Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 02] Read Online Free Page B

less dangerous—than the mercenary captain he rode with. Robert of Locksley had been soldier, Crusader, and king’s man also, in the days before the Turks had captured him on the same field where her father died. Before he had come home to England much older in spirit than when he left, if only two years greater in age.
    Sim closed and latched the gate. The sound of hooves against courtyard cobbles altered into silence beyond the gate, where stone became dirt track. She would not see or hear him again until he returned.
    Until a king was dead.
    Marian turned abruptly and strode across the bailey to the hall. Inside there was warmth, food, companionship. Even music; Alan was playing his lute. The melody was simple, his tenor voice pure in accompaniment. She paid little enough attention to the lyrics. Instead, she took her seat at the head of the table, intending to eat and drink—but discovered a sudden inability to move.
    The table was no longer empty. Men gathered at it now, the men she had expected to gather at it two hours before, when she had supervised the placing of platters and tankards, the treasured bowl of salt. All men save one, who now rode to France.
    It was Will Scarlet who poured a pewter goblet of ale and thumped it down upon the table next to her hand. “Drink,” he said. “ ‘Twill put color back in your face.”
    She had not known she lacked it.
    “Eat.” That was Little John, shoving a platter of pork in her direction. The pile was already denuded, ravaged by male appetites. “ ‘Tisn’t a war, is it? He won’t die.”
    Marian looked at them all. At Scarlet, scowling in perplexion; he did not understand her mood. At Little John, with a bush of red beard concealing half his face, but not the blue eyes that were, she saw, plainly worried. For her. At Much, working on a bulging mouthful of cheese—he would never learn proper manners—and at Tuck, whose plate was full of food yet untouched. Alan she gave the merest glance; his head was bent over his lute as he fingered the strings.
    “What happens,” she asked, “when the king dies?”
    Will Scarlet grunted. “They name a new one, don’t they?”
    “A son,” Marian said. “The eldest son, as Richard himself was the eldest of Henry’s surviving sons.”
    Tuck’s expression suggested he understood the implications better than the others. “But Richard Plantagenet has no sons.”
    “Aye, well.” Little John looked from Tuck to Marian, shrugging massive shoulders. “They’ll find someone.”
    “The Count of Mortain,” she said. “Prince John.”
    “D’ye think it matters to us?” Will asked roughly. “This king, that king . . . means naught to folk like us.” He paused, grimacing. “To you, maybe.” She was a knight’s daughter, while they were all of them so far below that as to be nonexistent.
    Marian drew breath. “Five years ago,” she said, “you robbed a tax shipment.”
    “For the king’s ransom,” Scarlet declared. “And ’twas Robin’s idea, wasn’t it? The son of an earl!” He shook his head, lifting a tankard to down a gulp of ale. “Naught to us. The king forgave us all our sins.” He grinned at Tuck. “Like a priest.”
    “That king,” Marian agreed, even as Tuck murmured that he was a friar, not a priest, “who may be dead even as we speak.”
    Scarlet fixed her with a scowl. “D’ye think after five years Prince John would recall a thing about us?”
    “Not Prince John.” It was Alan, stilling his strings to look at them all. “The sheriff. He will remember.”
    Scarlet hooted briefly. “ You, maybe—you tupped his daughter and got caught for the pleasure. But he’s naught to do with the rest of us.”
    “He would have hanged you,” Marian said, “for murdering those Normans—”
    “They murdered my wife!” he cried, red-faced in sudden anger.
    She raised her voice. “—and Tuck was nearly excommunicated because of the sheriff. Much nearly lost a hand to him, for picking