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word. In other ways, man is weaker.” Confound everything, she had lost her advantage, and he was back on his high horse. Within an eye blink, Etty changed tactics. “Tell me, Father, why are there holes in your smallclothes?”
    She could not have appalled him more if she had spit. He jerked upright and gasped for breath. “How dare you! I—”
    â€œYou lack a few coppers to spend for the making of new ones. Why so?”
    With his red eyebrows bunched fit to fly, he glared at her without speaking. She stared back at him. From the far side of the oak, she heard the laughter and talk of outlaws. A mistle thrush ranted from a high branch, and in the sky overhead, a hawk screamed. But around the campfire, all was silence.
    Etty said at last, “Lord Basil is pressing you hard, is that it?”
    â€œAye!” The answer exploded out of him. “If you had married him as I bade you, to ally our families, all would have been well. But since you willfully disobeyed me—”
    â€œHave you not reared me to possess my own mind? Now should I take poison if you command me to?”
    King Solon ignored this, ranting on, releasing truth at last. “Since you wed him not, all has fallen to ruin. His army is three times the size of mine. Already last autumn he took from me the better part of my lands. And now that spring is here, he will soon besiege Auberon itself.”
    â€œOh,” Etty whispered, for she was beginning to surmise what he wanted of her.
    â€œBecause you have been an undutiful daughter,” he said with his teeth glinting amid his bristling beard, “folk will starve and soldiers will die.”
    Etty felt weak. Visions flashed in her mind of terrified peasants running from their homes, of crops and villages in flames, of soldiers bloodily dying and castle walls falling, of rude strangers brawling into Auberon, tearing the tapestries, into her tower chamber, tossing her books into the fire, into her home—
    No. Sherwood Forest was her home now.
    â€œBut perhaps it is not too late,” her father was saying with an edge like a rat’s bite in his voice. “Lord Basil might yet be mollified if you submit yourself to him in wedlock.”
    Etty felt Rowan’s gentle touch on her hand. That contact seemed like the only real thing in the world, the only thing that kept her from whirling away in a wind of nightmare. Her father’s high-browed face swam before her eyes, his pallid skin stretched like parchment over the skull of his forehead.
    â€œYou quote the philosophers,” he was saying. “What would Socrates or any of the rest of them say now? Just by doing your duty to me as a daughter, you could save many lives.”
    â€œEtty,” Rowan whispered, “no. It’s all wrong.”
    Was it wrong? It felt wrong, yet . . . Etty shook her head, trying to clear it, but the thought would not go away. All her father wanted of her was sacrifice. And sacrifice was noble, was it not?

Ten

    S acrifice. Etty knew her duty: to give herself, the way most women did, the way Mother had always given and given of herself. . . .
    Mother.
    In that cage of Father’s making.
    Have Father command Mother’s release? When sky turned brown and earth turned blue, maybe it would happen. But till then, somebody had better do something.
    Etty’s feet, wandering like her thoughts, had already carried her to the edge of Robin Hood’s hollow. “I’m going to get Mother,” she said to the oak, the songbirds in tree and sky, the outlaws.
    She felt many eyes staring at her. Lionel, Rook, Rowan, the merry men, they all gawked.
    It didn’t matter. Mama would know what to do. Etty turned toward Fountain Dale.
    Rowan limped forward to catch her by the arm. “Etty, wait.”
    â€œNo. I’m going now.”
    â€œLass, bide a bit.” Robin Hood strode forward to stand in her way, reaching out toward her as if his touch could