Rogan and his men rode straight for the front of the house, their horses trampling over the pretty walkways and the flowers and the shrubbery. In spite of the seriousness of the situation she found herself frowning. Rogan would not think flowers meant anything in life.
"Good morn to you, brother," Tearle said cheerfully. "Will you come inside and eat with us?"
Rogan, atop his horse, his red hair making him look angry even when he wasn't, looked even bigger than Zared remembered. "I have come for my sister," he said in a voice that Zared had always obeyed.
She started to pull away from Tearle, but he held her fast.
"We will be ready soon," Tearle said. "Our garments and household goods are being packed now. But come and rest with us while we wait. I have ordered a half dozen cows killed, and they will be set to roasting soon. Your horses must be hungry, too."
Zared looked up at her brother and knew that Tearle must sound as insane to him as he did to her.
Rogan ignored him as he looked at his sister. "Mount and ride."
Again Zared tried to obey, but Tearle held her.
Rogan drew his sword. "Do you force her? I will kill you now."
At that Tearle released Zared, thrusting her behind him as he reached for the small knife at his side. Zared jumped between the men.
"He does not hold me," she said as loudly as her powerful lungs would allow. "No man holds me. I am free. Oh, Rogan, do not kill him. I have come of my own free will. Do not harm him."
She looked from one man to the other and knew in that instant she had insulted both men. She knew that Rogan had thought that she was honorable and that the only way she would have gone with a Howard was if she had been forced, but now he knew that she was not honorable, that she had betrayed the ancient Peregrine name. And she had insulted her husband by, in essence, saying that a woman must fight his battles for him.
It was Tearle, as she knew it would be, who made the first move toward peace. He sheathed his knife. "I do not wish to fight you. We are related now, and I wish this feuding to stop. You must come and eat with me, and we will discuss the future."
Rogan sneered down at him. "How many men do you have hidden in the house, Howard? Do you plan to take us once we are inside and befuddled with drink?"
"We can eat outside and drink water if that is your wish," Tearle said.
At that there were many groans from the men behind him.
"He will not attack you," Zared said. "He believes in peace." She said this with some wonder in her voice. How could one think of peace when looking at three hundred armed men?
At that Tearle put his hands on her shoulders. "I think you should leave us. Your brother and I have matters that we must discuss."
Zared turned pale at that. "I cannot leave the two of you alone."
Tearle looked up at Rogan as he sat on his big horse. "Your brother may hate me, but he is not a fool. He knows that if he kills me and takes you, now that you are my legal wife, then my brother will wipe what is left of your family from the face of the earth. Is that not right, brother?"
"I am not your brother," Rogan muttered, but he looked at his sister. "Go. I will not kill him—not now. Ready yourself to return with me."
She nodded at her brother, then took one more look at her husband and went back into the house.
"What are they doing now?" Zared asked Margaret.
"The same as before. The men are eating, and your brother is sitting at the table in silence, but he is listening. Lord Tearle is doing all the talking."
"Yes, yes, I know that he is a talker. He could talk until a dead man would leave the room to get away from him." She remembered the way Tearle had been able to twist everything she had said to him so that it was to his advantage. "My brother is not so easily led as I was," she muttered to herself. "Rogan will not agree to what a Howard says."
"Yes, my Lady Howard," Margaret said softly, making Zared grimace.
Zared sat down on a window seat and looked out over the lovely rolling English countryside. "He will not agree to leave me here," she whispered. So I will have to return with my brother, and I will have to leave this beautiful place and my beautiful husband, she thought. I must return to a place of hatred and talk of war.
It was nearly sundown when Tearle returned to the room they shared. She jumped up at once and went to him, but she did not get close enough to touch him. "When do I leave?"
"Early tomorrow," he said, stretching. "Those men of your brother's can eat. I do not wonder that your brother wants his title and lands back. It must cost much to feed men such as those."
"Do you jest about what is life and death to the Peregrines?"
He smiled at her. "I try to make a jest of everything. Have you not learned that yet? I am of the firm belief that laughter makes one live longer. Tell me, has that brother of yours ever so much as smiled?"
"Liana can make him smile," she said impatiently, then turned away. "So we have one last night together."
Tearle sat on the edge of the bed and began to unlace his tall boots. "Do you not plan to sleep with me when we are at your brother's house?"
It took Zared a moment to realize what he was saying, then she went to him. "You cannot go with us."
He smiled at her in a teasing way. "You can stand the place, but I cannot. Does this mean that you are more of a man than I am?"
She went on her knees in front of him. "Do not make a joke of this. My brother will kill you. If not directly, then there will be a falling stone, a blade that slips, an ax—"
"I did think of those things. I mentioned such to your brother." He paused in his undressing. "If he did not fear for the lives of those he loves, he would have killed me today. At least he would have taken great pleasure in the attempt. I have never seen such hatred in a man."
"He will kill you if given half a chance. You cannot think to go anywhere with him."
He put his hand under her chin. "I am not so fragile or so dumb and trusting as you seem to believe, nor is your brother as powerful as you think. Do you know that when I was a child I thought my brother Oliver was the strongest, bravest—"
"Oliver Howard is fat and weak and—" She broke off, knowing where he was heading. "You cannot think that I do not see my brother as he is. Rogan is neither fat nor weak."
He leaned toward her. "Nor am I."
She sat back on her heels. Why did each man think he was invincible? "What have you and my brother arranged?" She looked up at him with narrowed eyes. "What have you talked my brother into?"
"Ah, at last you admit that there is something that I can best your brother in."
"Tell me," she repeated.
"He has agreed to what I have always planned to do. I am going with you to your home. Your brother will not believe that I want his sister for any purpose other than as some hostage of war. I told him that I wanted you only for your body, but even that did not make him laugh."
Zared grimaced. No, that would not make Rogan laugh. "Why would you want to do this? Why would you want to leave all this finery for my brother's poor place?"
He was silent so long that she looked up at him, and the tenderness in his eyes made her look away. She knew that he was going so that he could be near her. Rogan was so stubborn, so hardheaded that he would not believe any words that she spoke if she told him that she was with a Howard because she wanted to be. Rogan would always think that she had been forced. And he would do what he considered necessary to get her back. Zared had to go with her brother.
"You do not have to go with me," she whispered. "Perhaps I can return to you… later."
"Ha!" Tearle said. "I think your brother is worse than you had described him. The man does not listen to reason. Do you know that I offered to give him this place if he would stop this war of his? I offered him half of the Howard estates upon my brother's death."
"He would refuse. All of what the Howards own belongs to the Peregrines."
He smiled at her. "He wanted you more than he wanted the
estates." At Zared's look of astonishment Tearle nodded. " 'Tis true. He said that he had lost too many of his family, and he could bear to lose no more. He would not trade you for all the riches in the world."
Zared looked away to hide her smile. It made her feel good that her brother loved her that much. She looked back at her husband. "You see that I must go with him."
"I understand that perfectly. I also know that I will not let you go either. Who will warm my bed at night if you are gone?"
She turned away. "You will find women. Men always do."
"Not women who chase me up trees and draw swords on me. Not a woman I find as entertaining as you."
She put her face in her hands. "You cannot go with me.
"I can and I will. Your brother, who has a head of rock, will have it no other way. I will go with you and stay with your family until he is satisfied that I have married you for some reason other than a personal feud." Tearle looked thoughtful. "Although I fear for my life if he hears the way I make you cry out in the night. He might think I am torturing you."
"I do not do that."
He gave her a smug smile. "Come and give me a kiss. Tomorrow we will ride with your brother, and we will see this place of yours. It cannot be as bad as you make it seem."
"It is worse," she said as she crawled onto his lap. "You will not be able to bear it."
He ran his hand down her hip and thigh. "I am made of sterner stuff than you imagine. In fact, I think that now I am made of steel. Do you know of a sheath where I could hide my sword?"
"Oh, Tearle, you fool," she said, laughing as she put her arms around his neck and began to kiss him.
Chapter Fourteen
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Rogan's wife Liana lay back against the pillows of her bed and closed her eyes against the pain. Two days before she had given birth to a large, dark-haired little boy, and the birth had almost killed her. She still could not move without pain.
"How are they?" she whispered to her maid Joice, who was straightening the room.
"There is no change," Joice said solemnly, then she looked up at her mistress. "This cannot go on."
Liana nodded in agreement with her maid. It had been a month since Zared had arrived with her Howard husband, and since then the hatred in the Peregrine castle had grown darker and deeper. Liana had not been able to reason with her husband about his hatred for the man. "He is your sister's husband now," she had said to Rogan, but Rogan refused to bend, refused to see anything in the man except what he wanted to see. And what he wanted to see was a man who was an enemy.
For the last four weeks Rogan had done everything that he could to break the Howard man. He had trained him until Liana had seen the man's shoulders drooping from exhaustion. Rogan devised dreadful tests for the man, such as having six brawny knights attack him in the hallways, and this after a long day of "training" on the field. What Rogan called training would have killed most men.
But the Howard man took it all and never complained once. Liana had seen him look at Rogan with a glare of determination in his eyes, as though he were saying that he was going to survive whatever Rogan gave him or die trying.
In the last weeks Liana had been so heavily pregnant, so uncomfortable, that she had not been able to leave the solar and so could only see and hear what was happening secondhand. But as she had sat still, her sewing in her hand, and watched, she had seen more than she wanted to see.
When they had heard that Zared had been married to a Howard Liana had at first thought that her husband was going to die of apoplexy. The violence of his rage was something that she had never seen before. Years before, when Oliver Howard had taken her prisoner, she had later been told that her husband had gone into just such a fit, a fit of such severity that the people around him feared for his sanity.
No matter that Liana had protested day and night; Rogan raised a small army to go to the Howard house and get his sister. "Perhaps she married him because she loves him," Liana had said. "Perhaps she chose the man as I chose you."
Rogan would not listen to her. Nothing she said made any difference to him. He was bent on gathering his army and going after his sister. "It will be the end of us all," Liana had said.
She spent long hours in the chapel praying for her husband's safety, knowing that she had just a few days to see him alive. The once grand Peregrine armies were too small to take on the many Howard men.
She sat by and watched as Rogan called his brother Severn to him, forcing him to leave his new bride at Bevan Castle. Severn was as enraged as his brother, and he told how he had been tricked and lied to by the Howard man. Severn kept saying that the Howard man had assured him that Liana had sent him to help them at the tournament.
It had taken her husband and brother-in-law some days to get ready to march to the Howard house. At the last moment Rogan had insisted that his brother remain behind, for he was sure that Oliver Howard would attack the moment Moray Castle was left with only a small force to guard it.
All the time Rogan had been gone Liana had stayed on her knees in the chapel asking God for the safe return of her husband.
She had not been prepared for the manner in which Rogan did return. He had come riding home beside a handsome dark-haired man dressed in finery such as Liana had not seen for years. And beside him rode Zared, but a Zared much changed from the boyish girl who had ridden off to a tournament weeks before.
Liana had watched the little group dismount, and at the sight of her husband's face her first hope that somehow the marriage of a Peregrine to a Howard would stop the feud fled. There was no happiness or forgiveness on her husband's face; only rage lived under his dark skin.
She stood at the window and looked down at the group, and her heart began pounding, for it was a group full of many base emotions. "Send Zared to me," she had said to her maid. Liana knew that her husband could wait, but the misery she saw on her young sister-in-law's face was something that Liana wanted to understand.
Zared came stumbling up to Liana's solar and, without preamble, threw herself at her sister-in-law, going to her knees and putting her head in Liana's lap—what lap there was left. Liana had quickly dismissed the other people in the room and run her hands over Zared's thick red hair. "Tell me all," she said softly.
Words came flooding out of Zared as she told about the tournament and about making a bargain with the Howard man that she would marry him if he could arrange for Lady Anne to marry Severn. "I never thought he could do it," Zared cried. "I thought I was in no danger."
Liana stroked her hair and listened. She listened not only with her ears but with her heart, and she heard more than just words. Zared talked of being "tricked" into marriage and of having to marry the Howard man, but there was an underlying softness to her words that told Liana a great deal.
"Tell me about your time alone with him," Liana said softly.
Zared dried her eyes on Liana's silk skirt and started telling of the few weeks they had spent alone together. "His house was a worthless place, of course," Zared said. "A dozen men could have taken it." She paused. "Oh, but it was lovely." She told about the house and described in detail the clothes she had worn there, and she told about the fair and about some of the places she had gone and what she had done.
"And what of this Howard man you are married to? Is he your enemy as well as Rogan's?"
Zared clenched her teeth together to fight back tears. "I do not know what he is. I do not understand him. He is so soft and so gentle. He praises me and sings to me and gives me presents and reads to me, and sometimes I feel as though I would die without him, but…"
"But what?" Liana urged.
"But I do not know what is in his mind. I do not know if he can be trusted. He is not like any man I have ever met before. He says only that he does not want war, but what if I trust him and he is lying? What if I allow myself to believe him and he betrays me and my family?" She put her face in her hands. "How can I let go of a hatred that I have had all my life because of a few we
eks of a man being kind to me? I must be made of sterner stuff than that. I have to be stronger than that. I cannot allow my passion for him to blind me to the fact that he is a Howard."
At that Zared began to cry again, and Liana could hear the anguish in her voice. Zared was more than confused about what the man she had married was and how she felt about him. "I was beginning to trust him, but I do not know why he married me. Sometimes I believe what he says to me, and sometimes I am afraid of my own belief. He says that he wishes to end this feud, but I fear that I am bringing the enemy into our house. If he gains our trust, he could open the gates at night and let his brother's army in here. He could kill us as we sleep."
"But what would he gain by that?"
Zared looked at Liana as though the older woman had gone mad. "He will have clear title to the dukedom and the lands. There will be no Peregrines to claim that he does not own the lands."
At Zared's answer Liana began to be afraid, too, and she wished she had never heard of the dreadful Howard man. She began to be afraid for the lives of all of her family: her son, her unborn child, her husband, and his sister and brother. Each night she quizzed Rogan on what he was doing with the Howard man, making sure that Rogan did not let up on his vigil over the man.
Once Liana took her son to the courtyard to see some new puppies and the Howard man walked by her, then stopped and smiled down at the lovely little boy with his bright red hair who held a puppy. He was still smiling as he looked back up at Liana, but the smile faded when she snatched her son to her in a protective way and glared at the man. He gave a sigh and walked away.
Liana did not have time to concern herself with how the brother of an enemy felt. She was much more concerned with the worry she saw on the faces of Rogan and Zared and Severn. Severn felt as though everything had happened because of him, and he worked hard to try to forgive himself, but he seemed to make no progress. He never left the training field, and Liana knew that he was pining for his new wife, whom he had left in the relative safety of Bevan Castle.