Will in Scarlet by Matthew Cody

Author:Matthew Cody
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-375-86895-5
Publisher: Random House Children's
Published: 2013-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

“William Shackley is dead.”

—Will Scarlet

Guy was still alive, Osbert was dying if not dead already, and for the second time Will was fleeing from his own castle. Only this time he’d escaped through a garbage chute.

Wolfslayer. Failure. Coward.

As he and Much trudged though the muddy field back to their hidden horses, Will tried to remember Osbert as he once was—laughing, quick to anger but full of life. He didn’t want his last memory of Osbert to be of him broken and dying. The look of hope in his eyes when he’d recognized Will was a cruel joke. The old knight expected him to go on to do great things, and perhaps it was for the best that Osbert died before he could realize his disappointment.

Will had missed his opportunity to kill Sir Guy because of bad luck. It didn’t matter that there was no way he could’ve known that the Horse Knight was away; he’d still failed.

“So that old man was a knight of your … father’s? Lord Shackley?”

Much’s voice startled Will out of his morose thoughts.

“Hmm? Oh.”

Of course. Everything Osbert had said in that cell exposed the truth about Will’s family, his own identity. And Much had heard every word.

“He was … not himself,” said Will. “You saw him. He thought you were a girl. Delusional.”

Much wouldn’t look at him. Funny that the boy should so easily be bothered by this. He was so small and delicately featured that this couldn’t have been the first time he’d been mistaken for a girl.

“But the way you answered him,” said Much. “Are you delusional, too?”

Will started to protest but stopped. He’d been in trouble enough times in his life to know when he was caught.

“Are you going to tell the others?” he asked.

“Remember what I told you before? About not being so important that you’d be trouble? Well, you are most certainly trouble.”

“I know.”

“Where are your parents now? They say the lord of Shackley was killed. …”

“That was my uncle Geoff,” said Will. “My parents are alive, at least I think they are, but they are both … overseas.”

His mother, he dared to hope, was safely with her family in France. She would be heartsick with worry, but at least she was safe. His father was a different story. Since they’d fled the castle, there’d been no word of King Richard’s captivity. The best Will could assume was that his father was still imprisoned with the missing king. It was a bitter thing, when the best a boy could wish for was for his parent to be in chains, but better in chains than suffer Geoff’s fate.

It was almost more pain than he could bear, and so he kept it buried deep down in an ugly dark place within himself, bound up tightly with wire and shackled to his need for vengeance. He had to find Sir Guy. He had to find another way.

“William Shackley is dead,” said Will. “I’m Will Scarlet now. I don’t know if you can understand this, but … I had to become someone else.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.