Laura Strickland - The Guardians of Sherwood Trilogy (22 page)

Give the man credit, Gareth thought, his wits moved swiftly and well for an untutored peasant. For Linnet’s sake, Gareth would need to refrain from killing him. This might prove a difficult battle, but better—far better—to turn Falcon away here, before he had a chance to throw his life away in Nottingham.

“What are you doing here?” Falcon called, standing full in the morning light. It made a nimbus of his wild, fair head, and Gareth saw how well he balanced on the balls of his feet, a fighter born.

Of course, Gareth thought, a moment too late, His father would have taught him, and none but a fool ever underestimated Scarface.

“You come seeking a fight,” he returned. “I mean to give it to you.”

Falcon shot a swift look around the clearing, no doubt suspecting a trap.

“Nay, it is just you and me,” Gareth told him. “Are you man enough to face me?”

No fool, Falcon must be wondering how Gareth had known to intercept him here. But his anger, well-stoked, was enough to overthrow his caution. He raised his sword and charged Gareth with a howl.

And Gareth, moving forward to meet him, heard a voice in his mind.
My love, my love, my love—do not harm him, I pray.

A difficult proposition, at best, for Scarlet came at him like a wild wind, sword high and whirling. No drilled maneuver, this. It held generations of pure Saxon bloodlust. Gareth set himself and raised his own blade, just in time to meet the first crashing blow.

By the sweet lady of heaven, who had taught the man to fight? If it was indeed his father, he must have been a brute with the sword. The sunlit clearing rang with the sound of blades meeting again and again. Gareth had all he could do to turn Falcon’s blows and no hope, yet, of taking the offense.

Aye, and he had spent countless hours drilling with the sword. But that had been as a squire and, later, the way a knight practices, by rote and by rule. Falcon knew none of that. His eyes glared at Gareth, crazed and wild, and all his rage rode in every strike.

Do not kill him, I pray.
Again he heard Linnet’s voice in his mind, sounding closer this time.

Aye, and he was lucky if he could keep Falcon from killing
him.

“Bastard!” Falcon tossed the epithet at him with another pounding stroke, delivered two-handed. Gareth did not know from whence he had come by his sword, but it was a good one, likely gotten from Scarface. He railed at Gareth with every move. “Curse you and all your kind, thinking you can take what you want! Use what you want! Ruin what you want! She was mine, do you hear me? Mine, mine, mine—”

He loves her, Gareth thought. The knowledge jarred through him like one of Falcon’s blows. He knows she has given herself to me. And he hates me as much as he loves her.

No time for thought, then. Gareth set himself to endure the fierce onslaught until Falcon began to tire, as Gareth knew he must. The man had not trained, as had Gareth, for endurance. He had never fought hand to hand while wearing heavy armor. Half a knight’s training centered on being able to last.

Yet never before had Gareth been forced to battle with a newly-healed arm. True, he had spent days on end, since his recovery, training the lads at Nottingham, and sparring with members of his uncle’s guard, as well. But none of that was sustained, and Gareth’s left arm now began to scream at him. It might do well enough holding a shield or even performing light duty, but he found himself forced to meet Falcon’s two-handed blows with both hands on his hilt, and felt it. He did not know what magic the woman, Wren, had used to heal his bone in such a miraculously short time, but clearly the miracle proved incomplete.

“Cur!” Falcon Scarlet spat at him. “Thinking you can rape the very flower of Sherwood!”

“’Twas no rape.” Gareth gritted his teeth and felt the sweat bead on his brow. “She gave herself full well to me. Had she wanted you, she would have done the same for you.” He lifted his blade swiftly, judging the time had come to take the offensive. At the same moment, he caught movement from the corner of his eye—a party burst into the clearing. His awareness told him Linnet numbered one of them, even though he barely dared to spare her a glance.

My love
. Her voice pulled at him.

And he replied,
Wait.

“Falcon!” someone screamed. Lark, it was. With the shreds of his attention, Gareth saw her run forward, closely followed by the other members of her party.

The movement—and perhaps the cry—distracted Falcon also. He turned his head, and Gareth took advantage, quick to push in upon him. He had to take the man’s sword. Short of killing him, it made the only possible end.

“Wolfsheads, wolfsheads!” Another cry, this one from behind Gareth. A party of mounted soldiers led by the captain of the guard, Monteith, burst into the clearing.

Run
, Gareth tossed at Linnet, his heart twisting in sudden panic.
Go, go, go—

Falcon!
she screamed.

And then madness erupted in the clearing.

Some of the outlaws fled. Gareth raised his sword horizontally and pushed at Falcon. “Go,” he said through gritted teeth. “Get you from here.”

The fool stood and stared at Gareth, his greenish-blue eyes wide, even as the soldiers surrounded them—too stupid or too courageous to turn tail and run.

All thought suspended then as an arrow whizzed past Gareth’s nose. Lark had also refused to flee. Instead she stood firm and drew her bow for another shot. Her first arrow had split the air between Gareth and Falcon, its aim to end Gareth’s life.

Her second took one of Monteith’s men through the throat. The man fell and his horse reared in distress, adding to the confusion.

Monteith called out, “Stand! In the name of the Sheriff of Nottingham, I do arrest you.”

Another arrow answered him. It missed only because Linnet dragged at her sister’s arm.

Go,
Gareth screamed at her in his mind.

I cannot leave her
, Linnet wept in return,
nor Fal.

And, quite plainly, Falcon Scarlet had lost all chance to fight his way free. The mounted soldiers now surrounded him where he stood, his chest still heaving from their battle.

He turned his head sharply toward the two women, as if he had heard one or both of them call him with her mind. Lark? Or Linnet, whose desperation Gareth could see carved on her face? Did Falcon reply through the bonds that joined them? Gareth could not tell, yet suddenly, to his relief, both women turned and fled.

Two members of Monteith’s troop started off in pursuit. Lark paused long enough to fire an arrow that caught one of them through the heart. Linnet ran on, and Gareth watched until he saw both of them disappear into the safety of the trees.

“Good work, Sir Gareth,” Monteith called to him. “Too bad so many of them escaped.” He leaned down from his mount and pointed his sword at Falcon’s throat. “At least we have this cur to drag back to Nottingham.”

Chapter Thirty-One

“You did this! You betrayed Falcon to your accursed Norman lover, and now all is lost. Fal will surely die. You have condemned the triad and Sherwood, both!”

The bitter words stopped Linnet in midflight and spun her around to face her sister. Lark, as breathless as she, looked transformed by rage, alive with it, and dangerous as a maddened wolf.

They were alone, save for the trees—as alone as they could ever be in Sherwood. Even now, distracted by grief and fear, Linnet felt the presence of the life force that contributed to Sherwood’s magic, an indefinable yet vital thing.

In the face of that, she struggled for speech. “I did not betray him. I never would.”

“Aye, and I did not suppose you would lie down with that Norman serpent, either, he with the blood of our people on his hands. Have you forgotten, Lin? Do you not remember how Ma bargained for justice? Or what the fight has cost us these last many years—Sally’s life, and poor wee Thrush, and countless others?”

“I have not forgotten.” Linnet wetted her lips, gone suddenly dry. “And Fal is as dear to me as any of them—nay, dearer. How could I possibly set a trap for him?”

“Easy, I should say.” Lark stared at her as she might a hated stranger. “Did you not tell me you and your Norman lover can communicate by thought, like Ma and Pa? Aye, you bragged of it! Deny that you warned him Fal was gone looking for him!”

Linnet went hot and cold by turns. How could she deny it? She had sent Gareth just that message—in an effort not to betray Falcon, but to keep him from harm. Then why had the soldiers arrived in the clearing? Her heart clenched and spasmed inside her chest. Surely her trust in Gareth was not misplaced.

Lark took her silence for answer. She hurled her next words at Linnet like weapons. “Ah, so I see what you are, Sister! And I see what your selfishness costs us—all hope for the future. Without Fal we are lost, the triad is lost, all is lost.” Disconcertingly, Lark began to weep, the tears of rage pouring down. She did not bend before her grief but wore it like a fierce battle shield.

“Lark, please try and understand. The triad has always come first with me. Sherwood has always come first. I did not choose to love Gareth, but I do love him.”

“Love?” Lark screeched the word so it echoed through the trees. “You do not love. For love is giving, love is sacrifice. Or have you learned nothing all these years?”

Lark’s anger, a pure, unstoppable barrage, crashed into Linnet like a visceral storm an instant before Lark launched her small, hard body in attack. Linnet went over backward with her sister on top of her, all arms, legs, and pain. Blows rained upon her from Lark’s clenched fists, accompanied by enraged cries. All her life Linnet had known her sister capable of this, but never had Lark’s rage been aimed at her. And never had the tight bond between them been so strained.

She raised her arms in defense, tried to catch Lark’s wrists to restrain her, but Lark had become an unstoppable fury. And far worse than the blows coming at Linnet was the hate.

My child. His child. Lark, please!
The words cried aloud in Linnet’s mind. Miraculously, Lark heard, even though Linnet uttered them not. Abruptly, the blows ceased. She removed her body from Linnet’s as from a source of contagion and scrambled to her feet.

“Say it is not so!” She gasped and stared. Her gaze raked Linnet where she lay. “You carry that bastard’s get? I should kill you now.”

Stung and hurting, Linnet cried, “Kill me, and the triad is destroyed.”

“It is destroyed already! If you think de Vavasour”—she spat the detested name—“will ever set Fal free of Nottingham another time, you are far too foolish to live. You have cost us all! Take your accursed brat and get out of my sight.”

Linnet struggled up, aching in every limb and wounded to the heart by what she saw in her sister’s eyes. With a whimper she turned from the hate, and ran.

She fled from, not to, and chose no direction except away. Her surroundings passed in a green blur fogged by tears. When her breath gave out she paused and gasped, doubled over, and then fled again.

She would not have believed she could become lost in Sherwood, where she had grown and played, yet when she went to ground at last, felled by the root of an ancient beech, she lay as a creature stunned and utterly bemused. No sense of orientation, inner or outer, accompanied her. The voices that so often hummed within her mind or her heart—those of Lark and of Falcon, of Sherwood itself—had ceased, and she had no sense at all of Gareth’s presence.

The silence terrified her. She lay on the moss where she had landed, aching and straining every sense, frightened of being alone for the first time in her life.

It seemed she had been born with the voice of Sherwood in her ears, the rustling of leaves, the undulating song of the breeze, the chuckle of running water, the constant murmur of life. The voices of her parents speaking together, mind to mind, had been always a soft, whispered presence of which she caught the echoes. Lark’s, and later Falcon’s, life force had been available to her if she chose to tap into them.

Now she heard only birds singing their eternal music through the deep, underlying silence, and she thought, I am going to die. I cannot live cut off from all that is. This is the end of me.

Something stirred to the right of her, a real and present sound, but when she turned her head she saw nothing there. Again, a rustling beyond her feet. She sat up, so abruptly her head swam and her stomach heaved, and saw a tuft of grass bend beneath invisible feet.

Who is there?
She spoke with her mind rather than her lips, for she knew this was no living person. Better anything, though, than the aloneness, and stunted senses.

A fox appeared from the trees and looked at her with Lark’s keen, golden eyes. Linnet blinked at it and it blinked back, and awareness nibbled at the edge of her mind.

Deep magic, as her mother might have said. Sudden longing to hear her mother’s voice again convulsed her heart.

“Do not weep, child.” The voice sounded in the air, and not in Linnet’s mind. She blinked in an effort to clear the tears and saw a woman standing before her where the fox had been.

She had the coloring of the fox, coppery red, and the very same eyes, like Linnet’s mother’s, like Lark’s. She was someone Linnet had never before encountered in Sherwood. Nevertheless, Linnet believed she could guess her identity.

She drew a breath and began to scramble up, but the woman held out a slender hand.

“Peace, Daughter. You need not stir yourself.” She smiled, and Linnet gazed at her in wonder. Beautiful she was, her hair half braided and trailing down, her smile as sweet as sunrise. Clad all in green wool and brown leather, she appeared scarcely older than Linnet. But her smile was Lark’s, quick and mischievous, and confirmed her identity in Linnet’s mind.

“Grandmother.” She breathed the word like a prayer. “If you come to me, I must be dying.”

“Your grandfather sent me.” She smiled again and beauty flashed in her face, as if it flared with the mention of the man. “Robin Hood.”

“You are Marian.” Stories of her were legion, how she had abandoned her comfortable existence to live with the outlaw Robin in Sherwood, and lived henceforth for him most truly. How she had crumbled upon his death and abandoned his child new born—Linnet’s mother, Wren—and later died languishing for love of him in a nunnery, a broken woman.