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
« ^ »
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.