Rowan Hood Returns Read Free Page B

captives. Chiefly, I went to the dungeons because no one would think to look for me there, and because men behind bars could not attempt to put their hands upon me. Perforce they had to talk with me instead. Later, after I had won some of them over, they instructed me in the use of this.” She tapped the sword lying close beside her.
    â€œOh,” said Lionel, his mouth an O, round.
    â€œAnd I whiled away much time by listening to their conversation among themselves. Most of them had been captured when their lord, Orric of Borea, had tried to invade my uncle’s domain. They were knights being held for ransom, or to keep them from turning their swords against my uncle again, or both. Generally they bragged of feats of combat, and excuses to challenge one another, as if fighting and killing were fun. You know the sort, Lionel.”
    He grimaced, presumably remembering his days as Lord Roderick’s son. “I know all too well.”
    â€œBut sometimes they spoke of their families, their homes in Borea, things that had happened there. And then came a day I heard one of them mention Celandine’s Wood, and I asked whether they knew aught of the woodwife Celandine.”
    Pushing her dinner aside, Etty leaned forward to lessen the distance between her and Rowan, her gray-green eyes consulting Ro across the width of the stone hollow. Rowan saw the question there.
    â€œGo ahead and tell them,” she answered aloud. She had already gathered the gist of the story from Etty during the day, piecemeal, as if gathering up the bones of her mother’s dead body.
    â€œI don’t like to speak of it if it hurts you.”
    â€œBut one of us has to.” Those who wore the strands of Celandine’s ring shared their troubles. What affected one of them affected all. “Better you.”
    So Etty spoke on. “They told me that four of Lord Orric’s knights had ridden to Celandine’s Wood, bearing torches in the daytime. Torches not for light to see by, but torches for fire. To burn down the cottage of the one they hated and feared.”
    â€œWoods witch,” the castle folk had called Rowan’s mother, disliking the power of woodsy magic and healing, power that had threatened their own. All dwellers in the forest—wolves, outlaws, the invisible spirits of trees and water, the ageless aelfe of the hollow hills, wild boars, wild men—all who dwelt in the forest gave uneasy dreams to Orric, Lord of Borea. Including—no, especially—the one whom the peasants called “the woodwife,” practitioner in salves and herbs and spirit lore, the half-aelfin woman who cottaged with her wild brat of a bastard daughter in the wilderness the common folk called “Celandine’s Wood.” Naming the place in the witch’s honor, as if she were of the nobility.
    Etty was saying, “So, pretending a lazy sort of curiosity, I asked Orric’s men who the four knights were who had done this deed. And they named them to me.”
    Ettarde, scholar that she was, had written down the names on a vellum she had rolled and thrust down her tunic, carrying it over her heart. Rowan, who knew nothing of reading or writing, had no need of such a scroll. The first moment Etty had read them to her, those names had branded themselves in her memory:
    Guy Longhead.
    Jasper of the Sinister Hand.
    Hurst Orricson.
    Holt, also Orricson, brother of Hurst.
    Orricson—that meant “Orric’s son.” The lord’s sons.
    â€œOrric’s henchmen whispered the names as if it would be ill luck to speak them aloud,” Ettarde was telling the others. “And even though these were warriors, supposedly braver than peasants, still, they made the sign of the Lady as if they feared a curse. Then they fell silent and would say no more.”
    A similar silence fell on those seated around the campfire. In that silence Rowan could hear nothing of the soft voices that usually spoke