Keeper of the Dream (36 page)

“Your father informs me that a wife’s willful disobedience of her lord and husband—a disobedience that results in an endangerment of his life and health—is on the list. On the
list,
Arianna. If you continue in this defiance, it will be my veriest duty to punish you, and you must grant your permission for this punishment. For such is the law and you cannot deny it.”

“What list does he speak of?” asked Cristyn. “What law?”

Arianna was grateful that the dark hid the sudden color that flooded her face. “It must be the mead talking,” she said to her mother. She pretended to study her nails, though it was so dark she could barely see her hand. “Your threats are like needles pricking the hide of a water buffalo, husband. I feel not a thing. In truth, I believe I will return to the hall now and resume my skeining.”

Mother and daughter stood up and made a great show of leaving, rattling the suspension chain and clomping on the hewn-log decking of the bridge. More bellows and threats echoed up from below. At the gate they paused and pretended to reconsider.

“I suppose,” Cristyn said, “much though they deserve it, it would be unnecessarily cruel to leave them floating in the moat for the entire night.”

“Mayhap you’re right,” Arianna said. “A guard could
mistake Raine for a Norman rogue and put an arrow in his arse.”

Raine’s voice came at her out of the dark. It sounded as if he were speaking through his teeth. “That is not at all amusing, little wife.”

Arianna smothered a laugh with her hand and met her mother’s brimming eyes. “Shall I fetch the rope?”

“I suppose …” Cristyn heaved a sigh of defeat, like a woman moved by pity in spite of her better judgment. “Else they will likely become waterlogged and drown afore morning.”

They tied one end of the rope to the chain and lowered the other into the moat. After a brief argument about who was to go first—during which Raine pointed out that age went before youth and Owain insisted that youth must go before beauty—the rope suddenly pulled taut as it took a man’s weight. Arianna felt a quiver of fear in her stomach as it occurred to her that she and her mother might have gone a little too far with their jest.

Owain’s head came over the edge of the bridge, followed by the rest of him. He looked like some slimy creature that had crawled out of a bog. Rearing up, he made a grab for his wife. “Come here, woman, and give me a kiss.”

Mother and daughter both ran off, shrieking and laughing, for the safety of the hall.

Owain turned his head aside and spat moat water out of his mouth. “Women!”

“Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.” Raine hauled himself onto the bridge. He shook his head like a wet dog and wiped the reeking slime off his face. “The first man to say that was probably Adam.”

Owain snorted a laugh. “Aye, no doubt. No doubt.” He bent over to wring out the skirt of his tunic, looking up through slanted eyes at the Norman, his enemy. The knight’s pale eyes were focused on the gate through which Arianna had disappeared. Owain straightened and laid a
heavy hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “You will cherish her, you will cherish my Arianna?”

Raine stiffened, but he did not shrug off his father-in-law’s hand. “She will come to no harm as my wife,” he said.

It was not precisely the promise that Owain had wanted, but it would do.

For he had seen the way the Norman looked at his daughter. Love did not make a man look at a woman like that. But hunger did. He had felt that sort of hunger for Cristyn the first time he laid eyes on her, felt it still after nearly twenty-five years. How well he knew that out of such a hunger, love could grow.

Sunlight glinted behind Arianna’s closed lids, and she opened them slowly onto the gilt-spangled canopy of her marriage bed. She stretched out her hand, but the place beside her was empty. She turned over, pressing her face into the sheet, breathing deeply of his smell.

Their marriage wasn’t perfect—far from it. But in the week that had passed since they’d left her father’s
llys
and come home to Rhuddlan, they had reached an accommodation. Aye, accommodation was the word for it. They had laughed and made love and spoken truths in the quiet of the night that neither one of them quite yet believed in the light of day. They were like two feuding enemies, she thought, enemies who had somehow grown fond of each other and weary of the fight. So they had buried their swords and sat down together to drink a cup of mead and tell tales and laugh together. And perhaps … perhaps become friends.

He brought her with him now when he toured his commotes. The land ruled by the Lord of Rhuddlan encompassed thick forests and bleak moorlands, all rock and coarse grass, and wild salt marshes where wading birds bred among empty tidal sands. But there were also rich open fields of oats and barley and rye, all patched together
haphazardly like a ragpicker’s scraps, and lumpish, cross-cropped hills dotted with flocks of wool-bearing sheep.

“It must please you to know that all of this is yours,” she had said one day as they stood on the crest of a hill admiring the view of the wide, rich green valley that bordered the band of blue water that was the river Clwyd.

“And yours,” had been his response, and she realized with a warm jolt of surprise that his were not empty words. He saw the Honor of Rhuddlan as hers to share—both in the bounty and the responsibility that came from ruling.

She stretched now, curling her toes. She really should be getting up, before Raine came to get her, calling her a slug-a-bed. They were to spend the day together supervising the harvest. Already the breeze coming through the open window smelled sweet from the freshly mown grain.

She had just swung her feet over the side of the bed, when a horrible nausea gripped her. She knelt in the rushes beside the bed, and was violently sick into the chamber pot. Breathing deeply, afraid for the moment to move, she sat hunched over and tried to will the nausea to pass.

A pair of lanky legs appeared before her. Her blurred gaze moved up the long length of them until it rested on a white face surrounded by locks of fiery red hair and an impish grin.

“What are you doing on the floor, my lady?”

“What does it look like I’m doing, you fool?” Embarrassed at having that wretched squire catch her in so undignified a position, Arianna stumbled to her feet. “And what are you doing up and about? You’ll rupture your wound.”

One moment, it seemed, she was talking and taking a step toward the squire, and the next thing she knew she was lying on the bed and Taliesin sat beside her with a bowl, her golden mazer, in his lap. He leaned over to wipe
off her face with a dampened cloth and a soothing heat seemed to flow into her, over her, as if she were sliding into a tub of warm, oily water. She looked deep into black eyes, eyes that glowed, moonlit from within.

He is no squire, she thought. No human boy could have survived such a wound she saw Kilydd give him, survive and then be up and about causing mischief in so short a time. And those eyes, something in his eyes …

“You fainted, milady. Nothing to worry about.” The voice was Taliesin’s, clear, melodic, the trained voice of a bard. But the eyes, the eyes belonged to someone else, somewhere else….

She squeezed her own eyes shut. Her stomach felt so queasy. She swallowed around the sour taste in her mouth and tried to ignore her pounding head.

“Do you need the chamber pot again, my lady?” Taliesin said.

Arianna’s lids slowly opened. “I fear that some Norman has tried to poison me.”

His mobile lips curled into a smile, his black eyes glittered, brightening. “Some Norman has certainly made you ill, milady. You are with child.”

“I can’t be.”

His eyes flashed brighter. “Don’t be foolish, girl. Of course you can be.” The light in his eyes faded. He looked himself again, all mischievous boy. His face bore a smug look. “My lord will be pleased,” he said.

With child.
Arianna pressed her hand against her womb. She was going to have a baby. Raine’s baby.

Emotions crowded in on her, so many and so fast that she couldn’t settle on any one—joy, fear, excitement.
Baby. I’m going to have a baby.

She became aware of Taliesin’s cheerful chatter as he danced around the room. “ ’Tis morning sickness you’ve got. You won’t die from it, you only think you will. It’s a good sign actually. It means the babe is taking.”

He appeared before her again, a blackjack mug in his
hand. He helped her to sit, tilting the leather mug to her lips. “This should help—it’s rhubarb, licorice, and wood-bane. The woodbane tastes awful, I fear. The licorice helps to disguise it some, but not a lot.”

Arianna swallowed the draught, grimacing at its bitter, oily taste. He started to pull the mug away, but she grabbed his hand. “Taliesin, you will leave me to tell my lord husband of this.”

“Of course, my lady. That pleasure should be yours alone.”

He flashed a ravishing smile, patting her cheek as if he were soothing a child. She couldn’t help smiling back at him. “You look mighty pleased with yourself, boy. You’d think this was all your doing.”

A mischievous, secretive look came into his eyes, and they shimmered, like twin stars in the blackest of nights. “Goddess be with you,” he whispered.

He sauntered from the room, humming a lilting tune. At the door he turned and, grinning broadly, put words to the music. It wasn’t a lullaby, as she had thought, but a love song.

The door swung shut on Taliesin’s sweet, liquid voice.
You are with child.
Raine would be pleased when she told him. Oh, more than pleased. It was what he wanted most, the culmination of all his ambitions.

She rubbed her stomach. How strange it seemed to think that at this very moment a babe was growing within her. How strange and how wondrous. She tipped her head, looking down at her flat abdomen, and she tried to picture it swollen with child. She saw a fat, waddling Arianna with a belly shaped like an ale barrel, and she giggled. She pictured herself with a babe in her arms, suckling at her breasts, and her smile softened.

With slow, careful movements, Arianna tried sitting up. She felt weak and heavy, but she was no longer nauseated. The golden mazer sat beside her on the bed where Taliesin had left it. She pulled it into her lap, cradling it in her palms. She looked down, but saw only her own face reflected back to her from the clear flat surface of the water.

She dipped her finger in the water. The reflection shattered and disappeared. She didn’t care if the magic bowl had suddenly decided to guard its secrets. She was living her future.

She had bred the Norman a son and all she could feel was joy.

Raine leaned on one outstretched arm, trying to hold a piece of curling parchment flat on the table, while at the same time adding a sum by pushing beads up the wires of an abacus. One corner of his mouth turned down in a frown and his hair looked mussed, as if just moments ago he had raked it with impatient fingers.

Arianna stood in the door of the antechamber. The sight of him caused the oddest sensation in the pit of her stomach, a sort of vibration, like a loud hum in a hollow cave, and a compulsion to touch him. She wanted to smooth the hair back out of his eyes and kiss his mouth into softness. But he had a visitor.

She started to turn away, but she must have made some sound, for Raine looked up. “Arianna … Come here. Have you met Simon?”

A fat, bandy-legged man waddled forward to greet her. He was richly dressed and sported a fancy beard that had been waxed and tufted and then interwoven with gold threads. The pointed yellow hat he wore, along with the big circle of saffron-colored cloth sewn on his breast, marked him as a Jew.

“Ah, the lovely Lady Arianna,” he said, with a flourishing
bow. His breath smelled sweet, of fennel seeds. “Your reputation does not do you justice, my lady, for your brow is whiter than the foxglove, your cheeks do glow pinker than apple blossoms. And your lips … ah, your lips are redder than … than summer poppies!” he exclaimed, looking pleased with his floral metaphors.

“Red as the bristles on an old sow’s ear, more like,” Raine muttered out the side of his mouth. Laughter gurgled up Arianna’s throat, but she caught it between her teeth.

“Skin whiter than a fish’s belly.”

Another snicker almost escaped out of Arianna’s pressed lips. She thumped her husband in the stomach with her elbow, and he hacked and wheezed and sounded as if he were choking to death.

Simon turned worried eyes onto his host. “My Lord Raine, that cough of yours is fierce. Might I suggest a poultice made from the fat of a hanged man to purge your chest. These summer agues have been known to turn deadly.”

Arianna couldn’t help herself, she laughed, for though the remedy was indeed a common one—when a hanged man was available—her fearless knight had turned quite pale at the suggestion. Thinking she might have affronted their guest, she quickly said, “I was admiring your beard, good sir.”

“Were you?” He stroked the object with obvious pride. “It’s all the fashion at the French court, they say. Though no man’s beard is allowed to be more magnificent than the king’s, of course. It wouldn’t be good politics.” He boomed a laugh that was rich and deep as the beat of a kettledrum. Arianna was shocked to see gold in his teeth as well.