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XLV. The Little Stone of
Robyn Hoode



The prioress slid one of Thomas’s arms off the side of the stuffed palliasse and over the bowl, took up a leaf-shaped blade by its thin metal handle, and cut along his forearm. The thick red blood began to flow.

Sister Amille continued to emit an odd tuneless humming, and the other wounded men on their straw pallets lay in a daze of the same spell she’d cast over Little John. Doncaster leaned over and studied the cut. “A good job of it,” he said. “But you drain him dry and he’ll be of no use as a teind.”

Sister Amille broke off her humming. “Oh, I won’t let him perish. There is something I would know of him.”

“How he is still alive?” Sir Richard asked the question as he closed the priory doors behind him. “I should like to hear that, as would Mother. That is, the Queen.”

The sister briefly smiled. “So it’s official. We all want to know the answer. He is too good at what he does, the way he interferes. The Queen does not seem to appreciate this. But she will. Tonight I put an end to all his obtrusion.”

We put an end to it, you mean,” corrected Sir Richard. The doors had no lock, no bar. He tugged on one instead, as if it were no great effort. The top hinge creaked and twisted, the wood deformed, and the two doors stood jammed together tightly in the middle. “I do hate to bring this up, but that John is soon going to realize he was spelled. This appraisal of yours is best finished on the other side.”

“Where it was always going to finish,” agreed Doncaster, “and him tossed into Hel.”

“Fine, go about it,” she answered in a tone that said she would not participate. She was hovering over her victim, watching. What she saw seemed at first an optical illusion—that the thin stream of blood had reversed direction. But it was no illusion. Blood was flowing up out of the pewter bowl and back into the incision she’d made. “Yes!” she hissed triumphantly. “Look! He is Yvag.”

“What?” Doncaster hurried over to her while Sir Richard, armed with an ördstone, began to cut an opening in the middle of the aisle directly in front of the palliasse on which Thomas lay.

The spitting ring of green fire opened onto one of Ailfion’s plazas, surrounded by glass and silver spires and needles pointing into the nocturnal blood-dark sky.

Something hard struck the heavy doors and then struck them again. There was yelling. Recognizable voices.

Doncaster tucked away his stone to draw his blade. Sister Amille unglamoured in an instant into Zhanedd, her gray-green face and golden eyes all that showed of the Yvag beneath the tunic and veil she wore. Zhanedd grabbed onto Thomas to pull him upright.

Sir Richard turned from the gate he’d opened. “But if he’s Yvag—”

Thomas came up easily and swiftly, eyes open, and he buried a black dagger in Zhanedd’s throat, then wrenched it down.

Wide-eyed and burbling up black blood, Zhanedd stumbled back out of reach and fell across the next patient who, spelled, flopped off the straw-filled bedding. Thomas hung onto his barbed dagger.

In that moment the broken door cracked further and was dragged partway open. Outlaws ducked in one at a time. Little John came first, his bow brandished as if to ward off a blow, followed by Will Scathelock, who fired even as he stood up. John’s shot followed close on. Arrows flew like winged vipers, and Calum charged in after them with a quarterstaff and a dagger. He went for Sir Richard, but halfway there, Sir Richard reshaped into Bragrender, who rose up to its full height as it flickered angrily through multiple forms snatched from those all around it.

“Stop!” cried Elias. “Calum, come back!”

But Calum did not hear. Basilisklike, Bragrender’s irresistible transformations stole Calum’s will. Even at the distance of the doorway the bowmen could all feel the creature’s bewitching effects and knew to stay back.

Will and another archer managed to fire off two arrows. Little John cried, “I don’t dare for fear of killing Calum!” Will’s arrow struck Bragrender, penetrating the armor, but just barely. The other arrow hit the opened gate and slowly passed through it.

Doncaster tackled Thomas and both tumbled off the pallet. He tried to stab Thomas with a thin quillon dagger. Thomas grabbed the abbot’s wrist with one hand and punched him in the face with the other, once, twice, the second time slashing across his face with the slick dagger. It hardly seemed to faze Red Roger.

Bragrender clutched Calum as a shield and sidestepped to where Zhanedd lay, black blood still bubbling from her long wound. Bragrender lifted her as if she weighed nothing, then hurtled across the aisle and through the open gate. An instant later, it tossed Calum back out, then sealed up the gateway. Seeing the gate close, Doncaster tried to get up and away.

As the last of the portal sparked and was gone, the outlaws and Waits raced to Calum and Thomas’s aid.

Will fired into Doncaster’s back, the arrow coming out the front. Doncaster folded forward, nearly impaling Thomas on the protruding head of the arrow.

Little John reached down and grabbed Red Roger by his hair. Thomas raised his dagger and stabbed the abbot through his heart. Knowing what was coming then, he pushed the body off him and onto the nearest palliasse, where the miller of Palavia Parva lay. Doncaster erupted in a mist of red.

John found himself holding up an already rotting corpse, which he flung away. It sagged across the miller, who was just beginning to stir and who shrieked in coming face-to-face with the moldering Red Roger.

“Woodwose!” bellowed Little John. He pulled Thomas up. “Ye yet live.”

“Thanks to you and Will, I—” He stopped. Behind Little John, Elias and Geoffrey were kneeling with Calum, whose lifeless body they held between them.

Elias’s head swung like a bell. “Such a good lad,” he said. “He was the best of us.”

“He was. So, too, Sir Richard,” said Thomas, “whose likeness they stripped from him to deceive us. Their idea of a jest.”

“We should kill them all.”

“I wouldn’t disagree with you.”

Elias continued to embrace Calum, his head bowed.

Will said, “But you were dead in the wagon—we couldn’t so much as rouse you.”

Thomas answered, “I was poisoned. A dagger, a ring perhaps, wielded by Sir Richard who was not Sir Richard any more than that rotten thing was Red Roger of Doncaster.”

“Skinwalker.” Will all but spat the word. He told Thomas, “They slew Sister Amille and the others.”

Thomas considered that. “This was a coordinated plan.”

“But how could they know we would triumph in the vill?”

“They didn’t have to. If we had lost there they would simply have abandoned the priory. It’s possible the Yvag—the demon—Zhanedd, didn’t kill the sisters until she knew we were on our way. Sir Richard sent word ahead. I could only listen, since they had me paralyzed in the wagon. I knew before we arrived that the prioress was false, but at that point I could say nothing.”

Geoffrey asked, “But why then did they bleed you? It’s as if they were trying to heal rather than kill you.” He grabbed Thomas’s wrist and inspected his forearm. “Why, that’s near healed,” he said in wonder.

Thomas drew his arm away and replied, “Their plan seemed to be to keep me alive but weak so they could take me through that ring they opened.”

“So, the sister was nah part’a this,” John said. “Another innocent sacrificed.”

“All of them innocent,” said Elias. “Calum. Warin.” He met Thomas’s gaze.

“Isabella,” Thomas added. “The creatures are pitiless. Which is why we have to remain vigilant and drive them out wherever we find them. For those they’ve killed already and those they’d kill down the road.”

Elias pointed to the spot where the gate had been. “What about that?” he asked.

“I don’t expect they’ll come through here again. What can it gain them? The spinners are no more, destroyed in the mill, and John’s sure to be more cautious now about who he robs on the King’s Way.” That caused some laughter. “But we still need to take care of these men’s wounds.”

“Aye,” they all agreed, save for the miller of Palavia Parva. He’d gotten free of Doncaster’s corpse and was sitting up. The wound in his shoulder had stopped bleeding. “What about my mill?” he wailed.

Thomas said, “I think most of us here will pitch in to rebuild it for you, good sir. I’ve some skill myself as a stonemason. We’ll make it for you better than before. Your sacrifice, after all, was critical to our carrying the day.”

“And we have carried the day, haven’t we, Robyn?” Will Scathelock declared.


Wounds were dressed, a bone or two was set. Elias and Geoffrey started a fire in the hearth.

Thomas and Will left the bowmen and outlaws to tend to each other, while the two of them, now with lit candles, walked around the priory cloister to the dorter where Will had found the nuns. They lay still as death. Yet, upon closer inspection Thomas didn’t believe they were dead. He believed he was looking at the same situation as with the Yvagvoja he’d encountered. They could lie in a suspended state for months, years, decades. Seeing the sisters tore open his memory of Isabella that final night, though no one was inhabiting these women, no cruel monsters wearing them like clothing. “There must be a simple way to wake them,” he told Will. Even while riding their conveyances, Yvagvoja could awaken when one of their little hobs screamed out an alarm. This magic must be similarly and simply broken. He only had to identify the means.

Zhanedd and others hummed a kind of music that invaded the mind, sapped the will. Alderman Stroud had done that to him long ago in an attempt to get him to kill Alpin Waldroup. Zhanedd had sent Little John out into the night with a few simple commands, once he was under her spell. So these nuns could have been sung to sleep. But Zhanedd was gone and they remained as lifeless as ever.

Looking closely at them, Will remarked, “They are dead. Look at them. As still as that beast you had me ride.” He reached into his purse and took out the ördstone Thomas had given him.

As he held it, the blue jewels of the stone twinkled in a sequence. Then a gossamer strand extended from the stone to the nearest woman. She seemed to tremble and then drew a deep breath. Astonished, Will backed away.

As if it was tracing the way to another portal, the stone emitted a second strand of light, and then another to the sleeping girl nearest him. She also began to stir as a spiderweb of thin lines connected to all of the sleeping nuns.

The first turned over as if to go back to sleep. Others stretched or yawned. One raised her head and looked right at them. She gasped.

Will stood, dumbfounded. Thomas took him by the arm and whispered, “I think it best we not remain in the good sisters’ dorter, brother Will. Come on.” They picked up the candles and hurried out into the night through the doors where Will had exited before.

Once outside, Thomas began to laugh. Will eyed him as if he was mad. “It was right in front of me all this time.” He held up his own ördstone. “All the tombs I opened with Alpin and on my own, the sleepers had two items on them, three if you count their armor: these barbed black daggers and an ördstone. The daggers are protective, of course. The stones open the way between here and Ailfion. ’Twas all I thought they did.”

“Yes. Who’s Alpin?”

Thomas waved the question away. “Then I discovered they can take you to anyplace from anyplace, provided you focus on your destination. And they point the way to previously opened gates.” He held up the stone. “Now, what if they also signaled the sleeper to wake in the first place? What if this one stone does everything?”

Will asked, “What mean you by everything, Robyn?” He held his own stone away, observed it askance.

Thomas could barely see his, save for the sparkling jewels that twinkled in some sort of sequence. He lifted the candle closer. Seven blue jewels scattered randomly across the surface of the near-circular black stone—but not random, because tiny etched lines connected them, fifteen if you viewed them one way, nineteen if you considered each tiny segment its own separate line. The jewels weren’t all the same size, either. The one set against the top scalloped depression—there were four—was tinier than the rest. The candles made the stones glitter as if grains of something sparkly were worked into the black stone.

He knew how to hold it to slice open and seal the world. He’d learned of necessity that he had only to recall a location for the stone to take him there. This one Alpin had lost in þagalwood, where Thomas had recovered it. It had saved his life then, and was attuned to him now. And yet it had taken Little John straight to his brother in Palavia Parva—perhaps because Thomas had remained close by? Because it knew he wanted it to assist John? That made it, what, aware, alive?

Inside his head, Thomas could sense the stone, a tightness as if his hair was standing on end. The jewels brightened and flickered in a new pattern. He held the candle away to find the stones bathing him and Will in their blue glow. He said, “I don’t understand. I knew them to be dead. They didn’t breathe.”

“Yes, and you returned them to life—with that.”

Will stared at him, horrified.

Thomas realized that could not be the story that got around. He slapped Will Scathelock on the shoulder and said, “They were under a spell, Will. That’s all it was. Created, I imagine, by another of these. Shatter the spell was all you did. No one’s been brought back to life.”

Will gave an unhinged laugh. “No, ’course not. Just spells and demons ever since the Nottingham fair.” He handed his own ördstone to Thomas. “Here, you keep it. I—I need some communion wine. A hogshead should do.” He was backing away as he spoke, then turned and walked quickly toward the wagon they’d arrived in, saw the unearthly white stallion nearby and immediately changed direction, heading for the broken doors.

Thomas could only grin after him.

With the two ördstones in one hand and a candle in the other, he wandered around the priory and through a garden wall. There was a stone bench among the shrubbery, and he sat, putting the candle down beside him. He held up the two stones. “You aren’t made by God, now, are you?” he said to them. He turned his over, laying the jewels against his palm. The fluttering candle flame revealed the intricate array of etched lines on the back. “But surely you are another of Isabella’s inaudita.

The words were hardly out of his mouth and then she was there. In front of him, exactly as she had been on that night in the King’s Houses when they had finally talked: her dark green gown, and on the back of her head the netted snood into which she’d drawn her hair. She was sitting with her bare feet up on the edge of the leather chair, her expression teasing. She said, “Are you familiar with the writings of Gervase of Tilbury?” Then it had been a question out of the blue. Now it was asked in response to his saying inaudita aloud. This was more than mere memory of an event. The interchange itself had transformed.

He tried to recall the conversation. One thing he remembered: “I have a request of you, m’lady.”

She focused upon him on the stone bench. “Yes?” she said, as clearly as if she were right there.

He was about to repeat what he’d said to her then, but he hesitated, recalling the riddle that had joined them: Another Janet for your bed, short-lived the love . . . 

Was it possible there was some memory of his wife he might ignite? He tried recalling her the night he’d first caught her bathing in the river. Isabella vanished, but nothing replaced her. Janet’s face was vague to him, the memory too far away to reach. Nothing appeared.

But he hadn’t possessed this ördstone then. It had come to be his only later, after Ailfion.

He thought about that. What did he remember of that jump from Italia to Melrose? Lying beside her after his escape, he’d asked if she remembered the first night when she’d snuck into his bed. He’d been out that first night, watching the Yvags take their new teind, and didn’t come home till morning. And Janet—

Janet was lying naked beside him. He was right there. He felt the linen cloth beneath him, watched the firelight at his back throw its flowing shadows over her and against the wall. “I did not sneak,” she said. “You weren’t home, so you’ve no right to characterize it as such!” He laughed, and then laughed again. He couldn’t stop, couldn’t believe it. He could see her, smell her, wrap her up in his arms and hold onto her. She wasn’t gone. She was warm and alive, and her face was crystal clear. He pulled her tight and clung to her. “Oh, my God, my God,” he whispered and closed his eyes in bliss.


Elias and Geoffrey and Little John found him in the morning, stretched out on the bench in the priory garden. The candle had melted away. To them he seemed overcome with joy at seeing them. Tears ran from his eyes. He behaved as if he’d shared substantially in the wine they’d drunk during the night, after the nuns and the prioress had awakened.

“We gave her a fright, whereas she terrified us,” said Geoffrey. “Thought it to be the creatures come back again. But Will set us right. Proclaimed they’d all been under a spell and you and he discovered how to lift it. Miraculous.”

As Geoffrey was speaking, Thomas tucked the stones into the pouch hung from his neck and silently vowed never to lose them. Janet, Isabella—they lived still, whether in his mind alone or in the world when he called them up, what mattered was that he could find each of them by recalling the exchange of a word or two. By some means the ördstone contained his life from the moment he’d recovered it.

Little John said, “Adam D’Everingham’s turned up last night, but we couldn’t find tha nowhere. ’E wants us both to join ’is Keepers of Sherwood.”

“So now we’re to be Keepers and Waits?” Thomas laughed. “That can’t last. Orrels will never allow it.”

“Oh, he might,” said Elias. “If persuaded. We shall tell him all about it before we bury poor Calum in St. Mary’s with his comrades.”

True, there was Nottingham and Sherwood to protect from another Yvag incursion, and more sleepers to hunt down. For as long as it lasted, he supposed he would live the part. The Woodwose was dead for all save Little John and Thomas resurrected as Robyn thanks to Isabella Birkin. “And how is the prioress of Kirklees this morning?” he asked.

“Come see for yourself,” said John. “She says she would like ta meet the fella who brought ’er back ta life.”

“That was Will.”

“Not according to ’im.”

“Is there any wine left at all?”

They strolled back to the broken doors, while, following behind in theatrical fashion, Geoffrey proclaimed, “Thus ends our performance here, and with our good lady waiting perfervid to thank her savior, the infamous Robyn Hoode!”


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