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Escaping my stuffy estate for my Realm of Solitude.
Chapter 2
Robin
Iwent southwest away from the manor, through the barley fields. Trying to stay inconspicuous. The serfs working our land gave me small nods as I passed. Two of them tried to hide their smirks and winks.
I’d always gotten along with the workers more than the nobility, likely because I treated them like actual humans, rather than servants.
Trudging past them, I was in no mood for smiling or conversing. I cut through the golden fields swaying in the late-afternoon breeze as my bow and quiver bounced on my back. Past the fields, a great meadow sloped uphill, where cattle grazed, watched by the shepherd. He paid me no mind as two hounds scurried around his robes.
At the end of the pasture, a fence demarcated our land from the royal forest beyond. The pine and oak trees reached high into the sky on the other side of the fence, calling to me. The greenwood was a glorious sight, making me smile for the first time all day.
I took in a deep lungful of crisp air, then carefully climbed over the fence and waded into the thicket.
This was my Realm of Solitude. The place where I could be free from the confines of my family, my duties, my reality. Where I could “pretend to be a man,” as my father put it.
The truth was not so simple. I didn’t want to be a man. I wasn’t even particularly fond of them. Only in the past few years had I begun to learn the nuances and soft pleasures of being a woman, and I quite enjoyed the things I’d learned about my own body while blossoming.
That softness vexed me, however; the innate weakness all women shared, which seemed impossible to overcome in the face of brutal, vicious men. It was a physical inferiority, and with that came societal inferiority.
Dressed in breeches and a hood, with my hair hidden and my lips perpetually downturned in a scowl, I felt liberated. Free from the hungry eyes that undressed me, the knowing smiles that licked chapped lips as I shuffled through town.
It didn’t matter what I was doing—shopping, visiting friends, taking a stroll along the river. A woman couldn’t escape the leers and jeers of the superior sex, who believed we owed them everything. Children, obedience, submission. Men saw me as prey to be feasted upon. Weak-willed and frail. They saw an object to own rather than a human to cherish, with thoughts and feelings and opinions of her own. They saw me as an opportunity, and weren’t afraid to exploit, attack, and break my resolve if it meant getting what they wanted. It happened all the time in Nottingham. And beyond, I imagined.
Disguised as a man? I avoided all that. Avoided the headache of simply existing.
Thus was my reality. Constantly navigating the turbulent waters of young adulthood as an unwed heiress to a sizeable amount of land. Fending off the suitors and lordlings who pined after my flesh and fortune.
Inside the forest, I ran my hands along the well-worn bark of the nearest oak tree, as if it were an old lover. I glided through the clearings and thickets and breathed in the earth and pine and pollen. Noonbirds chirped and nested. Forest fauna darted past and rustled in the undergrowth. Sherwood Forest teemed with life in every direction. Natural, intoxicating, dangerous.
Everything I wanted to be.
The forest was protected by a royal charter, which meant you needed a license to hunt game here. The king himself visited these woods for sport. The woodland stretched for days in every direction, providing the land with bountiful beauty, if only we took the time to appreciate her like she deserved.
It housed meadows and pastures and villages. People I’d never met. I’d always been too afraid to go too deep into the woods, lest I get lost and hounded by trappers, hunters, or other dangerous men.
I was not a fool. Just like how the forest provided, it also took. Every year, over crackling flames at night, we heard the stories: Awful things happened to solitary girls in here.
I didn’t see the forest as dangerous or sporting. I saw it as life-giving and essential for maintaining my sanity in this convoluted life I lived.
I’d always felt I’d been born in the wrong time. I was miniscule among the ancient oaks and gnarled branches of this place. Too rebellious to be locked into a life I never agreed to live.
There had to be something more out there for a woman like me. I was privileged and luckier than most, surely, yet I still felt trapped by my overbearing father, my demanding mother, and this line of hierarchy I couldn’t escape.
I didn’t want to be the Princess of Wilford.
I just wanted to be Robin. No more, no less.
In the greenwood, I could be.
Slinging my bow off my shoulder, I traipsed through the woods until I found him in a small meadow next to a babbling creek.
My brother.
He always met me here. I didn’t come to the forest every day, yet when I did, he was waiting for me. Next to the shallow creek, close to the ancient oak.
I smiled at him. “Well met, Sir Robert.”
