He actually grinned. “Well done! Ninety-nine men out of a hundred wouldn’t give that answer.”
“Women are more practical. And we have no problem with being called cowards,” she pointed out, wryly.
“Right. So, against someone with a knife, your first priority is going to be to escape. Your second, if you can’t outrun him, is going to be to evade him or hurt him so you can escape. You are unlikely to ever find yourself facing someone your size or smaller, so this is how it’s done.”
He couldn’t show her everything in one afternoon, obviously, but what he began with was very interesting indeed. Using a cloak wrapped around one arm as a shield, for instance, and the pattern of move out of the way, block the next blow, strike back while he’s off balance, run.
Mostly, though, he showed her how to evade, how to tell the way that someone was coming at her, and how to squirm out of the way like a ferret. How to cut or stab if she could, and if not, how to punch her attacker with the hand not holding the knife. “He’ll be concentrating on that hand,” Eric pointed out. “Not on the hand he thinks isn’t dangerous. And this is a good time to have a nice, heavy rock, a piece of wood or half a brick in that hand if you can.” He chuckled a little. “I once put a man down with a horseshoe that way. I’d picked it up and put it in my pocket — no point in wasting a good horseshoe.”
She hardly noticed that as she warmed up with the exercise, she hurt less and less, until, when he called a halt for dinner, she realized she hardly hurt at all!
“You are being rather nicer to me than you were when I first got here,” she said lightly, as they left the music room to clean up before dinner.
“I expected someone more arrogant, based on our first meeting,” he said bluntly. “Just another of the same sort of women who used to look down their noses at me.”
She snorted. “You bullied me, tried to intimidate me and did your level best to terrify me. What kind of response did you expect?”
“Not what I got, obviously.” He reached out and caught her elbow, making her stop. “Look…I’ll admit it. I wanted to bed you. If I can bully a woman into that position, I will. Most of the women I run into out in the forest respond to that. They’re happy to trade a rogering for getting off with whatever they’ve poached. I get what I want, they get what they want, no harm done. And I’ll freely admit I’m a good customer at the brothels, and when we still had human servants around here, I was known to tumble a chambermaid or three. That’s the kind of women I know best. The only other women I’ve ever met are the nobles who’d look through me as if I wasn’t there.”
She was not surprised to hear the venom in his voice at that last.
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he continued. “I’m not sure how to treat you, what to say around you. All the others, I know right off what my place is, what her place is, and that’s that. But you — ”
He let go of her arm. “You baffle me. I don’t know how to treat you. I just know I like being around you, and it’s not the same as it is with any of those other women.”
She felt herself warming to his tone, his expression. He was in dead earnest, so far as she could tell. And she couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him — the bastard, snubbed by the noble, resented by the servants. How lonely he must have been! How —
“It wasn’t a good life, being the unacknowledged bastard,” he continued bitterly. “My father’s people sneered at me when he wasn’t looking, half the time I had to thrash the servants to get them to obey me — and the only reason they did so after that was because I got away with the thrashing. Finally, I got a position, once I was old enough to be useful — they stopped sneering at me openly, but you could still see the contempt in their eyes. I had to fight for everything I got, prove I was better than the other man that might have gotten what I was granted. Sebastian didn’t sneer at me, but he doesn’t sneer at anyone. He had to fight for what he wanted, too, the wizardry business. The Old Duke wasn’t all that pleased about his son flinging magic around until the day the boy dared one of the squires that had been taunting him to fight him, and the brat ended upside down in a tree, hanging by one foot.” Eric smiled grimly at that. “That’s why he and I get along. That’s why, truth to tell, we were both just as glad to see the backs of most of the Old Duke’s people.”
She could almost see it — and no wonder he bullied people, if he had been bullied himself. That was why she was treating the twins as she did, treating them as a friend and a real sister and an ally instead of bullying them. It would have been easy to bully them, especially when they had been younger. The servants, her father, would have believed her, and not them, if they had complained. But that not only wasn’t fair to them, since they had done nothing to her, it would only turn them into little tyrants when they grew up — children became what they lived with. But Eric had only seen force used against him all his younger life, and fighting back was all he knew. There had been no one to teach him a better way, and — well, even if there had been, would that really have helped him?
And just as she started to respond to him, something that had been nagging at the back of her mind leapt forward.
The Rake’s Reward.
Oh, no. She had just read this very same scenario last night in that book about The Tradition! The poor, misunderstood rakehell… the man who was a rogue because deep inside he was still a lonely, neglected little boy… the good girl who would redeem him with her love and help him become the gentle man he was meant to be…
Even the fact that he was the bastard son played into that!
Except, the book had noted, that was seldom how the scenario played out, once the rake got what he wanted. The habits of a lifetime are very hard to break, and The Tradition was perfectly happy to perpetuate those habits, so that The Rake’s Reward generally turned into The Sadder but Wiser Girl or, well, any number of other songs and stories about girls who trusted a man’s sad story and wound up with a big belly and no wedding ring. And wouldn’t that be a fine way to go home, knowing that in a few months time you wouldn’t be able to hide what you’d been up to!
Oh, no, you don’t! she thought at The Tradition, angrily, and as she did so, she could actually feel the pressure that the Godmother had spoken about — the force of the magic trying to steer her into the Path it wanted. And then what? Given the situation here, there were all sorts of ways this could go wrong. She was all alone here, with only the Spirit Elementals, who probably wouldn’t be of much help if she said no, but Eric decided she only needed to be “persuaded” into yes. Or if he decided he was just going to take what he wanted, as he usually did. She rather doubted that someone with his appetites was going to be willing to settle for decorous kisses.
She also didn’t think he’d be inclined to propose marriage once he’d gotten her where he wanted her…
With her mind working logically instead of emotionally, other things occurred to her. It might not just be The Tradition at work. This could all be a clever act on his part, the wiles of the practiced seducer. Who knew how many other women he’d cajoled underneath him with that same story of the poor, sad, lonely boy?
Still, looking at his serious, thoughtful expression, she was tempted…