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yammering thing. He had to cradle it against his chest with both arms to keep it from squirming away from him. Dizzy, hugging the piglet, he slopped back to Beau, mud dripping in globs off his arms and legs and chest.
    “Lovely,” Beau declared, staring at him. “What we need that for?
Beaucoup
meat we have already.” With a languid gesture she indicated the boar’s hefty carcass.
    Rook did not answer her. He said only, “Give me your tunic string.”
    She stared at him, then at the long crimson lacing that closed her crimson tunic, then back at him again.
    “I’m not going to look at you!” Rook restrained himself from reminding Beau that her chest was as flat as his own. “I need a string.”
    She muttered, “
Sacre bleu
,” but untied the lacing, pulled it free of her tunic and handed it to him. Rook tied one end of the string around his piglet’s hind leg above the hock.
    “You’re welcome,” Beau said.
    Ignoring the hint for thanks, Rook set the piglet on the ground and secured the other end of the lacing to a sapling. The piglet strained against the tether and squealed, but Rook gentled its muddy head with his muddy hand. “Hush,” he told it. He pulled a packet of cold cooked perch from his belt and gave it to the piglet. The little animal gulped the fish, dock leaves and all.
    “
Mon foi
,” said Beau.
    “He’s a runkling,” Rook growled. “A runt. He’ll die if someone doesn’t take care of him.”
    Not looking at Beau, he watched the piglet eat.
    “My father used to call me Runkling,” he said.

Seven

    A baby
pig
?” exclaimed a boyish voice from the shadows of a hemlock grove.
    “A
pet
pig, forsooth,” declared someone else in more manly tones.
    “Walking on a leash, by my poor old eyes!”
    Rook recognized the third, quizzical voice as Robin Hood’s. Robin always thought he knew everything, but Runkling wasn’t walking on a leash at all. Actually the shoat scurried ahead of Rook as he pretended to pull back on the string tied to its hind hock. The pig went where he wanted because it thought it was getting away from him. Such was the contrary nature of swine.
    Rook wanted to tell Robin he was wrong, but he couldn’t seem to get his mouth open and say the words. Too tired. Too worn out to do anything except keep stumbling after Runkling and Beau. But why so weary? It had taken only two days for Beau to lead him to this new hideout of Robin’s, and there had been plenty of boar meat to eat. Why, Rook wondered hazily, did he feel so weak that he was staggering?
    “Phew, it stinks,” said the first voice, the high-pitched one.
    With an effort, Rook shifted his gaze from Beau’s back to look for the boyish speaker. Blurrily in the blue-green twilight beneath the trees he could see that yes, it was the Sheriff’s son, freckles and all. Tod. There he sat, at ease with his back against a hemlock trunk, his hurt leg wrapped in a splint, and a whole cooked partridge in his hands to gnaw upon.
    Runkling grunted and tugged at his tether, trying to get at the partridge. A pig will eat almost anything.
    Beau told Tod indignantly, “Stink?
Non, non
, the
petit
piggy, it smell better than you do.”
    “Well, something stinks.”
    “That would be Rook.” She flashed her lightning grin over her shoulder at him.
    He did not smile back. What did they expect? A creature of the wild did not stand in the rain and scrub itself, or bathe itself in the river. Rook was a wild thing, and he smelled how he smelled.
    “Rook,” said a soft voice.
    Rowan, here, with Robin’s band? Rook raised his head to look for her. Yes, there she stood, a straight arrow of a girl in her green kirtle. Foggily Rook remembered things Beau had been telling him, Sheriff’s son this and Sheriff’s son that, Rowan tending the boy’s broken leg and Robin Hood’s whole band with her, on the lookout and on the move in case the Sheriff himself came charging into the forest with a hundred knights swinging battle-axes,