I was this close to loosing the shaft when I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Put up,” said a familiar voice in my ear. “The sheriff ’s men are returning. It is time to fly.”
“I have him,” I insisted. “I can take him and save the world a load of trouble.”
“It may bring more trouble than it saves. Another day. We have what we came for—and now we must fly.”
With that, Bran pulled me into the brushwood at the side of the road and we were away.
No sooner in the wood and on the path than we heard the sheriff shouting behind us, “After them! Through there! Ten marks to the man who brings them back!”
Immediately, we heard the crack and snap of branches as the soldiers searched for our trail. In less time than it takes to tell, they found it and were onto us.
So now, here was a bother: fleeing through the woods over snow-covered pathways and no way to cover our tracks. Those fellas would have no difficulty at all seeing where we went. The first clearing we came to, I stopped to make a stand. “We can take them here, my lord,” I said. “I’ll drop the first one, you take the second.”
“I don’t have a bow,Will,” said Bran. “So, tonight, we let them live.”
“They will not pay us the same coin if they catch us,” I replied. “That is a fair certainty.”
“True enough,” Bran allowed. Gone was the feathered cloak and the long-beaked headpiece; dressed in his customary black tunic and trousers, he shivered slightly with the cold. “Consider it just one of the many things that makes us better men than they are.”
Our pursuers could be heard thrashing through the wood, coming closer with every heartbeat.
Bran smiled and winked his eye, his face a disembodied shape floating in the gloom. “But that does not mean we cannot have a little fun at their expense.” Turning lightly on his heel, he said, “Come, Will, let’s give them something to talk about when they join their comrades at Castle de Braose.”
With that, he flitted away. I glanced over my shoulder, then followed him into the forest. I caught up with him a few dozen paces down the path, where he had stopped beside an ancient oak and was tugging on a bit of ivy vine. “This is where we start,” he said, as the end of a rope snaked down from a branch above. “Stand where you are and make no more tracks,” he instructed.
I did as I was told. Bran wound the end of the rope around one wrist and gave it a tug. The rope snapped taut. He tugged again and the end of a rope ladder dropped from the limb overhead.
“Up you go, Will,” he said, passing the ladder to me. “I will hold it for you, but be quick.”
Slinging my bow, I grasped the highest rung I could reach and swung myself up, climbing the ladder with no little difficulty as it twisted and turned like an angry serpent under my weight. I gritted my teeth and hung on. After some tricksy rope climbing, I gained the limb of the oak at last. “Pull up the ladder!” hissed Bran in an urgent whisper. The sheriff ’s men were that close he could not speak more loudly or risk being overheard.
“There is time,” I whispered back. “Take hold and I’ll pull you up.”
But he was already gone.
CHAPTER 12
I hauled up the ladder as fast as I could and crouched in the crux of the largest bough to wait. Within five heartbeats the sheriff ’s men burst into the clearing we had just left. A few more steps along our trail carried them to the base of the oak, where our tracks became slightly confused. Although I could no longer see the path below, and was not fool enough to risk looking down, I could well imagine what they were seeing: the well-formed footprints of two fleeing men set in deep, undisturbed snow, and then . . . one set of footprints vanishing.
Only a solitary track continued along the path, and they were not slow to mark this.
They paused to catch a breath beneath my hiding place. I could hear them puffing hard as they stood below, searching, trying to find where the second pair of tracks had gone. One of them muttered something in French—something about the futility of catching anything in this accursed forest. And then