worksop.

I went to the food store on the lower bailey. I’d found it some months before, and despite the heavy lock on the front of it, I could sneak in through the high windows that weren’t never
guarded. Jumping and catching the sill, I hauled myself up and dropped inside.

It were a lick warmer than outside; the kitchens were near, and the heat from the fires kept the place a touch more livable. Wooden shelves stacked high to the ceiling were sagging with the weight of the fat of the land—grains of every sort, drying meat hung in great lines, stores of wine and oil and ale along with butter and eggs. They kept the milk in the kitchens day by day, but I sometimes managed to nick some of that as well.

Stealing through, I collected some flour, oats, dried meat, and meal, padding my shirt and thin coat with them.

The front door to the food cellar were locked, but there were a little back stair that connected up to the kitchens. I took it, twisting to the side to make it up the narrow steps. I slowed down, my steps turning careful near the door. There were a light shining on beneath the bottom edge of the door, and I heard voices, seeping through with the warm heat from the other side.

Tripping the latch, I eased the door open slow. In the crack I could see two cooks, bent over a flour-strewn table, pounding dough.

“Soon enough we will,” one said,
pound-pound-pound
. She were tall and red cheeked and thin, a proper opposite to the one across from her, round and short with small eyes that never left her task.

The other laughed. “Not never soon enough!” she said. She tossed a lump of dough onto a pile.

“With any luck the prince’ll bring his own cooks with him, and we won’t be much use.”

“Hush with that talk,” the second said. “I need this coin.”

“If the new sheriff is anything like the last, I won’t need the coin
that
bad,” the first said.
Pound-pound-pound. Pound-pound-pound
.

“There ain’t no new sheriff yet, they said. Said the prince is coming to pick one.”

“Well, don’t that sound like a merry picnic,” the first said, and they both had a laugh. Then she pointed farther than I could see. “Over there,” she said.

The second cook went over to whatever she were pointing at, and as the first raised her fist to
pound-pound-pound
, I pushed open the door and ran past them, nothing but a shadow in the corner of her eye.

The kitchens were connected to the soldier’s hall with a narrow walk, but I didn’t want to go in there. There were a big fire in there, and knights were almost always lumped around it, talking and drinking and trying to charm extra food from the cooks.

Going back out into the cold were welcome and oversharp both. The night were clear and worth more than a single shiver.

I went round the soldier’s hall to the first set of barracks, finding a window and sidling close. Propping my foot on a stone in the wall I jumped, grabbing the bars and hauling up to peer in.

The bit of light that were streaming in from the moon
behind me were eaten up by the fire in the room, red and glowing and catching on shining armor and velvet cloaks.

I let the bars go. Wrong barracks.

Going over to the next one, I did it again and looked inside. No fire and nothing much shining.

My arms burned but I held tight, scuffling my feet up the wall till I were all tucked in the window.

“Scar?” I heard.

I twisted a little so I weren’t between the moon and the men, and the light came through the window. “Godfrey?” I asked.

He nodded, standing on his cot to come closer to me.

“How you lot faring?” I asked soft.

“Not well,” he said. “Tired and hungry. A few men are sick.”

“What sort of sick?” I asked. I pulled out the little packages, the dried meat and oats. They couldn’t do much with the flour and meal; I’d save that for the town. I slipped it through the bars.

“Coughing mostly. Martin Dyer’s been casting up his accounts for days.”

Men were drifting toward the window, taking the food as others opened it and parceled it out. “What news?” called one man. “What of our families?”

“Everyone’s well,” I assured them. “We’ve been taking care of them. Food’s a mite scarce but ain’t no one starving, no one’s hurt. How close are you to finishing the work?”

Godfrey sighed. “Close. They’ve been working us damn hard lately. I think they want it done soon. You know I don’t think I’d have been so happy to see half the wall fall if I knew we’d have to rebuild the lot of it through the winter.”

I looked up at the full, laughing moon, mocking me from its far safe perch. “I wouldn’t never have asked it, if I knew,” I agreed. “And these damn knights are eating the shire out of house and home and never pay a farthing for it.”

“Just keep our girls safe, young Scarlet,” Hugh Morgan called to me. “It isn’t hardly wise to have knights roaming around who think they own everything without men at home.”

“I promise,” I said. I did as best I could. I didn’t want to tell him that some of
his
daughters were the sort that fancied marrying a knight and didn’t take my advice as much as I’d choose.

With most of the men taking their bit of food, they drifted away from the windows, and Godfrey leaned up closer. “How’s Rob?” he asked.

Godfrey Mason had been with us in the caves when the nightmares had started. They weren’t as bad then; the forest and fresh air had calmed him, I thought. But it weren’t so in the closeness of the monastery.

“He’s fine,” I said, but the words caught in my mouth like it were mud.

“Any word from Gisbourne?”

We hadn’t heard from Gisbourne in months. He’d left an animal for me in the forest, a fox staked out on a tree with a knife through its heart. Then he went to London, far as I knew. “No,” I said.

“There’s been talk around here,” he said. “The maids said Gisbourne’s things have been sent up to the castle.”

I looked at him. “What?”

“And the prince is coming. Everyone’s talking of it.”

“I heard. Didn’t know that Gisbourne were coming back.” I couldn’t stop a shiver from running over me like a wave.

His hands slipped from the bars like a creature going back to sea. “I’m glad I could do something, at least.”

“Thank you,” I told him.

I twisted on the window ledge and jumped down, holding the flour tight to my belly before setting off to the upper bailey. The middle bailey had been so long broken that no one much had been up here, and it were quiet and safe, the way I ain’t never known this place to be. The Great Hall were full fixed, the caved-in roof patched over. The residences stood dark and empty, and I went in them slow like phantoms might guard the place.

The sheriff’s room, the grandest in the place, were empty, but it were clear the maids had been through here, scrubbing floors and laying fresh rushes, putting up the heavy winter bedclothes and tapestries. Logs were piled beside cold fireplaces, and the whole place were clean and fresh.

Gisbourne’s room looked just as it had, like time had frozen with the winter, only there were two large trunks now at the foot of the bed with a fresh stuffed mattress and newly tight bed ropes.

The thief in me wanted to go through his things, look at his treasures like he weren’t someone I were so afraid of, but I
couldn’t. I sat cross-legged on the top of the trunk, as if sitting there and keeping his coffers closed could keep him from coming back.

We were supposed to have time. We’d paid dear, in blood and promises that took my soul with them. We’d tumbled the wall, we’d watched the sheriff die—it was all supposed to have meant something.

But it weren’t better. It well may have been worse.

I twisted the gold band on my finger, hating it anew. My time had run out, and my husband were returning to Nottinghamshire.

I went to Tuck’s, slipping in the back door, hoping for the noise and heat and familiar smell of the lot of the men. But it weren’t so; Tuck were alone, wiping down the bar.

“It’s late, Scar,” he said, offering me up a smile.