Jennifer Roberson - [Robin Hood 02] by Lady of Sherwood Page B

off. “What news?”
    As fog stirred and thinned about them, as equine exhalations set spumes of steam into the air. Gerard’s gaze flicked to Robin, who read the answer in the messenger’s expression. “ Le roi, ” Gerard said breathlessly. “ Morte. ”
    Robin shut his eyes. But closed lids did nothing to shield him from the truth, the piercing anguish of acknowledgment.
    Richard Plantagenet. Coeur de Lion. Richard, King of the English. Malik Ric, as the Saracens called him.
    Not Richard.
    Not Richard.
    Not the warrior who had knighted him at Acre after they took the city, who brought him into his inner circle of counselors and boon companions, who ransomed him from the Turks before even his father could.
    The Saracens would say, what is written is written. But he could not countenance such loss. Could not comprehend what such absence would mean to the world.
    The world that was, in one moment, utterly unmade.
    Mercardier, with startling alacrity, heaved himself out of the saddle and fell to his knees in the muddy, fog-laden road. With no grace, merely a surfeit of grief, of seemingly incongruous piety, he bowed his head and crossed himself, then began to murmur a prayer in hoarse-voiced French.
    Not Richard.
    Robin’s eyes, painfully dry because nothing in his youth had permitted tears, locked on to those of the messenger. His sluggish mind told him he knew this man, that this man knew him. And Gerard, acknowledging it, wore the face of bitter acceptance.
    “We are sent,” Gerard said in his accented English; he, too, was a man of Aquitaine, of Eleanor and Richard, duchess and titular duke. “Many of us, so many of us, to carry word. To London. To France. To Brittany. To all the great houses, the great men of England.”
    “My father,” Robin murmured blankly.
    Gerard’s expression acknowledged that. He knew Sir Robert of Locksley. Knew who and what his father was. “My lord,” he said. “The king is dead. It is my duty to carry word.”
    Mercardier, done with prayers, surged so quickly to his feet that his horse shied back, prevented from leaving the road only by dint of a mailed hand clenched upon his rein.
    “Who?” his ruined voice scraped. “Who was named? Prince John, or Arthur of Brittany?”
    Gerard’s face was pale and taut. “Both.”
    “ Both? ” Robin demanded, shocked out of sorrow into politics and the necessity of understanding the implications.
    “The king wishes—” Gerard broke it off, began again. “The late king wished the strongest to inherit.”
    He understood at once. He knew Richard better than most, and understood.
    So did the mercenary. They stared at one another, tense and grim, knowing what the king had done and what it meant.
    “I am for France,” Mercardier declared abruptly, turning to his horse.
    Of course he was. Richard was there. Richard must yet be served.
    “Where?” the captain asked, swinging a leg across the broad rump of his mount.
    “They will take him to Fontevrault Abbey,” Gerard answered. “To be entombed at his father’s feet.”
    Robin grimaced. Fontevrault was in Angers, in Richard’s French domains. England lost even the body of her king, as it had lost his father’s before him.
    As Mercardier settled into the saddle and gathered reins, he nodded once, decisively. “Then that is where I shall go.” His gaze was grim as he looked at Robin. “And you?” He paused, and the tone acquired an undertone of contempt. “The king now has no need of his matched boys.”
    Wincing inwardly—Mercardier wielded words as well as his sword—but permitting none of it to show, Robin looked at Gerard. “Where are you bound?”
    “To Huntington. To Nottingham.”
    To the earl, and the sheriff. Neither of whom would permit such news to paralyze mind or body, nor halt the plans they would plot.
    “Go elsewhere,” Robin suggested. “I will carry the word to my father, and to the sheriff.”
    But Gerard was experienced in such things as might affect