The Forest Queen Page 17

  I froze, suddenly understanding.

  There was someone there.

  “All right, Scarlet,” I whispered, forcing myself not to look too quickly or obviously where my owl was leading me. I caught Stutely’s eye and tilted my head ever so slightly, and he gave an infinitesimal nod. After a few moments, he drained his tin mug and stood, moving casually in the direction of the wine casks—​and toward the place my owl was directing us.

  I was grateful that my cloak hid the motion as I reached for my dagger. I reached up with my other hand and stroked Scarlet, murmuring to her in what I hoped seemed a nonchalant way.

  My eyes had adjusted to the firelight; even though I’d learned to be good at seeing the shapes of living things in the trees in my years on the hunts, I struggled to find what my owl so clearly saw. Was it there—​a dark shape, crouched on a branch as lightly and easily as a bird, as my Bird?

  I hardly had time to have the thought before the shape leapt from the trees and felled me. I saw a veiled face, and for a wild moment I thought it was Stutely, still in his disguise from the May festival—​but then I saw the real Stutely over me, too, making a dive at my attacker that would surely fell anyone.

  But it didn’t. The veiled figure made a fluid motion so fast and graceful it reminded me of Much diving for a kill, and then Stutely was on the ground, too, laid out by my side as neatly as trussed game.

  “Now,” said our assailant, in a regal and lightly accented voice that seemed to fill the whole clearing. “Now that I have proven my worth in combat, I will take the place I have earned in your party.”

  A veiled woman with a Su accent, an expert fighter who spoke like a noble. I realized that I knew her, or at least I knew of her.

  “Princess Ghazia,” I said. The name came out of me in a wheeze.

  She nodded. Stutely and I sat up, rubbing our chests.

  “Honored to meet you,” she said, dipping an Estinger-style curtsey. The gauzy layers of her black dress and veil fluttered.

  “At least a dozen guards were posted around our group tonight,” I said. All of them sharp and well able to fight, and armed with the best of Loughsley’s weapon stores, I thought. “How did you get past them?”

  Ghazia scoffed. “I stayed in the shadows, and I move fast.”

  “That you do,” Stutely said, still rubbing his breastbone.

  “And I can look like a shadow myself, in these.” She touched her dark clothes, her veil, with her fingertips; even that motion had speed and grace to it. “You have no idea of the freedom the veil affords me. No Estinger does, thankfully, or I would not be here tonight.” I saw by her eyes that she was beginning to smile. “It saved me from your boorish prince falling in love with my beautiful face, for instance,” she said.

  There was nervous laughter in several trees now, from the guards who should have stopped Ghazia from coming.

  “I would have had to marry him for the good of my kingdom, and I’ve seen how the Esting elite treat their people,” she said, growing serious. “Such abuses as you have suffered would never be tolerated in the Sudlands. Besides”—​the smile came into her eyes again—​“I’ve found that my tastes run elsewhere.” She curtsied once more, this time toward Alana Dale, who was watching her with an expression I imagined was not unlike that of someone who has just been struck by lightning.

  “Sadly, however,” the princess went on, “I have come here not in the name of romance, but to offer my help.”

  “How do we know we can trust you?” The voice from behind me was that of Kent Mason. I turned to see him standing by the fire, his arm around his wife. Nellie was not at her usual place by her mother’s side—​in fact, I hadn’t seen her since I’d returned from the city.

  She seemed to have vanished about the same time Bird had.

  I pushed that thought from my mind.

  “You’re one of them,” Kent continued. “A noble. A princess.” His voice dripped with scorn, but I was relieved and proud that it held not a trace of fear.

  “And your leader is the Lady of Loughsley,” Ghazia replied. “Besides, you all heard today what everyone in court is calling her.”

  Her use of my title was a jarring reminder. I hadn’t thought of myself as a lady for so long, it sounded like a lie to hear it spoken now.

  “The Forest Queen,” said Alana Dale. “And ooh, how it rankles the king, and the sheriff, too.”

  “How he goes on about it!” Ghazia took the opportunity to move closer to Alana, and the minstrel made room for the princess to sit with her by the fire.

  “‘The forest is chaotic,’ the sheriff says,” Ghazia went on. “‘It has no order, no discipline, no court, no law.’ He sees the world like a chessboard, I think, your sheriff does—​and a forest has no straight lines. That someone else might have figured out how to rule such a place, someone who isn’t him . . .”

  He sees the world like a chessboard. I stared at Ghazia, stunned: she had seen so little of him, but she was precisely right. She’d articulated something about him that I’d never been able to: John’s casual, merciless cruelty to anyone he thought had less power than he, and his fawning charm with those in higher positions. His life, his world, was a game and a battle, exactly like chess. He’d made himself into a powerful player for his king, and our group in the forest was his opposing side.

  And I his opposing queen . . .

  “He’s planned his next move,” Ghazia said. “That is what I came to tell you. He hates the stories that are being told about you, the way those stories are inciting rebellion. He has the king convinced that you’re not just thieves, but revolutionaries. He thinks you’re planning a war, and they’ve increased their taxes yet again so that Esting’s army can fight back. They’re going to stamp you out.”

  “Revolutionaries?” I looked around at our merry camp, at Little Jane and Anna Robin by the fire, at the Masons, at Will Stutely and the rogues, at the many families and individuals who had come here because—​because John had forced them to come, because they had nowhere else to go. “We’re not soldiers,” I said. “We’re just trying to keep everyone alive, and fed, and free.”

  Ghazia laughed. “What is that if not rebellion, when those who rule you want you hungry and indentured?” She shook her head. “What a strange place this is. Tyrants who call themselves noble, and rebels who claim they aren’t fighting at all.”

  “She’s right, Silvie,” Little Jane said. Anna Robin had fallen asleep at her breast. She adjusted her dress to cover herself and handed her baby to Mae Tuck, who stroked the infant’s cheek adoringly. When Little Jane looked at me, her expression was fearsome. “If someone wants to take from you, break you, make you wish you were dead, as the sheriff and the king have done, as John did to me . . . if someone doesn’t care whether you live or die, then living itself is rebellion.”

  I could still feel the rope in my hands with Little Jane’s weight at the end of it. I knew she’d earned her convictions, earned every one of the words she spoke.

  “We are rebels, Silvie, if only because we’re living our own lives, not the ones they’d choose for us. Not the ones your brother would choose. And living is . . . Just living is fighting, sometimes. Living on after the night I met you has taught me that. So has having Anna.”

  I nodded. The group around the fire took on a different cast: strong bodies, strong hearts, each of us in our different way contributing to a life that was better for all of us than the lot our unjust kingdom had cast us. We were rebelling, not just when we stole and redistributed the nobles’ and the Brethren’s money, but every time we laughed together, ate together, built shelter for each other, or dressed each other’s wounds. Every night Bird kept a fire burning in the forest.

  It was my turn to keep that fire burning now.

  “We have to move before John does,” I said, standing. “If we’re at war, then we’re going to win.”

  * * *

  “Silvie?” Lady Clara Halving stared at me from her bed, clutching
silk sheets to her chest. “Silvie, what are you doing here?”

  I smiled at her. “Did you mean it when you said you wanted to help Esting’s poor?”

  SIXTEEN

  Steal from the Rich, Give to the Poor

  Clara’s taste for palace guards had endured since the Hunt Ball, but I’d hardly dared to hope that their regard for her would be so strong. Drawing two of them away from their posts by the treasury door was the work of a moment—​or of a low-cut nightdress and a sultry look.

  “If this is what you mean by justice, darling, count me in,” she’d murmured to me before sidling up to the guards. I smiled, keeping myself well hidden behind one of the long hall’s marble pillars.

  “I’ve some friends in my chambers tonight. We’ve been amusing ourselves, but we wanted a little male company . . . That David Doncaster wouldn’t be here tonight, would he? Not that he quite holds a candle to you, James . . .”

  Watching her lead them away, I found it hard not to laugh. There were friends waiting in Clara’s room, all right: a dozen rogues in the same women’s clothes they’d worn to the May Festival.

  Perched on my shoulder, Scarlet watched, too. Bird was right that she wasn’t much of a hunter, but she was a loyal companion—​and a silent one, when she needed to be.

  All the time we had spent planning this heist, all through the night Ghazia had appeared and the following two days, I had been waiting for Bird to return. We had worked in shifts through the nights, building and building under Little Jane’s directions, and I had hardly slept myself. I couldn’t focus on him, not when there were so many more important things to plan and think about, but the wondering and the hurt were there, a hollow space in my chest—​especially since Nellie hadn’t come back, either.

  Still, I was glad he wasn’t here now, I told myself. This was a plan I had created, without his help or advice or his condescension, his insistence on my naivety and his own clearsighted, practical wisdom.

  It would have been easy to let anger at his sudden abandonment overwhelm me, as easy as it would have been to succumb to missing him while all of us in the forest made our plan.

  But if we succeeded, I would have time to feel as many things as I liked. And Bird would know, and John, and eve-ryone, exactly what kind of person I was.

  I slipped out of the shadows and into the royal treasury. I unlooped the thin rope hanging at my side and held one end up to Scarlet’s beak. She grasped it and swooped silently toward the vent in the treasury’s ceiling, and I took up the first bag of gold coins.

  * * *

  The rogues’ shadows lined the palace rooftop like turrets. Below us, more than fifty other members of our forest family waited, ready to receive our spoils and pass them on.

  The North River cuts through the middle of Esting City, separating the palace from the citizenry like a moat. The same river that weaves through Woodshire Forest, that flows in front of Loughsley Abbey and under the Wedding-Ring Bridge. The same river on whose banks so many of Esting’s villages are founded, the river that connects our whole country indiscriminately.

  The river that, this night, would feed us all.

  The spoils I’d found in the treasury had sickened me: the riches of centuries of noble greed had accrued there, jewels and precious metal and coin. Left in a dark room, doing no one any good. I’d worked quickly, pocketing as many treasures as I could and tying much more to the rope Scarlet had fed up to the roof, where the rogues were waiting.

  The finery sparkled even in the nighttime darkness as we handed it down and down and down to the river’s edge. Mae Tuck and Nell Mason, waiting by the water, formed the last link in the chain we made down from the palace rooftop. I could see the cold shine of the first piece of metal when it reached them, and they loaded it into the first of the boats we had made.

  There were hundreds of them, the smallest barely the size of two cupped hands, the largest not quite big enough to bear a person down the river—​but big enough to hold riches from the treasury; a sack of grain from the palace kitchen’s vast pantries; several bolts of warm, thick cloth; or a small collection of weapons from the armory. All of us together, even with the experienced thieves and the locksmiths and everyone else who had brought their own particular talents to this one great effort, had not managed to clear the palace stores of their excess wealth.

  But we had come fairly close. We had taken enough to feed and clothe the people of a hundred small Esting villages—​and arm them, too. Every little boat set upon the river started off in its own direction, pulled wherever the current sent it.

  The idea had been mine, the design for the boats a collaboration between Little Jane, Arthur, and Stutely. Every person in the forest family who had able hands had helped to build them. It was hard not to shake from weariness, but watching all the collected wealth of the palace flow out to the people who needed it sent a rush of relief and pride and energy through my body.

  I thought of Little Jane, exhausted and loving, nursing her baby. It was time for our country to feed its people.

  * * *

  Little Jane was waiting for me back in the forest, and she flung her arms open as I jumped down from the trees and ran to her. We made room for Anna Robin, who was sleeping in her wrap, between us as we embraced.

  “It went well, then?” she asked eagerly, pulling back to look at me. “Your smile says it did. Oh, I would love to have seen it—​tell me everything.”

  But I didn’t need to. I simply took her hand and led her down to the stream.

  This one small offshoot of the North River was not yet crowded with bounty; as we approached it, the stream was quiet and empty under the moonlight. But in only a few minutes, one of the little boats we had made floated into view. It was one of the smaller ones, the size of a large platter. A satchel of copper coins weighing perhaps a stone was strapped to it.

  I waited for the parcel to reach our part of the stream, and then I waded out a few steps and caught it. I held it out to Little Jane, my hands dripping. “See?”

  Her eyes glowed warmly in the darkness. “It worked perfectly.”

  I set the boat and the offering it carried back into the water, and it drifted calmly away from us.

  “In the morning,” I said, “people all over Esting will be waking up to food, clothing, money.”

  “Hope,” Little Jane murmured, stroking Anna’s hair. “Survival.”

  * * *

  When we got back to the clearing, Mae Tuck was setting up another bonfire. I was surprised to see a light glowing inside the cave, too.

  “You kept Bird’s fire going?” I asked the Mae.

  “No . . .” she said. “It’s only been the few of us here, and we’ve all stayed in the clearing, waiting for news. Safer together.” She frowned. “That fire should have died down to coals by now.”

  I was already walking away from them and toward the cave. He was back, Bird was back, and I was so angry with him for leaving, so eager to see him again—​

  The cave was empty. I peered into the darkness beyond the bright circle of the fire, and I even walked the cave’s perimeter, but no one was there. Bird wasn’t there. Someone who had stayed in the forest, one of the dozen or so who had young children to mind or who weren’t strong or quick enough to help in our palace raid, must have stoked it while I was gone.

  Of course they had. Once Bird did something, he committed to it absolutely. It was foolish to think he’d come back.

  But feeling that hope and then losing it so quickly had pulled away the happy rush I’d felt as I moved through the trees after our mighty success, as I had shown Little Jane the victory that was sweeping down the rivers all over the country. I felt the full weight of three days’ sleepless exhaustion, and all I wanted to do was rest.

  Outside, some of the quickest rogues were returning; even the fastest of them took at least half an hour longer to get back to our stronghold than I had, moving through the trees. They were getting ready for a midnight supper. It wouldn
’t be a celebratory feast, since all of us had spent our strength to the last; it would be a functional meal of nourishment and a few happy whispers before sleeping the sleep of the just.

  But I found I wasn’t even able to do that. I wanted, for just a little while, to be alone.

  I went to sleep in the empty cave while the rest of our party still murmured together by the bonfire. I couldn’t sleep in the tree houses with everyone else, not that night.

  The hammocks still hung by the walls, but even with several blankets and my cloak, it took me a long time to get warm. I remembered my first nights in the cave with Bird with angry longing. He had his freedom as much as I did, I reminded myself; no, more so. I couldn’t make him stay always at my side, as if he were Scarlet; even birds had their freedom, and they hunted the better for it.

  As if to remind me, Scarlet landed with a low hoot next to me. She had, shockingly, caught herself a mouse. She shook her head, the little creature dangling from her beak, displaying it to me with pride. Then she swallowed it in one gulp.

  “Good girl, Scarlet,” I said, half asleep at last. I heard the rustle of wings as she left me again.

  I pictured Bird with real wings like an owl’s, flying high above the canopy, dancing circles around the moon the way we’d woven our way around the Maypole. I kept thinking of those wings, that freedom, to lull myself to sleep, and I tried to use them to color my dreams.

  But my old nightmare claimed me again. Tangled and bound in the bedroom of a nameless palace, a faceless bridegroom advancing on me . . .

  I woke, startled, taking gasps of air that felt thin in my lungs and tasted somehow wrong. I pushed at my blankets, even though they were finally warm, just wanting my limbs to be free, to be free . . . Sleep made me so sluggish, and the air was so wrong . . .