Her actions and her words effectively silenced everyone, from Rogan down to the children whose father was tied to the tree.
“You?” Rogan said, as much surprised as anything.
“Give me two weeks’ time,” Liana said breathlessly, “and I will find your thief. Terrorized peasants do not produce good crops.”
“Terrorized…” Rogan began, then his bewilderment left. “Get her the hell out of here,” he commanded his brother.
Severn’s big arm caught Liana’s waist and pulled her from in front of the three condemned men. Liana thought fast. “I’ll lay you odds I can find your thieves in two weeks,” she shouted. “I have a chestful of jewels that you have not seen. Emeralds, rubies, diamonds. I’ll give them to you if I do not produce the thieves in two short weeks.”
Once again, Rogan and the people quietened and stared at her. They were all wondering what manner of woman she was, Rogan wondering most of all.
Severn’s grip on her waist loosened, and Liana went to her husband and looked up at him as she put her hand on his chest. “I have found that terror breeds terror. I have dealt with thieves before. Let me do this now. If I am not right, in two weeks’ time you may kill all of them and you will have the jewels.”
Rogan could only gape at her. She had nearly burned him to death last night and now she was making a wager with him like a man and interfering in his business. He had half a mind to yet send her to the dungeon.
“I could take the jewels,” he heard himself saying as he looked at her and remembered how alive she’d been last night. A sudden wave of desire overtook him, and he turned away before he touched her in front of his men.
“They are well hidden,” she said softly and put her hand on his arm. The same desire was also flooding her veins.
Rogan shook her hand away. “Take the thieving bastards,” he said gruffly, just wanting to get away from her. “In two weeks I will have the jewels and I will have taught a woman a lesson,” he said, trying to make light of the matter and not unman himself before his men. But a glance at his brother and his men showed they were not close to laughing. They were looking at Liana with deep interest.
Rogan cursed under his breath. “We ride,” he growled, moving toward his horse.
“Wait,” Liana said, running after him. Her hear, was pounding in her throat, for she knew that what she was about to say was greatly daring. “What do I get if I win the wager?”
“What?” Rogan said, glaring down at her. “You get the damned thieves. What else do you want?”
“You,” she said, hands on hips, smiling at him. “If I win the wager, I want you as my slave for one whole day.”
Rogan gaped at her. He was going to have to remove some of this woman’s hide and teach her how a wife should act. He didn’t say a word but put his foot in the wooden stirrup.
“Wait a minute, brother,” Severn said, grinning. He was recovering from his shock faster than the others. No one, including him, had seen but a few men and even fewer women challenge Rogan. “I think you should take the lady’s wager. After all, you can’t possibly lose. She’ll never find the thieves. We’ve been looking for months. What do you have to lose?”
Rogan, iron-jawed, cold-eyed, glanced at his knights and then at the peasants. He would win the stupid wager and he’d send her away before she interfered again. “Done,” he said, and without another look at Liana, he mounted his horse and started riding hard. His thoughts were black with anger. Damned bitch, she’d made a fool of him before his men!
His anger hadn’t subsided when he reached the castle. And once inside the gate, he sat on his horse to stare in disbelief at his men, his laborers, his women, all shoveling manure, sweeping, and scouring.
“I’ll be damned,” Severn muttered from beside Rogan as he stared at one old knight while he stuck a pitchfork into a four-foot-high pile of manure.
Rogan felt as if his own men were betraying him. He threw back his head and gave a loud, long, hideous war cry—and the people in the courtyard came to a halt. “To work!” he bellowed at his men. “You are not women! Work!”
He didn’t wait to see if he was obeyed, but dismounted and strode angrily up the stairs to the Lord’s Chamber, then to the private room to one side of it. This room was his and his alone. He slammed the door shut and sat down on the old oak chair that had belonged to the head of the Peregrines for three generations.
He sat, then stood abruptly and glared at the chair. There was a puddle of cold water in the seat, where someone had been scrubbing it. So angry he could barely see, he looked about the room and saw that it was clean. The foot-deep debris was gone from the floor, the spider webs that connected the weapons on the wall were gone, the rats were gone, the grease was gone from the table and chairs.
“I’ll kill her,” he said from between his teeth. “I’ll have her drawn and quartered. I’ll teach her who owns the Peregrine lands, who rules the Peregrine men.”
But as he put his hand on the door, he noticed a little table against the wall. He remembered seeing Zared’s mother use that table, but he hadn’t seen it for years. He wondered if it had been in this room all that time and he just hadn’t seen it. On top of the table, neatly placed, was a stack of precious, clean, expensive paper, beside it were a silver inkwell and half a dozen quill pens, the points sharp and ready for use. The paper and pens drew Rogan like a moth to a flame. For months he’d had an idea for a trebuchet, a wooden war machine that could throw large stones with great force. He’d been thinking that if it were built with two cranks instead of one, he could make the throwing arm much higher and get more power behind the stones. Several times he’d tried drawing his ideas in the dirt, but he hadn’t been able to make a line fine enough.
“The wench can wait,” he muttered, and went to the table and slowly and clumsily began to draw his ideas. He wasn’t as familiar with a pen as he was with a sword. The sun set, he struck a flint and lit a candle, and kept on laboriously drawing his design for the trebuchet.
Chapter
Eight
After Rogan left the peasants, it took a while for Liana’s heart to calm. She was certainly doing a poor job of pleasing her husband, wasn’t she? She could see his dark form, still wearing his wedding clothes, which were becoming greasier by the day, riding toward the castle and she wanted to run after him and apologize. It had hurt her to see the rage in his eyes. Perhaps it was better when he ignored her. Perhaps it was better—
“My lady, thank you.”
Liana looked down to see a thin, tired-looking peasant woman, her head bowed beneath her ragged hood as she took the hem of Liana’s gown and kissed it.
“Thank you,” the woman repeated.
The other peasants came to her and bowed down before her, and their groveling made Liana feel sick. She hated to see people as downtrodden as these. The peasants on her father’s land were fat and healthy, while these were gray with fatigue and ill health and fear.
“Get up, all of you,” she commanded, then waited while they slowly obeyed her, the fear increasing in their eyes. “I want you to listen to me. You heard my husband: He wants the thieves, and you are going to deliver them to him.” She saw the way their eyes hardened at her words. There was pride left in these people, a pride that made them protect the thieves from a hard master.
Her voice softened. “But first you are going to eat. You”—she pointed to a man who, if she had not intervened, would have a bloody back now—“go and slaughter the fattest cow on all the Peregrine lands and two sheep, then bring them here and roast them. You shall eat, because you have a great deal of work to do in the coming weeks.”
None of the peasants made a move.
“The hour grows late. Go!”
One man went to his knees, his face showing his agony. “My lady, Lord Rogan punishes any person who touches what is his. We cannot kill his animals or eat his grain. He keeps all of it and sells it.”
“That was the way it was before I came,” Liana said
patiently. “Lord Rogan has not as much need for money as he once did. Go and kill the animals. I will take the lord’s wrath on my head.” She swallowed at that, but she couldn’t allow the peasants to see her fear. “Now, where is the baker’s shop? The one who has the feud against my husband?”
It took Liana hours to set in motion what she meant to do. Two weeks was so little time. The six knights with her, at first silently standing by and watching with that special expression of amusement that men affect when a woman does something that they can not, she put to work.
She ordered a wheat field cut, the grain given to the baker, the sheaves to be used to thatch the decayed roofs of the peasants’ houses. She ordered a knight to supervise a mass cleaning of the streets, which ran with human and animal excrement. Another knight supervised a washing of the peasants, who were as dirty as the streets. At first she was appalled at the refusal of the merchants to take her word that they would be paid, but remembering the story of what her husband’s men had done to the baker, she forgave the merchants and gave them silver coins from the bag she carried on her horse.
It was sundown when she returned to Moray Castle, and she smiled as she saw two knights nodding sleepily in their saddles. Her plan was to make the peasants comfortable enough so that their loyalty would be to the master and not to a few thieves who were probably sharing their booty with the hungry farmers. It was not going to be easy to clean up a village within two weeks, but she was going to try.
The stench of the moat greeted her nostrils as she neared the castle, and she knew she’d have to get Rogan’s permission to drain the thing before the men would proceed. But inside the walls, she could see the difference. There was less filth on the ground, less piled up in the stables and around the shallow buildings built along the walls. When she rode up, the workers looked up at her and some men tugged at their forelocks in respect of her. Liana smiled to herself. They were beginning to notice her now.
She mounted the stairs to the Lord’s Chamber. Here the women had concentrated their efforts. It wasn’t clean yet, not by Liana’s standards—the walls would have to be whitewashed anew—but she could walk across the tile floor without tripping over bones.
Inside the room, at the clean table and chairs, sat Severn and Zared, their heads down on the table. Stretched along the length of the table was a long, three-deep pile of the fattest dead rats Liana had ever seen. They looked as if they were meant to be trophies of war.
“What is this?” she asked sharply, startling Severn and Zared awake.
Zared smiled at her and Liana thought again what a pretty, beardless boy he was.
“We killed them all,” Zared announced proudly. “You wouldn’t by chance know how to count, would you? Rogan does, but not as high as this many.”
Liana didn’t want to get near the rats, but Zared was so proud she felt she had to. She pointed and began counting. Each one she counted, Zared threw out the window into the moat below. Liana meant to protest, but a few rats weren’t going to make the moat worse than it already was. One of the rats was still alive and Liana jumped back while Zared brought a fist down on the rodent’s head. Severn grinned proudly.
Liana counted fifty-eight rats, and when they were gone from the table, she tiredly sat down next to Severn and looked about the room.
“Fifty-eight!” Zared was saying. “Wait until I tell Rogan.”
“Someone forgot to throw those bones out,” Liana said wearily, looking at the wall over the double fireplace. There were six horses’ skulls hanging there. She hadn’t noticed them before since they were probably covered with cobwebs, she thought.
She became aware of Severn and Zared gaping at her, looking as if she’d suddenly grown horns. She glanced down at the front of her gown, which was dirty but not hideously so. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Those are the Peregrine horses,” Zared said in a strained whisper.
Liana had no idea what the boy meant, so she looked to Severn. His handsome face was changing in expression from astonishment to a kind of cold, deep rage that, until now, Liana had thought only Rogan capable of.
Severn’s voice was quiet when he spoke. “The Howards laid siege to Bevan Castle and starved our family. My father, Zared’s mother, and my brother William died there. My father went to the walls and asked the Howards to allow the woman freedom, but they would not.” Severn lowered his voice. “Before they died, they ate the horses.” He turned to the skulls hanging on the walls. “Those horses.” He looked back at her, his eyes burning. “We do not forget, and the skulls will not be removed.”
Liana looked at the skulls with horror. To be so hungry that one was reduced to eating horses. It was on the tip of her tongue to say that the Peregrine peasants were condemned to a lifelong siege and would probably be glad of horses to eat, but she refrained.
“Where is my husband?” she asked after a while.
“In his brooding room,” Zared said cheerfully, while Severn cast the youngster a warning look.
Liana didn’t pursue Zared’s words because she understood more than she had at first. Perhaps there were reasons for her husband’s anger, for his obsession with money. She stood. “If you will excuse me, I must bathe. Tell my husband I—”
“Bathe?” Zared said, sounding as if Liana had said she planned to jump from the parapets.
“It’s a pleasant occupation. You should try it,” Liana said, especially since Severn and Zared were now the dirtiest objects in the room.
Zared leaned back in the chair. “I think I’ll pass. Did you really tell the Days to go home at night?”
Liana smiled. “Yes, I did. Good night, Severn, Zared.” She started up the stairs, then paused when she heard their voices.
“The woman has courage,” she heard Zared say.
“Or else she’s an utter fool,” Severn answered.
Liana continued up the stairs, and an hour later she was in her bedroom, soaking in a wooden tub full of scented hot water and watching the play of flames on the logs.
To her right the door was thrown open with a crash, and Rogan entered like a sudden storm on a peaceful day. “You have gone too far, woman,” he bellowed at her. “You have not my permission to dismiss my women.”
Liana turned her head to look at him. He wore only his big white shirt, which hung to the top of his thighs, a wide leather belt about his waist, and his braies. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, exposing thickly muscled, scarred forearms.
Liana could feel perspiration breaking out on her forehead. He was still yelling at her, but she didn’t know what he was saying. She stood in the tub, her slim, firm, full-breasted body rosy and warm from the hot water. “Would you please hand me that drying cloth?” she asked softly in the silence, for Rogan had ceased speaking.
Rogan could only gape at her. For all the many women he’d had, he’d never had the leisure to look, really look, at a woman, and now he didn’t think he’d ever seen anything as beautiful as this rosy-skinned beauty with the curtain of blonde hair hanging almost to her knees.
I won’t let her use her body to make me forget what she has done today, he thought, but his feet took a step toward her and one hand reached out to touch the curve of her breast.
Liana told herself to not lose her head. She wanted this man, oh yes, she so much wanted him, but she wanted more than a few minutes of rutting. She put her hand out and untied the strings of his shirt at his throat, then touched his skin with her fingertips. “The water is still hot,” she said softly. “Perhaps you’d allow me to wash you.”
A bath was a great waste of time to Rogan’s mind, but the idea of being washed by a nude woman…
He was out of his clothes in seconds, and when he stood nude before her—all of him standing upright—he made a grab for her. But Liana, laughing, sidestepped him.
“Your bath, sir,” she said, and Rogan found himself stepping into the tub.
The hot water felt good to his dirty skin and the herbs floating on the
water smelled good, but best of all was the woman, his wife, this beautiful…“Leah?” he asked, looking at her as she knelt over the foot of the tub, her breasts, pink-tipped and luscious, just grazing the wooden rim.
“Liana,” she answered, and smiled at him.
She began to wash him, running soapy hands over his arms, his chest, his back, his face. He leaned against the tub and closed his eyes. “Liana,” he said softly. Vaguely, he seemed to remember that this woman had done something unpleasant today, but he couldn’t at the moment remember what it was. She was so small and angelic, so pink and white, that he couldn’t imagine her doing anything he disapproved of.
He lifted his legs so she could wash them, then obeyed her when she told him to stand and her small, warm soapy hands washed between his legs. The pleasure he felt at her action was so overpowering that he spilled his seed on those small hands. His eyes flew open in alarm and, to hide his embarrassment, he roughly shoved her shoulder and sent her flying hard against the wall.
“You have hurt me,” she cried out.
Rogan had killed many people and never felt a thing, but this girl’s cry struck some chord in him. He had not meant to hurt her; he had only been unmanned in front of her. To his consternation, he found himself stepping from the tub and kneeling down to her. “Let me see,” he said, and bent her forward. Where she had hit the stones, her skin was bruised but not cut.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Your skin is too fragile, is all.” He ran his big, scarred, callused hand down her small, slim back. “It’s skin like the underbelly of a newborn colt,” he said.
Liana rolled her eyes at him and almost giggled, but she didn’t. Instead, she turned in his arms and put her head on his shoulder. “You enjoyed your bath, didn’t you?”
Rogan could feel the blood rushing to his face in embarrassed memory, then as he looked at her, her eyes twinkling, he realized she was teasing him. He had seen his brothers laugh with women, but Rogan had found very little that was humorous about women. But this woman made him feel different. “I enjoyed the bath too much,” he heard himself say, and was astonished.