Keeper of the Dream (52 page)

Raine advanced on the boy, thinking to give him a good taste of his foul temper, but Taliesin tossed something at him, grinning. “Don’t hit me, sire. Save your strength. You’ll need all of it for later.”

Raine snatched the thing that Taliesin had thrown out of the air. It was a small leather bag, closed together with a bit of string. “What’s this and why will I need my strength for later?”

“It’s a love philter, my lord. A bit of that in a cup of wine will make the one who drinks it near mad with desire.”

Raine pulled the string loose, opening the bag. He
sniffed its contents, which was a soft brown powder, like fine dust. It smelled musky. “What’s in it?”

“Mandrake root, of course. Also the pulverized liver of a toad and boiled hedgehog fat. Among other things.”

“God’s blood.”

“No. Not that,” Taliesin said, and laughed.

Raine growled another curse, but he stuffed the packet beneath his belt.

Taliesin plucked at the harp strings, creating a lilting, dancing tune. “Aye, that’ll put a good stiff bone in your braies, milord.”

“I don’t need it, you fool. I’ve been walking around hard as a battering ram for months. Are you sure this will make her mad for me?”

“Tonight is Lammas night as you know, though in Wales they do call it Lugnasa. In the time of the ancient ones, the women gathered around the
meinhirion
and offered up prayers and sacrifices to the god Lieu for a bountiful harvest. Arianna is a seer and so a part of her is drawn to the old ways. She will go to the standing stones tonight and there she will perform the ritual dance …” Taliesin lowered his voice, and his black eyes took on a strange and shimmering light. “Naked.”

In spite of himself, Raine felt a tingling in his groin. He scowled at the squire. “Why do I get the feeling I’m playing with loaded dice? You’re arranging something, and whatever it is, I doubt I’m going to like it.”

The squire tossed a fiery lock over his shoulder and looked up with wide eyes, innocent as a maid who’d spent her life in a convent. “Oh, no, my lord. Goddess forfend. Arranging things—that isn’t allowed.”

“Damn right it’s not allowed.”

The girl danced among the stones. A night wind, thick with the smell of the sea, bathed her face. The air was soft, warm, caressing her flesh like a lover’s hands.

A curlew cawed a warning, and she whirled, to see a knight on a black charger riding toward her.

He bore down on her and his hair, black as a raven’s wing, floated behind him like a banner on the wind. The charger’s hooves struck stone, and sparks flashed as he pulled the great beast to a halt, for he had seen her. The girl shivered, but it was not with fear.

She began to dance again.

Moonlight splattered the dunes with silver. The sea slashed across the beach, cutting between the rocks like scythes. He dismounted before he entered the circle of stones. He paused to watch her dance, watched as a white mist rose out of the ground like steam, enveloping her and the stones, until it seemed they danced with her. The wind whispered, telling tales long forgotten and best not remembered.

She danced, legs flashing silver, like the sea, among the grass.

She stopped suddenly before him, so close that the tips of her breasts almost brushed his chest. She had a wreath of mistletoe in her hair, which flowed over her shoulders, dark and thick, like a living mantel. But the rest of her was wondrously, gloriously naked.

He was afraid to touch her for fear she would disappear from the earth forever. She is a fairy, he thought, a creature of dreams, of yearnings that come deep in the night. Elusive, ephemeral, woman—he had never felt stronger, more powerfully male.

She took his hand.

And led him to the altar. Candles burned in melted pools of wax, surrounding the dip in the stone. The flames shimmered in the water … liquid fire.

They say that if a woman can get a man to drink of water that has touched the
meinhirion,
then he will love her forever.

Love her forever …

He waited for her, his breath suspended somewhere
between the earth and heaven and hell, waited for her to move, but she did not. So he did it for her.

He took her finger and dipped it in the water.

A crackling stream of fire leapt up her arm, flooding her in an incandescent light. Slowly, he raised her finger, wet and shining golden, up to his lips. A single drop glistened on the end of it, throwing off rainbows of light, and he caught the drop of water-fight with his tongue.

Heat blasted through him like a Sahara wind, searing him bare. He felt a shiver of fear, but it was too late to go back. He didn’t want to go back. He lowered his head and rubbed his tongue, wet from the water, across her lips.

Her mouth closed over his with a sudden, shattering hunger.

His fingers dug into her buttocks, and he crushed her to him hard. The wind flayed his skin. He was burning, melting, like silk held too close to a candle’s flame. He could feel their pulses beating, hear them, pounding, pounding, pounding in tempo with the surf at their backs, until it seemed the pumping of their blood was at one with the tide, one with the pulsating, driving force of life. Together, beating together.

Her mouth parted from his, and he groaned at the loss. His lips felt naked, his mouth empty, his tongue lonely.

But then she was undressing him, her mouth following her hands as she pulled off his tunic. She rubbed her palms over his chest, her fingers tugging gently at his hair. “You are a warrior,” she said. “My black knight.” He pushed out against her hands in a deep, unconscious breath.

She knelt before him, her mouth to his belly, and she kissed the arrow of hair where it disappeared into his braies. He shuddered beneath her lips. A groan escaped his clenched teeth, and he pressed his fingers against her head.

She opened the belt that held up his braies and let it fall unheeded to the ground. His braies sagged around his
hips and she pulled them down further, freeing his sex. She cradled it in her hands.

“You are so strong, so hard,” she said, and the words made him stronger still, harder still.

She lowered her head and took him in her mouth, and his breath left him on a soft keen.

But it was too much, the pleasure was too much and he couldn’t bear it. He pulled her down with him into grass wet by a silver dew.

She straddled his hips, poised above him on her knees.

He slid two fingers into her and opened her slowly. She arched, her head falling back so that her hair brushed his hips, and her breasts thrust up high and full. Her thighs began to tremble first and then it spread like ripples over her body until she was shuddering and convulsing and then shouting his name, and his eyes stung with a sweet, hot joy—that he could bring her to this, that it was his name she cried.

She lowered her head and looked at him with eyes wide open and dark with desire, her mouth swollen and slack. He dug his fingers into her hips, and lifting her high, he sheathed himself slowly, slowly inside of her. He wanted it to last. He wanted it to last forever.

His hand reached up to cup her breast, but then the wind blew and the candles flared, catching the torque around her neck, setting it afire. So he touched that instead.

Burned. Oh God, it burned. He could feel her pulse throbbing through the hot metal, as if he touched her heart. It thundered through his own blood like a violent sea beating against rocks. A curling silver mist blurred the edges of his vision. He looked beyond her face to the heavens and all the stars, and constellations began to whirl like a vast millwheel and the sky, the black, black sky bled into a white hot light.

He stood within the circle of stones with his beloved in his arms while around them chariot-mounted warriors
wheeled, brandishing swords, long hair spiked, naked bodies painted blue, and priests in white robes whirled in a frenzied dance, pouring forth imprecations. A trumpet of sound battered his ears, men shouted war cries, screams of rage, howls of pain. Smoke stung his eyes, and the sky burned, and he was afraid to die, for he could not bear the thought of leaving her, even knowing that beyond death she would be there still, waiting, his, always his. His beloved …

The sky burned red and the stars whirled and fell, raining fire, raining light. The light flooded through him, until he became the light and the light was her, and it burned, burned, and then was gone, and he was looking into Arianna’s face, Arianna’s eyes.

She was riding him, pushing up on her knees until he touched but the edge of her, then sliding back down his length, clenching around him, and he felt the first shudders of a release he knew he wasn’t going to be able to stop, even if it killed him, sure that it would kill him.

He shouted, spilling hot and deep inside of her.

She slumped forward onto his chest, her face nestled within the crook of his shoulder, her heart beating hard and loud against his chest. There were pieces of him up there floating among the stars, but most of him was inside her still, where he belonged. For she had stolen his soul, this woman, his wife. He would never fully belong to himself again.

“Cariad,”
he whispered in Welsh, a word he didn’t know he knew, a word he couldn’t remember hearing. But he knew what it meant …
beloved.

And so it was as the weeks passed and summer faded to autumn, that the Black Dragon came to understand the meaning of joy.

He watched his people harvest the land. Villeins and cottagers mowed the golden fields with scythes, while others followed, threshing the grain from its husks with
wooden flails. Still others fanned and tossed the grain into the air to winnow it from the straw and shaft. The breeze smelled pungently sweet from the freshly mown wheat.

But it was not Rhuddlan or the land or his place as the lord of it that was the cause of his unbounded joy. It was Arianna and their child. He needed them. More than his next breath, he needed them.

One day, after all the fields had been reaped and gleaned, Raine thought to celebrate by putting on an exhibition for the pages and squires, an exhibition of knightly horsemanship and lance play.

He let his knights do the showing off, but it wasn’t long before his men were clamoring at him to put on a little exhibition of his own. They set up a dozen small rings set on stakes at intervals down the length of the tilting field. The object was to spear, while riding bareback on a galloping horse, as many as one could with the tip of one’s lance. A perfect score required a feat of horsemanship, balance, and strength few men could master.

But Raine had bought himself a suit of Damascus mail with the money he had won performing that particular trick on the jousting fields in France.

He set his black charger full tilt at the row of stakes. He leaned out and away from the horse’s side, legs gripping hard, lance pointed at a downward angle. Too low and the point would stick into the ground, vaulting him off the horse’s back and wrenching his arm from its socket. Too high and he would humiliate himself by missing the rings entirely.

He did it perfectly—he should, after all those stolen hours of practice as a boy, paid for with beatings. The metal point scooped up the rings with neat clicks. At the end of the list, he wheeled his horse to the sound of cheering, his lance wearing all twelve rings like bracelets. He saw Arianna standing at the end of the field.

He spurred his horse, charging at a hard, free-shouldered gallop. The wind bit at his face and flattened his
hair. Hooves struck the ground with a steady thunder, like a barrage from a catapult. His thighs gripped moving flesh, powerful muscles flexing and releasing, flexing and releasing, blood pumping hot and fast in his veins. She stood with her head held high and watched him come.

At the last moment he swerved and pulled up hard beside her. His destrier reared, pawing the air. She looked up at him, sea-foam eyes wide, mouth parted. But with excitement, not fear.

She is mad for me,
he thought, and almost smiled. She was his, and he hadn’t even had to use Taliesin’s philter to get her. But she had never once said she loved him. Lust—too many women had come to him out of lust. He wanted more from Arianna.

He dismounted, turning his horse over to a page. Closer to her he could see that she looked tired, with shadows like bruises beneath her eyes and a wan tint to her skin. Nesta had kept her awake throughout the night with a cough.

Nesta … Every time he thought of his daughter he felt a soft warmth, a feeling of coming home. “How is our girl?” he asked. His hand slid beneath the fall of her hair to caress her neck. Arianna reached up and clung to his forearm, twisting her head up and around to smile at him.

Her smile was sweet. The warmth within him swelled, cocooning his heart, so that he had to blink a wetness from his eyes.

“Sleeping peacefully,” Arianna said. “I gave her a bit of ale and mustard seed and put a poultice of burdock on her chest.” She pointed toward the head of the lists. “Look, Rhodri is about to tilt now. How is he doing? Will he make a good knight?”

“He’s strong. A bit reckless, but he’ll grow out of that. He’s got the Gwynedd guts.” He saw that his words pleased her, and he smiled.

Rhodri caught Arianna’s eyes and waved, grinning. He
buckled his helm, hefted his lance, and spurred his horse into a gallop toward the quintain.

The quintain was dressed up like an infidel, but with a hole in his chest. The object was to put the lance through the hole. If a rider hit the quintain anywhere else it would spin around, thwacking him off his horse.

Rhodri struck a good solid blow, but he hit the mannikin smack on its right shoulder. He tried to duck but the quintain spun, catching him on the back, and sent him flying into the mud.

Taliesin, who had been sitting on the fence, hooted and cackled and slapped his knee. “You’re dead, Gwynedd!” he jeered. “Killed by old Quinty the Infidel, a better man than thee.”

Rhodri pushed himself onto his outstretched arms, shaking mud out his eyes. He was so covered with slime he looked like a tarred scarecrow.