“You are in grave danger,” her mother said, white puffs of breath obscuring her face. “You must leave Kirklees tonight.”
Isabelle’s voice pitched up in protest. “All this because I…embarrassed some lowly soldier? I know what I did was wrong, but he was no better. Those people were no threat to them. It was rusty threshers and makeshift cudgels against broadswords and crossbows. They never would have stood a chance. I know the people attacked those soldiers, and the soldiers must defend themselves, but the villagers were only hungry! I cannot imagine if King John knew the true state of his people starving here that he would approve of such brutality. Surely, if we speak to someone in charge, perhaps if I promise to apologize—”
“It is far beyond that,” her mother said with a firm shake of her head. “I wish I had more time to explain, but they will be after you as soon as they realize you are gone. You must leave now, immediately. Cover your tracks, leave no trace. Just as I taught you.”
“For hunting, not for…being hunted,” Isabelle said, numbness settling over her despite the rapid pace of her heart. “Mother, these are soldiers! Not rabbits or poachers. I could not possibly outwit them, even with your help.”
A quiet breath slipped out of Marien. “I cannot go with you. You must go alone.”
Isabelle’s jaw sagged. “What? I cannot go on my own. I have never even been outside Kirkleestown!”
“If there were another way, any other possible way, I would do it,” her mother said, stroking her cheek. Isabelle wished she could curl up and take refuge from this nightmare in her mother’s even tone and sure hands.
“But why can you not go with me?” Isabelle begged.
Marien would not meet her gaze. “Because I have other business here. I cannot leave, and you cannot stay. You will have to be strong, my child, even when the worst comes for you. You will have to be braver than you feel.”
“What do I have to do?” Isabelle whispered, her voice trembling on the edge of exhaustion.
Her mother gestured down the main road out of Kirklees. “Go south until you reach the town of Huntingdon, three days’ journey from here. Stay to the woods and keep out of sight. Do not seek help from the towns or travelers you pass along the way. Find the Blue Boar Inn at the split in the road, and ask for Thomas. Tell him that I sent you. He is an old family friend and you can trust him. He will know where to take you.” She hesitated again, a tremor going through her hands. “Tell him the Wolf has returned.”
Something in her mother’s tone and the crease of fear deepening between her eyebrows chilled Isabelle more than anything else that had happened that day. She clung to her mother’s hands, all pretense of bravery abandoning her.
“Mother, please—”
But a solitary shout went up from the direction of Frederick’s farm, slicing between them and severing their conversation. They cut their gazes to the impenetrable darkness of the woods, but nothing emerged from the shadows. Yet. Isabelle held her breath, willing herself into quiet stillness as they waited. Another shout rose, and then another, drawing closer.
“You have to run, Isabelle,” her mother whispered, her voice vibrating.
Isabelle tried to move her feet, but they wouldn’t obey. Her chest fluttered with little breaths, her head spinning. The next shout came close enough that she could make out the words clearly.
“Find the girl!”
“Run, Isabelle,” her mother whispered harshly, pushing her toward the road. “Run!”
And so she ran.
This couldn’t be the place her mother meant. Three days of running for her life, half starving and living off foraged berries because she couldn’t risk a fire to cook any meat, sleeping in snatches and waking up soaked in terror sweats, her legs already moving to run, to bring her to…a tavern?
The Blue Boar Inn—if it even was an inn, she thought it must be of the most unsavory kind—shone like a sweaty, foamy, frothy beacon of male indulgence. If she had imagined the opposite of the priory in Kirklees, this was the kind of place she would have envisioned. Woodsmen the size of plow oxen crowded around tables made from felled tree stumps, their beards hanging down over their tunics like fur, and their legs thicker than tree trunks in their rough woolen hose. The low-slung building behind them vibrated with calls for ale and off-key singing of songs that would make even the most worldly of the sisters turn red with shock. The only door into the inn, as far as she could tell, was on a direct path through the men, swinging open and shut like a curtain caught in a wind, stuffing so much humanity inside she thought the building would burst.
All this Isabelle watched from a stand of trees down the road, hunkered among the sparse brush, shivering and starving and on the verge of tears. Her skirts were splattered with mud and torn along the hems, her hair snarled and peppered with leaves and branches that made her scalp itch something terrible. The fine linen her mother had wrapped around her wrists had long ago disintegrated into black tatters. No doubt these men would cry ghost if they saw her emerge from the woods in such a state, a haunted soul denied the afterlife.
Now all those times she’d sworn to leave the rocky walls of Kirklees to seek the outside world struck her as exactly what they were—the foolish, naive fantasies of a child. Oh, how Sister Catherine would crow if she could see her, the old shrew. No doubt she was even now lording Isabelle’s arrest over Marien, as if it proved that her impulsive choices had finally got the better of her. A pang of guilt stabbed her gut at the idea that Sister Catherine might, for once in her miserable miserly life, be right.
She couldn’t do it. Even though the luscious aroma of stew slipping in between the smell of pine and dirt made her stomach beg for just a small spoonful, and her feet ached for a chair and her back for a soft bed, she couldn’t scrape together the courage to march through all those men just to find this Thomas.
“Maybe it will be easier in the morning,” she whispered to herself, running her fingers over the fletching of an arrow for the hundredth time that night. “Surely they must have…trees to chop, or boars to wrestle, or…whatever it is these men do.”
But she knew better. She knew she would have no more courage come sunrise and she didn’t have the time to wait. She’d heard the hooves up and down the road as she hid in the trees, light on the balls of her feet and sticking to the heavier parts of the underbrush as her mother taught her. She might even be too late now, and the soldiers might have already made their way here and were even now lying in wait for her inside. Though she did not think these foresters would take kindly to a contingent of soldiers in their midst, so perhaps she still had time. Not much, though.
A crowd of young men half the height and size of the other foresters approached the front door as she watched, many of them with cheeks and jaws still soft and chubby. Not that they acted like it. It seemed the smaller they were, the bigger their voices and bravado, so that even the youngest among them swaggered around like the only cock in the henhouse. The others mostly ignored him, but it gave Isabelle an idea.
She tore into the burlap fabric of the knapsack her mother had given her, a few crumbs from her last precious meal two days ago spilling on the ground as she twisted the fabric into the rough shape of a hat. She piled her hair into a thick knot on top of her head and scrunched the hat down over it. The burlap itched and slid around with the weight of her hair whenever she moved, but it covered what it needed to cover.