Keeper of the Dream (39 page)

He turned back to her. A coldness descended over him, numbing him. He had things in perspective now. She was his wife, his chattel, to use as he willed. To be punished when she disobeyed him and to be kept in her place with a mailed fist. A man didn’t have to trust his wife, he only had to rule her.

“Aye, we do have that,” he said, his voice flat and cold. “Me hard for you, and you hot and wet for me and loving every bit of it. You are good for only one thing, Arianna, and that is spreading your legs for me.”

He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her over to the bed, flinging her down on top of it. He stood looking down at her—at her hair spread out on the fur, at her mouth partly open, lips trembling, and at her eyes, dusky
and deep, and growing wider and wider as she saw his intent on his face.

She reared up, but he threw her back down, falling on top of her, pinning her to the bed with his weight. He tangled a fist in her hair, pulling her head back so hard the tendons stood out taut on her neck. She shuddered once and then stilled.

“Raine, don’t—”

He slammed his mouth onto hers, so hard their teeth grated, and out of him poured all his rage and all his pain, and his hate. He hated her for betraying him, and he hated himself for believing in her, believing in anyone again when he should have known, had always known that to trust like that was just asking for a kick in the gut.

She bucked against him, tearing her mouth free. “Not in anger, Raine,” she cried. “Not like this or you will hurt our babe.”

The words stretched between them, like a drawn bowstring. He froze in place on top of her, one hand still tangled in her hair, his mouth just inches from hers. The room fell so silent, his ragged breathing sounded as loud as ocean breakers and he could feel her breaths harsh and hot against his face. There was a tiny drop of blood on her lip where his teeth had cut her.

He rolled off her. He lay on his back, staring up at the green damask canopy. She lay beside him, unmoving but for the rapid rise and fall of her chest. She wasn’t crying. She had cried when she’d given him her worthless oath of fealty, but she wasn’t crying now.

“You’re pregnant,” he finally said.

“If you don’t believe me, ask Taliesin.”

A baby. A son. The words finally sank in and for a moment his chest swelled, warm and full of joy … and then he remembered how she had betrayed him.

He pushed himself off the bed, the interlaced leather springs creaking loudly in the silent room. At the door he paused. The hand that gripped the latch trembled, until
he made it quit. “Damn you,” he said softly. “And damn me for a fool.” He wanted to turn around and look at her, but he didn’t think he could stand it. So he just left.

Taliesin was in the stairwell, playing on his crwth, and at the sight of Raine he burst into song:

A snarl of rage tore from Raine’s throat. He grabbed the crwth from the boy’s arms and swung it against the wall. The delicate wood shattered and the strings broke and sprang loose with a grating twang of discordant sound.

Taliesin stared down at the broken instrument at his feet, then up again at Raine’s retreating back. He knelt and picked up what was left of the fingerboard, and then a piece of the soundbox. Slowly he stood and continued up the stairs to the lord’s chamber.

The door was partly open. Arianna lay across the bed, her fingers clenching and unclenching in the thick marten fur, her shoulders heaving.
“And keep me for your one true love,”
he sang in a soft, sad whisper.

Turning, he leaned against the wall. He looked down at the jagged pieces of wood still clutched in his hands. He let his hands fall and the wood slipped from his fingers to clatter onto the floor, unheard by the girl who lay weeping nearby.

Raine stood at the edge of the tide, looking out to sea, not thinking. Not even allowing himself to feel. The water slopped and sucked at his boots. From time to time he would pick up a piece of driftwood, white and dry as an old bone, and toss it into the breakers, and then he would watch the sea carry it away. Only when the setting sun began to turn the water into a pool of molten copper did he return to Rhuddlan Castle.

Sir Odo stood at the top of the steps to the great hall. His head was sunk deep into his shoulders like a toad’s and his eyes watched his lord approach with grim disapproval. Raine felt betrayed all over again, that his best man would still take her side in the face of her obvious treachery.

“Fill your mouth with her name,” Raine snarled as he came abreast of the big knight, “and I’ll put my fist in there with it.”

Sir Odo’s lips pulled back from his teeth. “The midwife had to be sent for. To tend to the lady whose name you don’t want me to mention.”

Raine felt his heart stop, but he nodded, saying nothing. He allowed no expression to show on his face, and he made himself walk at a normal pace across the hall toward the stairs that led to his chamber.

It was dark in the stairwell—the servants had forgotten to fire the rushlights. A shadow loomed up at him out of an embrasure, and with an instinct honed from too many years of fighting just to survive, Raine whipped his knife from its sheathe, nearly taking out the eyes of the figure that wavered ghostlike before him.

“My lord, don’t! ’Tis I, Rhodri.”

“God’s love, boy. Don’t ever spring at a man out of the dark like that.”

Raine put up his knife and the boy materialized out of the shadows again, more slowly this time. In the half-light his face looked pinched and drawn. Tear tracks stained his cheeks.

He grabbed Raine’s arm. “I was the one who sent the message to Kilydd about the grain, my lord. She always tried to take the blame for us when we were little, because Father wouldn’t whip her near as hard as he would us….” His voice faltered for a moment, and he wiped his nose with his sleeve. “I just thought you should know the truth in case she … well, I just thought you should know.”

The words seemed to hang in the air, pulsing to the beat of Raine’s heart. Something shifted inside of him. He sucked in a big draught of air, his eyes squeezing shut.

“I will discuss this with you later,” he finally said. He tried to make his voice stern, but the words came out sounding tired.

Still, Rhodri’s throat worked as if he’d just swallowed a minnow, though he squared his shoulders. “Aye, my lord.”

The door to their chamber was closed. Raine thought about knocking, then changed his mind. His fingers grasped the latch and he wondered for a moment if it would be barred against him. But the iron bolt lifted easily.

The boy’s voice drifted out of the darkness. “She won’t die, will she?”

Raine set his jaw and pushed the door open with his fist.

A woman turned from bending over the bed, having just pulled the covers over Arianna’s still form. For a moment Raine thought his wife was dead, and then her hand moved, clenching at the sheet.

The woman who had been tending to her came toward Raine. She was of middle years, slab-jawed, and with a nose hooked like an eel pole. “I am Dame Beatrix,” she said.

Raine nodded at the midwife. It was a moment before he could speak. “Has she lost the babe?”

“It’s only a little spot of bleeding. This can happen sometimes in the first months. But you must have a care for her, my lord.” She had little slits for eyes and they narrowed even further as she studied him. “A man cannot expect to beat his wife and not have his unborn babe suffer for it.”

“I didn’t beat her. I … we had an argument, but I didn’t hurt her.”
But there is more than one kind of hurt, you bastard, and you hurt her.

“A babe’s hold on the womb can be weak, my lord,” the midwife was saying. “I always tell man and wife, they should have a care.”

“I will. I’ll care for her,” Raine said, and he spoke the words as a vow.

He approached the bed on legs stiff as stilts. She looked so small and vulnerable, lying alone on the big expanse of white sheet. Her lips were bloodless. Her skin had the pale translucent shade of an eggshell; he could see the blue tracery of veins on her closed lids. He had seen too much of death not to know how easy it was to die, how quickly and mercilessly death could come. As he looked at her pinched, drawn face, it was not only the child he thought of. He didn’t want to lose either one of them.

He leaned over and almost kissed her, then picked up her hand instead. “Arianna?”

She pulled her hand from his grasp and turned her face away, pressing it into the pillow. She had not opened her eyes to look at him.

“Arianna … your brother told me the truth.”

“Go away, Raine.”

He didn’t go away. He sat on a chair beside the bed throughout the night, watching her sleep. In the morning, when she at last looked at him, he did something he had sworn he would never do. He asked for forgiveness.

Raine stood on a windswept bluff and watched his wife walk along the high road toward town.

He watched as she stopped to speak to a strange youth in a dashing saffron mantle—a traveling minstrel and a good one, by the look of the fancy gittern strapped to his back. She stroked the neck of the boy’s piebald pony and the wind carried the sound of her laughter to Raine, where he stood upon the hill.

A hand fell on his shoulder and he turned to look into the face of Reynold, the master mason from Chester. The man held one of Raine’s drawings spread wide between two big-knuckled fists.

“This says you intend to dig a canal and divert the Clwyd so that ships can sail right up to the castle.” The man was built like a haystack, round and squat. The tools of his trade hung from his belt: foot iron, compass, level, and plumb line. His breath was wheezy from years of inhaling stone dust.

At Raine’s nod the man’s face screwed into a fierce frown, which he aimed in the general direction of the river. “You’re talking about digging a ditch wide and deep
enough for a ship to navigate and it’s got to be at least a league long. Man, it’ll cost you a fortune.”

“Just tell me if it can be done.”

“Oh, aye, it can be done all right. My lord.” A gleam came into the mason’s eyes, which were the pale, washed-out blue of a winter’s sky. “It won’t be easy, mind you. But it can be done. Aye, aye …” He wandered off, muttering to himself about sluices and dock-gates and the vagaries of the tides.

Raine turned back, expecting Arianna to have passed through the town gate by now and saw instead that she came right toward him, climbing the bluff with long-legged strides.

The wind pressed her skirt against her legs, and he watched the play of her muscles beneath the silk, lithe and slender, yet strong. She panted a bit from her climb, so that her breasts strained upward against her tightly laced bliaut. Her mouth was slightly parted, and as she approached he saw a film of moisture glistening in the tiny valley above her upper lip.

“Good morrow, wife.”

“Good morrow, husband.”

Her gaze slid away from his, and she looked around her. The master had already put a gang of men to work, excavating trenches for the castle’s foundation. One of the workers passed by, wheeling a barrow filled with dirt. The man tipped his cap at her and smiled, showing a mouthful of stubby, brown teeth, and he greeted her in Welsh, calling her Lady of Gwynedd. Her lips broke into a wide smile in answer, and Raine would have given just about anything to have had the warmth of that smile turned on him.

“So you have begun to build your new castle,” she said.

“Aye.” He studied her profile. The sun and wind had put a touch of pink in her cheeks, but the rest of her face was pale. Too pale. She had done up her hair into a white linen coif and veil that framed her face and emphasized
the regal elegance of her bones. He thought he preferred it when she wore her hair in the Welsh way, flowing freely down her back and held in place only by a flower or metal chaplet. But this way was nice as well, for a man could then have the pleasure of taking it down. “Would you like to look at the designs?” he said.

Not giving her a chance to say no, he slipped his hand beneath her elbow, and he thought she might have shivered at his touch, but it could have just been the wind. He led her over to the shelter of a giant oak, where his drawings were spread, held down by rocks. He squatted on his heels and after a brief hesitation, she knelt beside him. She had to put her hand on his shoulder for balance while she did so, and her touch raised the fine hairs on his neck. He breathed deeply, filling his nostrils with the smell of musty parchment, freshly dug dirt … and her.

“This is just a rough rendition, but you can get an idea.” He showed her how the inner ward would be shaped like a squashed square, with two opposing gatehouses and single towers at the other two corners. He explained to her how the keep and all the towers would be round instead of square, which would make them more defensible against sapping. He told her how he planned to give the castle access to the sea and all the while he watched her face, not quite sure what it was he hoped to see there.

She twisted her head to look up at him, and he got lost in a pair of depthless green eyes. “You will use this great castle to make war on the Welsh,” she said.