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In general, Will was a very calm person. He liked his coffee, he liked his bow, he liked a quiet ride with his horse. He enjoyed banter and music, but then, of course, there were a few things that had a way of pissing him off.
And one of them was ordering a young, bleeding girl to be dragged out of the road so that way a noblewoman wouldn't be late.
When he let that arrow fly, he wasn't intending to kill anyone, though. No, he wasn't going to murder pointlessly. He especially wasn't going to murder the poor men who had to work for this awful woman just to put bread on the table. That was why he had removed the arrowheads from 18 of his 24 arrows, replacing them with blunt heads.
When that arrow flew, it crashed into the side of the helmet of the soldier closest to Robin. The clang of metal rang through the air and the soldier fell over, unconscious.
Robin flinched and scooted away from him, still on the ground. She still looked boyish with her short hair, but without the padding around her midsection he found himself wondering just how she had convinced him so easily. His momentary lapse resulted in Halt smacking him upside the head, and the soldiers had an opportunity to scramble into formation.
And Robin was gone.
She had disappeared completely from that spot in the road, and the soldiers couldn't seem to figure out where she had gone, much less who had fired the arrow.
Two more arrows flew, knocking the men on the horses unconscious. They fell to the ground with a thud that made even Halt wince, and one of the remaining guards yelped in a distinctively not masculine way.
A yowl emanated from the carriage, and Will saw a flash of a red cloak through the window. The door popped open, and the noblewoman went flying out of the carriage. She landed in a very undignified heap on the ground, and she was shouting obscenities that no proper woman ought to know.
"Yeah? Well you're a bigger one, m'lady! Hogging all this gold for yerself!" Robin hollered, waving a small trunk of gold. She was using a fake accent that really was quite dreadful, and Will had absolutely no clue why she was doing such a thing. "There's poor people starvin' round abouts here, ya know and it really just isn't very kind."
The woman reached for her ankle and drew a knife, waving it about in front of Robin as though she was going to try to stab him. Although the woman had obviously been trained, she had been trained in a noble court where she had obviously been taught that certain manners applied, and SURPRISE, when you're getting mugged, no one really follows the rules.
Especially rules like one-on-one fighting.
Little John lumbered out of the tree line then and hugged the woman from behind, immobilizing her. She started squealing and Robin jumped down, waving her own throwing knife in the woman's face.
"Ya didn't think I was alone, did you?"
"A little girl like you?!" the woman hissed, struggling against Little John's size. "Of course you weren't! No mere girl is going to take on armed knights and a trained lady of the court!"
"Really?" Robin said. Will felt despair settle in his stomach as he saw a glint of anger in Robin's eyes, and knew she was probably about to do something rash. "Well, it's a good thing I'm no mere girl. When you wake up, please tell his Lord Baron-ness that Robin Hood sent you."
"When I wake -?" the woman started, but then Robin brought the hilt of her throwing knife down hard on the woman's head. She went limp in Little John's arms and he dropped her to the ground.
"That wasn't particularly friendly, Alis," Little John said, frowning down at her. "Your family wouldn't be approving."
"Well, it's a good thing I haven't got one then, isn't it?" Robin replied, sheathing her knife. "But we've got the gold now, so we've got a start."
Will melted out of the tree line. "We really have got to work on your temper." He was pretty furious with his apprentice right then, but in order to make his point he kept his voice calm. "Injuring a noblewoman is not good for us trying to get you a spot in the Corps. You do realize that King Duncan has to approve this, right? If he hears awful things about your behavior, you will not be a Ranger, girl or not."
Robin looked down at her shoes, blushing furiously. "Sorry," she said.
"If I might lend my observation," Alan-a-Dale said, leaning against the carriage. "It seems she is very sensitive about her gender."
"It's not that it's my gender! It's just that people are such damn sexist pi-" Robin started up with fire in her eyes.
"Enough," Halt said, holding his hand up to silence Robin mid-word. "Alan is right. You are far to sensitive. You are the first Ranger girl, but only if you keep your temper, and therefore you are bound to face some skepticism. If you cannot hold your own when people call you a girl, then perhaps they should call you a boy."
Robin looked up, taken aback. She clearly wasn't entirely following Halt's logic, but Will saw it immediately. "Yeah," Will nodded. "You didn't have these temper problems when everyone thought you were a boy. And it would help with a disguise, if nothing else."
"But..." Robin began, but then she trailed off. She didn't have any argument against what they were saying, but she certainly didn't like it.
"If word keeps getting back to the baron of a girl stopping carriages, he's going to remember you, and he will connect you with the Rangers," Gilan added. "And while Duncan most definitely won't care what the Baron thinks, he will care what all the other nobles have to say. If all the nobles hate you because of what this Baron says, then you're screwed."
"I agree," Mauch offered, peaking out from behind one of the white horses pulling the carriage.
"Me too," Little John said, looking down at Robin. "You always had your dad's fire, but you need to keep it on the down-low. It's what's safest for you."
"Fine," Robin said, stubbing her toes against a rock peeking out of the soil. "I'll go back to dressing like a boy."
"Alright," Will said, nodding. "Once you have disguised yourself again, we will go deliver the gold."
"OK," Robin said, perking up a little bit at the prospect of handing out the stolen gold to the poor. "I'll go get ready, but could someone maybe possibly go through the carriage to see if there was anything I missed?"
"I will," Mauch volunteered immediately, raising his hand as though he was a school boy in class. He scampered into the carriage and disappeared. Robin turned on her heel and disappeared into the trees, and Will heard the neigh of Nudge as Robin left.
"Your apprentice is getting to be a handful," Halt said, poking the noblewoman's foot with his boot.
"I bet I could have trained her better," Gilan commented, smirking.
"Do you actually want her?" Will asked, arching his eyebrows at Gilan. Gilan paused, pursing his lips.
"I don't see why not," Gilan replied. "Lots of people said a Ranger couldn't use a sword, didn't they? Well, look at me now. And lots of people said a girl couldn't be a Ranger, didn't they?"
"You really want to be the one with that temper on your hands?" Will asked, somewhat incredulous. He wasn't going to give up on his apprentice, of course. His own stubbornness was taken over. But if he had had a glimpse that this was what he was getting into, he might have declined that riding companion he ran into back on Lafway feif.
He realized that he didn't actually know a lot about his apprentice. Basically everything that the fabricated Sandy had told him would have been a lie, and he knew precious little about Alis. But he supposed that Robin was someone entirely different than those two people she had shown him, and he wasn't sure just what he was getting into with this girl.
