Keeper of the Dream (55 page)

The alewife took a sip of the ale, swished it around her mouth, threw back her head and swallowed loudly. She screwed her face up in concentration and a silence descended on the crowd as it held its collective breath.

“ ’Tis fit to drink,” she finally said, with a solemnness worthy of a bishop. The crowd let go of its breath in a single sigh.

A sloshing leather jack of the brown liquid was pushed into Arianna’s hands. She took a sip, pronounced it delicious, and the villagers cheered. Raine, too, was given a jack. He up-ended his and drank it down at once to the accompaniment of more cheering. The ale left a residue of foam on his upper lip, and he licked it off with his tongue. Arianna, watching, thought how she would have liked to lick it off for him.

But they were in too public and holy a place for such a display. They were the special guests of honor at the town of Rhuddlan’s annual church-ale. Kegs of the special brew had been rolled into the cemetery. It would be sold by the jackful, along with loaves of fresh bread, with all profits going to the church.

At the moment the church was being used to store the
surplus hay from the harvest and the smell of the freshly mown grass was so thick in the air, it tickled Arianna’s nose. A late June sun, yellow as gorse flowers, beamed down from a flawless sky, and Arianna would have laughed for the joy she felt—if she also didn’t feel more pregnant than a sow carrying a double litter.

Jack after jack of ale were purchased, consumed, and purchased again. Taliesin, gittern swinging from his shoulders, gathered up a little makeshift group of musicians and a tabor, a sackbut, and a pair of timbrels launched into a rousing tune that made up for in volume what it lacked in style. The villagers joined hands and whirled furiously in the carole, singing at the top of their lungs, and the church bell set up such a clamor that Arianna winced, fighting an urge to clap her hands over her ears. The dancers whirled faster and faster until they blended together like the spokes of a spinning cartwheel.

Arianna’s foot began to tap. “I would like to dance, husband.”

“Absolutely not.”

She poked at her enormous stomach. “Look at this. I am fat as one of those ale barrels. I want this baby to come.”

Raine patted the spot where she had poked. “Our daughter will come when she is ready. You are not to jiggle her out of you.”

“I keep telling you, Raine, though you do not listen. This time it is a son that I am breeding for you.”

They stayed to drink another cup of ale and then walked back to the castle, his arm supporting her. “I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this,” Raine said, when she had made him stop for the third time so that she could catch her breath. The babe rode so high it pushed against her lungs.

“Dame Beatrix said a good long walk might make it come,” she answered him. “You’ve never been pregnant, Raine. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“God be praised for that. When we get home you will do something quiet. How about a game of tables?”

She made a face. “Tables are boring.”

“You only say that because I always win.”

Arianna’s fingers hovered over a whalebone bishop and a smile played around her mouth. With a decisive movement she pushed the game piece down the board. “I believe I have just checked you, husband.”

Raine grunted. “The game is not over yet. In truth, I have you right where I want you, little wife.”

Arianna’s smug smile suddenly turned into a grimace. Raine jumped to his feet, sending knights, bishops, and pawns into the rushes. “Did you feel a pain?”

She sucked in a deep breath. “Nay, ’twas only gas.”

“You’re going to lie down this instant. If you put up any more arguments, I’ll turn you over my knee.”

“I’d like to see you get me over your knee with me in this condition. It’d be like turning a turtle onto its back.”

Nevertheless, he was relieved to see that she allowed him to lead her over to the bed. She wasn’t the only one anxious for the babe to put forth its appearance. His guts had been tangled into knots like snarled gittern strings for weeks now.

Arianna had just fallen asleep, and Raine was about to leave the room, when the trumpeter at the gatehouse announced a visitor. He went to the window, surprised to see a lone woman ride into the bailey. He was even more surprised when he saw that the woman was Sybil.

He met her at the bottom of the steps of the great hall. She pushed the hood of her mantle off her head and looked up with big lavender-blue eyes. Eyes that stared at him above a cheek that bore a livid bruise in the shape of a man’s hand.

He guided her inside with a light arm around her shoulders, taking her up onto the dais and into the small antechamber that led off the end of the hall.

He turned her around to face him. He tilted her chin up, and he brushed his thumb along her cheekbone, just above the bruise. “Did Hugh do this to you?” They were the first words he had spoken to her. Her eyes fluttered closed and she nodded. “Why?”

“We argued. He …” She stopped, lifting her shoulders in a helpless little shrug. “It’s for a different reason every time, and the same reason.” She pulled away. Her fingers twisted around the love-knot brooch he couldn’t remember giving to her, and when she looked up again, he saw that her eyes were wet and shining with unshed tears. Her lower lip trembled open and she caught it with her teeth. “I wish that I could just leave, Raine. Sometimes I want to go away somewhere and never come back.”

She looked so hurt and bewildered, like a little girl who has just been punished and doesn’t know why. But there was nothing he could do for her. She was Hugh’s, and he could not come between his brother and his brother’s wife.

Suddenly her shoulders hunched and she buried her face in her hands, muffling her words. “I shouldn’t have come here. I know it’s wrong, but I …”

He made the mistake of touching her, and she fell into him, wrapping her arms around his waist, rubbing his chest with her breasts, burying her head in his neck. “Don’t say it’s too late. Say you still love me. Tell me you still love me.”

He grabbed her shoulders, stilling her. He felt the wetness of her tears on his neck, the beating of her heart against his chest, the softness of her. And the wrongness of her.

“Sybil …”

She lifted her head and looked at him.

He stared into eyes that were soft purple, the color of an evening sky one summer day when they had made love in a field of grass. In a sad and futile way, she was right, he
hadn’t stopped loving her. But it was the girl of that summer he loved, not the woman of today. Because of that girl, in memory of that girl, he didn’t want to hurt her.

But he was going to have to.

“It’s over with us, Sybil. It ended on the day you married my brother.”

The words came out harsher than he’d meant them to. Her chest jerked and her hands clenched into fists against his chest. “But I still love you.”

He gave her a little shake. “You’re in love with a memory. But memories are only pieces of the past. Whatever might have happened or could have happened, didn’t. We are married to other people now, for better or worse. Go home, Sybil. Go home and keep the memories, but let go of the past.”

Her head fell forward and she laid her brow on his chest. Slowly she straightened and when she looked up at him this time, a smile trembled on her lips. “But you did love me once. For a while you were mine.”

He answered her smile with one of his own. “It was a sweet summer, Sybil. I will never forget it.”

His hands had closed around her shoulders, to push her off of him, when he heard a sharp, angry intake of breath. He jerked his head around and there stood Arianna, looking at him with Sybil in his arms.

He relived a thousand years of hell in that one moment, while she stood there and looked at him, saying nothing, just looking at him with blank sea-foam eyes. She turned and walked away, her stomach leading the way before her.

“Hell,” Raine said. And then he said it again. “Ah, hell.”

Sybil had let go of him and taken a step back, but he didn’t notice because he was still staring at the now empty doorway. She had to say his name twice before he turned and looked at her.

She smiled, a smile from the old days that dimpled the
corners of her mouth. “Oh, Raine, I do believe you’ve gone and fallen in love with your little Welsh princess.”

Raine took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Aye, I love her.” It was an odd thing, but the words, once said, tasted good in his mouth. In truth, they tasted so fine, he said them again. “I love her.”

“But you haven’t told her, have you?”

“Well, I … Well, not exactly. But, dammit, she knows I love her.”

Her smiled faded. She touched his cheek, once, lightly. “Tell her anyway, Raine. Tell her before it’s too late. It’s a rare thing, is love. And too easily lost.”

They looked at one another—she thinking of the past, he of the future. She stood up on her toes and pressed her lips to his in a light, fleeting kiss that spoke of good-bye.

He escorted her out of the hall and put her on her horse, but he didn’t even wait long enough to watch her ride out the gate. Instead he bounded back inside and up the stairs. He stared at a thick expanse of iron-banded oak and sighed. He really didn’t want to take a battle-ax to his own bedchamber door.

“Arianna, let me in so that we can talk.”

Silence.

“Arianna, you are judging me falsely again, and I grow weary of it.” Silence.

“Arianna, I can’t tell you I love you through a bloody door!” Somebody snickered.

Raine whipped around. Taliesin slouched against the wall, his arms folded over his chest, and a smirk on his pretty mouth. “Have you tried opening it, my lord?”

“Huh?”

“The door. Mayhap it isn’t even bolted.”

Raine grabbed the latch and the door swung open easily beneath his hand. He shot Taliesin a quelling look before the boy could start flapping his jaws again, then he
took a deep breath, girded his loins … and stepped into an empty chamber.

“She went to the
meinhirion,”
Taliesin said, appearing suddenly at his side. The boy heaved a huge sigh. “Once again you have bungled things. This is getting to be a bad habit with you. Why the goddess ever thought—”

Raine’s hands clamped down hard on the boy’s shoulders. “She didn’t try to ride there, did she?”

“Nay, she couldn’t. She walked.”

Raine lifted his eyes heavenward, thanking God for small favors. “I’ll wring her neck for this!” he bellowed, giving his squire a rough shake because the boy was in his hands and handy.

He felt anger boiling up within him and he let it rise, reveling in it. It was the anger of righteous indignation, of a man who has found himself in love with a woman who bewilders him and drives him mad, but whom he couldn’t possibly live without.

The squire watched his master’s broad back disappear down the stairs and his eyes shimmered, shooting out sparks like falling stars.

The light faded. He rubbed his aching shoulders—he would be sporting bruises for a week at least. The kitchen wenches and dairy maids would all feel sorry for him, they would want to kiss him and make him better.

He threw back his fiery head and laughed at that. His laughter, rich and deep, echoed down and up and through the years.

She had known him to keep his anger tightly under control, and she had felt the full blast of his icy rages. But never had she seen him hot-blooded and bellowing. If it wasn’t for the memory of once again catching him with that wretched Sybil in his arms, she would have laughed.

He leaped from his horse and came charging up to her, huffing and puffing and breathing fire, just like the dragon
he was named after. “What in hellfire is it that you think you’re doing?”

She jerked her chin into the air and looked down her nose at him, because she knew he hated it. “What are you doing here, Raine? Shouldn’t you be with Sybil? Already she probably grows lonely for you … for the feel of your arms around her.”

He flushed slightly, then his jaw tightened and jutted forward. “What am I doing here? What are you doing here?” He flapped his arm. “You’re about to have a baby and you’re out wandering the bloody moors.”

A part of Arianna was suddenly aware that her skin felt clammy and the roots of her hair were damp with sweat, but most of her was more preoccupied with making her husband suffer just a bit before she forgave him. “Why should you care what I do, or where I am? When it’s Sybil you love.”

Raine let loose with a string of curses that shocked even Arianna’s experienced ears. “I love
you,
you thickheaded wench! I love you!”

“You say that now.”

“Aye, I say it now,” he said, somewhat calmer, only battering her eardrums a little. “I say it now … I love you, little wife.”

“Now doesn’t count.”

“What do you mean, now doesn’t count?” He was bellowing again. Nice dragonlike roars. “Why doesn’t it count?”

“Because I’ve put the words into your mouth. They didn’t spring from your heart.”

“Jesus wept.” He pushed his hand through his hair in that typical masculine gesture of exasperation with a female. He pointed his finger at her, shaking it like a scolding alewife. “I know what you want. Well, fine—that’s just what you’re going to get.”

He pulled his tunic over his head with a vicious jerk and sent it sailing through the air. His chainse followed.
He leaned against one of the standing stones and yanked off one boot, switched feet, and then yanked off the other. He started to peel off his chausses.

It suddenly occurred to Arianna that he was taking off his clothes. All of his clothes.

Surely, he couldn’t be thinking he was going to—no, of course he couldn’t. “Raine, stop.” Off came his braies. He was definitely naked now. “Raine, what are you
doing?”

He fell down onto his knees before her, seizing her hands. “You wanted me naked and on my knees, just like in that cursed song. Well, here I am.” His voice had softened. She had never seen his face look the way it did now. All that he was feeling was there, in the tautness of the skin across his cheekbones, in the curve of his lips, in his eyes—turning smoky and warm. “I love you, Arianna, my wife, my lifemate.
Cariad
… Beloved, beloved. I love you.”