Keeper of the Dream (19 page)

“At least I find solace in the knowledge that it is not forever. One day King Arthur will arise from his golden bed on the Isle of Avalon and take up his magic sword, and you will be driven from this island. The day will come when Arthur will once again sit on his throne in London. The great seer Myrddin has so prophesied our ultimate victory.”

“Ah, yes …” His long fingers toyed with the wine goblet’s dragon tail. “Taliesin tells me you’re something of a seer yourself. Be sure to let me know when Arthur is about to come so that I can begin to worry.”

“That is a fault of you Normans—one of your
many
faults. You have no imagination.”

“On the contrary. I know well the stench of a man after he’s been dead but a few hours, so I can easily imagine how your King Arthur must reek after lying on that golden bed and rotting for six hundred years. If he came back to sit on the throne in London, the inhabitants would expire from the stink.”

Goaded now beyond fear, Arianna hurled at him the worst insult she could think of. “You, sir, are no true knight!”

He startled her by throwing back his head and laughing. Sunlight glinted off his strong, tanned throat. For a moment she lost herself in looking at him. At his finely cut mouth, his flaring cheekbones. God help her, but he affected her in ways she didn’t understand, and didn’t like.

“You may scoff, but the day will come,” she said,
though her voice shook, “when you Normans and all your name will know defeat.”

His face still bore traces of laughter and his eyes had changed color, from flint to soft smoke. His smoldering gaze fastened onto her mouth. “My name will include your son, Arianna. For you will have a son by me.”

Arianna was convinced her heart had stopped. When it started up again, it beat in unsteady lurches. “No … I won’t …”

“You will. I will plant him in your belly tonight.”

Raine knelt among sweet-smelling rushes, his brooding gaze focused on the bed. The gray fur coverlet had been folded back, the fine camlet sheets strewn with violets.

The bishop swung a censer, sending clouds of incense wreathing around the embroidered canopy. The bronze lamps overhead swayed on their chains, causing shadows to undulate against the gilt-painted walls. The old man’s dry voice crackled like dead leaves as he chanted,
“Dominus vobiscum …”

If ever a marriage bed needed blessing, Raine thought, it was this one.

God’s truth, he would rather have her willing. But willing or no, he would take her virginity. Their marriage had to be consummated this night, in case Owain showed up outside Rhuddlan’s walls tomorrow demanding back his daughter and his land. More than the truce, more even than his possession of the castle, Raine’s claim to Rhuddlan rested on his marriage to Arianna.

The bishop shook the aspergillum and holy water flew out the holes of the perforated silver vessel, splattering the bed. The droplets spread, darkening the satin like tears of blood. He needed her virgin’s blood on the sheets
come morning. He wanted a son growing in her belly before the end of summer.

The bishop withdrew on a fanfare of horns. Raine stood and looked down at the bent head of his wife. He was struck by how white was her scalp where it showed in the part of her dark brown hair. He reached down for her, offering his hand. A moment later she put her palm in his. He felt a shudder pass through her body as he pulled her to her feet. When she lifted her eyes to his, he saw that they were filled with a stark kind of fear.

Then a laughing, chattering group of women surrounded them, pulling her away from him.

In the great hall below, his brother and the other guests had already made heavy inroads into a tun of malmsey wine. Raine endured in silence their ribald jests while he drank and waited for the women to put her to bed. He suddenly felt so tired that he just wanted to get it over with.

His mood had turned so grim that when it came time for him to rejoin his bride in their chamber, the men took one look at his face and decided to forego their part in the bedding revels. Raine mounted the stairs alone.

The door’s hide hinges squealed as he swung it open and Arianna jerked, snatching the sheet up under her chin. The cresset lamps had been doused, the room lit now only by the fire in the brazier and the single flame on the tall, filigreed candlestick beside the bed. The dim flickering light threw the bones of her face into shadowy relief.

He searched for something to say to her, but could think of nothing. He pushed the door shut and leaned his shoulders against the worn, iron-banded wood. She stared back at him, her eyes black in her pale face.

“Arianna …”he began, his voice slurred, husky with fatigue. He struggled for a way to reassure her without promising not to hurt her, for he knew that he would.

But the words wouldn’t come. The tense silence
dragged out between them. Her chin lifted and her lips curled into that beautiful sneer—the one that made him want to master her and make love to her, both at the same time. “Well met, Norman. Have you come to plant your babe in my belly?”

His jaw hardened. He pushed himself off the door and started toward her. “Aye, wench,” he growled between his teeth.

Her hands clutched the bedcovers tighter to her chest and she pressed back into the pillows.

“Drop the sheet,” he said.

“You could at least be chivalrous enough to—”

“I
said
… drop the sheet.”

Her hands fell to her sides, and the sheet slithered to her waist. His fist shot out, grabbing a handful of the satiny material and ripping it completely off her.

Her palms pressed so hard into the mattress that the tendons stood out on her wrists. Her chest shuddered with the effort she made to contain her breathing. The smell of violets hung heavy in the air around the bed, but it was the sight of her naked body that caused the sweet ache of his sex to swell and harden with need.

She wore still the bronze torque of twisted snakes around her neck; they seemed to curl and writhe with her heaving breaths. The skin of her breasts was so pale he could see the blue tracery of veins. He cupped one in his palm and felt her heartbeat quicken.

He turned away, pulling off his tunic and chainse. The air felt cool on his bare chest. He sat on a leather coffer at the end to the bed to pull off his boots. Standing up again, he fumbled with the cords that fastened his braies to his chausses, cursing when one snarled into a knot. He peeled the undergarments down over his buttocks, kicking them aside.

Her breath sucked in on a gasp.

He turned his head and saw that her eyes had fastened on his blood-engorged sex. Her wide gaze moved up his
stomach, over his chest, and he actually thought he could feel it caressing his flesh like hot, moist breath.

He lay down onto the bed beside her, not touching her yet. The leather springs groaned beneath his weight and she shrank back as if she could pull the pillows around her like a shell.

“Arianna, look at me.”

She wouldn’t look at him, but lay instead staring straight up at the canopy overhead, as pale and stiff as the painted statue of the Virgin in the chapel. God’s mercy but this was going to be impossible.

He traced the bronze circlet where it followed the con-tours of her collarbone. The metal was hot, scorching hot and it seemed to throb and pulse beneath his fingertips For a brief moment a strange, curling silver mist blurred the edges of his vision and a roaring rose in his ears, like the surf crashing against rocks. He shuddered and the mist dissipated, the crashing, sucking sounds receded. The metal collar was cool against his fingers and he was sure then that he had imagined it all.

He pushed himself up onto his elbows and looked into his bride’s still face. She blinked and then at last her eye focused onto him. Again he touched the circlet at he throat. “Why do you wear this?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

He wrapped his hands around her neck, pressing hi thumbs into the hollows just above the twisted metal collar, and felt the drumming of her blood. “When I ask you a question, wife, I want an answer.”

Her pulse plunged and dipped. Her eyes were dark and haunted, like a Welsh mountain forest. He felt her swallow. “It is a seer’s torque. Only one with the true sight in allowed to wear it.”

“And what things have you seen?”

He watched, fascinated, as she ran her tongue along he full lower lip and then sucked the lip hard into her mouth “You. I saw you.”

That mouth … he had to taste that mouth. He lowered his head, but she flinched, turning her face away, and so he stroked her hair where it pooled, thick and dark like spilled wine, over the violet-strewn pillows. He twisted a hank of it around his fist and brought it up to his face, breathing deeply.

“It smells like a lemon,” he said, and cupping her cheeks in his hands, he forced her face around and kissed her.

She jerked her head violently aside.

He spanned her jaw with his long fingers, holding her in place as he lowered his head to recapture her lips. But she twisted beneath him, panting against his open mouth. “Stop. Please stop …”

He grasped the sides of her head and gave her a little shake. “You are my wife, damn your thick head. You are supposed to submit to me.”

“No, I don’t want—”

His grip tightened, shaking her again, harder. “You will submit, Arianna. You will feel my seed spilling inside of you and then I will know that Rhuddlan is well and truly mine.”

“Rhuddlan! That is all you care about. I am nothing but a name to you, a means to buy legitimacy, when all I ever wanted … all I want …” Her eyes brimmed with sudden tears and her chest heaved as she fought off a sob. “You can’t have me, not the part of me that matters.”

He drew in a deep breath as he struggled with his temper. “You are making this into much more of an ordeal than it need be.” He slid his finger across the fullness of her lower lip. “If you would quit fighting me, you might even take pleasure from it.” He moved his finger along her jaw and down her neck, stroking, stroking…. “But I will have your virginity this night, Arianna. Easy or hard, I will have it.”

She arched back against the pillows, thrusting her arms
down rigid at her sides. “Oh God, take it then and be done with it!”

He moved his head to kiss her again, but she jerked her mouth away from his. So he brushed his lips across the elegant hollow beneath her cheekbone. Her skin was as smooth as melted wax. Her hands came up to his chest and she tried to push him away. He trapped her fingers, pressing them against his flesh.

She pulled her hand from his, and her palm brushed through his chest hair, rubbing his nipples, and he groaned deep in his throat. He slanted his lips onto hers and her whole body shuddered and tensed. He ran his tongue along her lower lip, felt it tremble.

“Open your mouth.”

She opened her mouth, to breathe, to protest. Whatever the reason, he didn’t hesitate. He broached it with his tongue, slowly and carefully, the way he intended to broach her below. Her mouth was hot and he filled it.

She went absolutely still. But when he met her tongue, stroking the length of it with his, she reared against him, breaking the kiss.

He reached between them and caressed one breast, his callused-roughened palm grating against her soft skin. She shuddered, her nails digging into his arms as she tried to push him away from her.

He tensed his muscles, resisting her. He cupped one breast, lifting it, and she gasped arching against him as his lips closed tightly around her nipple. She made a little mewling cry of protest as he sucked the nipple deep into his mouth, and it budded up hard against his tongue.

She was almost frantic now, bucking against him like an unbroken colt. “Don’t do this to me,” she pleaded, her breaths grating harshly in her throat. “I will hate you all the rest of my life if you do this.”

He lifted his head. Her eyes were stained black. She shivered although her skin felt hot, and everywhere he touched her, it rippled. He drew her closer against him
and his stiff rod brushed against her belly. He shuddered at the feel of her softness against him. She cried out, squeezing her legs tightly together.

He covered her, moving so that his chest hair rubbed across her nipples, while he pushed her thighs apart with his knee. She tried to shield herself with her hand, but he pried it away.

“I hate you,” she said on a sobbing breath.

“Yes, I know. Hate me, Arianna. Hate me all you want. But open your legs for me.”

He stroked her heaving stomach, and followed his hands with his mouth. He palmed her mound, his fingers stretching her open. He lowered his head and thrust his tongue inside.

A blade flashed by the corner of his eye, and pain exploded in his arm. “Christ!” he hissed, on an intake of breath.

She tried to stab him again, and he reacted instinctively, grabbing for the weapon. She flung up her head just as his arm moved forward to block the fall of the blade, and his wrist bone slammed hard into her eye. The blow stunned her so that he was able to twist the knife from her fingers. He flung it across the room.

He held her hands above her head, pinning her down with his weight. He lay between her spread thighs, and the blood dripped from the cut on his arm onto her breasts. Their harsh breaths grated together into a sobbing sound that filled the still night air. He looked into her eyes … eyes that damned him with her hatred and her scorn.