Rowan Hood Returns by Nancy Springer Page B

women with spindles dangling from their hands gawked from the doorways of the wattle-and-daub huts; chickens squawked and scuttled, dogs barked, half-naked dirty children jostled either to get away or get closer. Some of these people perhaps had met with Rowan before, when she had been Rosemary, the woodwife’s daughter. But she pushed aside fear that they would recognize her, for they had seen her seldom. Moreover, she sensed how much the years since her mother’s death had changed her.
    Rowan felt the great warhorse beneath her starting to snort and champ the bit, arching its neck, showing off, the vain overgrown donkey. “Toads squat in your ears, horse,” she muttered. Her fists tightened and sweated on the charger’s reins as she led her comrades around the edge of Borea village toward the track that would take them to the fortress.
    There. A dirt road that cleaved the village and ran across earthworks, Lord Orric’s failed attempt at a moat, to the gate. Once she had found the way, Rowan wrestled her horse to a brief halt and beckoned Lionel to take the lead.
    Ro’s horse went along more quietly now, following the gray, and her grip on the reins relaxed. Although her eyes looked straight forward at the lord’s stone and timber walls, she found herself mindful of Celandine’s Wood also, a not-too-distant peaceful presence behind her back.
    And something else behind her back as well. A stir, a murmur, footsteps. She turned her head.
    Beau, looking around also, confirmed what Rowan glimpsed. “La, half the village, they follow us to see what passes!”
    â€œWho goes there?” shouted a man’s voice from the fortress.
    Rowan’s head snapped around. Let the village folk gaggle like geese if they liked.
    â€œHalt!” shouted the same voice. “Name yourselves and your business!”
    A guard. The gates stood open, for it was daytime, and folk bustled in and out: washerwomen, scullery girls, a peasant leading a donkey half buried under sacks of seed for planting. But the guards still watched to challenge strangers.
    Three of them, in helms and quilted tabards, barred the way to the gate with pikes at the ready. A fourth stood atop the guardhouse; it was he who had shouted the challenge.
    Rowan and Etty halted at the rear of the small cavalcade. It was Lionel, in the fore, who spoke. “We are travelers bearing dire news for your lord.” The band had agreed that it should be Lionel who dealt with the guards while the rest of them hung their heads and tried to look maidenly.
    â€œTravelers? Of what nature?”
    â€œI am a minstrel.” As before, Lionel carried his harp in the crook of one arm. “These are my sisters who accompany me.”
    Someone snickered. “Indeed,” said the chief of guards with a sneer in the word. “Your sisters. And how do you, a minstrel, come by such various sisters and such fine horses?”
    Taking no offense, Lionel replied quietly to the second question only. “The pony is mine. The two warhorses we have brought here to return to your lord. One of them belonged to Lord Orric’s son Hurst. The other, to his son Holt.”
    A gasp and a muttering went up from the crowd of villagers behind them, and for a moment the chief of guards’ mouth fell open. Then he demanded, “You bear news of young my lords Hurst and Holt?”
    â€œI do.”
    â€œEnter.”
    Hearing the command, the three guards with pikes lowered their weapons and stood aside. But Lionel and his entourage made no move toward the gate.
    â€œNay,” Lionel told the chief guard, “we’ll proceed no farther.” He vaulted down off his gray steed to stand, a humbler visitor, on the ground. “I respect the lord’s grief, and also I fear his wrath, should I tell him that his sons lie dead.”
    A gasp and a clamor went up all around, such a hullabaloo that the chief guard shouted to be heard.