The Taming (Peregrine 1)

The door had been chopped down by Severn and Baudoin as they went in to get their brother and keep him from injuring himself.

When Rogan came to his senses, he was calm—very, very calm. He was so calm that Severn’s anger rose.

“We will attack,” Severn said. “We have the money now. We’ll hire mercenaries. We’ll at long last rout the Howards from the Peregrine home.”

Rogan looked at Severn and imagined his brother washed and laid out in a coffin—the way he’d seen Basil and James when they had fought to return Rogan’s first wife. Rogan knew he must not do anything rash, that he must think clearly and calmly. He could not attack a place as vast as the Peregrine lands without a great deal of planning.

For days he worked long and hard, driving his men to exhaustion as he readied them for war. At night he stopped only when he could move no longer, then he fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

But even with all his work, he still missed her. She was the only person in his life who’d ever made him laugh. Neither his father nor his older brothers had ever laughed when they were alive. But then he’d married this girl for her money and nothing had been the same since. She was the only woman who dared to criticize him. Other women were too afraid of him to complain of his treatment. Other women didn’t tell him what he did wrong. Other women had no courage, he thought. They didn’t set beds on fire, didn’t wear coins to dinner, didn’t dare ask him about his first wife.

He was supervising the packing of war machines on to wagons when a Peregrine knight came with a package from the Howards. The little oak chest had been catapulted over the wall with a message that it be given to Rogan.

He wrenched the lock off with a steel pick and took out the cloth-wrapped bundle to see Liana’s hair inside. Somehow, he managed to remain calm. With her hair, her beautiful, silky hair, clutched in his hand, he started toward the tower.

Severn caught up with him. “Where are you going?” he demanded.

“This is between Oliver Howard and me,” Rogan said quietly. “I go to kill him.”

Severn swung Rogan around. “Do you think Howard will fight you one on one? That he will fight you fairly? He’s an old man.”

Rogan felt the hair in his hand. “He has harmed her; I will kill him for it.”

“Think what you’re doing,” Severn pleaded. “If you so much as ride up to Howard’s gate, he’ll have that thick hide of yours filled with arrows. Then where will your wife be? Come, help us prepare for war. We’ll attack Howard properly.”

“Properly!” Rogan said, half sneering. “As we did in ’thirty-five? There were five Peregrine brothers then and still the Howards beat us. How can we, as poor as we are, hope to battle the Howards? We will take our tiny force and lay siege and Howard will laugh at us from atop his walls.”

“Yet you think that you, one mere man, can do what all our men cannot?”

Rogan had no answer for him. Instead, he went to his brooding chamber, locked the door, and did not come out for twenty-four hours. By then he knew what he was going to do. When he and Liana had gone to the fair, he had seen how easily the peasants walked in and out of Moray Castle. He had always seen them, of course, with their baskets of squawking chickens, their three-wheeled handcarts loaded with crude goods, men with tools strapped to their bodies as they came to do repair work, but he’d never noticed them. Only when he was wearing peasants’ clothing did he see the freedom of access these people had, the way they went through the gates without a question asked. Yet if a man in armor on horseback had come within ten miles of Moray Castle, he would have been greeted by armed men.

Rogan called his two brothers into his brooding chamber, for the first time including Baudoin as family. Liana did that, he thought. She had given him that most precious of gifts: another brother. Rogan told his two brothers he planned to dress as a peasant and go alone into the Howard fortress.

Severn’s shout of protest made the pigeons fly off the roof. He yelled, he raged, he threatened, but he couldn’t sway Rogan.

Baudoin, who had been quiet through Severn’s storming, finally spoke. “You will need a good disguise. You’re too tall, too easily recognized. Gaby will make you a disguise that not even Lady Liana will see through.”

That day Rogan and Gaby and Baudoin had worked on turning him into a one-eyed, humpbacked, crippled old man. Severn had been so angry he’d refused to participate, but Rogan had gone to him and asked for his help. Rogan knew that Howard spies

watched them, and he wanted Severn to make them think Rogan was still at Moray Castle. Severn and Baudoin were to make the Howards think that Baudoin was Rogan.

Alone, Rogan had gone to the Howard fortress. As he and Severn had parted in the forest, Severn had clasped his brother to him, a rare gesture between Peregrine men that would not have happened before Liana came and softened them.

“Bring her back to us,” Severn said softly. “And…I don’t want to lose more brothers.”

“I will find her.” He gave Severn one last look. “Take care of Zared.”

Severn nodded, then Rogan was gone.

Rogan found that his stooped, leg-dragging stance made his back ache, and the Howard men who ordered him about often punctuated their orders with kicks and shoves. He made note of their faces and hoped someday to see them on a battlefield.

He skulked about the castle, hauling swill, doing whatever he could to be near people who were talking. The castle was abuzz with gossip about the treachery of the Peregrines, how they were trying to steal what rightfully belonged to the Howards. The people speculated on Liana and said she wasn’t good enough for Oliver’s young brother. Rogan snapped a broom handle in half at that, which caused a cook to beat him with a leg of mutton.

He ate what he could steal, and since the Howards, on the Peregrine family’s estates, were so wealthy, they never missed the food. He slept in a corner of the stables or in the mews with the birds.

He worked and he listened, keeping his uncovered eye open for anyone who looked as if he might know something.

It was in the third week, when he was about to give up hope, that a man kicked him in the small of his back and sent Rogan sprawling in the dirt. “Come with me, old man,” he said.