Keeper of the Dream (30 page)

Arianna stepped between them, heedless of the sharp, slashing hooves. “Ivor ap Gruffydd killed one brother and blinded another so that he might rule the whole of Rhufoniog after his father died. You’ll not defeat him so easily, Norman.”

He couldn’t help it. He touched his fingers to her mouth and it trembled beneath his touch. “Would you mourn my death, Arianna?” He brushed his thumb along the length of her lower lip again, then again. “I told you once. I never lose.”

But it was not Ivor ap Gruffydd he was thinking of defeating. It was her.

His hand fell to her shoulder, then to her arm, and he pulled her up against him. But when he lowered his head, she turned her face aside. He let go of her arm and caught her jaw between his long fingers, jerking her head back around again. And brought his mouth down hard on her lips in a kiss that was swift and fierce, and angry.

Thrusting her away from him, he vaulted into the saddle. He gathered up the reins, looking down at her. She stared back up at him as slowly, deliberately, she wiped the taste of him off her mouth.

He threw back his head and laughed.

Rain poured down on the open bailey. It splashed over the eaves in miniature waterfalls and gurgled in small rivers along wagon ruts and gutters. The night was as black
as the devil’s heart. Gusts rattled the shutters in the bedchamber where Arianna paced, as she had paced for two days and most of three nights, awaiting her husband’s return.

She almost missed the bleat of the watchman’s horn, so loud was the storm. She threw open the shutter and the wind snatched it from her hands, sending it crashing against the wall like the snap of a catapult.

Leaning out the window, she peered through the dense night and driving rain. She heard shouts and the stomping of hooves muffled by mud, the jingle of bits and the clink of armor, the clatter of weapons. She strained for the sound of his voice, but heard it not.

And later, a long time later, she heard the clunk of boots on the stairs. But it was Taliesin who burst through the door, shouting, “Come quickly, my lady! He is sorely wounded.”

Arianna’s knees crumbled, and she had to grasp the bedpost for support. “W-where is he?”

“In the stables. I fear he is dying.”

She ran into the antechamber where the chatelaine’s bag of herbs and balms was kept, along with the spice chest and penny barrels. Why had they left him in the stables? He must be so badly wounded they were afraid to move him. God … her fingers scraped with desperate haste at the lock.
Dying.
Raine was
dying.
Damn him, he couldn’t leave her now when she had just barely gotten to know him. When there was so much left unfinished between them.

Clutching the medicine bag tightly to her chest, she hurried back to the squire. “What has happened to him?”

“It’s his hindquarters, my lady. They were hurling fire-pots down on us from a mangonel, and balls of burning pitch. One struck his hindquarters, setting his tail afire. He’s sorely burned, my lady.”

“His tail afire?” Arianna flung the bag onto the bed and seized the boy by his slender shoulders, shaking him
so hard his teeth rattled. “It’s not Raine who’s wounded, it’s his cursed horse!”

He stared at her with wide, innocent eyes. “Did I not say so?”

“Nay, you did not say so,” she said through gritted teeth, giving him another rough shake. “You deliberately misled me!”

A smug grin swept across his face. “And did not your heart stop when you thought ‘twas Lord Raine who lay dying? Did you not think that if he died, then so too must you die, for life would be but a barren desert without him? Do not you realize that it is love you feel for this man, your husband—”

“It wasn’t love I felt, you pox-faced idiot!” She flung the boy away from her, so violently he tripped over his own feet and landed on his rump. “It was only a wife’s natural concern for her husband.” She pointed a shaking finger at him where he lay sprawled in the rushes, his laughing gaze daring her to deny the truth of his words. “And if you ever breathe a word of this to your master, you blackhearted, conniving traitor, I swear by your goddess I will set the dogs on you and feed what’s left to the crows!”

Snatching up the medicine bag, she ran from the room with the sound of Taliesin’s cackles following after.

Arianna stopped off at the kitchens for a piggin of lard, some figs, and a costrel of soured wine. She had to carry it all in the folds of her mantle, so that by the time she reached the stables she was soaked. Once through the door she paused to catch her breath and shake off the water. The air inside was damp and smelled of wet horse and fresh dung. Straw rustled, pawed by restless hooves, and she was greeted by snorts and an occasional nicker. From a stall in the rear, where spilled a pool of lantern light, she heard a man’s murmur and the wheezing, belabored breath of an animal in pain.

The soles of her shoes made no sound on the swept,
packed earth. She stopped, her hand on the stall door, and looked inside.

His
broigne
was stained dark with rainwater, his hair plastered to his skull in wet swirls. A two-day’s growth of beard shadowed the lower half of his face. She thought the lines that framed his mouth seemed more deeply etched, the skin more tautly drawn across his cheekbones. He sat cross-legged on the hay-strewn floor, the destrier’s head cradled in his lap. He spoke softly to the big horse and she was shocked by the tenderness she heard couched within the rough words.

“Don’t you go dying on me, you old flea-bitten, mangy bag of bones.” His hand stroked the thick black neck, as gentle as his voice. “I promise you’ll be fed on nothing but winnowed barley for the rest of your idle, misbegotten days—”

His head snapped around at the creak of the stall door opening. The all-too-revealing pain vanished from his eyes as if they’d been shuttered. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I see no reason why a noble steed should suffer for a Norman’s sins.”

She knelt beside the great beast, who quieted immediately, as if he sensed her presence would bring relief. She searched her bag, assembling the herbs and other ingredients she would need. The hair had been seared from the horse’s left hindquarters, leaving bare hide covered with oozing, bleeding blisters. He followed all her movements with an unblinking eye glazed with pain.

“What star was he born under?”

Raine’s hand paused in its rhythmic stroking, then resumed. “I don’t know. I got him as a yearling. Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters. All remedies are associated with the stars and planets and certain ones work best on those born under certain signs. Since we don’t know the date and hour of his birth …?” She glanced up at him to
receive a negative shake of his head. “Then I shall have to use a general remedy for burns.”

She mashed up the figs and mixed it with the soured wine, added dandelion and bryony root and stirred it all into the lard. Then she sprinkled in a packet of dried cow dung. She scooped up a handful of the mixture, repressing a shudder at its stink and gooey feel.

“I don’t think he’ll die,” she said. He didn’t answer, but the taut lines that bracketed his mouth relaxed a bit.

Except for an occasional shudder of his powerful muscles, the horse didn’t move as Arianna smoothed the doctored lard over his burns. She could feel Raine’s eyes on her, but when she cast a glance his way she saw that as usual his face was inscrutable. Yet she remembered the achingly tender sound of his voice when he had tried to soothe the stallion. He would speak that way to a woman he loved, she thought.

The horse nickered and she crooned to him, without thought:

“For mercy’s sake, sing anything but that,” Raine said.

She looked up at him in surprise. “You know the song, my lord?”

“Every bloody word of it. The first six months he squired for me, Taliesin regaled my ears with that cursed lovers’ tale near every night. He only shut up after I threatened to bore a hole through his tongue with an awl.”

Arianna tensed her jaw to keep from smiling. But at the same time she felt a chill. So it had not been a dream, after all. Or it had not been
her
dream. She wanted to ask Raine how the song ended, if the lady of the lake ever won her knight’s love.

Instead, she daubed on the last of the lard in silence. Sitting back on her heels, she wiped her hands with straw. Raine eased the stallion’s head off his lap and stretched to his feet. His fingers closed around her arm to help her up, letting go of it immediately as soon as she was. She felt the loss of his touch as a hollowness in her chest, an ache.

She swallowed, cleared her throat. “There’s naught else I can do. The salve should numb his pain.”

He said nothing.

After a moment he lifted his hand and smoothed back the wisps of hair that had begun to curl around her forehead as it dried. His thumb brushed her cheekbone. “There’s a gentleness in you, a sweetness….”

Arianna’s throat felt tight, and her heart began to beat in unsteady lurches. She wanted him to hold her, she wanted it with a longing so intense it made her chest ache. But she could not forget that two days ago he had left her and ridden off to do battle with Kilydd and Ivor and if he was back already and alive, then it must mean that her cousins were dead and that he had killed them.

“What did you do to my cousins?”

He fixed her with ice-pale eyes. “Kilydd escaped. Ivor died in the fighting. I cut off his head and hanged his body by the feet from the ramparts, where it will dangle until the ravens pick clean his bones and serve notice to the rest of you Welsh that the Lord of Rhuddlan will suffer no rebellion—”

She whirled and ran for the door, but Raine overtook her in two strides. He snagged her arm, hauling her around, pinning her to the door of an empty stall.

“You are my
wife,
Arianna. That means you will be loyal to
me,
over all others. You are to give me your respect and your obedience and your worthless Welsh loyalty without question, no matter what the cost. And you are going to give me this”—he thrust his hand between her legs, cupping her sex—“when I ask for it and how I ask for it, and you’re going to quit pretending not to want
to give it to me because we both know damn well you do.”

He went still. Her body shuddered, and her hips arched, pressing upward. His fingers curled ever so slightly, pushing soft silk into the tender folds of her mound.

She could feel her own pulse pounding in her neck. It seemed to match the steady drumming of the rain on the thatch. Away from the light, his face was shrouded in shadows, but his eyes burned. He hadn’t removed his hand.

She sucked in a deep breath and the movement caused her breasts to brush against his leather
broigne.
They tightened, swelled, and there was a thick heaviness between her legs, a burning ache, where he touched her still, still…. The breath came out again, slow and shaky. He still hadn’t removed his hand.

“You’re wet for me,” he said, his voice rough. “I can feel it soaking through your clothes. Wet and hot.”

God’s death. She wanted him. She wanted him with a wildness that frightened her. She lost herself in his eyes, eyes that turned dark and moved down to her mouth. With deliberate provocation, she wet her parted lips.

And with slow, erotic purpose he lowered his head, to take her lips in a deep and violent kiss.

He tasted hot, and smelled of wet leather and anger and lust. He grabbed her hair, pulling her head back so that he could deepen the kiss, so that he could impale her mouth with his tongue. She clung to him, digging her nails into the back of his neck. They sank together to the dirt-packed floor.

He pulled at the laces of her bliaut. Her nipples puckered in the sudden wash of cold air against her thin chainse. He lapped a nipple with his tongue, wetting the fine linen. He sucked and nibbled on it with his lips. Tearing open his braies, he took her hand and closed it around
his aroused sex. She thrilled to the muffled sound of pleasure that came from deep in his throat.

“You do this to me, Arianna. Does it please you to know that you can do this to me?”

It was only fair, she thought. Only fair that she had the power to make him want her, when he had such power over her. “Do it to me,” she whispered. His mouth closed over hers, flooding her with the taste of him. Heat and man and lust.

He yanked up her bliaut, running his palm up the inside of her thigh. His fingers traced the outer edge of the triangular nest of hair, down between the cheeks of her bottom, then up again, sliding deep within the soft folds of her sex, and she convulsed, her hips coming off the floor.

He tried to ruck her skirts up to her waist, but they were caught beneath her. He tore his mouth from hers, swearing. “Get undressed.”

“But what if somebody—”

He didn’t let her finish. He ripped her bliaut down the middle and then her chainse. She gasped, but not with shock.

“I want you naked too,” she demanded.

He pulled off his clothes, flinging them to all corners of the stable. He kept his eyes riveted onto her face as he knelt between her thighs, and lifting her legs, brought them up over his shoulders. He lowered his head and kissed her low on her belly.

She thought she must tell him to stop, that it was wicked, a perversion of the French sort, but instead her fingers became entangled in his hair and she was pressing his head down low and further.

Her muscles jumped and tensed beneath his mouth and then, oh God, he slid his tongue inside her. His tongue plunged and licked. He nibbled with his teeth and sucked the nub of her between his lips, and a fire began to build inside of her, so intense, so hot, she couldn’t decide if it
was pain or pleasure. She only knew she didn’t think she could bear it.

He played her with his tongue, making her blood sing, and there wasn’t enough room inside of her for all that she felt. Heart and lungs pressed against her bones and flesh, pressed and pressed until she was sure she would explode.

“Raine!” she screamed, emptying her lungs in a guttural cry as the tremors she could no longer hold back burst over her, going on and on until she thought she was dying.