Shirewode (The Wode) by Hennig J Tullos

Author:Hennig, J Tullos [Hennig, J Tullos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2013-09-07T22:00:00+00:00

XVI

NAMES are power, he’d taunted, and then Gamelyn… Gisbourne… Guy… and oh, sweet Lady, who was he anyway but fury and hate and need and longing all thrown together and shaken, then sifted separate again? How could everything the Templar now was turn Robyn as widdershins as what Gamelyn had been, then?

Marion was alive.

Alive.

Robyn wanted to curl up on the altar and bleed himself out onto it… finished. Because he knew. Knew.

Had he died as he ought, perhaps none of it would have happened….

Writhing self-absorbed in guilt ill becomes you, my own. You did die. It was finished. Cernun brought Hob-Robyn back, but for Rob of Loxley, it was finished.

The Horned Lord’s voice was, for a wonder, calm. Pragmatic, even.

You knew, you heartless sod, you knew!

The only heart I possess is in my possession of yours.

And if that wasn’t fair nigh to a jab, Robyn didn’t know what was.

Yet even then, gods cannot know everything. Particularly when thisworld holds a pwca like to you….

Robyn slapped his hands to his ears and refused to hear. For all the good it did him.

’Tis the Lady who holds the hem of your sister’s spirit. She also has rooted the mighty Oak. She has played well, and you yourself set into motion things I never would dream.

She knew, then.

There is little She does not know. She is, after all, Mother of all things.

They’d nearly reached their next campsite. The forest was damp, muted-quiet from the rain and fog. Robyn walked point, but John kept inching farther ahead, exchanging looks with the others. All of them knew their leader was walking half aware.

Of course, they had come to some understanding of it by now. Part of the price of their success was that Robyn was oft hag-ridden waking as well as sleeping. But their prisoner was not so blasé; more than once Robyn felt Gisbourne hesitate, felt that gaze—concerned? unlikely!—strafe him.

Aye, and Robyn felt everything when this was happening to him….

Stop looking, like you care or it matters t’ the likes of you what’s happening to me. Leave me alone. I hate you. I never want to see you again. I should have died that night, should have—

Enough! the Horned Lord growled. Had you died, your consorts would have been lost to us forever.

You say’t like you think they ent still lost.

They would have gone on, blinded by a light which would enslave and blind others. We would never have raised the Ceugant into this world—

I don’t care. A silent whimper into the black. I don’t care, don’t care!

For the sake of all you were to each other, for all you could still be, you must care. They need you. Both of them, prisoned. Both of them jessed, hooded. You are the Hooded One. They are not.

So I’m the prisoner, then? And that’s to be right.

You’re the one who can bear the bindings.

Nay, I canna. Not this. Not anymore… go away. Leave me be!

Meanwhile, their prisoner was shuffling in his bonds—he could be heard a mile away.

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