He sliced quickly through the thongs and pushed to his feet, backing away from her. He did not at all like the way his body was reacting to her, not when his mind insisted on leaving her the bloody hell alone.
The first thing she did was jerk her tunic down over her legs. She straightened, moving slowly, a grimace twisting her face. She chafed at the marks on her wrists. Though the blood rushing back into her cramped muscles must have been agony, she didn’t make a sound.
Raine had backed up until he was propped against the tent’s center pole. He crossed his legs at the ankles and folded his arms across his chest. She lifted her head to meet his eyes and he saw her throat work as she swallowed hard. “What … what do you mean to do with me?”
“Nothing. Let you go.”
Her eyes grew wide. “But why? Aren’t you going to—” She cut herself off, and he was amused in spite of himself at the color that flooded her face. As if she didn’t know a dozen such words for what she was offering.
He supplied a few. “Plow you? Swive you? Lay you? Tup you? Nay, wench, I think not.” He let his gaze roam over her, pretending to consider her charms and to find them lacking. And ignoring all the while the growing heat and pressure in his loins that made him out to be a liar. “You’re not to my liking.”
Her face had gone from bright red to pale to red again. “Damn you, how often must I say it? I am not a whore!”
Raine stared at her a moment longer. It was as if they played at hoodman’s bluff; he couldn’t catch her in the truth. Suddenly weary of the game, he jerked his head toward the tent flap. “Ah, Christ. Go on. Get out of here.”
She wet her lips, as if seeking the words to change his mind. But in the end she said nothing. She swung her legs around, easing off the bed. Giving him a wide berth, she hugged the side of the tent where his coffer and war chest lay. He saw the intent in her eyes the split second before she acted upon it.
She seized up his sword, slashing sideways in a wide arc. He ducked and the blade bit into the pole with a chunk sound, like an ax cutting into kindling. She’d come so close to taking off his head, he’d felt the blade lift his hair.
Her breath came in sobbing gasps as she jerked at the sword, trying to work it free from the tough ash wood. He tackled her around the hips, dragging her down to the ground and rolling on top of her, trapping her arms behind her back. He pinned her beneath the weight of his chest and brought his face close to hers. He felt the frantic pumping of her heart.
She arched her back once, desperately trying to buck him off, then subsided. For the first time he saw fear in her eyes.
“Murderer! I hate you! You killed my—”
He smothered the rest of it with his mouth.
He made the kiss brutal and punishing. She tried to twist her head aside, so he grasped her cheeks between his hands. His pressed his mouth down harder, bruising her lips, forcing them open, and he plunged his tongue inside, burying it deep. She went rigid a moment, then her pelvis arched, rubbing across his stiff arousal. He tore his mouth away to watch her face as he pushed his bulging sex up hard between the cleft in her legs.
Her mouth was wet and open, and her pale face bore the marks of his fingers. Her neck muscles were pulled taut and rigid, and her eyes stared up at him, so dark a green they looked almost black.
He hooked his fingers into the top of her tunic, ripping it partway open, and the words spilled out of her on a gasp of breath, tight and raw. “Oh, God, please, don’t …”
Raine’s mouth twisted into a hard smile. “It seems, wench, that you are to my liking after all.”
“Sire! I’d never thought you’d do such a thing!” Sunlight spilled over them. Taliesin stood just inside the tent, his face ashen with shock.
Raine’s head snapped up and around. “Damn you, boy, can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Oh, goddess … This is not at all working the way I had planned it. Sire, if you but could try to contain your lust—”
“Taliesin … go away.”
The boy took a step into the tent. “Nay, sire. Please don’t make me do something we’ll both later regret. Only I can’t let you dishonor her.”
Raine’s head sagged. He squeezed his eyes shut, struggling for breath. Slowly, he lifted his head to look at his squire. “Then what in hellfire did you give her to me for?”
“You were supposed to … to like her, not bed her.”
“Well, as it happens, I don’t like her at all. But if I had liked her the end result would be the same, with me on top and her …” Beneath me. In truth, he rather liked the feel of her beneath him. She was slim-hipped and long-legged and he’d never kissed a softer mouth. He stared at her mouth. Her lips, red and swollen, trembled as she drew in deep, panting breaths, and her eyes were wet and dark. As he watched, a single tear rolled sideways across her cheek and into her hair.
“Sire, please,” Taliesin said, sounding almost frantic with worry. “You are not behaving as you ought. You were supposed to have wooed her first.”
Raine cursed himself, for that single damn tear had somehow managed to cool his lust. “Wenches like her aren’t wooed, they’re taken.” He lunged to his feet, roughly jerking her up with him. He thrust her so hard at Taliesin that their heads collided. “Next time you think to supply me with a whore, try to ascertain if she’s sane first.”
He didn’t see it coming. Even if he had he would never have believed it.
She drew back her fist and punched him in square in the nose.
A jagged pain blew out the top of his head like a bolt from a catapult. Blood splattered down the front of his bliaut. It poured over the hand he had put up to the throbbing, burning hurt in the middle of his face. Through a red haze he heard her screaming at him.
“God rot your tongue, you loathsome, puffed-up toad. I’m not a whore!”
Raine was a man who prided himself on his self-control. Emotions brought you pain and trouble; they often got you killed. Not giving a blessed damn about anything was the creed he lived by. In his twenty-five years he had been sliced and stabbed, and once he’d even been set on fire. But no one, absolutely no one, had ever succeeded in bloodying his nose, and he was furious. He was going to strangle the wretched bitch.
The squire held her by the arm in a tight grip. Raine advanced on them, heedless of the blood that poured into his mouth and down his chin.
Taliesin thrust the girl protectively behind him and seized Raine’s rigid arm. “Sire, you can’t kill a woman.”
“Yes, I can,” Raine said viciously. But the red haze that blurred his vision was beginning to recede.
Blood was splattering everywhere. Raine tilted back his head; blood ran down the back of his throat into his mouth. He tried to wipe the blood off his face with the sleeve of his bliaut. He pressed the soft linen against his nostrils; blood soaked through the material and dripped in a steady stream, as if from a lavabo spigot, onto his chest.
“Get rid of her,” he said to Taliesin, his voice deadly. “Permanently this time. And don’t ask me what to do with her,” he added as Taliesin’s mouth opened. “Put her in a grist sack with some rocks and drown her like a cat Sell her to a Saracen brothel.”
Taliesin gasped. “Sire! You can’t mean it!”
“No, you’re right. Even infidels don’t deserve such hell. Bury her in a hole somewhere. Or, better yet, put her in a rotting vessel and send her out to sea. Whatever you do with her, just make cursed certain there isn’t a thief’s chance in hell our paths ever cross again in this lifetime.” He lowered his head. “Christ, where is all this blood coming from?”
She laughed. “I hope you’re bleeding to death.”
He tilted his head back again. He spoke very calmly, very precisely. “Taliesin, why is she still here?”
“My liege, there is something you should know. She’s—”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“Prince Owain of Gwynedd’s daughter.”
“Christ Jesus …”
&nbs
p; Slowly, he lowered his head again. The bleeding, thank God, had at last stopped. He looked at her with new eyes, seeing things he hadn’t noticed before—the breeding in the elegant bones of her face, the delicate white hands that had never toiled in the hot sun, the arrogant tilt of head and chin that came from a lifetime of ruling instead of being ruled. He had thought her uncommonly attractive for a whore; now he saw that she was beautiful. But then anything looked beautiful when it was worth its weight in gold. “Owain’s daughter …”
She lifted a proud chin. “I told you I was no whore.”
Raine ignored her. His gaze jerked over to Taliesin, then back to the girl. “Are you sure …?”
“Aye. But sire, I don’t think I like what you’re thinking.”
“God in heaven … This cursed wench is worth a fortune in ransom,” Raine said as the full import of her presence in his tent, in his hands, sunk in.
Her chin came up another notch. “Now that you know who I am, you Norman son of a poxed whore, you will accord me the proper respect.”
He laughed in her face. “How much do you reckon I can get for her?”
“Goddess preserve me,” Taliesin muttered at the avaricious light that blazed in his master’s eyes, but Raine wasn’t listening.
He was always short of money. He’d won fortunes in wars and tournaments, but the chivalric code he lived by demanded extravagance—in alms and gift giving, in entertaining, in dress and daily living. Money trickled through Raine’s fingers like water. If the king gave him Rhuddlan … if the king gave him Rhuddlan, he could well use the gold this highborn wench was going to bring him.
An excited voice jerked Raine’s attention off the girl. Sir Odo’s page appeared at the entrance to the tent. “Forgive me, sire. The King’s Grace commands that you attend him. He’s bathing at the abbey, sire, in the holy well.”
Raine spun around, pulling the bloodied bliaut over his head. He kicked his coffer onto its side, dumping out the contents to find a clean overtunic. “Don’t let her out of your sight,” he said to his squire over his shoulder.
“But—”
“I swear by the cross, if you lose her on me, Taliesin, I will string you up by your thumbs.”
“A moment ago, sire, you wanted me to put her in a leaky boat and send her out to sea.”
“A moment ago she was a useless whore. Now she’s the highborn wench who’s going to make me rich. If you lose her on me, boy, I will tie you up with your own guts and toss you in the river to drown.”
Taliesin heaved a huge sigh. “I won’t lose her, sire. But if you’d only think a moment beyond this ransom business you would see that—” But Raine had disappeared.
Taliesin looked down into Arianna’s stunned face. His grip around her arm tightened and he gave her a little shake. “What is wrong with you two?” he demanded with childish petulance. “This isn’t at all turning out the way it is supposed to.”
5
Raine tossed a coin into the toll keeper’s basket, then pushed his way through the band of pilgrims that clogged the abbey’s gate. They had a bagpiper with them, and they sang a rousing crusader’s song, swinging their palm branches back and forth in time to the beat.
One of the fronds slapped Raine in the face. He brushed it aside irritably, almost tripping over a beggar’s staff thrust across his path. He whirled around, his hand on his sword … and looked into puckered, black and empty sockets.
“Alms, messire, alms!” The beggar held out a scabrous hand. Raine fished in his alms purse for some coins, but he was careful to keep his eyes averted from the mutilated face.
The abbey was packed with people. Besides the usual pilgrims and penitents seeking salvation, and the diseased and deformed seeking a cure, there had been added the stewards, pages, and sycophants who everywhere followed in the wake of the king. In a grove of sycamore before the abbey church, a geyser spewed up from a spring to fall into a rock-lined pool. Droplets of water clung to the leaves and sparkled in the sun like diamond chips.
The king bathed alone, but at least twenty fawning nobles stood around him, bearing towels and clothes, food and drink. Their shouts and laughter almost drowned out the abbey’s bell as it rang for sext. Disdaining assistance, Henry pulled himself out of the pool by the strength of his long, muscular arms. An earl handed him a linen towel edged with lace. He rubbed it briskly over his deep chest and a belly that was already showing a slight tendency to swell with fat.
Raine had been to the abbey well once before. When he was six he had been forced to make a pilgrimage here, along with the other Chester stableboys. The castle chaplain had told them a story about the well, about a Welsh girl by the name of Winifred who had been a beautiful virgin dedicated to her chastity. As Raine remembered it, one day a horn-mad prince had come along and decided, naturally, that he wanted to tup her. When she denied him, he struck off her head in a fit of temper. Winifred’s head had rolled down a hill and where it came to rest a spring gushed forth, the holy well now known for its miraculous cures.
As a boy, Raine had pictured the lady’s head bouncing down the hill like an inflated pig’s bladder, and he’d laughed out loud. The priest had given him a clout on the ear for it, but he still thought it funny.
“Do you find something amusing, big brother?”
Raine turned at the sound of his brother’s voice. His smile widened when he saw that Hugh’s flushed face was topped by an overly large gold-tissued cap that didn’t quite hide the purple crust of clotted blood along his temple. He wondered how his brother, who hated fighting, had acquired the wound. “What happened to you? Did you run into a Welsh ambush too?”
“At least I didn’t lead my king into one.”
“Neither did I,” Raine said, but his voice was cut across by King Henry’s roar.
“You will cease this childish bickering at once, the pair of you!” The king stood before them with his bandy legs spread wide, his fists on his hips. “For God, I will banish you both if you insist on disturbing my peace!”
Hugh flushed and mumbled an apology. Raine met the king’s fiery gaze with a blank expression, though he knew that if Henry decided one of them must go, it would not be Hugh.
But King Henry’s temper had always sputtered and flared like a guttering candle. Now he was smiling at Raine, drawing him to his side. Draping his arm around Raine’s shoulder, he led him around the well toward the open doors of the abbey church. Water lapped over the edge of the pool. The air smelled sickly sweet from the queer reddish grass that grew on the stones that lined the basin.
Henry gestured to the bottom of the well. “They say ’Tis Saint Winifred’s hair and blood that we see.”
“It looks like moss to me, Your Grace.”
Henry barked a laugh and his arm squeezed Raine’s shoulder in a rough embrace. “God’s eyes, you’re a cynical bastard. Don’t you believe in anything?”
“Precious little,” Raine said truthfully.
Henry stopped and turned Raine to face him, his big hands resting heavily on the knight’s shoulders. “I’d like to think you believe in me. For you’re a damn fine man to have guarding one’s back.”
“I am your liege man, sire,” Raine said, but there was an edge to his voice. The code of a knight, the code he lived by, was the only thing in this world he still believed in. But he was afraid, so very afraid, that he had even stopped believing in that years ago. And if that were true, then he would have nothing.
Henry said nothing, but his pale eyes misted and he punched Raine lightly on the neck. It was a gentler version of the buffet given to a man on the day he was first knighted and swore allegiance to his liege lord. “Come with me, for I would seek your advice on what to do about these accursed Welsh,” he said, then turned and strode briskly into the church, leaving Raine to follow in his wake. “I trow, there is no honor among the Welsh,” he tossed over his shoulder.
Raine said nothing. It was his experience that there was no honor anywhere.
The king
was using the church as his headquarters. Bedding and cooking fires Uttered the nave. Horses, tied to the columns, fed from oat bags and staled into the rushes. Armed men lounged along the aisles, playing at draughts and dice, while varlets scurried about, bearing baskets of bread loaves and jacks of ale.
A trestle table draped with white cloths had been set up for the king’s repast, but Henry hated the idea of sitting down for anything. Now he paced the aisle of the nave, chewing on a capon leg. Raine wondered if he dared to bring up the subject of Rhuddlan again. He’d already spoken to the king about it once, on that long overnight ride. But he’d been given no definite promise.
Raine mouthed a silent curse. To hell with it—he would come right out and ask Henry for the fief and accept the decision, be it aye or nay. But then the sight of Hugh strolling toward them down the nave stilled his tongue. The earl’s lips bore a satisfied smirk, but Raine detected the small tick at the corner of his right eye that meant Hugh was nervous. Raine began to hope again.
Until Henry turned to him and said, “Your brother the earl has put in a claim for Rhuddlan. I regret to say this, for I know how you’ve set your heart upon it, but he does have a measure of right on his side.” The king, who had a fascination with the law, went on to explain with some exuberance the legal precedence for the Earl of Chester’s claim.
Raine wanted to put a fist through his brother’s gloating face. He told himself that it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, there would be other castles, other chances, but he was twenty-five … twenty-five and all he had to his name was a sword.
A procession of chanting, white-cowled monks entered the transept, drowning out the king’s words. A squire genuflected before Henry, presenting a wine cup. Raine’s gaze fell on the top of the squire’s bright coppery curls.
The squire started to back away and Raine’s hand lashed out, jerking the boy to his side. “What in Christ’s name are you doing here?” he growled beneath his breath. “Where’s the Gwynedd wench?”
Keeper of the Dream Page 7
