So Severn was planning to leave in two days for the tournament, and he was refusing to take the finery Liana had had made for him. "She will take me as I am."
"She will not have you at all," Liana had snapped.
But now he was telling Liana that he planned to take Zared as his squire. Zared smiled in anticipation: to see the world, to hear the music, taste the food, to…
"She can not go," Liana was saying. "Do you forget that for all her disguise she is a female? What if her sex were discovered? What is to keep some drunken man from her body? She will not be much of a marriage prize without her virginity."
Marriage? Zared thought. No one had mentioned marriage to her.
Liana's voice lowered. "What of the Howards? They will know that two of the Peregrines attend the tourney. Will they not try to take one of you? And will it not be the younger, smaller one?"
"Even the Howards would not offend the king, and he will be there."
"On the journey there and back, then," Liana said angrily. "Severn, please listen to me. Do not endanger the child's life. Do not let your anger at Iolanthe cause the death of your sister."
Zared realized that her hands were made into fists, her short nails cutting into her palms. She wanted to show herself to Liana and shout that she could take care of herself, that if any man tried to touch
her, she'd use a knife on him. How could Liana think she was so weak that she must be protected like the puniest female? She was a man, not a woman!
"I mean…" Zared whispered, and to her horror she felt tears coming to her eyes. She was female, but she could take care of herself.
"She will go with me," Severn said, and his tone made Zared know that he meant to discuss the subject no further.
Zared pushed away from the wall and ran down the stairs before Severn saw her. Damn them all, she thought. One minute she was on the training field with Rogan yelling at her to hold her sword higher, and the next she was hearing Liana say she was too weak to fend off some drunk's advances. Was she a knight or a puny female? Was she a man or a woman?
She kept running down the stairs until she reached the courtyard below, and there stood Severn's stallion saddled and waiting for him. Cursing her whole family for confusing her, she jumped on his horse and thundered across the drawbridge, ignoring the shouts behind her.
She rode as hard and as fast as she could, not caring where she was going. The castle and the Peregrine lands disappeared behind her, and she spurred the horse harder and faster. She was some miles from home when the three men fell in behind her. A quick look back showed that they wore the Howard chevron and the Howard colors.
Her heart leaped to her throat. Rogan had warned her that the Howards watched them, that the Howards sat in wait for one of the Peregrines to go unprotected.
All her life she had been warned about the Howards. From the time she had been born the treachery of the Howards had been drilled into her. Generations earlier a Peregrine duke, old and half senile, had taken for his second wife a young, pretty woman from the Howard family. The woman was ambitious, and she had persuaded her old husband to change his will to leave all—the money, the title, the estates—to her weakling of a son, a son that many whispered was not the duke's get.
The only way the Howard woman could persuade the old man to disinherit his grown sons was to make him believe he and his first wife had not in truth been married. The old man, his mind clear one day and foggy the next, had requested that the parish registers that recorded the marriage be brought to him, as well as the witnesses. But no registers were to be found, and all the witnesses had died—some of them all too recently.
The old man, dying and in great pain, had declared the sons of his first marriage bastards and had given everything to his wife's waiting family.
Since that time the Peregrines and the Howards had fought for the wealthy lands that the Howards controlled. Over the years the losses on both sides had been heavy, and the hatred was very deep.
Zared looked back at the Howard men chasing her, then rode harder than she ever had in her life, her head down to the horse's neck, the mane whipping at her eyes. The horse's hooves pounded on the hard, rutted dirt track, past people and carts and animals. But it wasn't long before she could feel the tired horse losing ground and feel the Howard men gaining on her.
"Come on, boy," she said to the horse. "If we make it to the king's forest, we'll lose them there."
She spurred the horse on, her heart beating hard with the horse's.
They almost made it, but moments before they reached the forest, when Zared could see the concealing safety of the trees ahead, the horse stepped in a hole and went down. Zared hit the ground and went rolling head over heels across the dusty road. When she stopped rolling and looked up three men were standing over her, swords pointed at her throat.
"It's the youngest Peregrine," one man said, as if he didn't believe his luck. "We'll be paid well for this."
"Stop counting your money and tie him up. I don't want him escaping before we can get him back."
One man grabbed her arm and pulled her up. "Little thing, he is," he said, feeling Zared's arm.
She jerked out of his grasp.
"Don't fool with me, boy, or I'll give you a taste of my knife. I don't guess Howard will mind whether a Peregrine is delivered to him dead or alive."
"Quiet!" the first man said. "Put the boy on your horse, and let's leave before his brothers come."