Keeper of the Dream (25 page)

And then she
could
see it. Striated ribbons of color, blues and purples and violets, that swirled through the air. Shimmering, rippling rainbow threads that wove together into a tapestry of sound. They wrapped around her, caressing her skin like a lover’s hands. She felt exposed by the music, both beloved and violated.

She reached out, trying to touch the colors of sound, but though they danced around her still, her hands passed through them as if they were wisps of mist. Tears filled her eyes, for the music was so beautiful it hurt.

The bard plucked the strings in a slow, melancholy arpeggio. The chimes faded into a whispering stillness. The banners of sapphirine mist hung in the air for a moment longer, then dissipated slowly, ghostly remnants of the dying chords.

“Taliesin?” she whispered into the night, though she expected no answer. The music had not come from beyond the door, or inside the room. It had come from the same place her visions did, from the circle of time. It could have been played centuries ago or not yet played for another hundred years.

Then as soon as she was sure the music had vanished back into time, a sweet, liquid voice took flight.

This time the song wove around her like a river of silver. She could feel it, hot and molten, and where it touched her skin, she burned. He sang and with the music he created a lake where there dwelled a girl, and of a knight who came to claim her body without giving her his love.

The tale was both sweet and melancholy and Arianna smiled through her tears. Suddenly she was
in
the song, and it was as vivid, as real as any vision. She smelled the fecund odor of the algae-scummed mud that bordered the shore. She heard the caw of a crow and felt a summer wind, wet and hot. She was a girl, arising from the flat silver bowl of the lake, a girl who was naked, with long, dark hair, her milky skin slick with water, and breasts with brown, protruding nipples. She waded toward the shore and a knight came to stand before her, his shoulders filling the coppery sky. Silver sunlight bounced off his burnished black mail, surrounding him with a white halo of light. She raised her arms, beckoning, and there were tears in her eyes. Tears and a sad, desperate yearning.

“Oh, please …” Arianna cried, feeling already the pain that was to come. But at the sound of her cry the lake and the knight vanished and she was left with only the words, words that told of the knight’s rejection and the lady’s vow.

Then as suddenly as it had begun, the music stopped. Arianna waited, her breath suspended, for it to begin again. But the silver river had thinned to a trickle, then vanished. The silence now was ordinary, the silence of a hall at sleep.

Suddenly, the candle beside the bed flared back into life.

Arianna jerked upright, swallowing the cry that leapt to her throat. She sagged back against the piled pillows and waited for her heart to stop its wild beating. As she waited, her eyes opened wide, her ears straining, she understood that it all had been a dream.

She drew in a deep breath, and slowly she calmed. But the emotions of the dream stayed with her—the hollow, empty ache of a girl who loved but was not loved in return. It left a sadness that caught in Arianna’s throat.

She looked at the man sprawled beside her, this man who had made love to her without loving her only hours before. She could still feel the wet stickiness of his seed between her thighs. And a tenderness, a hurt.

The hero of her dream song had dark hair and a hard mouth, and his eyes had been like the lake, flat and silver. She wondered if the dream had gone on, if the knight would have ever come to the lady of the lake naked and on his knees and with his love in his hands.

Because the knight in the dream song had been Raine.

But then she could not imagine Raine, with his pride and his impregnable mail-armored heart, ever doing such a thing.

God’s death, Arianna. You are being a witless nit It was only a dream.

She did not want her Norman husband’s love. She wouldn’t want his love even if he brought it to her naked and on his knees. It was only a dream; a dream that meant nothing.

And if it was not a dream, then that God-cursed squire who called himself a bard had somehow been responsible for it all. The wretched knave—to wake her from a sound sleep with his caterwauling.

She rolled over and punched the pillow. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to will herself back to sleep. But sleep was elusive, not coming until a long time later, when she had drawn the pillow to her breast like a shield….

As if she were trying to protect her heart.

The next morning, Arianna sat at a table within the bedchamber, chewing on the end of a bent goose quill and trying to make some sense of the Rhuddlan ledgers. Ceidro’s seneschal had turned up missing after the battle, and from the way he’d kept the accounts, Arianna was beginning to suspect his disappearance wasn’t a coincidence. The man had been skimming the cream off the top of her brother’s coffers for months.

She scraped and smoothed a fresh sheet of parchment with the pumice stone and had just picked up a bear’s tooth to polish it with, when she felt the change in the room. It was as if the sun had suddenly burst free from behind a cloud. Her blood began to hum and a heat flushed over her skin.

“Good morrow, my lord husband,” she said, not looking up. Her hand shook a little, though, as she rubbed the flat edge of the big tooth over the crackling yellow sheet. She had sensed his presence as soon as he was near, without seeing him. Such a thing had never happened to her before.

“I must be getting out of practice,” he said. “I used to be able to creep up on an enemy much better than that.”

She did look up then. He filled the doorway, leaning against the jamb, with his thumbs hooked into his belt, his legs crossed at the ankles. His face was flushed from the sun, his hair ruffled by the wind.

“And do you think of your wife as your enemy, my lord?”

“Let us say I am careful to remember that she is a Welshwoman.”

The bear’s tooth squirted out from between her fingers, clattering across the table and onto the floor, to disappear into the rushes.

He pushed himself off the jamb and came toward her. He hunkered down at her feet and sifted through the straw. His chausses pulled across his thighs and the muscles of his back bunched beneath his thin summer-weight tunic. The sunlight streaming through the open window glinted off the blue lights in his hair, and she had to quell a ridiculous impulse to run her fingers through it. It seemed odd to see him like that, kneeling at her feet, just like the knight in the dream song.

His head came up suddenly, and then his hand, as he tossed the tooth at her. Caught by surprise, she snatched the tooth awkwardly out of the air and her elbow sent first the pen and then the scraper rolling onto the floor. He retrieved both implements and handed them up to her, flashing one of his rare smiles. “Is there anything else you’d like to drop whilst I’m down here?”

“Oh, no, no, I’m finished … I mean, I thank you for …” She realized she was babbling and bobbing her head like a chicken pecking in the dirt, and she made herself stop.

He stood up, towering over her. He had been hunting that morning and she could smell the forest on him, and the kill.

He looked down at the ledgers of bound parchment
and the amusement fled his face. “What are you doing?” he demanded, his voice sharp.

So lost was she in looking at him, that it took a moment for his words to penetrate her fogged senses. “What? Oh, these are the castle accounts, my lord. They’re in a sorry shape. You haven’t appointed a steward as yet and I thought that—as I’ve just inventoried Rhuddlan’s stores—that whilst I’m about it I might as well … that is …” She thrust her chin into the air. “If you insist, I will turn the accounts over to your priest. Though if his Latin is any indication, I fear he is a poorly lettered man.”

“You, a mere woman, claim to be more learned than my priest?”

Arianna clenched her teeth. “I was taught my letters and how to cipher along with my brothers and all the boys who fostered with us. My father believed knowledge enhanced a knight’s stature. And a lady’s as well.”

Some emotion flared in his eyes and was gone. “Clerking is for priests. A woman has no use for such knowledge. And a knight’s value lies in his prowess with a sword.”

She decided to ignore his opinion of women, for she knew most all of Christendom shared it. But she could not let the other pass. “It is a very poor knight, indeed my lord, who cannot read and write. A real knight is always a man of learning and honor and chivalry.”

His lips twisted into a bitter smile. “Only in the songs of the bards, Arianna. In
real
life, knights kill any way they have to and with no thought for honor or chivalry. They’d cheat their own mothers for the coin to bed a whore, and lie to God Himself to buy one more hour of this miserable life. Their limbs rot off from their wounds and they puke their guts out with diseases. They wind up selling their souls and bartering their honor because after a while anything seems better than dying and—ah, hell!”

He cut himself off abruptly, turning away from her. Arianna pushed to her feet, knocking into the table. The
inkhorn teetered and would have spilled if Raine hadn’t spun back around, his hand shooting out to steady it.

He laughed suddenly and caught her to him. “You are dangerous, woman.” He backed up, sitting down on the coffer beneath the window and drawing her between his thighs. “Dangerous to yourself and to others, with your foolish ideals and your flapping elbows.” His voice had turned oddly soft and caressing. “Perhaps I ought to tie you up and gag you, the way that Taliesin did when he dumped you in my tent that day.”

His thighs tightened around her hips, drawing her closer to him. She resisted a moment, then yielded. She wanted to yield. Her hands came up between them and her palms wound up resting on his chest. His tunic was warm from the sun and partly unlaced, revealing brown skin and a V of curling dark chest hair. She wanted to kiss him there, but she didn’t. She could see a rough spot on his jaw that the tonsor had missed while shaving him that morning. She wanted to kiss him there as well.

His hands settled around her waist and Arianna almost shuddered at his touch. She tried to grab hold of her scattering wits. “I’m glad you brought up the subject of Taliesin, my lord,” she said around a strange tightness in her throat.

She felt his chest expand beneath her palms. “What has that wretched whelp done now?”

“In the fortnight that you have been here at Rhuddlan he has managed to bed every single one of the kitchen wenches save for Bertha, and he has now started in on the dairy maids.”

“Why did he pass up Bertha? Isn’t she the one with the splendid tits?”

“Hunh! They droop and swing about like a cow’s udders.” She felt a twinge of jealousy that her husband had noticed Bertha’s magnificent breasts. Arianna had rubbed gillyflower juice every night for years on her own breasts
to get them to grow. “Nay, Bertha was saved from your squire’s base lechery because she has a rash.”

“Ah.”

“Not
that
sort of rash, you dolt.” Laughing, she thumped his chest with her fist. He caught her hand, bringing it up to his mouth. He nipped her knuckle, then licked it, sending a shiver up her arm. He was going to make love to her soon; he had sought her out for the purpose of making love to her, and in the middle of the day. She thought of what he had done to her body last night, how he had made her feel, and she knew that she wanted it to happen again.

“God’s truth, you must do something about Taliesin, my lord,” she said, and was shocked to hear a quaver in her voice. “Else Rhuddlan will be overrun with babes nine months hence.”

“What would you have me do—geld the boy? Order your wenches to keep their legs together.”

One of his hands had moved up to her breast. His fingers found her nipple and she had to bite her lip to keep from moaning. “I might have known I would get no help from you on this matter, as you are a man and have not a care for how many maids you debauch or bastards you sow.”

“You malign me, wife. I’ve given up debauching maids and sowing bastards, now that I am married.”

A part of her was pleased by his words, the other part barely heard him. She could think of nothing but the feel of his hand on her breast, of what his fingers were doing to her nipple.

“I see that I shall have to take matters into my own hands,” she said, having trouble getting the words out her tight throat. “I’ll give all the wenches brakeroot to take in wine. At least then they won’t be gotten with child.”

His fingers suddenly fastened around her wrists and he jerked her hard up against his chest. “How do you know of such things?”

For a moment she simply stared at him with bemused eyes. Her breast still tingled from his touch. “Every woman knows … ”

“Nay, only whores know how to keep a man’s seed from taking root.”

“You insult me, my lord.”

His fingers tightened their grip, digging into her flesh, and his jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped. He brought his face so close to hers she felt the angry heat of his breath. “And do you know, too, of a way to rid yourself of a babe once the seed has been planted?”

“Aye, but—”

“If you ever,
ever
take anything to abort my child, I will kill you for it, Arianna. Believe this, for I mean it.”

She jerked free of his grip and shouted so loudly he blinked. “I would never do such a thing, you worm-witted, bog-headed, moldy-tongued Norman! I want a child.”