Snatching up the medicine bag, she ran from the room with the sound of Taliesin’s cackles following after.
Arianna stopped off at the kitchens for a piggin of lard, some figs, and a costrel of soured wine. She had to carry it all in the folds of her mantle, so that by the time she reached the stables she was soaked. Once through the door she paused to catch her breath and shake off the water. The air inside was damp and smelled of wet horse and fresh dung. Straw rustled, pawed by restless hooves, and she was greeted by snorts and an occasional nicker. From a stall in the rear, where spilled a pool of lantern light, she heard a man’s murmur and the wheezing, belabored breath of an animal in pain.
The soles of her shoes made no sound on the swept, packed earth. She stopped, her hand on the stall door, and looked inside.
His broigne was stained dark with rainwater, his hair plastered to his skull in wet swirls. A two-day’s growth of beard shadowed the lower half of his face. She thought the lines that framed his mouth seemed more deeply etched, the skin more tautly drawn across his cheekbones. He sat cross-legged on the hay-strewn floor, the destrier’s head cradled in his lap. He spoke softly to the big horse and she was shocked by the tenderness she heard couched within the rough words.
“Don’t you go dying on me, you old flea-bitten, mangy bag of bones.” His hand stroked the thick black neck, as gentle as his voice. “I promise you’ll be fed on nothing but winnowed barley for the rest of your idle, misbegotten days—”
His head snapped around at the creak of the stall door opening. The all-too-revealing pain vanished from his eyes as if they’d been shuttered. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I see no reason why a noble steed should suffer for a Norman’s sins.”
She knelt beside the great beast, who quieted immediately, as if he sensed her presence would bring relief. She searched her bag, assembling the herbs and other ingredients she would need. The hair had been seared from the horse’s left hindquarters, leaving bare hide covered with oozing, bleeding blisters. He followed all her movements with an unblinking eye glazed with pain.
“What star was he born under?”
Raine’s hand paused in its rhythmic stroking, then resumed. “I don’t know. I got him as a yearling. Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. All remedies are associated with the stars and planets and certain ones work best on those born under certain signs. Since we don’t know the date and hour of his birth …?” She glanced up at him to receive a negative shake of his head. “Then I shall have to use a general remedy for burns.”
She mashed up the figs and mixed it with the soured wine, added dandelion and bryony root and stirred it all into the lard. Then she sprinkled in a packet of dried cow dung. She scooped up a handful of the mixture, repressing a shudder at its stink and gooey feel.
“I don’t think he’ll die,” she said. He didn’t answer, but the taut lines that bracketed his mouth relaxed a bit.
Except for an occasional shudder of his powerful muscles, the horse didn’t move as Arianna smoothed the doctored lard over his burns. She could feel Raine’s eyes on her, but when she cast a glance his way she saw that as usual his face was inscrutable. Yet she remembered the achingly tender sound of his voice when he had tried to soothe the stallion. He would speak that way to a woman he loved, she thought.
The horse nickered and she crooned to him, without thought:
“But my love I do keep for those things of my heart …
God and my lord and my trusty steed.’ ”
“For mercy’s sake, sing anything but that,” Raine said.
She looked up at him in surprise. “You know the song, my lord?”
“Every bloody word of it. The first six months he squired for me, Taliesin regaled my ears with that cursed lovers’ tale near every night. He only shut up after I threatened to bore a hole through his tongue with an awl.”
Arianna tensed her jaw to keep from smiling. But at the same time she felt a chill. So it had not been a dream, after all. Or it had not been her dream. She wanted to ask Raine how the song ended, if the lady of the lake ever won her knight’s love.
Instead, she daubed on the last of the lard in silence. Sitting back on her heels, she wiped her hands with straw. Raine eased the stallion’s head off his lap and stretched to his feet. His fingers closed around her arm to help her up, letting go of it immediately as soon as she was. She felt the loss of his touch as a hollowness in her chest, an ache.
She swallowed, cleared her throat. “There’s naught else I can do. The salve should numb his pain.”
He said nothing.
After a moment he lifted his hand and smoothed back the wisps of hair that had begun to curl around her forehead as it dried. His thumb brushed her cheekbone. “There’s a gentleness in you, a sweetness….”
Arianna’s throat felt tight, and her heart began to beat in unsteady lurches. She wanted him to hold her, she wanted it with a longing so intense it made her chest ache. But she could not forget that two days ago he had left her and ridden off to do battle with Kilydd and Ivor and if he was back already and alive, then it must mean that her cousins were dead and that he had killed them.
“What did you do to my cousins?”
He fixed her with ice-pale eyes. “Kilydd escaped. Ivor died in the fighting. I cut off his head and hanged his body by the feet from the ramparts, where it will dangle until the ravens pick clean his bones and serve notice to the rest of you Welsh that the Lord of Rhuddlan will suffer no rebellion—”
She whirled and ran for the door, but Raine overtook her in two strides. He snagged her arm, hauling her around, pinning her to the door of an empty stall.
“You are my wife, Arianna. That means you will be loyal to me, over all others. You are to give me your respect and your obedience and your worthless Welsh loyalty without question, no matter what the cost. And you are going to give me this”—he thrust his hand between her legs, cupping her sex—“when I ask for it and how I ask for it, and you’re going to quit pretending not to want to give it to me because we both know damn well you do.”
He went still. Her body shuddered, and her hips arched, pressing upward. His fingers curled ever so slightly, pushing soft silk into the tender folds of her mound.
She could feel her own pulse pounding in her neck. It seemed to match the steady drumming of the rain on the thatch. Away from the light, his face was shrouded in shadows, but his eyes burned. He hadn’t removed his hand.
She sucked in a deep breath and the movement caused her breasts to brush against his leather broigne. They tightened, swelled, and there was a thick heaviness between her legs, a burning ache, where he touched her still, still…. The breath came out again, slow and shaky. He still hadn’t removed his hand.
“You’re wet for me,” he said, his voice rough. “I can feel it soaking through your clothes. Wet and hot.”
God’s death. She wanted him. She wanted him with a wildness that frightened her. She lost herself in his eyes, eyes that turned dark and moved down to her mouth. With deliberate provocation, she wet her parted lips.
And with slow, erotic purpose he lowered his head, to take her lips in a deep and violent kiss.
He tasted hot, and smelled of wet leather and anger and lust. He grabbed her hair, pulling her head back so that he could deepen the kiss, so that he could impale her mouth with his tongue. She clung to him, digging her nails into the back of his neck. They sank together to the dirt-packed floor.
He pulled at the laces of her bliaut. Her nipples puckered in the sudden wash of cold air against her thin chainse. He lapped a nipple with his tongue, wetting the fine linen. He sucked and nibbled on it with his lips. Tearing open his braies, he took her hand and closed it around his aroused sex. She thrilled to the muffled sound of pleasure that came from deep in his throat.
“You do this to me, Arianna. Does it please you to know that you can do this to me?”
It was only fair, she thought. Only fair that
she had the power to make him want her, when he had such power over her. “Do it to me,” she whispered. His mouth closed over hers, flooding her with the taste of him. Heat and man and lust.
He yanked up her bliaut, running his palm up the inside of her thigh. His fingers traced the outer edge of the triangular nest of hair, down between the cheeks of her bottom, then up again, sliding deep within the soft folds of her sex, and she convulsed, her hips coming off the floor.
He tried to ruck her skirts up to her waist, but they were caught beneath her. He tore his mouth from hers, swearing. “Get undressed.”
“But what if somebody—”
He didn’t let her finish. He ripped her bliaut down the middle and then her chainse. She gasped, but not with shock.
“I want you naked too,” she demanded.
He pulled off his clothes, flinging them to all corners of the stable. He kept his eyes riveted onto her face as he knelt between her thighs, and lifting her legs, brought them up over his shoulders. He lowered his head and kissed her low on her belly.
She thought she must tell him to stop, that it was wicked, a perversion of the French sort, but instead her fingers became entangled in his hair and she was pressing his head down low and further.
Her muscles jumped and tensed beneath his mouth and then, oh God, he slid his tongue inside her. His tongue plunged and licked. He nibbled with his teeth and sucked the nub of her between his lips, and a fire began to build inside of her, so intense, so hot, she couldn’t decide if it was pain or pleasure. She only knew she didn’t think she could bear it.
He played her with his tongue, making her blood sing, and there wasn’t enough room inside of her for all that she felt. Heart and lungs pressed against her bones and flesh, pressed and pressed until she was sure she would explode.
“Raine!” she screamed, emptying her lungs in a guttural cry as the tremors she could no longer hold back burst over her, going on and on until she thought she was dying.
His name echoed in the stable rafters as he waited for the space of a heartbeat, his mouth pressed still between her legs. He reared up and drove into her. She cried out again because, though she was wet and hungry for him, he was huge and he had driven deep.
He leaned back so they could see where they connected, man to woman, man in woman. “You are mine, Arianna,” he said, as he pressed more deeply still within her, until she thought he must surely be touching her heart. “Mine …”
But you’re inside of me, Raine. And when you’re inside of me like this, you’re a part of me, you are mine.
His hand splayed her stomach, middle finger inching down and she arched upward on a gasp. He began to move within her, pulling out until only the tip of him remained, then plunging his length in again and again, harder and faster, thrusting, thrusting, thrusting while his finger stroked and stroked and stroked and the tension within her built until she couldn’t bear it anymore and she broke apart inside, broke all apart into thousands of little pieces, until she saw herself in little pieces, floating like stars in a black heaven, and she felt his seed spewing deep inside her.
He collapsed on top of her, his chest heaving, his skin slick with sweat. The rain pattered on the thatch above cheir heads and cool air blew through the cracks in the walls. A horse nickered softly. After a while, a long, long while, she could feel her wildly thumping heart begin to slow, to quiet.
He eased his weight off her chest, bracing himself on his forearms. His sex was still inside her.
“You shouted my name,” he said.
“I did not.”
“You bellowed, little wife. Like a fishmonger touting her wares. And you came, hot and wet against my mouth And then you came again when I was inside you. I felt you, gripping me.”
She could feel the heat flooding her face. “It was a accident.”
He grinned. “I know.”
“It won’t happen again.”
“It will,” he said.
He was growing hard inside of her again, already, moving inside of her again, already. And she wanted him again. Already. She squeezed her eyes shut, turning he head aside. But he cradled her cheeks between his hand and forced her around to face him.
“Look at me,” he said.
She couldn’t look at him. He would be able to see what she was feeling, all that she was feeling reflected in her eyes.
“Look at me, damn you.”
She opened her eyes. His own eyes were hot and glittering. “It’s not enough, Arianna,” he said. “You’ve give me your body, but it’s still not enough. I want more from you. I want more.” He buried his face in her neck, archin his back, pushing, plunging, filling her. “I want all of you….”
They didn’t hear the stable door creak open, or see slight figure enter. He smiled when he heard the sounds of sex, the sighs and moans and sucking kisses. And pause to watch the shadows that undulated and danced on the wall—a man’s arched back, shapely legs wrapped around pumping hips.
When he left, he was whistling softly to himself. Outside the rain had stopped. The moon broke through the scudding clouds. For a moment silvery light bathed the deserted bailey, glinting off long, coppery curls. Black eyes glowed, moonstruck, and old. So very, very old.
15
It was the sort of day the poets spoke about, a day meant for love.
The rising sun flooded the sky with a blaze of gold. Thrushes, nesting in the sycamores by the river, burst into song. A pair of milk cows, grazing on the grassy banks, added their bells to the chorus, tinkling in merry harmony.
Beggars and pilgrims had gathered for alms outside the gatehouse as they did every morning. But on this day, the lady of the castle was herself administering to the poor. The almoner, with his iron scuttle full of pennies, stood to one side of her. On the other was a servant bearing a flat basket tray piled high with loaves of bread. It wasn’t day-old bread, as was given out at most castles, but baked fresh just that morning. Its warm, yeasty aroma mingled with the scent of heliotropes and violets floating over the wall from the castle gardens.
The pilgrims, blessed by God, came first. They had all taken a vow not to bathe or cut their hair while on their travels. In their robes of shaggy wool and scraggly felt hats they reeked of leek soup and human sweat. Arianna dispensed the alms holding her breath.
A man with a withered arm shoved the pilgrims aside, followed by an old crone with a goiter, round and purple like a plum, protruding from her neck. A skinny girl in a tattered tunic and bare legs approached next, leading an old blind woman. Arianna folded the woman’s knobbed and crooked fingers around a breadloaf and pressed coins into the thin outstretched hand of the child.
The girl looked up at Arianna with peat-brown eyes sunk into the fleshless bones of her face. “May sweet Mary’s grace be upon you, my lady.”
“Go with God, child,” Arianna said, but her attention was focused across the river, on the hills of Rhos, where a haze hovered like a pall over the balded slopes. The hills of Rhos, where for three days Raine had been hunting her cousin.
She thought of that night in the stable, of the violence of their passion and the feelings he had unleashed inside of her. But she could not change what she was, whom she loved. Kilydd had fostered with her family when they were children; he was as much of a brother to her as Rhodri. She could not deny her family and her land, any more than she could deny herself. Her flesh, her blood were Cymry, and so was her heart.
Within the bailey the chapel bell rang, calling the faithful to midmorning mass. As the peels floated away on the heavy summer air, Arianna heard the warning rattle of a leper’s bone clappers. At its dreaded sound the few pilgrims and beggars who were left quickly shuffled off.
The leper, abandoned by God, walked up the road from town. She wore the long gray robe and scarlet hood to mark her as one afflicted by the dread disease. A thin veil swathed her from head to knees so that none might have to look upon her ravaged face. The almoner and the servant were already backing toward the gate
, for the leper was almost upon them now, her bone-rattle clacking. Arianna approached the poor woman alone.
“May your soul repose with God,” she said, pressing a handful of pennies into the leper’s bandaged hands just as a group of horsemen burst out of the forest, galloping across the tilting fields. The leper, hampered by her trailing robe and veil, took off in a stumbling gait. Arianna stood frozen a moment. Then she picked up her skirts and ran to intercept the band of men.
Raine vaulted from the saddle before the charger had come to a complete stop. “What in God’s wounds are you doing?”
“Giving alms to the … poor.” Her voice trailed away as her gaze riveted on the man hog-tied to a cob, his arms chained behind his back. Raine was shouting at her, saying, “Christ Jesus save us. That woman was a leper!” But she barely heard him, for her thoughts were filled with the horror that her cousin Kilydd had been captured and that now he would die. Her husband would kill him.
Kilydd cocked his head up, shaking sweat-damp hair out of his face. Dirt caked the seams of his brow and cheeks, but his mouth bore a surly smile. One eye was swollen shut, but the other met her gaze, golden like summer honey, and she saw within it a questioning look, and a plea that she would save him.
She had taken an unconscious step toward the prisoner, when her path was blocked by a chest covered in black chain mail. Slowly, she lifted her head.
She had known his eyes to turn dark like that, dark like smoke and smoldering with hunger and passion. But what burned in his eyes this time was rage—hard and hot, and unforgiving.
She flinched at a sudden movement of his hand. But he was only pulling something out from beneath his broigne. He dangled it before her face and it caught the sunlight, blazing like a torch. His voice whipped her like a lash. “Is this familiar to you, sweet wife?”
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