Wild Boy Read Free

them?”
    Rook only growled, his eyes narrowing to slits.
    Rowan answered for him. “Tell us what?”
    “Why, you were all invited for dinner, lass, to give the Nottingham lad a Sherwood Forest welcome.” Robin’s eyes glinted with fun as he turned toward Lionel. “We traded the horse for a goatskin full of milk and a whole wheel of yellow cheese—”
    “Cheese?” Lionel yelped, lurching to his enormous feet.
    “—and a dozen loaves of white wheat bread.”
    “And
bread
?”
    “But it doesn’t matter,” Robin went on, “because the imp has given us the slip.” Robin said this with a certain admiration. “First he refused to tell us his name, then he cursed my ancestry and threatened that his father would hang us by our heels from our own oak tree, and then while we passed the mead around, somehow he befooled us all.”
    “
Mon foi
, he got away? From
you
?” Beau’s dark eyes sparkled with mockery to remind Robin that she herself had once gotten away from him and his merry men.
    But Robin seemed not to mind. “He got away clean as a whistle.”
    “You hadn’t tied him up?” Rowan asked, soberly teasing.
    “Why, no, lass, he’s just a bit of a boy.”
    Bit of a boy? Rook felt emotions like blackthorn bristle in his chest. He felt himself starting to tremble with rage. But no one seemed to notice.
    Serious now, Rowan thought aloud. “He’ll bring Nottingham down on you like a hornet’s nest.”
    “If he can find his way home! But I’m more afraid he’ll come to harm.” Robin’s hands flew up like startled doves. “He’s afoot, he has no idea where he is, and how will he fend for himself in the woods? He’s likely to starve—”
    “Let him starve!” Rook burst out, fists clenched like his heart.
    Every head turned; every face stared at him. “Goodness gracious,” Lionel said.
    Robin asked Rook, “Lad, what has the Sheriff’s son ever done to—”
    “He’s devil get!” Rook matched Robin Hood stare for stare.
    But he felt Rowan’s gaze on him. She said slowly, “Rook, I’ve often known you to speak good sense, and I’ve never known you to waste breath in anger.”
    He turned his head to face her, but said nothing. His reasons for hatred were his own.
    With a low, worried note in his voice, Robin asked, “Rowan, lass, what if the lad comes here? I was hoping he might see the light of your fire….”
    “He’ll come to no harm here.”
    She spoke firmly, as was her right. She was the healer, and her spirit inhabited this rowan hollow; nothing evil could happen here. Still, she looked to Rook for his promise.
    Rook nodded to her. He, too, wore one strand of Rowan’s silver ring on a leather thong slung around his neck, so that the circlet rested over his heart. Until he gave it back, he was a member of Rowan’s band.
    But it was not for her to say whether the Sheriff’s son would come to harm on the tors where Rook denned like a fox in a cave. Rook met Rowan’s gaze for only a moment more before he turned and strode away, his bare, hard feet carrying him surely into the night on his own.

Three

    A t daybreak, Rook sat cross-legged on a crag near the top of a steep, rocky tor. He had not slept much, but then, wild things seldom did. From his rocky vantage, he watched Sherwood Forest awakening like a living being, breathing its morning mist, steam rising white between the deeply green oaks as they stretched their limbs toward the sun. But no sunshine would caress them today. The sky brooded leaden gray and low, heavy with rain.
    Rook noticed that Rowan and Beau and Lionel were up already, even before the thrushes and wood larks. He could not see them through the lush leaves of early summer, but he saw hints, movements. And he saw other such intimations throughout Sherwood Forest, shadows flitting beneath the trees, thickets stirring even though no breeze blew. Those shadows and stirrings were Robin Hood’s outlaws on the hunt. Evidently the Sheriff’s son had not yet been