Blanche glared at him, then shrugged. “Perhaps you are right, though I do not see that it matters much.”
Dienwald was quiet a moment, as if in deep thought. “Scream, my lady. One never knows.”
Kassia heard Blanche’s frantic screams. “No!” she cried, and would have run toward the copse, but one of the men grabbed her arms and held her still.
Some minutes later, she saw the man come striding toward her, straightening his clothes. She paled, realizing what had happened, and moaned softly in her throat.
He stopped in front of her.
“You . . . filthy animal! How could you harm a helpless woman!” She tried to struggle free of the man’s hold.
“Perhaps,” Dienwald said softly, frowning even as he spoke at her heartfelt cries, “you should think of yourself for a moment.”
Kassia looked up at him. She had remembered his face set in lines of cruelty. But he didn’t look cruel now. His hair, brows, even his eyes, were the color of the coarse-grained brownish-gray sand on the beach. There was even a line of freckles over his high-bridged nose. He was not a large man, she realized, not overpoweringly large like Graelam, but he was built solidly, and she knew she would be no match against him.
“What did you do to Blanche?” she whispered.
“I raped her,” he said quite calmly, “and let her go.”
He watched her eyes grow large with fear; then she lowered her lashes and stiffened her shoulders. “What will you do with me?”
“We shall see, little chick,” he said. Dienwald felt an unwonted surge of guilt at the miserable show of defiance from this pitiful little scrap. “Come, we ride now . . . No, you will not ride your mare, you will sit before me.”
He would rape her, she thought. But what did it matter? Nothing mattered.
She allowed him to lift her in front of him. His destrier pranced to the side, disliking the extra weight, but Dienwald spoke softly to him, and he quieted.
They rode in silence for an hour or more.
“Who are you?” Kassia asked at last.
“You may call me Edmund,” he said lightly. “And I will call you Kassia. That is your name, is it not?”
She nodded, and he felt her soft curls graze his chin.
He frowned over her head, his eyes between his destrier’s ears. She had not once mentioned her powerful husband. It was as Blanche said. Graelam despised his wife, and she knew it well.
“Your husband, why was he not with you?” he asked abruptly. “It is not wise for two women to ride unescorted.”
She laughed. The man who had raped Blanche and stolen her was lecturing her! “My husband,” she said, not hearing the helpless bitterness in her voice, “did not know we would be riding. ’Twas my fault. We are still on my husband’s land. I thought no one would dare . . .”
“You were wrong,” Dienwald said shortly. “And you are something of a child in your reasoning, are you not?”
“ ’Twould appear so,” Kassia said.
“And also a shrew?”
He looked into her face as he spoke, and saw the incomprehension widen her expressive eyes. “A shrew,” she repeated blankly. She sighed deeply. “Mayhap I am. My lord makes me so angry sometimes. I fear that I am sometimes unable to moderate my feelings or my words.”
Why was she speaking to him as she would a person she had known all her life, and trusted? It was idiocy. She was an idiot.
She did not realize that two tears had welled up in her eyes and were trailing down her cheeks.
“Stop it!” Dienwald growled at her. “I have given you no reason to cry.”
She blinked, and knuckled her eyes with her fists, as would a child. “I am sorry,” she said. “I am afraid.”
He cursed softly and fluently, some of his words more coarse and descriptive than Graelam’s.