“I trust you will be honoring me more than any other? You will perhaps honor me so very much that you will feed me from your own knife?”
“Yes,” she said, grinning at him, “I have plans for my knife.”
She laughed as she dug her heels into Wicket’s sides. She was gone from him again.
After another ten minutes, Chandra drew in Wicket’s reins and carefully guided his descent to the rocky stretch of beach below, cut off from the harbor at Croyland by a thick finger of land. Jerval followed her, looking at the softly lapping waves collapsing gently on the coarse black sand.
It was a bright day, the sun full overhead, no rain clouds in sight. When they reached flat ground, Chandra dismounted, pulled off Wicket’s bridle, and shooed him away. Jerval did the same, and when he turned to face her, he saw that she was eyeing him, a look he didn’t begin to understand.
“About the formal banquet this evening,” she said, not looking at him. “You and I have jested about it, but truly I have not really thanked you properly for saving me.”
“I have never jested about it,” he said.
“That is because when you remember, you feel fear again that I could have had my throat sliced open.”
“If I could have sat on you to keep you safe, I would have.”
Immediately, her mouth was open to defend her own skill, her cunning, her strength. He raised a hand and lightly touched a finger to her lips, still chapped. “Attend me, Chandra. You must allow a man to do what he was born to do, and that is to protect you. If you take that from him, then what good is he?”
She said slowly, looking out over the sea, “I hadn’t thought of it like that. But there are so many ladies who still need protecting. They litter England. What matter does it make if only one of them doesn’t need your protection? If I don’t?”
He said patiently, touching his fingertips now to her arm, watching her slowly turn back to him, “A man is what he is. You could be larger than I, more vicious than King John before his barons finally defeated him, more stout of heart than King Richard, but it simply wouldn’t matter. I must protect you or die trying. If I don’t, then I am not worth much of anything.”
“You speak like the ideal of knighthood, Jerval. I know that men can perhaps protect women, but they seem to forget all about it when one is available to be raped. Where is all your vaunted protection then?”
“Rape? What are you talking about? Graelam didn’t touch you, did he?”
“No, he didn’t.” She’d almost said too much. Even now he was looking at her, and he was puzzled, wondering why she’d said that. Quickly, she thought, quickly, she had to distract him. “But you cannot deny that men will take what they can and it doesn’t matter if it is a male or a female at their mercy. If you are different—well, I don’t really know that, do I?”
She’d finally done it, just shoved him right over the edge. Anger flamed deep and hot. “Damn you, Chandra, you believe that I would harm someone weaker than I? You don’t know me well enough, you said. Then why would I take my time to save your white hide? And, having saved your hide, why then didn’t I simply throw you on the ground and ravish you?”
“I would have killed you and you knew it.”
He wanted to clout her. Instead, he grabbed her, hurled her over his shoulder and walked to the water.
Since he wasn’t stupid, he had an excellent grip on the back of her legs. She reared up, yelling curses at him, hitting him, but she couldn’t hurt him overly, not if she couldn’t kick him. He kept walking. The water lapped over his boots. They would be ruined. Well, no matter. He kept plowing forward into deeper and deeper water.
“What are you doing? Are you mad, you idiot? Put
me down!”
He said nothing, just kept pushing his way through the water until finally it was at his waist and then he stopped. “You are arrogant. Beyond that, you are ignorant. You think only of yourself and your own value. If you have any wits at all, you have buried them under layers of your own wonderful opinion of yourself.”
She fought him, nearly broke some of his body parts, but he managed to hurl her another six feet forward into deeper water.
She slammed into the water—and sank like a stone.
He strode back to the beach, then turned to see her swimming gracefully, powerfully, back to shore.
Well, damn. He’d hoped she would have a bit of trouble, perhaps need him to rescue her, but no luck. She was wearing trousers, not a gown.
When she pulled herself out of the water, she walked up to him and drew back her fist, her intent to break his jaw.
He laughed with the joy of it. He grabbed her arm, pulled her off balance toward him, then flipped her over his shoulder. She landed on her back in the sand some feet beyond him.
Instead of rage, or curses, she lay there a moment, getting her breath back, and then she grinned up at him. “That was very well done,” she said. “I can wrestle and do all sorts of vicious holds, but not that throw. Could you show me how to do that?”
He said after he managed to recover, “You defy any logic that I have ever known.” He gave her a hand up, then spent the next hour showing her how to gain enough leverage, to use his own momentum against him to send him over her shoulder.