Shadow of the Wolf by Tim Hall Page A

his stick so hard his knuckles had turned white. Lagot and Alwin were stepping back.
    ‘Let him go, Narris,’ Lagot said.
    ‘We don’t want his food,’ Alwin said. ‘We don’t want anything he’s touched.’
    Narris scratched at his face with the stump of his left arm. ‘It’s not that easy. He’s a thief. Thieves have to pay. No matter what.’ He raised his gaze, looking to the far side of the pond. Robin saw him nod.
    So, there are more than three of you, after all.
    He turned just in time to see Swet Woolward and Harmon Byeford rushing him from behind, thumping across Mill Bridge. And then they were coming at him from both sides, Narris yelling and leading the charge down Marsh Ridge and even Alwin and Lagot shouting and swinging their sticks now that they could see it was one against five.
    Robin lashed out at his nearest assailant and he felt his fist connect with bone and in the next instant his world had shrunk to kicks and blows and the taste of blood and the feeling of hard earth and finally a cold deep churning and gasping for breath as his world turned over and swirled red and black.
     
    At least three of the others had ended up in Mill Pond with him. By the time Robin pulled himself to the bank they were helping each other out of the reeds and were dragging themselves up through the village. Narris was limping, and it sounded like Alwin Topcroft was sobbing.
    Robin was bleeding freely from a cut on his forehead; one hand was numb but the fingers still flexed.
Barely a scratch. They weren’t even trying.
    But then he noticed something: his father’s shortbow was no longer strapped to his back. He looked for it and saw they must have taken that too, along with the hare.
    Now
Robin’s rage was rising.
    He stalked up into Wodenhurst, looking for Narris, looking for his bow.
    As he moved through the lanes, beneath the boughs of theTrystel Tree, he was met by silence, and by faces at windows, and children who came out to look before being dragged back inside. And finally, at the top of the village, he was met by a circle of armed men and women.
    Pagan Topcroft was there, as nervous and rat-like as his son, gripping a mattock; and big Nute Highfielde, dumb as an ox, holding a threshing flail; and mean Agnes Poley, with her wildfowl net. There were eight or nine of them, and dizzy as Robin was he didn’t put up much of a fight before they had him in the net and were dragging him through the dirt.
    ‘He could have crippled my son,’ Pagan Topcroft was saying.
    ‘I saw the whole thing,’ Anges Poley said. ‘He attacked them with a stick.’
    ‘He tried to steal their meat,’ another voice said. ‘Food that could feed the whole village and he wanted it for himself!’
    ‘Put him in here, where an animal belongs.’
    ‘Where’s my bow?’ Robin shouted, thrashing within the net. ‘Give it back!’
    They thrust him into an empty cowshed, slammed the door and bolted it and left him there in the dark, dripping wet and bleeding and cold.
     
    Hours later, a voice at the door of the cowshed.
    ‘Robin, it’s me. And Mabel. Just us. We’re coming in.’
    The door opened. Warin and Mabel Felstone moved inside.
    ‘I’ve brought you some of Narris’s clothes,’ Mabel said. ‘They’ll be a bit small for you now, but you should get out of those wet things.’
    Robin was shivering, but he didn’t reach for the clothes. He remained sitting against one wall, his hood raised. Warin came close and laid Robin’s shortbow on the ground.
    ‘He shouldn’t have taken it,’ Warin said. ‘I don’t know who threw the first stone, and I don’t care. I just need this stupid war to stop. Here, I brought you this too. I’ve been using it in the coppice. But I’ve been thinking, your father would have wanted you to have it.’ He gave Robin a bone-handled knife in a buckskin sheath. It was his father’s old woodsman’s blade, serrated on one edge, slicing steel on the other.
    ‘Why now?’ Robin said,