Keeper of the Dream (50 page)

Taliesin paused, and the warm summer breeze carried away the last of the vibrating chords from the gittern. In the silence Arianna heard a choking sob, and she realized to her horror that it had come from herself.

The gittern erupted again into an explosion of sound. Taliesin’s voice dipped low, taut and aching, before soaring upward to a fevered gaiety.

Her own knight touched Arianna on the shoulder and turned her to face him. “What a babe you are,” he said. He tried to wipe the wetness off her cheeks with the pads of his thumbs. “You shouldn’t cry. It’s only a foolish story.”

She twisted her head away, and missed the tightening of his mouth. “You could never begin to understand,” she said, the breath shuddering in her throat. “All her life a girl dreams of that happening to her, of finding a man to love her that much.”

He laughed harshly. “How much—enough to slay dragons?”

Suddenly she could bear it no longer. She pulled away from him and ran.

She heard his voice calling after her, but she kept running. The fair had been set up beneath the shelter of the castle, along the grassy, sloping banks of the Dee. Somehow she found her way to a postern door that had been cut into the wall and stumbled into the courtyard.

“Arianna!”

She whipped around, surprised that he had come after
her. She hadn’t fled to have him chase her, and she didn’t think she could bear to face him, to be with him any longer. Let him go to Sybil.

She whirled and ran up the long sweeping stairs and into the great hall. She felt like a hunted animal, running for her lair. If she could only make it to their chamber she would be safe from him. She raced across the hall, slipping on the enameled bricks. The staircase was set into a tower wall and she fled up the twisting mural stairs. Her legs tangled in her tunic and she fell to her knees with a hard jar that skinned her palms and rattled her teeth.

“Arianna!”

She glanced back over her shoulder as she pushed herself back to her feet, her breath sawing in her throat, her raw hands burning. He was almost upon her, his spurs striking sparks on the stone. His figure flashed in and out the splashes of light that poured through the arrow slits in the wall, getting closer. And then he was upon her.

He hauled her around and slammed against her, pinning her to the wall.

“Damn you.” He was panting, and his eyes were throwing off sparks, brighter than his spurs had done on the stairs. He eased his weight off her, but he kept her trapped by placing his hands of either side of her shoulders. “Don’t run away from me when I call you.”

“Why don’t you just whistle for me as you do with your hounds and save yourself the expenditure of breath?”

He brought his face close to hers, so close that if she so much as breathed her lips would brush his. She could see the rough stubble of his beard, the lines at the corners of his mouth. And his eyes, smoky gray and growing darker, like lowering storm clouds.

“If you want to have a fight, I shall be pleased to oblige you.” He growled the words, low in his throat.

A part of Arianna knew that she would never get her husband back into her bed by behaving more shrewish than an alewife, but her anger with him was now a hot
cloud in her brain. She shoved him, hard, in the chest. “Let me go.”

His head went back, but his arms remained braced around her. He looked down the length of her body. She wore a double girdle of plaited gold thongs that wrapped once around her waist, and then again around her hips, and knotted in the front to form a V. Until now she’d never noticed how the fashion blatantly called attention to the round parting of her thighs.

Now she could feel his eyes on that part of her body, and she burned there.

His gaze came back to her face and the bright heat of sexual hunger glowed in his eyes. “I won’t woo you naked and on my knees, Arianna.”

“I haven’t asked you to.”

He lowered his head, and he kissed her. His mouth was rough and hungry, and it had been so long, so long. She thought she would never get enough of the taste of him.

His hand cupped her breast. She became aware suddenly of how heavy her breasts felt, aching, filled with milk. He worked the laces of her bliaut free and slipped his fingers beneath the neckline of her chainse. Her nipples were so sensitive she nearly screamed into his mouth when he oh-so-lightly brushed one with his thumb.

From above their heads came the sound of a baby’s piercing wail.

“My daughter is hungry,” he said against the corner of her mouth.

But he didn’t let her go. Instead he looked down at her exposed breast. She watched as his fingers, so dark against the paleness of her skin, gently squeezed her distended nipple until a drop of milk appeared.

A soft, strangled sound tore out her throat.

He caught the drop of milk on his thumb, and slowly, his eyes on hers, he brought it up to his open mouth. His tongue came out, and he licked it clean and Arianna moaned his name.

“Milady?”

Edith stood at the top of the stairs, a squalling bundle in her arms. The maidservant’s cheeks were pink, but her mouth was drawn into a tight line of disapproval. “Forgive me, milady. But Nesta … she is hungry.”

Raine watched his wife’s dark brown hair sway back and forth, caressing her bottom as she disappeared up the stairs, and his hands trembled to touch her.

He knew that if he rubbed his face in that hair it would smell of lemons. He could follow her into the chamber and watch her nurse Nesta, and he could imagine the feel of her nipple budding up hard and round in his mouth, and the taste of her, ah God, the taste of her. Afterward, while their babe slept, he could lay his wife on the bed and undress her slowly, and then kiss and touch every inch of her skin. He could spread her legs wide and bury his face between them and lick and suck her there until she shuddered and quivered against his mouth. Then he could bury his heat inside of her and die a little. Just the thought of doing those things made his sex so hard he had to lean against the wall and squeeze his eyes shut, his chest jerking as he fought for breath.

He wanted her. Christ, how he wanted her.

But he couldn’t bear the thought of how she had seen him in those visions, seen him vulnerable and scared, alone and aching. It was too intimate, more intimate than sex. Or perhaps as intimate as sex with her could be if he let it. He knew he couldn’t stay away from her forever, no man had that much will. But he would take her again only when he was ready, when he was sure he could come out of it at the end without her possessing him utterly and forever, body and soul.

So instead of doing what he wanted to do, which was to follow her up those stairs and spend the rest of the day and night loving her, he went back down into the hall.

He spotted Taliesin immediately, lounging against one of the pillars, the gittern slung across his chest by a strap.
For some reason the sight of the squire brought anger squeezing up into Raine’s chest. It was the wretched boy’s constant romantic babble about wooing maidens and quests and love everlasting—Christ, it had even gotten him started thinking along those lines.

He advanced on the boy, wagging a stiff finger. “Not another peep out of you, wretch. Or I’ll wrap that God-cursed noise-box around your head.”

Laughing, Taliesin held up a hand in surrender. “My lord, if you care not what you do to my head, at least spare a thought for the gittern.”

Raine growled a curse and flung himself through the passage screen. He found himself back out in the courtyard with no clear thought of how he’d gotten there. He needed to buy some things, a good breeding horse for one, but he didn’t go back to the fair. His legs of their own accord seemed to carry him instead to the tilt yard.

His boots stirred up puffs of dirt as he walked the length of the field. The quintain stood at the end of the run—a mannikin covered with an old coat of mail and a shield, set on a post. From this distance, with the setting sun in his eyes, the quintain almost looked like a real man, an old battered knight who had fought for too long, seen too much.

Raine had not been weaned on destrier and lance as Hugh had been, as was any boy who hoped to be a knight. Instead, he had snuck out at night on a horse borrowed from his father’s stables to tilt at the quintain by the light of the moon. Often he was caught and flogged for it, but that hadn’t stopped him.

It had hurt him at the time to think that his father thought more of his blooded horses than his own son. But he understood a little better now the earl’s anger. A good war-horse cost more money than a common man could expect to earn in a lifetime. An unschooled boy could endanger the training and health of such a valuable beast.

Yet somehow on those borrowed horses and with no
one to show him, he had taught himself how to hold a lance steady while charging, to turn and move a galloping charger without using the reins. In all those hours he had been sustained by a dream—that one day he would kneel before his father and receive the buffet of honor, a blow for once delivered in pride, not anger, and hear the words from his father’s lips: “Be thou a good knight.”

It had not happened that way. Instead he had been knighted in a far-off land by his father’s enemy. When he came home it had been on the day of his brother’s marriage to the girl he loved, and he had stood before his father, all of nineteen, proud and maybe a little scared, in his armor and his spurs and with his knight’s sword girded round his waist.

His father had looked right through him and said, “What churl is this?”

“Your bastard stableboy, my lord earl,” he’d answered, so full of himself he could have conquered dragons. “Don’t you recognize me?”

But the earl had dismissed him, as easily as flicking a fly off his sleeve. “I thought Matilda’s men had made a blind eunuch of you,” he’d said with a laugh. Others joined with him. Hugh, and even Sybil.

Look at me,
Raine had wanted to shout into that impassive face. I
am your son, damn you. Your son!
Aloud he said, “Nay, instead they have made me a knight.”

His father had looked right at him then with cold gray eyes, eyes so like his own, and had seen not a knight, or even a man, but a whore’s bastard still. He’d known then that between them things would never change.

He picked up a stone now and threw it at the quintain, missing. He wondered if Arianna had seen it in one of her cursed visions—that day in Chester’s great hall during the banquet of Hugh’s wedding, when he had stood before his father and been rejected for the last time.

“Raine … I have been looking for you.”

He spun around. A small, slender figure walked toward
him across the field. She had her hair down, like a girl’s. It swung, brushing her hips, glowing silver in the sun. Not all the memories, he decided suddenly, were bad.

“Sybil,” he said, and he smiled.

They walked in silence from the tilting yard to the castle gardens. It was quiet here, sheltered from the wind by the walls and enclosed by whitethorn hedges. And cool, as it was shaded from the sun by old yews and oaks. Beds of flowers and herbs lay in geometric patterns, like the designs on a Saracen carpet. The air was almost cloyingly sweet with the smells of roses and lilies, of mint and sage and coriander.

They walked around the fish pond, and Raine caught the flicker of a silver carp among algea-scummed lily pads. The leaves above rustled and the trill of a wren floated down upon their heads.

Sybil’s fingers toyed with the brooch that fastened her mantle. It was a cheap trifle, made not of silver, but tin, with no ornamenting jewels. It was fashioned in the form of a love knot.

Sybil noticed his gaze on the brooch, and she said, “Do you remember this, Raine? You gave it to me that summer you left.”

“Aye,” he said, though in truth he had no memory of it at all. He certainly hadn’t bought it for her, as he’d never had any money when he’d worked in Chester’s stables. He must have stolen it from a peddler’s cart one market day. And he had not
left
that summer, he had been taken, tied to the end of a rope and driven like a slave to Rhuddlan—a hostage his father intended all along to abandon.

She stopped and turned to face him, her hands clasping his forearms. “Why won’t you ask me why I married Hugh?”

“I know why.”

Her mouth curled into a funny smile that trembled on the edges. “You were gone a long time, Raine.”

A lock of hair drifted across her cheek, and he brushed
it back. “I never really expected you to wait,” he said. He spoke the truth. He had hoped, but he had never really believed. He couldn’t remember a time in his life when he had ever really believed in anyone or anything. “You were Hugh’s affianced and a lady, born to be a countess. I was nearly as low as a serf, worse really. A bastard stable-boy. I never thought you would wait.”

“Then you were wrong, because I waited, oh I waited and I prayed. I thanked God every day that the old earl was in no hurry for Hugh to marry, because he didn’t want his heir to start thinking too soon about inheriting. But then we began hearing the stories about you, how you were so brave and took such chances. First, to win your spurs, and then in the tournaments afterward. Hugh said once that … that you would be dead before the age of twenty. He said it with such certainty, and I thought … I thought if I married him that you wouldn’t have to risk your life anymore.”

His surprise must have shown on his face, for she covered his lips with her fingers before he could speak.

“I know,” she said, softly, sadly. “Too late I realized that you weren’t doing it for me at all, but for yourself. For power, money, glory. You would have gone on risking your life no matter what I did. You always will.”