The Outlaws of Sherwood Read Online Free Page B

pressing her cheek to his; her hair tickled his nose. Much, with a sigh, laid his bow carefully against the boulder that had hidden Robin. Another squirrel chattered somewhere close by, and the stream made small gloop ing noises as it ran, as fish broke the surface to swallow water bugs and bits of leaves.
    Marian said, “I was so afraid we wouldn’t find you—that you’d go straight away, take ship for the Holy Land—be sold as a slave to the Saracens—that we’d—that I’d never see you again.”
    Much said, “We heard they had some trouble planned for you today—but we only heard this morning. ’Twas a friend of my father’s told him. If there had been time we would have tried to stop you coming; but it was too late.”
    Marian, unmoving, said to Robin’s shoulder, “I was worried today, at the fair, long before there was any reason to worry—before you were even late.”
    â€œAnd then you were late,” said Much.
    â€œAnd then you were later, and then we started looking,” Marian said, and turned her face at last; there were tear marks on it, and Robin felt a pricking behind his own eyes, that Marian should cry over him. “This place was my best hope—and my last—that you might think to come here and look for us.”
    Robin looked around, puzzled, and then recognised what he had not thought to look for. This was the little river where Much’s father’s mill. lay, below them where they now stood by over a mile. But here, with its splendid boulders for playing King of the Mountain, and a pool just upstream for pirates and leaf-sailing races, was where Much and Marian and he had spent happy hours as young children. He murmured, half to himself, “I’ve been running—as I thought, away, or somewhere—all day. Since morning. And this is where I end: barely a league from—from where …”
    Marian stepped back, but only to put her hands on Robin’s shoulders, as if she feared that if she did not hold on to him he might still go to the Saracens. “Robin—has it been so bad, since your father died?”
    Robin almost smiled. “Not so bad as right at present.”
    But Marian would not be distracted. “Why did you never tell us? I—I thought you grieved for your father, and did not wish to press you as you seemed not to want to speak. But—someone could have done something—my father—or you need not have been a forester.”
    Robin shook his head. “Your father—or anyone else—could have done nothing, had I been willing to ask. Hush,” he said, as Marian opened her mouth. “It doesn’t matter. Forestry, and the making of arrows, is all I know; and you know what Will Fletcher in Nottingham is like—he would have stood no competition, and I could bear him less as a master even than the Chief Forester.”
    â€œIt is not Will who would have brooked no rivals,” said Much, “but the sheriff, who might have found you a little less willing to pay his tax.”
    Robin shrugged. “It matters not. What is done is—done.” And then the sight of Tom Moody clutching at the feathered shaft rising from his red-stained tunic was before him, and the shrug turned to a shudder and he closed his eyes.
    Marian’s hands shifted and tightened on his shoulders, and she said softly, “What happened, then? We know you met with trouble, dark trouble, but we do not know its name.”
    Robin looked at her in surprise. “You don’t know? You—” But he could not get the words out.
    Much said, “My father’s friend thought they might accuse you of killing the king’s deer; someone was bragging that he had stolen one of the arrows you’ve made from Sir Richard’s son, who was too drunk to notice.”
    Marian whispered, “That’s a hanging offense—if they could do