“What are you doing?” I asked, pulling away.
“I need to see your eyes when I ask you this.”
“Ask what?”
“Are you in love with Rob, Scar?”
I hesitated. Sometimes, like with the baby, or the strange way Rob touched my hand, I kind of thought I might be. But then he would yell at me or shut me up with a glare and an insult like he had that morning, saying I were fooling with John. John, who were in front of me, asking if I loved Rob, looking at my weird eyes without looking away. “No,” I told him. It were the truth, I think. Or as much of the truth as made a difference.
“Good.”
He leaned forward, his eyes looking right into mine, and his mouth came so near I felt the skin of his top lip on mine. His eyes stared into me, and he just waited there, looking for something, or waiting for me to do something, but I didn’t know what. I looked down, not sure of myself.
He chuckled, and his thumb ran over my lips. The touch made me jump, made everything stranger, and I pulled away from him.
“See you back later, Scar,” he told me.
I didn’t look up until he left, and then I sat on the ground and hugged my arms about my knees. I didn’t know what to make of that at all.
Chapter Seven
The morning were rough. It were our first day on the road since the chest were taken, and it felt like rolling thunder in the distance. With just a fortnight to get enough goods and fence them again before tax day, we all knew how much more gold were needed now, but it felt like all our luck had pure run out.
I kicked at a branch and stared at the empty road like travelers would appear if I wished it. I kept glancing at Rob and John, and the rough feel of John pushing his thumb over my mouth jumped into my head.
I stood. “Rob!” I called. He stepped out onto the road, looking up at me. “I’m going to Nottingham, see what I can steal there. This isn’t helping none.”
He nodded. “Fine. Meet back at Tuck’s tonight, all right?”
“Sure.” I skittered across a tree branch, heading to Nottingham Castle and away from John and Rob. ’Course, going to Nottingham weren’t getting away from Rob, in truth. It had been his home once, and walking there felt like he were walking ’longside me.
I nabbed some silver and food from the keep and were leaving at dusk when I heard someone making an awful racket. I ducked down one of the alleyways of shacks that made up Nottingham’s town, and sure enough, right by the castle wall, I found a girl in a pretty red dress crying her eyes out.
I came over to her and looked down the way, making sure there were no one to bother her. “Come on,” I told her soft. “I’ll get you home.”
She looked up at me, and my heart kind of stuck in my throat. It weren’t Joanna by any stretch, but she had yellow hair and blue eyes, and for a second it looked like her. My hand were already out and she took it. “Thank you, sir.”
I helped her stand up, and she leaned on me. “What’s your name?”
“Alice.”
“Where’s your home?”
She shook her head. “I live inside the castle. I’m one of the maids.”
“Why you crying, then?”
She burst into tears again, and I didn’t know what to do. “S-s-sh,” were all she managed.
“Hush,” I told her. I pulled out a roll from my pouch. “Here, eat something.”
She took the roll and managed a few bites of it. “’S terrible work,” she said. “Me and the girls all know. It’s better if the sheriff takes a shine to you, you know? He’s kinder then. Gives you money and lets you skip some chores and feeds you more too. It’s not so bad. And he was so nice to me—I thought he really loved me. But I t-told him it’s his baby,” she said, pressing her hand against her tummy. The breath whooshed out of me. “And he hit me!” she wailed, fizzing up into tears again.
“Listen,” I said, thinking quick. “I know someplace you can go. The keep won’t mind you having one on the way, and the work’s not too bad. You’ll be right as rain.”
“Are you mad?” she cried, pushing away from me. “You think I can leave this place? I can’t, not ever. He’d send Gisbourne to kill me, he told me.”
“Gisbourne’s a thief taker, not a hireling. The sheriff can’t order him about as he pleases.”
She shook her head, turning back to the castle. “You’re a stupid boy. You don’t know anything of how the world is.”
I shook my head too, watching her scamper back into the castle.
I waited as long as I could to meet up with the lads, going up by Thoresby Lake and waiting till stars popped out overhead. Too many thoughts were rolling inside me, thoughts of Joanna and London and those last final days that I never liked to think of much.
When I thought of Joanna, there were days I wanted to remember. When we first ran away to London, we still had money in our purses, and it felt like the world were opened up wide to us in a single breath, like we never had to listen to no one again and everything would be perfect. Like we had cheated fate.
’Course, fate were right around the corner, waiting. Fate never stopped following me—not now, when just as I thought I were free Gisbourne came blazing back into my life like a hell beast, and not then—in those terrible days in London when the money were gone and Joanna and I both turned our own kind of desperate.
That were why it were no use to think on Joanna. Everything ran back to London, to those last days.
I were right tired, that were all. The sheriff’s poor Alice weren’t no Joanna and I couldn’t fix neither of them, and I had no business thinking of such things anyway. People who wanted my help needed it tonight.
I saved one roll for myself, chewing on it slow. Maybe if I could just eat I wouldn’t get stuck on the past quite so much.
The quiet night were falling, so I went to Tuck’s, but it were a slow sort of going.
I walked straight into a storm.
The boys were waiting for me outside Tuck’s, and Rob nodded me forward, walking off into the night toward the cave.
“The sheriff caught Godfrey and Ravenna,” Rob told me.
“Caught?” I asked.
“Lady Thoresby told us they’re accused of trapping a rabbit.”
“That’s not poaching!” I protested.
“I think the sheriff is punishing Godfrey because he didn’t get us. Sheriff thinks he lied to him.”
“He didn’t promise them us,” I argued.