Outlaw Princess of Sherwood Read Online Free PDF

life looking over your shoulder?”
    Etty actually smiled, for Lionel knew exactly what she was talking about. He had gone through something of this sort with his father, Lord Roderick Lionclaw, who had put a blood-price of a thousand pounds on his son’s head until Lionel had confronted him.
    â€œSo you want to stay and fight back,” Robin said with both pride and phlegm in his voice.
    â€œNot with weapons. Not if I can help it.” Etty wanted no bloodshed. It had been bad enough to see the man-at-arms die today, his simple face looking surprised as a gray goose-feather flower sprouted from his chest.
    Rook asked curtly, “Then how?”
    â€œI don’t know yet. Robin, you’d better go warm yourself by a fire. I must think of a plan.”

Five

    S eated on a high crag overlooking Fountain Dale, hidden by holly and keeping a cautious distance, Ettarde watched the encampment below for some hint of what to do. A sign, an omen, a token, anything, Etty didn’t know what. Two nights now her mother had been left out in the cold and damp without covering, while Etty had shivered in her mantle and blanket, and frost whitened the stones and ferns in the morning. How much more could Queen Elsinor endure before she caught her death of sickness?
    All around, in holly and rowan, wood larks and robins and wrens caroled that it was spring, morning, morning, spring! Ettarde hated them for singing when her mother was suffering. Through the crowns of the oaks below, wreathed with mistletoe but not yet in leaf, Ettarde could see that wretched golden cage and the entire encampment laid out in small, like the lead figures in the toy palace she had once played with. No. Don’t think of those days. Think what to do. How to rescue Mother?
    Have Lionel enchant the guards with his singing? No. They would recognize him and seize him at once. Have Robin Hood go in disguise? No. He was even more likely to be recognized than Lionel. Summon the aelfe, the spirits of the forest, to help somehow? I might just as well try to tell the wild geese what to do. Etty sighed. She needed one of Robin Hood’s foxy ideas, and Robin’s head was too stuffed with phlegm to give her any. Briefly she reviewed Plato in her mind, and Herodotus, and Julius Caesar’s history of the Gallic Wars. Nothing in any of them seemed to apply to the situation of one’s mother in a cage.
    In the middle of the clearing the golden cage glinted in the sunlight. Deceitful thing, shining so fair. Etty could see in it a figure like a tiny white pennon—her mother, like a flag marking the center of the camp. Off to one side of Mother, the horses stood tethered to a line. Off to another side were ranged the wagons and supplies. In another direction again flowed the wellspring of water that gave Fountain Dale its name, with tents pitched nearby for the men-at-arms. And at the fourth point of the compass, in splendid isolation from the lesser tents, stood King Solon’s pavilion all decked with rosettes, its canvas freshly painted bright red and white, its pennons fluttering.
    And everywhere, guards.
    Numbly Ettarde studied their positions, noting how they centered upon her mother’s golden cage, three concentric circles of guards. How to rescue her mother? Fly to her through the air? Not unless wings sprouted sometime soon. Burrow to her underground? That would take too long.
    It seemed hopeless.
    Yet Etty stayed where she was, frowning down on the encampment as if it were a puzzle she could solve somehow. The sun rose higher, drying the melted frost from crags and bracken and prickly holly leaves. The wood larks flew away, the robins and wrens quieted. Hawks circled in the high sky. Down below, a few travelers walked the Nottingham Way. A peasant driving a yoke of oxen. A charcoal burner with his load of wood piled on his donkey. A dark-cloaked figure . . .
    Etty stiffened, wondering if it might be Robin Hood in his idiotic