Keeper of the Dream

by Penelope Williamson

He reached her in two strides and jerked the sheet from her grasp.

  “You bastard—”

  His hand smothered her mouth and her head would have slammed against the wall if he hadn’t cushioned it with his other palm. “You are overly fond of that word, little wife. And I don’t like the sound of it coming from your sweet lips.”

  Arianna wanted to tell him that she didn’t give a leper’s damn for his likes and dislikes, but she couldn’t speak with his hand pressing so hard against her mouth, and she was cutting the soft underside of her lips on her teeth.

  “Now you will apologize,” he said, slowly and distinctly, “and you will address me as ‘my lord husband’ when you do it.”

  She stared up into his ruthless face, telling him with her eyes where he could go, and what he could do with himself and his title once he got there. But he’d had more practice at this sort of jousting, and she was the first to blink and look away.

  He released her mouth. “I will have your apology, Arianna,” he said in that soft, flat voice.

  He would have it, too, she knew that. She lifted her chin and attempted to stare at him down the length of her nose.

  “Forgive me for bringing up the shameful circumstances of your birth, my lord husband. I shall endeavor not to do so in the future … no matter what lengths you go to remind me of them.”

  A startled look came over his face. “Jesus Christ … only you could manage to apologize and insult a man all in the same breath.”

  He stared at her a moment longer, and his brows drew together while his lips twitched, as if he couldn’t decide whether to frown or to laugh. Then, muttering an oath, he hauled her up against his chest and slammed his mouth over hers. His hands moved down to clasp her shoulders, lifting her up on her toes so that he could kiss her deeper, his tongue thrusting between her teeth.

  Balling up her fists, she pushed against his chest, breaking the lock his mouth had on hers. His head flung up and his fingers tightened their grip. A muscle jumped in his cheek and she could see little tremors coursing through his body as he fought for control.

  His hands fell away, and he stepped back, though he kept her pinned to the wall with his flinty gaze. “I was patient with you last night because it was your first time, but you are my wife, Arianna, and I need an heir. And, by God, if I have to swive you day and night I will do so until I get one.”

  Arianna wanted to scoff at the man’s idea of patience. She lifted her head. “I will do my duty, for Gwynedd’s sake, but don’t expect me to take any pleasure from it.”

  “I don’t give a damn whether you take pleasure from it or not. As long as you take it.”

  Their eyes stayed locked in silent combat a moment longer, then he turned away from her. She snatched up the sheet, wrapping it around her like a shield.

  He finished dressing in silence, pulling on a quilted chainse and the leather coat lightly armored with horn plates that the Normans called a broigne. Arianna remained where she was, armored in the sheet and following his every move.

  He paused at the door and turned to point at the bed. “You will be here, in that bed, waiting for me when I return tonight. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly …” She paused a beat, then added, “My lord husband.”

  11

  From the window of their bedchamber, Arianna watched Raine ride across the open marsh with his brother at his side. Their horses’ hooves sent up sprays of water behind them. Both men bore hawks on their gauntleted wrists and the shore birds, sensing danger, took flight.

  But before Raine left he had pulled his black charger around at the gateway to his castle and looked back toward the great hall. He took his lance from his squire, lifting it high in the air. The hot summer wind caught his black dragon pennon, unfurling it against a shell-colored sky.

  As if she needed reminding of who ruled her now.

  She washed and dressed quickly, for she had decided that she would begin right away to assume her duties as chatelaine of her husband’s castle. She had prepared all her life for this mantle of responsibility, and she looked forward to feeling the weight of it. Raine might think himself to be master of Rhuddlan, but she was his lady, and she knew from watching her mother over the years that a woman could acquire much power beyond supervising the spinning and seeing that the rushes were changed once a week. In truth, a capable wife could make herself indispensable to her lord and his demesne.

  The hall downstairs was in shambles from the revels of the day before, and that was the task she would set about first. She required a horde of servants to clean it out, but she decided to take a quick tour of the other buildings and bailey first and make a complete list of everything that needed to be done.

  Though barely past matins it was already brutally hot outside. There wasn’t a cloud in sight to mar the deep blue of the sky. The bailey was a beehive of activity, for the new Lord of Rhuddlan was wasting no time in improving his castle. A group of men pitched new thatch onto the roof of the granary. The smith hammered on a plowshare at the forge. A pair of villein boys whitewashed the walls of the kitchen with long-handled brushes.

  Arianna was crossing the yard when she spotted her cousins Ivor and Kilydd at the mounting blocks, preparing to leave. She opened her mouth to call out to them, only stopping herself just in time. One look at her black eye and they would jump to the wrong conclusion and start a war. To avoid them she ducked into the open door of one of the rambling, thatch-roofed stables.

  It was dim inside but only a little cooler. The scent of freshly strewn hay lay thick in the air. The horses were busy chomping their morning fodder, but the squires and stable boys appeared to be occupied elsewhere. She heard an adolescent, off-key voice singing a Welsh drinking song about a warrior who preferred quaffing his mead to tupping a woman.

  She followed the music to a small tack room. She paused at the threshold, smiling, as she watched her brother sing to himself while he straddled a sawhorse and rubbed goose grease into the seat of a saddle.

  At the sound of his name his head jerked up. “Oh, Arianna, ’Tis you …” He started to grin, and then his pale green eyes opened wide. “He beat you! The Norman bastard beat you!”

  Arianna’s hand flew up to her eye, and she winced at its soreness. “Nay, he did not,” she said. Rhodri had been made a second squire to the Lord of Rhuddlan, but he was a hostage nonetheless. She could not have him charging to the defense of her honor. “It was an accident. You remember the time you and Dafydd were wrestling and he accidentally broke your arm? Well, it was like that.”

  “You were wrestling with Lord Raine?”

  “Don’t be a witless nit,” she snapped at him to cover a sudden and unexpected blush. “Is this my lord husband’s saddle?”

  Rhodri scowled at the rag in his hand. “Aye, that wretched Taliesin has put me to this task.” He gestured at a tangled pile of bits and bridles that rested in one corner. “He said he’d string me up by my thumbs if I didn’t have all this tack cleaned and polished ere nightfall. God’s eyes, you’d think the little sot was King Henry himself, the talent he has for ordering a body about.”

  Sensitive of her brother’s fourteen-year-old dignity, Arianna struggled not to laugh. “Nevertheless, Lord Raine will be pleased when he sees how his saddle now shines.”

  Rhodri shrugged and his mouth turned down. “Aye, but I’m only biding my time.” He leaned into her, lowering his voice. “The guard on me is lax, Arianna. I could have escaped long since, but I knew you’d want to come with me. Mayhap we could try tonight?”

  Arianna seized her brother’s shoulders, giving him a rough shake. “God’s death, use your wits. Have you forgotten that we’re hostages for Gwynedd’s honor? Do you want to give King Henry an excuse for invading our lands again with his accursed army?”

  Rhodri stared at the packed dirt of the stable floor. “Nay …”

  “A hostage is not supposed to escape, ’Tis not the thing. Besides, did you not swear an oath of homage to Lord Ra
ine when you became his squire?”

  Rhodri’s mouth was set in a mutinous line. “That oath doesn’t count. ‘Twas given to a Norman.” He picked at a splinter on the sawhorse. “I hate Lord Raine near as much as I hate that wretched Taliesin.” His gaze fastened onto her face and he frowned at her bruised eye. “Arianna? Do you remember the tale of that Norman earl who married a daughter of Powys and then killed her when he later found himself at war with her father?”

  Arianna knew well the story, what child of Wales did not, for it was such a splendid example of Norman perfidy and cruelty. The earl had arranged an ambush for the Lord of Powys, and his wife, upon getting wind of it, had warned her father off. The earl, enraged over what he perceived as his wife’s treachery, had cut off her head and impaled it on a stake atop his castle wall.

  Arianna ruffled her brother’s thatch of light brown hair, then laid her arm across his shoulders. “Don’t worry about me, for I don’t intend to give Lord Raine reason for putting my head on a spike,” she said. She could well imagine what the Black Dragon would do to her should she ever, for the sake of her father or her people, be forced to betray him.

  Rhodri squirmed out of her embrace. “God’s death, leave off, Arianna! Don’t be hanging around my neck like a wet mantle. If that wretched Taliesin had seen this I’d have never lived it down.”

  Arianna refrained from teasing her brother about “that wretched” Taliesin, who was assuming all the proportions of the plague in Rhodri’s eyes. She left him to his polishing, only warning him to have a care for his thumbs, and then set about her own work. She decided she ought to approach Sir Odo, who had been made bailiff of Raine’s demesne, and inform him that she would take on all responsibility for what fell within the bailey walls.

  She found the big knight out by the pale that had been constructed on the lists to hold the confiscated cattle. But except for a cow with a bald patch on her rump and a bow-legged calf, the pens were empty.

  “He gave them back,” Arianna said.

  Sir Odo turned. Sweat gleamed in the pits and seams of his cheeks and he scrubbed a hand over his face. “Milady?”

  “Lord Raine has given the cattle back.”

  Odo’s mouth cracked open in a smile. A gap showed black between his two front teeth. “Did you think he would not?”

  “But Taliesin said—”

  “Taliesin!” The knight drew in a snort that flared his nostrils wide. “When that boy dies the last thing to quit working is going to be his tongue. And as for your husband, milady, the last thing to go will be his pride. Never apologizes and doesn’t explain. It can get annoying, especially if you’re the one who’s got to follow around after him and do all the apologizing and explaining.”

  Arianna stared, frowning a moment longer at the empty pens, and when she turned she found that Sir Odo studied her bruised eye with a look of disgust on his face. “But for that”—he pointed his chin at her eye—“the boy will have to do his own apologizing.”

  The eye suddenly throbbed and Arianna had to resist an urge to touch it. “It was an accident,” she said, and wondered why she felt the need to excuse her husband in front of his own man.

  Sir Odo grunted, rubbing a big paw across his chin until his beard rasped. “I would tell you a story, milady. Though by the Cross, he would have my guts strung on a Maypole if he knew I was flapping my jaws like this.”

  “I would keep faith with you, Sir Odo,” she said solemnly.

  He rolled his thick shoulders like a horse with an itch. “Aye … well, it happened a few years back when Lord Henry did battle with the French king over Aquitaine. Henry made this certain knight his bailiff over the castles we’d taken, while he went off to spend the winter at his court. But the land had been savaged by the fighting and the winter was a bad one. By Candlemas the serfs were eating boiled grass and the bark off the trees. That was when the bishop sent out his minions to collect the tithing.”

  “But if the people were starving, how could they collect a tenth of nothing?”

  “There’s always something, milady, even during a famine. But they didn’t get so much as a kernel of corn, because this knight we speak of chased the devil’s spawn away—even hanged one who was being stubborn. Then he went to the bishop, fat as a Martinmas hog in his palace, and informed his excellency there’d be no tithing that year, and he held a sword to the man’s throat as he said it.” Sir Odo’s eyes took on a gleam at the memory, then he turned his head aside and spat between the gap in his teeth. “’Course, the bishop put him under the ban for it.”

  A chill crawled over Arianna, lifting the hair on her arms. If a man died while under pain of excommunication his soul would be cast down into the pit of hell for all eternity. And a woman who married a man under the ban damned her own soul as well. “And did Ra—did this knight we speak of stand up to the ban?”

  “Aye. Balls of iron, he’s got—” Sir Odo’s pitted face flushed red as a holly berry. “Forgive me, Lady Arianna. I’ve been too long with naught but other knights and my horse for company.”

  Arianna dismissed his apology with a wave of her hand. “With nine brothers I’ve heard words foul enough to curdle the devil’s blood. But what happened? Surely the knight is no longer an excommunicate.”

  “Nay, Henry used his influence to get the ban lifted and thought it a right good jest too. Until he found out none of the lord’s tithing had been collected either. The knight we speak of had to sell everything he owned then, down to his sword, to pay Henry back, not only for what he never took in as bailiff, but for what he gave out to the serfs that winter from the castles’ own stores …” His large brown eyes fastened onto her face. “Leastways, that’s how the story goes.”

  Arianna looked back at the empty pens. She felt strangely light and gay. She hadn’t danced at her wedding yesterday; she felt like dancing now.

  Smiling, she turned to the big knight. “Thank you for telling it to me, Sir Odo. And I would ask a favor of you.” She informed him of her plan to become, in effect, steward of her husband’s dominion within the bailey walls.

  “I would welcome it, milady,” he answered readily. “What with worrying about harrows and hedges and pigs and fodder, my head’s near splitting as ’tis.” He kneaded his brow with thick, knotty fingers. “’Struth, I’d rather be fighting a war somewhere.”

  Arianna brought Sir Odo a tonic of peony root for his headache, which earned her a hearty kiss on the cheek that nearly knocked her over. For the rest of the morning she threw herself into the considerable task of setting Rhuddlan Castle to rights.

  The stores of wine and ale in the butteries of both the keep and the great hall had been sorely depleted by the wedding feast, and Arianna decided to spend the hour after dinner taking inventory of the stocks in the cellar.

  She threw herself into the task of counting the tuns of wine. She had just rolled aside a keg of ale when she saw something that made her pause. A name had been etched into the wall of the vault. She tried to make out the letters, but the carving must have been done years ago for it was begrimed with dirt. Taking up the torch she had stuck into a bracket near the door, she leaned over to spell aloud the crude letters.

  “R … A … I … N … E.”

  She leapt back, so startled that she dropped the torch, and she spent a few anxious moments coaxing the flame back into life. With the torch wavering in her hands, she bent over to read the name again. She touched the first letter.

  A tide of raw terror washed over her—his terror. She was locked in this cellar and waiting, waiting for … Eyes.

  A pain stabbed behind her eyes, so fierce that she clenched them shut. They’re going to put out my eyes. “No …” she sobbed. But the sound came not from her throat, but his.

  For the flash of a second she saw him—a dark-haired boy huddled in the corner of the vault, tears streaming unheeded down his dirty cheeks. She felt his terror and his pain as surely as if they had sprung from within her own breast. He threw back his head a
nd screamed. “I am your son, damn you! Your son! How could you do this to me, your own son?”

  “Oh, please, don’t,” she cried, and reached for him….

  She was falling into a whirling vortex of howling wind and white, pulsating light. She smelled wood smoke and rain. She heard the croaking of ravens and harsh laughter and a man’s voice, thick with excitement … “After this morning’s work, Chester’s bastard will be making no bastards of his own.”

  The sea of light swirled, darkened to the color of blood. The blood flowed, flared, turned into tongues of flame, became a fire in a stone forge in a castle yard, a yard she knew, cast in shadow by a hulking shell keep, and …

  A raven wheeled overhead, black wings flashing against the dim light of a stormy dawn. The air was cool and smelled of rain, but sweet, so sweet after so many weeks shut up in the dank cellar. Then he saw it … a forge glowing ruddy, the fire hissing as it was splattered with the first drops of rain.

  Fear walloped into his chest like a battering ram, and his legs almost gave out beneath him. He stumbled, but didn’t fall. They dragged him toward the forge and he set his teeth on begging words. They might take by force his sight and his manhood, but only he could give away his pride.

  A man in a black leather hood turned then … a long iron staff, burning red, red, pointed at his eyes. He would have begged then if he could have, if he could have gotten the words out past the choking fear. Eyes. Oh, God, how could a man live without eyes?

  A knight in scarlet stepped in front of him. “No, cut off his balls first. Make that be the last thing he sees….”

  Rough hands tore at his braies. A gust of wind and nervous laughter. Ravens screeched, already smelling blood. The flash of a knife pressed, cold against his shrinking flesh. God, God, don’t do this to me, he prayed. But he didn’t believe in God, and he’d never known mercy, so he had no hope. He thought of the girl he loved and felt sick to think of what they were taking away from him.

  The knight in scarlet pushed his face against his, snarling, “Tell your father, the earl—this is what we do to the sons of traitors.” My father doesn’t care, he wanted to scream. The Earl of Chester doesn’t care what you do to me. The knight waited, waiting for him to break. And he was breaking, inside, where it didn’t show. “Christ, boy. Are you made of stone?”