"Yes, I fought you. Had someone pulled a knife on my brother, he would have destroyed his attacker."
"Even a bit of a female?"
"Perhaps not a female, but he would not have been beaten so easily. No, not my brothers or"—she thought for a moment—"nor do I think Colbrand would have been beaten so easily."
"But then Colbrand would not have the brains to know you were female," he said tightly.
"Perhaps not. You do have a mind, it seems. You seem to know about… about unmanly things such as women's gloves, and how to tell the quality of emeralds. It is just men things you know nothing of."
"Oh?" He was trying to keep his temper. "And what assures you I know nothing of what men do?"
She looked surprised. "You would be entered in the tournament if you could. You would not spend your time playing nursemaid and servant if you could hold a lance. Liana said Oliver Howard was so rich he could hire men to fight for him. Perhaps in France you hired men to joust for you while you sat with the ladies." Her face brightened. "Yes, that is it. That is how you know so little of men and so much of women."
Tearle could not speak for a while. She was still, like a kid, walking backward, and she was smiling as though she'd figured out some great problem. She had decided that because he knew so much about fabrics and jewels and ladies' clothes that he could not be a man. It had not occurred to her that there were more men like him than men like her brothers, who car
ed only for warfare.
He opened his mouth to tell her—as though words could change a lifetime of her ideas of what men should be—but he saw a man behind her trying to control an unruly horse. The horse, angered by several strokes from its master's whip, broke free, running and kicking toward Zared, who had her back to the animal.
Tearle didn't think; he just leaped for Zared and flattened her to the ground, his big body completely covering hers. As the horse ran at him, hitting him again and again with its steel-shod hooves, he tucked his head down, trying to protect his head and neck by hunching his shoulders.
Within seconds there were shouts, and men scared the horse away, but not before it had done a great deal of damage to Tearle. He lay still a moment, taking deep breaths. He couldn't yet tell if his ribs were broken.
Beneath him Zared began to squirm as she tried to push out from under him so she could breathe.
"You are hurt?" a man above them yelled.
"Fetch a cot," another man yelled. "We will carry him."
Tearle painfully rolled away a little to let Zared out from under him, and as he looked at her face he knew he could not allow himself to be carried away. He could give her no more reason to think him less than a man.
He took a deep breath and rolled onto his side.
"I will fetch Severn," Zared said. She could think of nothing else to say, but she knew that a Howard had probably just saved the life of a Peregrine. She would fetch Severn, and he would know how to deal with an injured man.
"I am well," Tearle said, speaking with difficulty. The right side of his body felt as though it had been crushed. "I have merely had the wind knocked from me.
"Severn can—"
"No!" he said, closing his eyes against the pain. Using all the effort he could muster, he sat up.
"You are hurt," Zared said. "I will fetch help."
"No!" he said again.
By then there was a crowd around them, all of them gaping at the man who had been brutally kicked by a horse but was rising as though he had not been injured.
It took all Tearle's effort to come to his feet. He slowly took a couple of deep breaths, and as far as he could tell, his ribs were unbroken. "We must return," he said to Zared.
"You have to—"
"To what?" he asked, glaring down at her.
"Nothing," she said angrily. "There is naught I want you to do. If you were hurt, you would no doubt cry to high heaven for relief. I have to return to help my brother."
She turned away from him, leaving him to follow or not. She hated the way her knees felt a little weak after what had happened. The Howard man's body had so completely covered hers that she had been able to see nothing of the horse, but she had felt the impact of the hooves on his body as the horse hit him.
Yet he had shielded her. Why? What did that Howard want of her?