The Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley Page A

Robin. “Maybe he wants to run back.”
    â€œI permit that remark only because you are responsible for all your people,” she replied. “Will would never break a promise; nor would he want to break his promise to you. You have no complaints of him besides a little current sullenness, do you? He’s a member of your band till you throw him out, and the more fool you if you want to.”
    Robin sighed. “On the contrary, I want to be convinced that I don’t have to. I don’t in the least want to lose him, and have been putting off trying to find out what his doleful looks are about, for fear of what I would hear. But what comes now to the sister?”
    Marian frowned. “I don’t know, but I will try to find out, for Sess’s sake as well as Will’s—and the curiosity of a certain outlaw leader. Now that the story has got out a bit, I can ask leading questions; better yet, I can set Beatrix to asking them. Her long nose has been twitching with eagerness since Hawise came back with the first bit of the tale some days ago. It is the favourite topic as we sort colours for our latest epic tapes-try.
    â€œSess must have the loyalty of one of her maids, to bring her food and water, but they’ll find out who it is, and then I feel almost as sorry for the girl as I do for Sess. This can’t last long, one way or another. I suppose Sess is hoping the embarrassment she’s causing her Norman’s dignity will bring him to break off the engagement by the time they dig her out of her earth; but I have not heard that he has done so thus far.” She chewed her lower lip. “What I have heard of Sir Aubrey is not comforting. She is lucky—if you want to call it luck—that it was marriage he offered her.” She stopped abruptly, and when she spoke again her voice was light and careless. “Her betrothed is a lout, her father is a boor; and now her brother is trailing around looking like a thunder-storm about to burst. Men are not sensible creatures.”
    â€œThank you,” said Robin.
    â€œBut I would be looking like a thunderstorm myself if it were my sister,” she said, “so I except poor Will after all.”
    â€œWhat about me?” said Robin. “Am I to be excepted from the ban?”
    She looked at him, smiling, but the smile changed in some way he could not follow, and he both badly wanted to know what she was thinking and badly wanted not to know. “I except you only so long as you do not try to make it impossible for me to go on visiting you here,” she said.
    â€œYour ban is ill-defined, then,” said Robin, “for you would now tell me to let my heart have all its own way over my good sense—what there is of it.”
    â€œIs that what it is that I want?” said Marian. “Then, yes, I would.”
    There was another ill bit of news that spring. Edward returned from a visit to Nottingham town one day while everyone was still sneezing and the high road was no road at all but a badly rutted mud slide, and said that there were queries out about a man wanted by the sheriff; and that the description was of a very large man with dark hair and beard, who might be known as John Little. The queries were rather urgent; more urgent than the disappearance of a failed farmer late last autumn would warrant.
    â€œI cracked the skull of one of the soldiers who came to put me in debtors’ gaol,” said Little John quietly. “Perhaps the man died.”
    His guess proved true, and then Little John also fell into a bleak mood. Robin sent him off on a new errand every time he returned to Greentree, that he might have little time to brood. There was never time for idleness, but even so, Little John recognised what Robin was doing very soon, which Robin privately thought was a good sign. When Little John said rebelliously, “I am no babe, that needs to be nursed, as you would nurse me through the blame