An Anne of Green Gables-flavored chapter, though you don't have to be familiar with Anne to understand it!
She ran on instinct, on knowing the less-traveled footpaths of the woods as clear as her own veins were mapped under skin, and she ran with the baying of hounds filling the moment of flight between every down-stride, unlucky to have chosen this day, this afternoon of fox-ready huntsmen, to mount another raid on the treasury vaults.
Regina moved steadily downhill, bound for the river, until it was momentum hurtling her forward more than her legs and the water lay open to her below. It flowed quick, and she would have groaned if she could spare the breath, for she had been aiming for shallows, for an easy crossing to throw off the chase, and she had found its depths instead.
She was tired, flagging now, and she couldn't chance swimming when she had no strength to keep her sense of direction or hold her head above the waterline.
The dogs had fallen behind, the sound of pursuit faded but not gone, and Regina didn't have time to change course, not while she was caught up in a jarring, unstoppable sprint to the bottom of the last slope.
The toes of her boots dragged against the ground when she hit the flat edge of the riverbank, and she listened, tried to guess the surest course to safety by light and sense alone, all the while scanning and scanning for something she could make use of.
She spied it, then: a skiff, the kind favored by local fishermen, tucked and tethered to a dock so slight she thought it likely even the owner had forgotten where to find it.
She had come away empty-handed (and nearly unhanded) from the vaults – surely it was not so great a crime to…liberate a boat that, from the looks of it, no one would miss?
Hands fumbled with knife, and she sawed through moldering rope before steering the boat away from land. Regina was drenched to her knees immediately, then halfway up the thigh and struggling to keep her footing well enough to kick herself up and over, gracelessly spilling onto the wooden floor and nearly spearing a lung on the raised corner of the board nailed down for a seat.
She would be bruised all down her front tomorrow, but she felt only relief that the boat stayed well-balanced while the current carried it, quickening, downstream – away from the village, away from the party of hunters she had so unwittingly alerted to her presence, away.
She lay flat all the same, heart-down and small against the threat of arrows that could still find their way into soft wood or softer flesh, and – foolishly, perhaps – shut her eyes against the racing, reeling motion of both the river and her blood.
Everything was amplified by the curve of the skiff, and her heart and her lungs knocked together uncomfortably, seeming to echo from inside and outside her head, all directions drowned in the ceaseless beating.
Her clothes are sodden, heavy, and it would be a long walk back from wherever the waters bent or slowed enough for the boat to ground itself.
She was, for the moment, content to be at the mercy of the elements – and what could she do without oars to decide her destination? Cheek against wood, and still, still, hearing heightened with her eyes closed against the world, and then everything was wet, and she was choking on the rush of water up her nose and mouth.
Regina lurched upright, more than sodden, and the soft wood of the boat had been too soft, after all. Fully corrupted.
She was sinking.
There was nothing for it but to swim, the skiff submerging too rapidly to think about trying to salvage any part of it, and she slipped past the bow with arms outstretched to meet the flood.
The current tumbled her, not as badly as she had feared, but exhaustion and disorientation were powerful forces, and she couldn't quite manage to stay afloat for more than a few breaths at a time.
The river was widening, calming somewhat, and she began to touch against bracken drifting across her path. Clutches of branches and high cattails hugged the shallower points of the riverbed, but she had no means to reach them, and she might have given herself up for lost if not for the spindly, fallen birch that stretched farther into the stream than anything else.
She would be able to catch herself against it with a little effort. If it bore her weight, she might have a fighting chance at clearing her head and resting her muscles and finding her way to a bank low enough to beach herself on.
She only hoped that the birch was more resistant to rot than her ill-fated skiff.
Regina timed the lunge correctly and clove to the trunk, which was blessedly slender enough for her to secure both arms around. The water still buffeted her legs, and her arms would tire, she knew, but she held tight and drew full breaths and felt absurdly grateful that she hadn't been weighed down with stolen gold.
Resting her forehead against the tree, she thought of the chase that had driven her here, the sour taste of her misfortune almost scraping a laugh out of her.
A most effective escape route, indeed, she considered wryly, and hummed in amusement she didn't have the energy to voice.
The slap of the current was regular, lulling – and therefore dangerous, in its false placidity – but it was overlaid with sharper cuts of noise that pricked her ears (and the hairs at the nape of her neck) to attention.
And, straining to listen, she wondered if she had truly addled her brain or if that was the sound of a pair of well-handled oars approaching from her flank.
She angled her head to peek and cursed through her teeth at the sight of the man rowing towards her.
The simplicity of his clothing and the confidence in his strong, steady strokes might have tricked another eye into taking him for an ordinary fisherman, but she knew his face: even in the shadows cast by the wide brim of his hat, she knew the man who teased her so, who had humiliated her and then claimed friendship, and, oh, it would be better to drown than to suffer his company like this.
She leveraged herself against the birch, raised her head as far above the water as she could, and endeavored to look down her nose at Robin of Locksley as he propped an oar beside her and held himself fast against the pull of the river.
"Regina Mills," he greeted, and she could kill him for the way his face, his very voice, crinkled with laughter. "Whatever are you doing?"
She would not meet his eyes, drew herself upright even though her shoulders balked at the movement, and spoke with as much flippancy as her situation would allow.
"I thought it quite obvious," she said, watching the corner of his mouth lift in anticipation. "I'm fishing."
Robin warred with a smile, lips twitching and subsiding as he held a hand out to her, and (she had to roll her eyes) it was an offering she could not refuse no matter how it wounded her pride.
"Ah," he said while she settled across from him, the boat tipping seasickly under the surprise of her added weight. "How terribly unobservant of me."
She stared at him, then: a flat, fierce look that dared him to press her further.
Runnels of water dripped from her hair, from her hands, down the hollow between her breasts, and she would liken it to a thaw if she wasn't so damnably cold. The heat of mortification came on slowly, and it was enough to hold her rigid, straight-backed and hard-nosed – but only just.
Robin maneuvered them away from the tree with a prod of his oar, watching her and the river in turns and waiting, it seemed, for her to break the silence.
She did.
"And you? Do you make a habit of searching the riverbeds for loose gold?"
Regina mistrusted his appearance, his garb so different from his usual hunting greens and looking like nothing so much as a disguise, and she wondered if he had played at reconnaissance today – or worse, if he had poached a job out from under her once again.
"I've found it's the fastest way to travel south," he replied evenly, but not without a glint in his eye that deepened her scowl. "And I doubt you could ask for better waters for trout fishing, wouldn't you say?"
"If you must know," she started, then wished she had bitten her tongue.
Robin pulled on the oars and made no answer, and she took the slack he was giving her with a jut of her chin.
"If you must know, I landed myself on the wrong side of a foxhunt and made to escape with some fisherman's skiff," she said, and perhaps it was the shiver of wind over her wet clothes and skin that chilled her voice so. "Which promptly sprung a leak and stranded me as you saw."
"And yet the fox lives to see another day," he said, nodding his head towards her with the kind, open smile he had first tried on her after claiming credit for the heist she had pulled on the treasury last year, the one that had stirred nobles across three counties into an uproar and caused his name to be immortalized in song and story and whispers of caution.
If he was waiting to be thanked, if he thought this was some kind of rescue of fair maiden that would win him her favor, he would be sorely disappointed.
"You needn't carry me farther than the nearest mooring." She gestured to a point on the approaching bank at random, hoping it would indeed prove low enough for Robin to draw against. "That one will suffice."
He followed her command, and she was half out of the boat the moment it hit the shallows, gritting into rock and sand.
Robin moved efficiently, though – she expected nothing less from a thief, but she cursed him all the same – and he hauled the boat out of the tow of the river and fell in at her heel before she could stagger away.
"Regina, wait," and he touched softly at her elbow.
She stiffened at his familiarity, at his continued presumption, but he outpaced her and outweighed her and seemed determined not to let her run this time.
"I should go while they think I'm drowned," she muttered, looking down at the fingers that still lingered by her arm and trying to feel her old anger. "I didn't need rescuing."
His eyebrow quirked, but his hand dropped to rummage in a pocket and drew out a fold of parchment – one she immediately marked as a wanted poster commissioned by the Queen, having graced a number of them herself.
Her heart sank. (It should rage, but she had had too much disappointment in an afternoon to feel it like anything but a stone dragging her under.)
"I found this in the village today. I thought it high time they revise the amount of the rewards they're willing to offer for leading an outlaw to the noose."
"You must be very proud – I'm sure your head is worth more than I'll see in my lifetime."
Regina backed from him, alarmed to find that she might cry (she wouldn't, but) and desperate to be away, alone with her bruises and her embarrassment.
She mustered her parting shot and delivered it with a venom that shook around the edges. "Did they get the nose right this time?"
"No, no, you misunderstand – "
He sighed, exasperated and earnest, one hand rising to pacify her as the other forced the parchment on her.
"Look at it," he prompted, and she let her eyes fall, rotating the page until she could see it properly.
Two sketched faces stared back at her, Robin's (and, no, they still hadn't managed to fix his nose) and, though she could scarcely believe it, her own – given equal prominence and equal price with an unheard-of two thousand gold pieces promised for each of them, if brought to justice.
"It's only a shame you've been lumped with me," he said. "I suppose they don't want to bankrupt themselves by paying out your full value."
"Please. I would never expect to overshadow you."
Robin frowned and swept a heavy hand over forehead and hair, knocking back his hat and sending it to the ground in the process. He let it lie.
"Must we be rivals, Regina? The competition has made me a better thief, undoubtedly, but I think it would do us both good to work together." Teeth dug into lip, and he flicked his eyes to her hopefully, persuasively. "Stir up some real trouble."
"You…you betrayed me," and it was not the right word, for he had not known her then, no trust had been broken, but she would not allow him rob her of the anger that had informed her every action for this long. "If you think coming to my aid – aid which was demonstrably unnecessary – today pays for that, you're a fool."
He exhaled, had the pluck to look regretful.
"I saw an opportunity for profit, and I took it, at your expense – as an outlaw is wont to do. Had I known it would have pitted us against each other thus, well, I never would have done it."
"Why did you?" Regina asked, quietly, unable to let the moment pass without getting his answer, as unsatisfactory as it was sure to be. "It could have been…why me?"
"That job was the best I'd ever seen." He was so serious, speaking almost before the words had left her tongue, and his eyes burned where they touched her skin. "And I wanted to meet the woman who had pulled it off."
"By helping yourself to the reputation I had rightfully earned?"
"It seemed reasonable at the time."
She shied back from him again, growling. "You think you're so clever – "
"Not clever enough by half," he interrupted with a playful shake of his head. "Might I remind you of the time you brained me with the counterweight of my own booby trap and proceeded to take my winnings as your own?"
"Your skull's so thick I wasn't sure you even noticed."
"Trust me, I noticed."
"I should go."
After a beat, he nodded, but he reached back into the bottom of the boat, rustling for something, and threw a bolt of flannel to her before she could turn away.
She was about to protest – she was not weak, despite the goose pimples raising themselves from neck to waist, and she did not need to be cared for like a babe – but Robin was already bent to shove his craft back into the stream.
"Keep it," he called over his shoulder, splashing calf-deep through the current. "A fox needs a good disguise now, more than ever."
And he was away, and she did not watch him leave.
For all they were not friends (never would be), there was something kindred in him, a wildness that brooked no forgiveness, and Regina understood that well enough.
She twisted the ends of the flannel in her fingers, wrapping it more securely around her, and trudged homeward – her step made a hair lighter, perhaps, by the creased bit of parchment slipped under her belt and the enveloping scent of pine she wore, sharp and sweet and deliciously within her grasp.