Rowan Hood Returns Read Free

whether Lord Marcus felt affection for her. And how Queen Elsinor could love Etty the way Rowan knew she did, yet could let her ride away. Finally Ro murmured, “You told her good-bye.”
    â€œOf course. I promised you I’d come back, Ro.”
    Etty’s hand crouched as still as a hiding mouse amid coltsfoot in bloom near Rowan’s face. On one finger lustered a serpentine strand of silver, a ring. One strand of the band. Others were worn by Rook, Lionel and Beau. The two remaining strands remained on Rowan’s hand. Without looking, without moving, she could feel their presence on her ring finger. The gimmal ring, the six strands that formed one, had belonged to Rowan’s mother before she died. Was killed, rather. Now the strands of Celandine’s ring had become the emblem of a band. An outlaw band.
    Yes, Rowan had expected that Ettarde would return sometime—but alone? Unescorted, in danger and in haste? Etty had ridden hard; Rowan had seen the sweat foaming and crusting on Dove’s neck. Chest pressed to cold stones, Ro felt as if the air around her had also turned to stone. Her heart lay clay cold, and not with fear of Marcus’s men, who were riding away.
    â€œThere’s something else,” she said to Etty without moving her head. “I’ve been feeling it all day.”
    Etty lay silent until the last rider had trotted past and the sound of hoofbeats and jingling harnesses had faded.
    Rowan was a friend to silence, but this time she could not stand it. “Etty?”
    â€œWait till we can move.”
    When the backs of the riders had grown small with distance, disappearing around a bend in the road toward Nottingham, Rowan turned her head and said again, “Etty?”
    But Ettarde didn’t answer yet, just stood up. Even though she wore the heavy boots of a youth, Etty got to her feet gracefully, as befit a princess. Reaching down, she helped Rowan stand. But as Rowan faced her, Etty turned away, beckoning, walking toward the forest.
    â€œDove’s too white,” confided Ettarde, for all the world like a princess making court conversation. “Even in the bushes she shines like a full moon rising. There was no time to hide her, but we can track her and find her, I think, if Tykell hasn’t chased her clear to—”
    â€œEtty,” Rowan interrupted.
    Beneath the shelter of the first towering oak tree, Etty turned to face her.
    Rowan whispered, “What is it that brought you back here, wearing a sword at your side?”
    Ettarde took a deep breath, met Rowan’s gaze with somewhat less than her usual composure, and answered. “I have learned the names of those who murdered your mother.”

Three
    T he rowan trees had whispered truth that morning. Now, at nightfall, sitting in her accustomed place beside the spring, Rowan heard the rowan grove all around her rustling in the breeze, but she could no longer hear how the trees sighed Good-bye, good-bye. Resting her back against the concealing boulders, she heard the trickle of sweetwater in the stone bowl of the spring, but she could no longer hear its gentle grief as it bade her farewell. This morning she had sensed how the very stones, bones of Sherwood Forest, silently lamented of loss: Farewell, Rowan, fare well. But tonight she sensed nothing. Stones were only stone.
    She gazed into the evening campfire but saw nothing except flames. The others around the campfire, eagerly talking with Etty as they ate their dinner of bread and venison, could not possibly know, but Rowan knew: Her body sat in the rowan hollow, but in spirit she had already departed. No longer at one with her rowan grove and its sweetwater spring, in a sense she was already gone.
    I will come back, she had once whispered to another such spring far to the north: Celandine’s spring. I will come back someday, and I will find out the names of those who set their torches to the thatch, and they will pay.