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of her left hand. Although she could no longer feel the presence of spirits in earth and trees and sweetwater, still, she could feel the presence of the remaining two strands of Celandine’s ring.
    Six rings in one, finely wrought to fit together like a puzzle, Mother’s gimmal ring had survived the deadly cottage fire unharmed. A thing of aelfin power, that ring, and the aelfe had spoken through Rowan the day she had made that silver band of many strands the emblem of her outlaw band.
    Now Etty wore one on her finger, Beau one on hers. Lionel and Rook wore their strands suspended on thongs around their necks, under their jerkins, so that the rings nestled over their hearts.
    Tonight Rowan felt like the weakest strand of the band, almost broken. Not that she had ever called herself their leader or thought of herself as anything more than their comrade, despite the way they seemed to turn to her. But now she felt herself far less than ever before. No aelfin power in her anymore. Worse. Weakness. She was a burden to her friends.
    Yet here they remained with her, just as the silver circlet remained intact, embracing her finger. Like a larger embrace, her comrades encircled her. Far more than the strands of the ring bound them all together. And it was this thought that made Rowan’s heart feel warm and full even while the rain pelted down.
    With her right hand, Rowan caressed the two strands of silver, slipping them up to her knuckle and back again, hugging them with her fingertips.
    One of the silver strands remained on Rowan’s hand for herself. And one of them waited for someone yet to receive, someone so far unknown.

Ten
    B y the time birch and willow had come into leaf, two weeks later, Rowan and the others had reached the northern fringes of Sherwood Forest. Rowan rode a booted pony now; Beau had tied pieces of uncured deerskin around Dove’s feet to blur their hoofprints so that Guy of Gisborn, or other enemies, might not easily follow the trail. And the booted pony was brown; Beau had stained Dove with juice boiled from alder twigs.
    Then, only partly joking, Beau had attempted to eat the cooked wood. She was hungry. All of them were. Meat does not fill a body as bread or fruit would, and sometimes there was not even meat, for hunting while on the move is no simple matter, and at times not even a rabbit blundered into bowshot. As for foraging, this was the worst time of year. Sometimes supper was only wild onions or the eggs of nesting songbirds. Even fish was hard to come by, for fishing requires staying in one place for a time, and they had to keep moving on. Luckily, one day Rook had spied a mess of eels swarming up a brook to spawn, and scooped them out of the water with his bare hands. Poached eel for supper had seemed a feast, although Lionel grumbled that an eel was just a snake with fins.
    All of this, they endured for me, Rowan thought as she halted Dove to look at what lay ahead. My friends. Hungry on my account. Because she sought vengeance for her mother’s death. Otherwise they might still be sheltering warm and dry in Robin Hood’s great hollow oak tree.
    So it was with a humble heart that Rowan scanned the open, heathery uplands before her. From the concealment of one of the scattered copses at the northernmost reaches of Sherwood, she could just barely see Barnesdale Forest, a low lavender smudge on the far horizon beyond the heather moors. To get to Barnesdale, they must journey across that rolling upland, gleaming golden in the canted light of a sinking sun, its beauty deceitful. The moors offered no hiding for outlaws; Rowan knew that there would be danger. As surely as night was on the way right now, peril would be on the way tomorrow.
    And then, beyond Barnesdale, they must journey across open pastureland again before they reached Celandine’s Wood. More peril.
    For her own sake, Rowan did not care. But what right did she have to endanger all of them?
    As if guessing