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an unfamiliar weight now, when once it had been frequent. That was years before. Another lifetime. Another person. The maid she had been then had long sincevanished. A childless widow remained, a score and seven years of age now, a veritable crone.
    Her palm slid along the sleek length of the bow, idly testing. Five feet of Spanish yew, carved from the heart of a seasoned log and fashioned without joints; horn nocks clamped in place with a thin length of twisted flax permeated with beeswax, a resilient bowstring for arrows made of ash and fletched with goose feathers. Lovely, lethal, cherished as much for the giver as the gift; a trick of nature had lent her the talent to use it well.
    The redolence of wet, chewed earth filled the air. Her breathing was soft, a faint haze in front of her face to dissipate in the mist. It was densely wooded beyond this track, quiet oblivion amidst tangled vines and creepers. The leafy, thick crown of the Cockpen Oak was barely visible; it presided over a small clearing near the Edwinstowe Road.
    The fluty trill of a plover rent the air and propelled her forward. When she neared the massive girth of the Cockpen Oak, Fiskin grinned out at her from the deep cavity scoured by time and nature. She smiled.
    “ ’Tis a little late in the year for a plover. A jackdaw is the proper signal.” Her criticism was no more dampening than the rain that failed to penetrate the lush bower of leaves that spread almost to the ground.
    “Oh.” Fiskin emerged from the oak. He brushed clinging leaves from his rough woolen jerkin. “But not so late this year, milady. Winter forage was scarce in the fields.”
    “Forage was scarce all over England.” She gestured to the road with her longbow. “Do the others wait?”
    “Yea, milady, in the verge along the Birklands road. The bracken there is high as a man’s head already, for the trees are thinner and let in the light.”
    Tension tightened the muscles in her shoulders and down her back, knotted in her belly and knees. She bent a glance down the indicated track. Nothing moved, save shuddering leaves struck by rain.
    Fiskin gazed wistfully at the bow she held; his eyes were dark blue, hair the color and texture of straw thatch, his frame slender as a sapling.
    “I could shoot it, milady.” He gestured to the bow. “If a gentlewoman can bend the yew …”
    “No.”
    He let the eager hand drop to one side and tugged at his forelock in belated servitude. It was a gesture Jane disliked; a frown pleated her brow.
    “There is no need for that, Fiskin. I merely meant that you could not draw it without tutoring. Today is not the time.” She glanced down the empty road again. “Nor the place.”
    “Do they come, milady?”
    “It is hoped they do. Now go. See to Will and the others, then return to Ravenshed.”
    He was swift, a fleet hare bolting down the road, heedless of the slick mud that turned ruts into mires. She was alone again, with only her thoughts for company.
    Her footfalls were muffled on the grassy verge as she picked a path free of mud; the tree loomed in majesty, low branches stretching out twenty feet from the trunk on each side. A squirrel frisked along a branch as thick as a man’s chest, its protest accompanied by a twitch of red tail.
    She braced a hand on the fissured bark; it was cool and damp under her palm. A furring of powdery green residue grew where the trunk was wet. Peering inside the shadowed cavity that had so recently hidden Fiskin, she saw with pleasure that it was as large as it had seemed when she was a child.
    Inside, she felt it close around her, a musty shroud of ancient patience, mocking the fleeting lives of men. She had come here with her uncle. So long ago now, the time and the man gone the way of all; a vision lost, a legend faded. There were still times she thought it but a dream.
    Then she would remember—a scrap of conversation, a shaft of sunlight through dappled leaves, the winding of the horn—and she