Keeper of the Dream (32 page)

She resisted him for a moment, pressing against his chest with her clenched fists. But she wanted this, oh how she wanted this. Her lips opened and her tongue met his. There was a desperation to their kiss. As if they both knew that to hunger like this, without pride, was wrong, would only bring them pain.

The door opened behind them and he stiffened, thrusting
her away so violently that she stumbled and had to grasp the arm of the faldstool. Their eyes clashed and held, and his burned her with his fury. The taste of him was still hot and wet on her mouth.

Sir Odo filled the doorway. “My lord, I would speak with you,” he said, careful to keep his face blank and his shaggy-browed eyes focused on the distant wall. “It’s most urgent.”

But Raine stood unmoving, staring at her. His lips parted slightly on an expulsion of breath. She thought of how he had tried to punish her with that mouth, and of how she had taken it. At last he turned to Sir Odo, jerking his head in the direction of the door.

Sir Odo followed Raine out into the stairwell. But with the big knight’s bull-throated voice, Arianna was able to hear it all. The Welsh crofters belonging to one of Raine’s vassals, a Norman who ruled over the lands of the valley to the south, had been inspired by the recent rebellions, taking up cudgels and sickles and attacking their master while he was hunting. The knight was sorely wounded and likely to die, and the Welsh were now terrorizing the countryside.

Then Raine said something she couldn’t hear. She wondered if he was ordering Kilydd’s death.

The two men reentered the chamber. She saw no trace on her husband’s face of the sexual fire that had raged between them only moments before. “You will remain here and guard my lady wife,” he said to the big knight, though he looked at her. “Don’t let her set one dainty slipper outside this chamber.”

Sir Odo coughed and studied the floor. “Aye, m’lord.”

“And as for you, sweet wife … Have you ever seen what armed knights can do to a group of peasants?”

A low, half-worded cry escaped her. “Raine, I didn’t—”

He flung his arm in the direction of a Virgin statuette that was tucked within a corner niche. “I suggest you
spend the time praying to Our Lady, Arianna. Pray to her for the souls of those whose deaths you and your precious cousin will have caused on this night.” With that he strode from the room, calling for his squire.

Arianna went to the window. She watched him mount a gray destrier that was not quite as spirited and strong as his black, and ride through the gate with a dozen of his knights. Taliesin followed behind, carrying Raine’s shield and lance. Moonlight reflected off the squire’s golden helmet, turning his head into a blazing torch. She watched the bobbing torch as it crossed the drawbridge and tilting fields, watched it become smaller and dimmer until it was extinguished altogether by the blackness of the forest.

She stayed at the window long after there was nothing left to see but the yellow horn of the moon and a star-filled sky. When she at last turned around she was surprised for a moment to discover Sir Odo hovering in the middle of the chamber, shifting his weight from foot to foot like a dancing bear.

“Forgive me for intruding on your privacy, my lady,” he said, flushing so that his pitted face looked like a pulped berry. “But I, uh … milord said I was to—”

“ ’Tis not your fault.” Arianna patted his shoulder, giving him a smile dazzling enough to make him blink. “I should not trust me either, if I were Lord Raine. Come, Sir Odo. I challenge you to a game of tables.” She took the big knight’s arm and ushered him over to the faldstool, then dragged up an inlaid ivory-and-mahogany chess board. “It will be a long night and I doubt either one of us shall sleep.”

Sir Odo hesitated only a moment before sinking with a sigh into the chair. His gaze fell on the carafe of wine and he wet his thick lips.

“Mayhap you are thirsty, sir,” Arianna said, and smiling again, she picked up the chalice from off the floor where Raine had left it and pressed it into the knight’s
hand. “It is good wine, this. It comes from your King Henry’s Aquitaine, or so I’m told.”

“You took the devil’s own time, Arianna. Half the night is gone.”

Arianna bit down on a curse as she scraped her knuckles on the rusted shackles, trying to force the stiff key to turn in its hole. “A little more gratitude would not be amiss, cousin.”

“Just quit nattering and get the damn thing off me.”

The lock tumbled open with a groan and the chains clattered onto the cellar floor. Kilydd kicked them aside and stood, stretching the kinks out of his muscles. Arianna was already at the door, waiting. “Hurry,” she whispered.

The slumbering guards slouched against the wall, their open-mouthed snores echoing in the stairwell. Kilydd paused to poke one between the ribs with his toe. “Look at him, cursed Norman whoreson—”

“God’s death, Kilydd, will you hurry?”

She dashed up the narrow mural stairs. Kilydd bumped into her when she stopped abruptly to peer around the corner at the entrance to the hall. Night sounds came through the screen’s passage—drunken snores and the shuffle of restless sleepers, the click and rustle of mice foraging in the rushes and the
whump-whump
of a dog’s hind leg pounding the floor as he scratched his fleas.

Sucking in a deep breath, she scurried across the opening, motioning behind for Kilydd to follow. They were almost through the shell keep when one of the guards, who had stepped outside the gatehouse to relieve himself against the wall, spotted them.

Kilydd grabbed her, thrusting her into the shadows and clamping his mouth down over hers. One of his hands groped for her breast while the other rucked up her tunic, baring her thigh to the guard’s leer.

She heard the man’s lewd laugh through the blood that
rushed in her ears, for she hadn’t had time to snatch a breath. Her head whirled and lights flashed before her eyes. She pushed against Kilydd’s chest, but he only kissed her harder, mashing her lips with his teeth.

It was the oddest thing, for when she was thirteen, the same year she had rubbed gillyflower juice on her breasts to make them grow, she had promised the Virgin a wax statue in her image if Kilydd would only be seized with a wild desire to kiss her. The desire had never seized him, and her infatuation with her cousin had eventually been transferred to the beekeeper’s son. Now, here, six years later, he was finally kissing her and all she felt was a desperate need to breathe.

The guard reentered the gatehouse and at last Kilydd released her. Arianna drew in a wheezing breath.

She tried to rub some feeling back into her lips. “Did you have to maul my mouth as if you were mashing grapes?”

“Hellfire, Arianna, you’ve been wanting me to do that to you for years. Don’t tell me now you didn’t like it.”

“You kiss like a boy, all soft and mushy.”

Kilydd snarled and shoved her in front of him. He followed in fuming silence down the long wooden stairs of the keep, across the drawbridge and into the bailey.

They paused within the black shadow cast by the hulking tower at their backs. The night was so clear that the stars looked close enough to gather in baskets, and the moon, though only a quarter full, bathed the yard with such light it seemed that hour before dawn when the sun was but a promise away.

“I couldn’t drug the entire castle, and the gatehouse is crawling with guards. But you can slip out through the postern door,” Arianna said, and had started forward when Kilydd seized her arm, drawing her up short.

“Give me your knife.”

“I haven’t got one.”

His hand snaked out, reaching under her tunic and
whipping her dagger from its sheath before she could draw breath to protest. His teeth flashed white in a grin. “You forget, we had the same teachers, cousin. Now, where’s that soulless bastard you call husband? I’ve a score to settle with him.” “He’s not here.”

He stroked Arianna’s cheek with the flat of the blade. “You wouldn’t be lying to me, would you, Arianna
geneth?
You wouldn’t, perchance, be trying to save your husband’s handsome neck? Do you like
his
kisses, eh? Mayhap you’ve grown fond of his perverted French ways.”

Arianna’s fingers wrapped around his wrist, pulling the knife away from her face. “He isn’t here, I tell you.” She gave him a little shove. “The postern door is over yon, between the farrier and the mews. Get you gone before someone else wakes up needing to piss and stumbles upon us standing here, flapping our jaws as if we’ve nothing better to do.”

He pinched her chin between his fingers, giving it a rough shake. “Have you pease porridge for wits, woman? I can’t walk all the way back to Gwynedd. I’ll need a horse. I’ll keep an eye out whilst you fetch one from the stables.”

“God’s death,” she hissed at him, jerking her chin from his grasp. “I’m beginning to wish I had left you to hang.”

Arianna did as he bade, anxious now only to be rid of him. She found the palfrey she’d been using during the past month—a chestnut gelding with a soft mouth and just enough fire in his disposition to make him a challenging ride. The horse felt enough like her own that it didn’t seem so much of a thievery to be giving it to Kilydd. She had the horse saddled and bridled in no time. She nuzzled its neck with her cheek as she gathered up the reins.

“I just knew you’d be up to something like this.”

Arianna whirled, her hand to her throat, where her thudding heart now resided. When she saw who it was,
her heart pounded even harder. “What in God’s mercy are you doing frightening me like that?”

Taliesin stood in her path. His long, lanky legs were spread in a stubborn stance, his full mouth turned down sulkily at the corners—looking no different than one of her brothers in a pout. But there was something strange about him. The stable was shadowed in the bit of muted moonlight that managed to filter through the cracks, but his body seemed outlined in a faint luminescence, as if a lamp burned brightly at his back. He wore a simple squire’s tunic over leather leggings, but the golden helmet on his head shone as brightly as the noon sun. For a moment Arianna thought the helmet pulsed and shimmered. But she blinked and the illusion disappeared.

A low growl, like thunder, rumbled in the distance. Arianna heard the sound but her mind instantly rejected it, for the sky had been filled with stars a moment ago; there hadn’t even been the thinnest wisp of a mist, let alone a cloud.

“You mustn’t run away, my lady,” Taliesin said.

Arianna opened her mouth to tell the boy she had no intention of running away, then slammed it shut. How else would she explain the need for a horse in the middle of the night? Her hands clenched around the leather reins. She hoped Kilydd would have the sense to stay out of sight until she had dealt with the squire. And damn Taliesin, anyway. Surely she had seen him ride out the castle gate at Raine’s side, yet here he was. It was just like the wretched boy to pop up like a weasel when he was least wanted. If only she could get by him and out the stables with the horse, perhaps Kilydd could manage his own escape after that.

So she now thought to try the same trick on the squire that she’d plied so often and to such good effect on her brothers whenever they’d tried to deny her something she wanted.

She made her lips go all trembly and her eyes all soft
and imploring. “Oh, Taliesin, I do truly fear for my life. Earlier this night Lord Raine beat me.” When the squire appeared unmoved, she embellished on her lie. “Beat me most cruelly so that I’m covered all over in bloody welts and near faint with pain. He thinks me a traitor along with my cousin and there was naught I could say to convince him otherwise.”

All the while she spoke, Arianna nudged the horse forward. Thunder rumbled again, closer this time, and the wind had kicked up. It rattled the barn door that the squire had failed to latch behind him, and whistled around the eaves.

Taliesin’s teeth had sunk into his lip and his eyes narrowed with uncertainty. Arianna had started to think her ruse was succeeding when his chin jutted stubbornly. “Lord Raine wouldn’t have beaten you if you hadn’t provoked him. He is not by nature a violent man.”

“Not a violent man!” Arianna nearly shouted, only stopping herself in time, so the words came out in a strangled growl. They were drowned out anyway by the howl the wind was making outside. Lightning flared so brightly it penetrated through the cracks in the warped wooden walls. A loud crack of thunder followed, ripping through the air, and the palfrey shied.

Taliesin stepped in front of her. “You’ll not be leaving the castle.”

A gust slammed against the stables and the unlatched door flew open, banging against the wall. The palfrey reared and Arianna clung to the reins as she gaped open-mouthed at the fury of the elements outside. Lightning flashed again and she saw a milking stool go tumbling across the yard. The sky was as black as the pit of hell. The clouds suddenly opened and water poured down on the ground of the bailey turning it into an instant sea of mud.

“You can’t run away in the middle of a storm,” the boy
said, and his thin hand looked blue in the flashes of lightning as it closed around her arm.

At his touch a torrent of fire sizzled through Arianna, as if the power of the storm had been transferred into the boy.
Or was coming from him …

Her mind shuddered at the thought even as it came to her. The light around the squire flared and shimmered, and his black eyes glittered silvery as if lit by the moon from within. Lightning flared again, crackling and spitting around them, so bright and hot it seared her skin. She screamed, instinctively flinging her hands over her head. She smelled brimstone and golden spots danced before her eyes. But when the spots faded and she focused onto Taliesin’s face, she saw only a boy, who looked even more frightened than she felt.

“Glory,” he said on a sharp intake of breath, his eyes wide. “That was close …”

She tried to calm the horse, which was now thoroughly panicked by the storm. She led it toward the open door. Taliesin kept after her with his tongue.

“If you will only pause to think, my lady. My lord is going to be very, very angry about this. It does not auger well for your future happiness, if you stab your husband on your wedding night and then run away a scarce week later. He will only have to go after you and it will put him in a foul temper.” Suddenly Taliesin threw himself in front of her. “Don’t do this, my lady, I beg of you.”