Keeper of the Dream (47 page)

The room fell silent and she knew they all watched her. Her cheeks grew warm and she lifted her head to look into eyes the pale-purple color of lavender. They were the most beautiful eyes Arianna had ever seen, and they belonged to the woman her husband had once loved.

The Lady Sybil drifted closer to the bed, and Arianna caught the expensive scent of ambergris. The countess looked as slender as a hazel wand and beautiful in a pale-pink bliaut embroidered with jewels and bead work. Gold threads had been woven through her thick silver-blond braids. Her face was so pale, Arianna decided she must sleep with a mashed-bean poultice on it near every night.

Whereas my face is fat and blotchy and I smell of milk, Arianna thought. Just like an old house cow.

But there was such a look of pained yearning in Sybil’s eyes as she watched Nesta suckle at her breast that Arianna knew she should feel no envy of the woman’s beauty. She remembered how the gossips said Sybil had been married for six years but had yet to conceive. It was her punishment, they said, for continuing to love a man not her husband.

Raine began to stroke the dark fuzz on Nesta’s head with a crooked finger. Sybil’s gaze rested on his bent head and the feelings in her heart shone plainly out of her face, like a sunbeam though the sheerest veil.

Unable to bear it, Arianna looked away … and
caught Hugh staring at his wife. Some dark emotion flashed across the earl’s face, before he masked it with his sardonic smile.

Does he know that his wife loves his brother? she wondered. Of course he does—all of England knows it. Such a thing would hurt a man’s pride, if not his heart. It was the sort of thing that would drive a man to shoot an arrow into his brother’s chest.

But it could not have happened as I saw it, Arianna thought. For Raine would not welcome a man who had once tried to kill him into his castle, he would not ask that man to stand up as godfather to his firstborn.

Not that it wasn’t possible for brother to hate brother enough to do murder. In Wales, where land was not passed on whole to the eldest, but divided among all the sons, it was common for brothers to blind, castrate, and kill one another to increase their share of the inheritance. It was, Arianna knew, a recurrent fear of her father’s—that when he died, his sons would commence slaughtering one another.

Nesta decided she’d had enough of eating. She let the nipple fall out of her mouth and heaved a loud belch.

Hugh laughed. “She has her mother’s beauty and her father’s manners. It’s a pity she’s a girl-child, though. She can’t inherit and she’ll cost you a fat dowry when it comes time to buy her a husband. Especially as she is a bastard’s daughter.”

“But you forget, my lord earl,” Arianna said in a sugar-sweet voice. “That she is also the granddaughter of a prince, and I am young yet and have proven most fertile. Doubtless I will breed my husband many sons.”

Taliesin giggled, Hugh looked taken aback, and Sybil paled. Raine frowned at her, but she ignored him.

She refused to sit silently while Hugh used words like knives on the man she loved. Though she knew that Raine truly did not care that their first child was a girl. Already he loved Nesta with such a fierce gentleness. Arianna
couldn’t watch her man holding their baby without her throat closing up and tears blurring her eyes.

A soft breeze wafted through the open window, carrying with it a mingled scent of the sea and of freshly plowed earth. It was a sweet day, a day meant for laughter and giving. She looked at her husband’s averted face and she was filled with such a love for him that she ached with it.

Lord God, she did so want to take him in her arms and tell him how her life and heart were now linked with his, as tight and intricately as the rings of steel on his coat of mail. Yet something stopped her. Perhaps it was because she’d never heard the words from him. Oh, she knew he loved her, she had felt it in his touch, heard it in his voice the night of Nesta’s birth, when he had kissed her and called her his little wife. Perhaps the words themselves weren’t necessary.

But she wanted them just the same.

“Did you see what Hugh and Sybil gave her?” Raine said, holding up a jewel-encrusted silver christening cup.

“It is beautiful,” Arianna said, though in truth she thought it a bit gaudy.

It was evening now, and they were alone together. It seemed odd, after all those days and nights without him, to have him suddenly here. She felt awkward around him, unsure of what to say, sensitive to his every word and expression. They had been too long apart, and now they were strangers again.

He wandered over to the cradle and bent to study his daughter, who was fussing. He pushed the rocker with his toe and sang in a smoky voice:

He looked up and caught Arianna watching him. The song died on his lips and Arianna would have sworn that he blushed. “Dame Beatrix says that rocking a babe will make the fumes from the humors in her body mount to her brain and thus help her to sleep,” he said gruffly.

Arianna hid a smile. Raine was taking fatherhood so seriously. One would think he was the first of his species to procreate.

“Will you leave off gloating over your daughter for a moment, and come kiss her mother?”

He sat down on the bed beside her and gathered her into his arms.

His mouth was hot and moist, and it moved easily beneath hers, letting her lead the way. But not for long, for soon she felt his tongue slide into her mouth. She let him end the kiss when he was ready, though she almost passed out from lack of breath.

“You should rest now,” he said.

He started to pull away, but she held him to her. She had her face buried in the crook of his neck, her fingers threading through his hair. “Lie next to me, husband. I want to know you lie beside me whilst I sleep.”

He said nothing, but she felt him tremble as he held her, and she thought she heard him sigh.

She wormed her hand beneath his tunic and chainse. She pressed her palm against his bare flesh, felt his stomach muscles spasm. She inched her fingers lower, beneath the belt that held up his braies, her nails scraping along the edge of his pubic hair. His sex stretched and thickened, pushing against the back of her hand.

His breath hitched, and the hand that had been stroking her hair clenched, pulling at her scalp. He started to shift his hips away from her, then didn’t.

“Arianna, we can’t … Ah, Jesus. If you don’t stop I’m going to spill my seed all over your hand. I’ve been too long a time without you.”

“My brother Cynan says a hand is better than a whore because it can’t give you the pox.”

He started to laugh, and then his breath caught again. For she had moved lower to lightly, lightly caress the inner skin of his thighs. He leaned back on his hands and she saw the muscles in his arms quiver. “Are you offering to perform a perversion on me, wife?”

She merely smiled.

She wanted to pleasure him slowly, so she moved back up his stomach, to his chest. The smell of him, tangy and male, seemed to enter through her skin. His rib cage expanded as he took a ragged breath. She could feel the pumping of his heart beneath her palm. She rubbed her hand across his finely molded flesh and felt the ridge of a fresh scar. It was a long diagonal cut, left by the slash of a knife or the glancing blow of a spear or …

An arrow.

She pushed away from him so hard that he rocked back on the heels of his hands. “He did shoot at you! Your brother tried to kill you and yet you ask him to stand godfather to our Nesta. How could you?”

He stared at her with glazed eyes, his chest heaving. “Hugh wasn’t trying to kill me. He’s never been any good with a bow and I left it until too late to duck this time. It’s a game we play—” He broke off and his eyes narrowed.

In one swift movement he was over her. He pressed her down into the pillows, bridging her shoulders with his hands. His eyes turned the bleached gray of a winter sky as he studied her face. “How did you know it was Hugh who gave me this wound?”

“Taliesin told—”

He moved his head back and forth once, slowly. “Taliesin doesn’t know. He thinks I got it during the battle.” His fist snaked out, grabbing her hair, yanking her head back so hard that tears started at the corners of her eyes. “Did Hugh tell you? I wondered why he went running
home as soon as his forty days were up. Mayhap, it was to visit my bed? Was it?” His hand tightened and jerked, pulling at her hair. He brought his face so close to hers she could see the black specks in his eyes and feel the heat of his angry breath. “If you’ve put horns on me, sweet wife, I will strangle your pretty neck. But first I will bring my brother’s balls to you on the tip of my sword.”

She dug her nails into his wrist, trying to loosen his grip. “God’s death. I have waddled about your hall fat as a stuffed goose for months. How can you seriously think I would take a lover?”

He searched her face, trying to decide whether to believe her, until she wanted to punch him right between those opaque gray eyes. “You are a fool,” she shouted. “And you make me so cursed angry sometimes that I could spit!”

He leaned back, letting go of her hair. He took a deep breath, then another, closing his eyes. “Then how do you come to know of an incident that took place unwitnessed between my brother and myself in a forest in France? Explain this to me, Arianna.”

She would have to tell him the truth, and he would hate her. He would feel invaded, his very soul exposed and flayed. No man with any pride at all would be able to accept what she was about to tell him.

She sucked in a deep breath as if she could draw courage from the air. “You know that I am
filid,
a seer. I have visions, and in them I can see the future and sometimes the past. Usually they come to me in pools of water. Lately they’ve come most often in my golden mazer. I saw you in the battle. It was fall and they charged at you out of the trees and you killed a man with your lance and four more with your sword. And then Hugh came, with his bow …”

His gaze had jerked over to the mazer where it sat on the chest beside the window. She wondered if he could
see the way it pulsed and glowed, if he could feel the beckoning force of its power.

“What else?”

“There is nothing else.”

“What other times have you spied on me with that damned thing?”

“It isn’t like that! I can’t control what I see.”

“What else have you
seen
then?”

She couldn’t look at him, afraid of what she would find in his eyes. She kept her gaze on her hands, which clutched and twisted the sheets in her lap as she told him about the first time she had seen him, charging her with his lance. “I knew you would bring me pain,” she said. She wanted to add: I
couldn’t know how I would fall in love with you,
but he would be able to accept, she knew, only one confession at a time.

Instead, she spoke of the other visions, of being with him in the bailey here at Rhuddlan on the day they had come to put out his eyes, and that fall morning in Chester when he had asked for a pony and gotten a beating instead.

Only when she was finished did she raise her eyes … to find him looking at her as if he were looking into the face of the devil.

“Raine … It doesn’t have to be what you’re thinking. To be that close to another—it can be a beautiful thing. More beautiful than—”

He pushed himself up from the bed and walked away from her, his back stiff. He went over to the cradle and looked down at his sleeping daughter. Then he turned abruptly and started for the door.

“Raine!”

He stopped with his hand on the latch. He did not turn around.

“I know what every inch of your body tastes like. I have taken you inside of me, inside my womb and my
mouth. Is it so awful to think that for a moment I dwelled in your mind, that I felt a bit of your pain?”

His fist slammed into the door, shoving it open. “Stay out of my past and out of my head, Arianna. Just stay the hell away from me.”

Arianna couldn’t help smiling as she watched her husband’s fingers weave the bell heather into a tiny garland. The baby, swaddled tightly in folds of soft linen, swung between them, hanging from a low branch of a big horse chestnut tree. They had stopped beneath it, she and Raine, for an outdoor nooning on their way to the summer’s fair at Chester.

Raine finished twisting the flowers into a circle. He stretched up onto one knee to put it on Nesta’s head as if he were crowning a queen. A little too big, it drooped over one eye. Laughing, he dipped his head, rubbing her tiny nose with his. “Now don’t you look like a saucy May Day wench?”

Arianna laughed, too, and leaned against him, pressing her breasts into his back. “And where, husband, did you learn to plait a lady’s chaplet so prettily?”

He moved away from her so that they were no longer touching. He sat down, his back against the trunk, one leg bent, his wrist resting on his knee. She thought he wouldn’t even bother to answer her, but then his head swung around and his eyes were as hard as the sunbaked hill they sat upon. “I used to make them for Sybil when
we were children. But then I’m surprised you didn’t see that, Arianna. When you were peeping into my past.”