Keeper of the Dream

Wales, 1157

The wind carried with it the stench of burning thatch and the anguished wail of a woman’s scream.

A knight on horseback rode through the sacked town. The wind sent an ell of bright ruby silk floating toward him down the muddy road. The cloth snagged a moment on a broken cartwheel before a gust whipped it free, and it was trampled unnoticed beneath his charger’s hooves. But when a pack of squealing rats darted into the road from a smoldering hayrick, the horse reared in alarm. The knight controlled the enormous black beast easily and without thought.

He passed a wall of burning timber, and the flames flickered in the sheen of sweat on his face, flaring in his flint-gray eyes. A spearman darted in front of him, waving a pitch-soaked brand. Laughing, the man called out the knight’s name as he put the torch to a hovel roof and the straw ignited into a fountain of fire. A hail of cinders and shrieks of terror swirled up from inside. But the knight rode on.

The door of a nearby cottage burst open and an archer reeled across the threshold. He stumbled into the knight’s
path to sprawl facedown in a puddle, a ploughman’s sickle buried in his back. Rivulets of blood, like spilled wine, ran from his outstretched hands. A sobbing girl crawled after him. Her tunic was ripped down the front, baring small, blue-veined breasts. Yet the knight passed her by without sparing a glance—just as he failed to see the discarded loot of dented pots and burst sacks of grain that littered the way before him.

On he rode with single-minded purpose out the town’s battered gate, where he pulled up within the shadow of the wall.

His brooding gaze followed the rutted road where it wound along the river toward a castle. In the gray twilight the castle’s sandstone walls took on the black-red color of dried blood. It loomed thick and heavy against the rain-sodden clouds, but in the tower, light glowed from a solitary window.

“Rhuddlan …”

The knight spoke the castle’s name aloud, but there was no inflection in his voice. Just as his face—though streaked with marks from his helm and splattered with another man’s blood—bore no expression. It could have belonged to an effigy on a tomb.

He stared a long time at the keep with its frail speck of light. When at last he turned away, it was with a savage, parting promise….

Rhuddlan, you will be mine.

Behind the shuttered window where a light still burned, a young woman cradled a bowl in her palms. It was fashioned of gold and rimmed with a band of pearls, and for a moment, as she held it, the vessel seemed to glow softly and pulse in her hands. But though she calmed her mind and peered into the bowl’s luminescent depths, she beheld only water and a shimmering reflection of the cresset lamps swinging on the wall above her head.

A rough voice barked in her ear. “Do you see anything yet?”

Arianna jerked, slopping water onto her rose silk bliaut. She set the bowl down onto a nearby chest with a clatter, and wiped at the growing wet stain on her skirt. Tossing a fat brown braid over her shoulder, she glared at her brother.

“God’s death. Nothing is likely to happen with you peering at me like a nervous priest in an alchemist’s shop. As if you expected to see brimstone come curling out my ears at any moment.”

“What I expect is for you to tell me what I need to know.” He spun away from her, then turned back, flinging out his arm and pointing a stiff finger in her face. “You wear the seer’s torque around your neck, yet you are next to useless when it comes to
seeing
anything.”

Unconsciously, Arianna touched the ancient collar that encircled her throat. It was of bronze—two twisted snakes, their heads meeting in the center with flicking tongues and staring emerald eyes—and in that moment it felt as if they were strangling her. But she tilted up her chin and matched her brother’s anger with her own. “And what of you, Ceidro? You wear a man’s sword around your waist, yet I don’t see you acting the part of a man on this night.”

A dark flush spread over Ceidro’s cheeks. Hunching his shoulders, he turned away from her, and Arianna regretted her hasty words. She went to him and laid her palm against his rigid back. “I tried, Ceidro. But you know it doesn’t work that way. The visions never come on command.”

Ceidro said nothing. Nor did he turn around. Arianna fought back another urge to shout at him. She didn’t want to argue with her brother. It was frustration that caused them to snap at one another. Frustration and fear. Ceidro knew well the visions had never once come when summoned. And when they did appear, rare and unexpected
they often left her feeling ill and terrified, having revealed things she’d sooner not know. But her brother, too, was afraid. He wanted her to look into the future and tell him whether he would prevail in the battle he had to fight on the morrow.

She forced him to turn and meet her eyes. She tried a smile. “It’s the cursed Gwynedd temper. But we shouldn’t be fighting one another. Not now.”

Ceidro retrieved the bowl and thrust it at her. “Then try again.”

Arianna looked down at the golden vessel, but she didn’t touch it. It was a mazer, a drinking bowl, and centuries old. One day two years ago a mysterious bard had arrived at her father’s court, saying that he’d heard of the Prince of Gwynedd’s daughter, how she wore the seer’s torque and possessed the
filid’s
gift of prophecy. He had given Arianna the bowl and told her it had once belonged to Myrddin, the greatest magician and seer who had ever lived. But though she kept it with her always and though the visions continued to appear, sporadic and unbidden, in every mundane medium of water imaginable, from a bathing tub to a rain puddle, Arianna had never been able to call forth a single glimpse of the future in the bard’s so-called magic mazer.

So now Arianna lifted her head to tell her brother that it was no use, but the sight of him stilled her words. In the soft light his thin, beardless face looked pathetically young. Like her, he possessed the Gwynedd features of pointed chin, sharp cheekbones, and wide-spaced, sea-foam eyes. Tonight, fear showed in those eyes. And lingering traces of a bitter grief. Only a month ago his young wife had died in childbed, and he’d barely had time to mourn before he found himself defending this border
cantref
and castle against an enemy force twice as large and more powerful than his. And he was but twenty, only a year older than she.

Ceidrop pushed the curved edge of the mazer against her chest. “Are you going to cooperate with me, or no?”

Arianna swallowed hard, forcing a smile. “I’ll try again. But mind, you quit hovering over me like an anxious midwife.”

She was reaching for the bowl when a gust of wind ripped through the thin parchment windowpane, loosening a shutter. It slammed against the wall with a loud bang and Ceidro whirled, his hand flying to his sword.

He flashed Arianna a sheepish smile as he returned the mazer to the chest and strode across the rush-covered floor to refasten the latch. But he stiffened when he reached the window and his hand wrapped around the wooden shutter in a crushing grip. “God …”

“What? What is happening?” That morning the scouts had reported the enemy was on the march, but miles away. Yet through the rent in the window Arianna suddenly smelled smoke and heard an hysterical clanging of church bells from the village that lay between the castle and the sea. “Ceidro?”

“Christ Jesus save us,” Ceidro said on an intake of breath.

Arianna’s mouth went dry and her knees trembled as she joined her brother at the window. The town below was ablaze, gilding the lowering clouds and the distant sea with an iridescent glow. Flaming brands were reflected in the blades of countless weapons, flickering like hundreds of fireflies against a night sky. As they watched, a woman fled up the road toward the castle, a knight on a white charger pounding after her. Arianna held her breath, expecting the man to cut the woman down with a slash of his sword, but instead he leaned over and jerked the woman up by her arm, throwing her facedown across his saddlebows.

“God curse the English and their Norman masters,” she whispered, almost choking over the fury that squeezed her chest.

Ceidro stirred beside her and Arianna heard an answering tremor of hatred in his voice. “Aye … God curse them all.” Then he added fervently the oft-repeated prayer: “And God grant the Cymry victory.”

Though outsiders called their land Wales, the people who dwelled within its dark forests and misty mountains called it Cymru. They called themselves the Cymry, and they could not remember a time when there hadn’t been war. All their lives and the lives of their fathers and grandfathers had been spent in a desperate struggle for their freedom against first the Saxons and then the Norman invaders. Still they believed and they dreamed of liberty, and the bards sang of a time when the great King Arthur would arise from the Isle of Avalon, where he slept, to lead their people in one final and victorious battle against their enemies.

The bards sang, too, of Arianna’s family. Of the House of Cunedda, lords of Gwynedd, direct descendents of the great heroes of Britain. The sons and daughters of Gwynedd were the embodiment of the past and the caretakers of the future. They ruled over a quarter of Wales and their duty was to keep the dream of freedom alive.