1
The morning the Merry Men came for Old Rosie, Clem was trying to put a hat on a fox.
She felt quite bad about this later.
At the time it had seemed important; the fox had become tame enough to take scraps of meat and twists of hide directly from her hand, and putting a hat on him was the next logical step.
The construction of said hat had somewhat consumed her morning. She had visited the seamstress over by the river and come away with some soiled felt, unfit for trade; she’d swapped a little sage tea with Jon, who had a chronic sore throat, for a single turkey feather, just the right size to accessorize a small vulpine head.
She had been waylaid for a while by the miller’s boy, Alfred, who was seven and had scraped both his knees raw but was being very, very brave about it. His elder sister Loos squeezed his hand while Clem blotted his wounds with thinned honey, and then wasted a narrow strip of bandage on him, sending him home a proud, wounded warrior. Rosie always grumbled that Clem was too free with both her compassion and her supplies, but she could hardly argue that they were in dire need right now. Clem’s penchant for experimenting was earning her quite the reputation, and had been attracting the sort of customers who paid in actual coin rather than stray bits of ham and pats on the head. They weren’t well-off by any stretch of the imagination, but tying linen bows on Alfred’s bloody knees wasn’t going to tip them over into destitution.
Shaping the offcut of felt into something hat-shaped had taken a sweet half hour, sitting with her boots off in a stretch of buttery sunlight in the far reaches of the garden, among Rosie’s ramshackle beds of mint, soft lavender and elder. The fox had made a few appearances, poking his head out of the woods to snuffle for treats and glare accusingly at her when none were to be found. He’d chosen the right garden to frequent; anyone with livestock would have made it their life’s mission to see him turned into cloak-lining, but Clem and Rosie had been told very firmly by Jon that their temperaments were “ill-suited to the needs of chickens,” so Rosie’s beds remained eggless and the fox was free to come and go as he pleased.
When Clem had finally reached a hattish conclusion, she fetched a soup bone, still stringy with meat, and offered it up with an enticing wiggle.
“Good little lads get hats,” she said, not bothering to talk soft or low; this fox was used to her by now, and would only have been suspicious of a gentle cajole. “Bad little lads too, I suppose. A hat for every little lad, regardless of temperament—that’s my guarantee.”
The fox seemed indifferent to the concept of hats, but very interested in bone meat. He approached. Clem readied the hat. The fox dithered, sensing a trap.
This continued for quite some time. Clem was so engrossed in her task that she didn’t notice a knock at the front door, or hoofs on the path.
It was only when she heard something shatter inside the little house, ruining her best hatting attempt so far, that she realized something was amiss.
Her body’s reaction to danger at her door was immediate.
Her chest contracted. Her breath caught. She was suddenly sweaty in strange and unexpected locations, like the insides of her elbows and the backs of her ears. For one terrible moment, she was nine again, and the world was ending.
She shook it off.
By the time she had barreled through the back door, there were two cloaked and hooded figures standing by the hearth. They were armed to the teeth and comically ominous among all the charming clutter, some of which now lay broken and smashed underfoot. One of them had Old Rosie—who wasn’t really that old, but had lived long enough to wrinkle around the edges, like she’d soaked for too long in the bath of life—with both hands pinned behind her back.
From the color of their cloaks, it was immediately apparent that these were Merry Men. Merry Men! Standing in Clem’s house! Threatening Clem’s Rosie!
She would have asked for autographs if she weren’t prioritizing finding a weapon.
“Hullo, Clemmie,” Rosie said, perky as ever. “Is it my birthday?”
“No,” said Clem, groping around on the table next to her for something sharp. “At least … I don’t think so. Is it?”
“It’s not,” said the enormous man who had Rosie pinned. “Well … it might be. I don’t know when your birthday is. But to be clear, that’s not why we’re here.”
“It’s just, you’re awfully handsome,” Rosie said, trying to twist in the young man’s grip to get a better look at him. “And strong. I don’t go in much for Merry Men, but if they all looked like you…”
Clem snorted. “He’s not handsome, Rosie, he’s kidnapping you.”
“When you’ve been around for as long as I have, Clemence, you’ll begin to understand that these things are not mutually exclusive.”
Clem’s fingers had closed around a heavy stone pestle, still dusty with crushed fennel.
“If you came to woo her, then be my guest,” she said to the large man, “but it’s a little presumptuous to grab first, and it’s very telling that you had to bring a friend along for moral support.”
The other hooded figure, who was approximately a third of the size of the first, made a brief, choked noise that Clem thought might have been a laugh. This held promise.
“Now, why don’t I make some tea?” Clem said brightly, with a smile. That sounded nice. Tea. Tea with actual Merry Men. A bit of a misunderstanding, followed by laughs and bonding over biscuits. “Then we can all sit down for a moment and talk about why you’re here, before anybody does anything—”
The door flew open, smacking against the wall and then coming to an undignified stop, and a third person—also anonymized by a long, mossy Lincoln green cloak—entered. Their associates straightened up slightly; the tall one tightened his grip on Rosie, who said “Goodness!” not sounding nearly as upset as she should have been.
“What’s this?” said the newcomer. She had a low, no-nonsense voice with a little rasp to it. “Stop dicking around.”
“Not dicking,” the tall man protested. “What part of this says dicking? Just didn’t expect there to be two.”
There was a brief pause, during which Clem felt the unseen eyes of this new authority upon her.
“Who is she to you?” she said to Old Rosie.
“Not sure that’s really any of your business,” Clem said, still friendly as ever, at the exact same time that Old Rosie said, “Well—that’s my Clem.”
The newcomer did not seem particularly moved. “We don’t have time for this. Let’s go.”
It finally dawned on Clem that they really were going to take Rosie with them; Rosie, who never left the village of Oak Vale if she could help it, and had a bad knee, and drank her nettle tea at the same time every morning standing with her hand on her hip surveying her garden. She’d hate that. It wasn’t very Merry of them at all.
“Take me,” she said quickly. “If you need a healer. I’m good … ish. Young too. Sprightly, even.”
“Could do, Captain,” said the tall man, addressing the hood in charge. “If she’s offering.”
“Leverage,” said the smaller person, speaking for the first time. “Right?”
“Yes,” said the captain. “That’s what I was about to suggest. Knock her out. Bring some of … this. Whatever looks useful.”
“Now hang on a minute,” Rosie said, struggling against her captor, finally having the good sense to sound concerned. “You can’t just be taking people. That’s not on.”
“I don’t like being knocked out,” added Clem. “That’s just a personal hang-up of mine, you understand.”
She raised her pestle, readying for a fight she had no chance of winning; before she could take a single step forward, someone new grabbed her from behind, squeezing her wrist until she was forced to release her weapon. Clem hadn’t even heard the back door creak. She felt a heavy blow to the back of her knees and immediately crumpled to the floor.
The only advantage of this was that she could see her pestle where it had rolled away and become wedged in the dust under the nuts, seeds and berries cabinet. She reached for it, but was stopped by a foot, which landed firmly on her forearm and pressed her gently into the floor.
“What are you even going to do with that?” said her unseen assailant, irritatingly wry. “Ask me to lie still and grind me into a fine powder?”
“Enough,” snapped the kidnapper-in-chief. “Let’s go. And you”—Clem could only assume that Rosie was being addressed now, as she was at entirely the wrong angle to see for herself—“you know why we’re here. We must all act in the best interests of the people of the wood.”
“That’s funny,” Clem said into the packed dirt of the floor. “Because I sort of thought I was one of the people of the wood, and I’m over here being pummeled.”
Her attacker removed her foot, and then hauled Clem to her feet. “This wasn’t a pummeling,” she said in a low, amused voice. “It was closer to a massage.”
Clem glimpsed the young woman under the hood—umber skin, a black braid and a flash of a smile—before a blindfold was slipped neatly over her eyes.
“No offense, but I wouldn’t like to be the receiving end of—”
“Bye now.”
Clem’s mouth was prized open with firm precision; she tasted the sharp, vinegary tang of dwale on her tongue before the world blinked out.
2
There was something wrong with one of the front wheels of the wagon, and Mariel had already lost half a fingernail trying to fix it. She was regretting removing her leather gloves, which had been necessary to get a proper feel under the hub; she was having second thoughts about jamming her fingers in there again at all, now that she was lightly bleeding.
Unfortunately, she had declared that it would be an easy fix and shoved Morgan aside to do the thing properly; anything less than perfect future rotations from the wheel in question would be unacceptable.
“It’s probably because this is more of a potato wagon,” said Morgan, who was now kicking sullenly around the back wheels, “and not a potatoes-and-dead-bodies wagon.”
They were parked in the trees, out of sight of the village; Mariel was grateful for the small mercy of not having to try to fix a wagon in full view of local urchins, farmers and lollygaggers, who would have been suitably intimidated by their green cloaks at first, but might have been less so as they watched her trying to jam a wheel back onto the axle with a bleeding hand and a hood that kept falling over her eyes as she worked. The horses were standing about looking politely bemused, but they were disciplined enough not to wander away or start grazing the shrubs. If only her people were quite so well-behaved.
“She’s not dead,” said Josey, leaning over to check their cargo. “She’s just resting her eyes.” One of Josey’s older sisters had spent hours meticulously combing and braiding her hair back at camp, and she had taken those hundreds of tiny braids and pulled them into one tight, single plait that started at the top of her crown and brushed her shoulder blades as she straightened up.
Morgan’s hair was a self-shorn shag of dark feathers, and they liked to glare sullenly out from underneath their fringe like a wildcat sizing you up from under a bush, as they were doing now; the effect was ruined slightly by the fact that they were a foot shorter than Josey, who was lithe and rangy and made no effort to look threatening at all. This made it all the more satisfying when somebody underestimated her so thoroughly that they were unconscious before they realized she had stopped smiling.
If Mariel had been allowed to pick her own company, Josey Abara was one of the only names that she would have written willingly on her list.
Morgan, on the other hand, had been assigned to Mariel’s company because absolutely nobody else was willing to take on a green fourteen-year-old who had managed to pack enough rage and apathy for a lifetime into just a decade and a half. Mariel was constantly weighing up how incompetent she’d look if she “accidentally” left Morgan behind one day on a patrol—or let them fall into a fast-running river, or sent them on an errand and then instructed everybody else to run away very fast—against how peaceful and orderly she might find a Morganless existence.
Alas, Baxter would never stand for it.
He came to crouch next to Mariel by the wheel now, his bulk so substantial that it was like a big, blond hillock had taken up residence at her shoulder. Despite her previous insistence that she could fix a goddamned wheel by herself, he wedged his enormous hands under the bed and lifted the entire front half of the wagon from the ground.
“Reckon there’s a stone jammed in there,” Baxter said, his voice as even as always and barely strained. “You might want to poke it with a knobby stick, Captain.”
Mariel was not going to do anything as undignified as poking it with a knobby stick; she poked it with her finger instead, despite the risk of further violent de-nailing, and when it came loose, Baxter gently lowered the wagon back down onto the ground. He at least had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed by this latest in a long line of Herculean feats.
He leaned in, darting a glance at their cargo and then aiming soft concern in her direction. “She isn’t dead, is she?”
“No,” Mariel said, not bothering to lower her own voice. She’d checked that herself, when they’d loaded the oddly cheerful girl up next to the supplies. The healer’s companion was shorter than she’d looked in the cottage, but she was by no means small. She had spring-curled hair the color of milled flax, ropy pink-and-white scars on her palms, and legs that looked so capable of kicking that Mariel had been glad that she was unconscious, even if knocking her out had been a little overzealous on Josey’s part. She had definitely been breathing.
“Good. ’Cause it was good of her to offer to come.”
“Good of her?” said Mariel, wiping her finger impatiently on her tunic, the blood mostly vanishing among the dark, mottled green. “She’s not on a summer jaunt, Scarlet. This was a tactical decision. We’re killing two birds with one stone: healer for us, and it sends a message.”
“Right,” said Baxter, frowning. “And the message says…”
It said: pick your side, and then stay on it. Remember what’s being fought for. Remember who the good guys are. Don’t fuck with the good guys.
The message was for Mariel’s father too. If he thought she couldn’t handle anything more than a company of dull-witted children and easy retrieval missions, she’d show him that she could think like a leader; that she could be bold, and enterprising, and ruthless. He’d have no choice but to respect her, when all her victories were laid at his feet.
Ultimately, it was a very good thing that it wasn’t the sort of message that needed to be written down, because it was too bloody long.
“People often demonstrate a troubling lack of self-preservation,” was all Mariel said in reply. “Threaten somebody they love, and suddenly they’re all ears. She offered herself instead—that means they care for each other. We can use that. Do you think the old woman is going to step out of line again, knowing we have her ward?”
“I do love it when you talk like that,” said Josey, from where she was strapping some of the non-human cargo down. “Brutal. Bloodthirsty. It makes me feel so warm and fuzzy inside.”
Such insubordination from anybody less useful would have pushed Mariel from generally perturbed to very pissed off. Josey had earned a generous helping of leniency.
Mariel glared at her anyway. “I’m just being practical.”
Copyright © 2024 by Lex Croucher
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