Keeper of the Dream

by Penelope Williamson

  She could not prevent her hand from shaking as she reached up to take the circlet of twisting snakes. Her fingers brushed his … and the sky above them exploded into flames. Fires crackled, spewing oily smoke. War cries and screams of death. And then he was there, her beloved, standing tall and strong before her, and he touched the torque around her neck and he kissed her mouth and spoke to her of forever. But she knew, because she had seen, that this kiss would be their last. Tears blurred her eyes, washing the world in a sea of blood, and above her the sky burned and burned.

  In the next instant it was all gone, and forgotten by her next breath. The metal collar was warm in her hand, but she thought it was from having been carried against her husband’s body.

  “He was going to use it to buy an army to take Rhuddlan with,” Raine said, his eyes boring into her, his voice cold, so very, very cold. “An army recruited from the stews of Ireland. Did you know that, Arianna? But of course you knew it, that is why you gave it to him.”

  Her gaze flashed to Kilydd, but he had his head bowed, studying the ground. She had a vivid memory of him running down the stairs into the yard of the drapery, tucking a leather bag of jangling coins into his belt. She knew she could never explain how he came by the torque, not without implicating Christina in her lover’s treachery.

  But nor could she bear to have Raine think she’d so deceived him. She laid a hand on his mailed arm. “I did not give it to him, my lord. As God is my witness, I did not.”

  Every muscle in his body grew taut, hardening against her. He removed her hand as if her touch disgusted him. “Don’t lie to me, Arianna,” he said, and for a moment she thought pain flared in his eyes, before they turned hard again. “At least don’t lie to me.”

  She could only shake her head, as a sadness closed her throat, a regret for something gone that had never been. He did not believe her, would never believe her, nor could she blame him that this was so.

  When he turned away, as if he could no longer bear the sight of her, she cried his name.

  A shudder rippled across his back. But he didn’t look at her again.

  “What will you do to him?”

  He didn’t answer her. He sat in a faldstool before the brazier and followed her every movement with narrowed, hooded eyes.

  An immense sorrow swelled in Arianna’s throat. She went around the bedchamber lighting more candles, trying to banish the sorrow with a blaze of light. The pungent smoke from the burning tallow made her sneeze, but her husband did not call on God to bless her.

  His face was all sharp bones, impenetrable as a stone cliff. Even the flickering shadows cast by the candles gave no illusion of softness. His long fingers toyed with the filigreed stem of a wine chalice as he watched her, but he had yet to drink.

  She tried to will him to raise the cup to his lips, but at the same time she knew that if he did drink she was doomed. She had laced his wine with henbane, just as she had drugged the ale that would be given to the men who guarded the keep. Later, deep in the night, when all were asleep, she would descend into the cellars and free her cousin. Raine would never forgive her for it.

  But she could not watch Kilydd die. He was the son of her mother’s brother, her blood, and she could not watch him die.

  She drained her own cup, hoping it would inspire Raine to thirst. But all she succeeded in doing was making herself dizzy.

  Suddenly she could bear the silence no longer. She knelt at his feet, her hands on his thighs. She felt a shudder pass through him before his muscles tensed. She looked up into his hard, implacable face.

  “Can we not at least talk about it, my lord?”

  The vertical lines that framed his mouth deepened. “What would you have me say, Arianna?”

  “That you believe I had no part in this. That you don’t hate me.”

  His lips curled slightly and he looked away from her.

  She leaned forward, her breasts pressing into his knees. “Spare him, my lord, I beg of you. Imprison him if you must, or exile him. But spare his life. If not for my sake, then for us, for our marriage. For how can we ever grow to love one another if—”

  She cut herself off, appalled at the words that had slipped from her mouth. He would laugh at her now, or sneer. She would deserve it for being such a fool.

  But he did not laugh or sneer. His eyes, pale and blank as a pool on a still and moonlit night, impaled her so that she could not move. He stood abruptly, tangling his fingers in her hair and hauling her up with him.

  He jerked her hard against his chest. Their faces were now so close she could see herself reflected in his eyes.

  He stroked her cheekbone with his thumb, catching a tear that had somehow escaped without her knowing it. “Don’t expect love from me, Arianna.”

  Her chest burned with humiliation, and she felt as if she were choking. She tried to pull away from him, but he tightened his grip.

  She pushed against him, desperate now for she was about to cry, and she wouldn’t be able to bear the shame of that. “Let me go.”

  “No,” he said. “I will never let you go.” He slammed his mouth down over hers in a brutal and punishing kiss.

  She resisted him for a moment, pressing against his chest with her clenched fists. But she wanted this, oh how she wanted this. Her lips opened and her tongue met his. There was a desperation to their kiss. As if they both knew that to hunger like this, without pride, was wrong, would only bring them pain.

  The door opened behind them and he stiffened, thrusting her away so violently that she stumbled and had to grasp the arm of the faldstool. Their eyes clashed and held, and his burned her with his fury. The taste of him was still hot and wet on her mouth.

  Sir Odo filled the doorway. “My lord, I would speak with you,” he said, careful to keep his face blank and his shaggy-browed eyes focused on the distant wall. “It’s most urgent.”

  But Raine stood unmoving, staring at her. His lips parted slightly on an expulsion of breath. She thought of how he had tried to punish her with that mouth, and of how she had taken it. At last he turned to Sir Odo, jerking his head in the direction of the door.

  Sir Odo followed Raine out into the stairwell. But with the big knight’s bull-throated voice, Arianna was able to hear it all. The Welsh crofters belonging to one of Raine’s vassals, a Norman who ruled over the lands of the valley to the south, had been inspired by the recent rebellions, taking up cudgels and sickles and attacking their master while he was hunting. The knight was sorely wounded and likely to die, and the Welsh were now terrorizing the countryside.

  Then Raine said something she couldn’t hear. She wondered if he was ordering Kilydd’s death.

  The two men reentered the chamber. She saw no trace on her husband’s face of the sexual fire that had raged between them only moments before. “You will remain here and guard my lady wife,” he said to the big knight, though he looked at her. “Don’t let her set one dainty slipper outside this chamber.”

  Sir Odo coughed and studied the floor. “Aye, m’lord.”

  “And as for you, sweet wife … Have you ever seen what armed knights can do to a group of peasants?”

  A low, half-worded cry escaped her. “Raine, I didn’t—”

  He flung his arm in the direction of a Virgin statuette that was tucked within a corner niche. “I suggest you spend the time praying to Our Lady, Arianna. Pray to her for the souls of those whose deaths you and your precious cousin will have caused on this night.” With that he strode from the room, calling for his squire.

  Arianna went to the window. She watched him mount a gray destrier that was not quite as spirited and strong as his black, and ride through the gate with a dozen of his knights. Taliesin followed behind, carrying Raine’s shield and lance. Moonlight reflected off the squire’s golden helmet, turning his head into a blazing torch. She watched the bobbing torch as it crossed the drawbridge and tilting fields, watched it become smaller and dimmer until it was extinguished altogether by the blackness of the fore
st.

  She stayed at the window long after there was nothing left to see but the yellow horn of the moon and a star-filled sky. When she at last turned around she was surprised for a moment to discover Sir Odo hovering in the middle of the chamber, shifting his weight from foot to foot like a dancing bear.

  “Forgive me for intruding on your privacy, my lady,” he said, flushing so that his pitted face looked like a pulped berry. “But I, uh … milord said I was to—”

  “ ’Tis not your fault.” Arianna patted his shoulder, giving him a smile dazzling enough to make him blink. “I should not trust me either, if I were Lord Raine. Come, Sir Odo. I challenge you to a game of tables.” She took the big knight’s arm and ushered him over to the faldstool, then dragged up an inlaid ivory-and-mahogany chess board. “It will be a long night and I doubt either one of us shall sleep.”

  Sir Odo hesitated only a moment before sinking with a sigh into the chair. His gaze fell on the carafe of wine and he wet his thick lips.

  “Mayhap you are thirsty, sir,” Arianna said, and smiling again, she picked up the chalice from off the floor where Raine had left it and pressed it into the knight’s hand. “It is good wine, this. It comes from your King Henry’s Aquitaine, or so I’m told.”

  “You took the devil’s own time, Arianna. Half the night is gone.”

  Arianna bit down on a curse as she scraped her knuckles on the rusted shackles, trying to force the stiff key to turn in its hole. “A little more gratitude would not be amiss, cousin.”

  “Just quit nattering and get the damn thing off me.”

  The lock tumbled open with a groan and the chains clattered onto the cellar floor. Kilydd kicked them aside and stood, stretching the kinks out of his muscles. Arianna was already at the door, waiting. “Hurry,” she whispered.

  The slumbering guards slouched against the wall, their open-mouthed snores echoing in the stairwell. Kilydd paused to poke one between the ribs with his toe. “Look at him, cursed Norman whoreson—”

  “God’s death, Kilydd, will you hurry?”

  She dashed up the narrow mural stairs. Kilydd bumped into her when she stopped abruptly to peer around the corner at the entrance to the hall. Night sounds came through the screen’s passage—drunken snores and the shuffle of restless sleepers, the click and rustle of mice foraging in the rushes and the whump-whump of a dog’s hind leg pounding the floor as he scratched his fleas.

  Sucking in a deep breath, she scurried across the opening, motioning behind for Kilydd to follow. They were almost through the shell keep when one of the guards, who had stepped outside the gatehouse to relieve himself against the wall, spotted them.

  Kilydd grabbed her, thrusting her into the shadows and clamping his mouth down over hers. One of his hands groped for her breast while the other rucked up her tunic, baring her thigh to the guard’s leer.

  She heard the man’s lewd laugh through the blood that rushed in her ears, for she hadn’t had time to snatch a breath. Her head whirled and lights flashed before her eyes. She pushed against Kilydd’s chest, but he only kissed her harder, mashing her lips with his teeth.

  It was the oddest thing, for when she was thirteen, the same year she had rubbed gillyflower juice on her breasts to make them grow, she had promised the Virgin a wax statue in her image if Kilydd would only be seized with a wild desire to kiss her. The desire had never seized him, and her infatuation with her cousin had eventually been transferred to the beekeeper’s son. Now, here, six years later, he was finally kissing her and all she felt was a desperate need to breathe.

  The guard reentered the gatehouse and at last Kilydd released her. Arianna drew in a wheezing breath.

  She tried to rub some feeling back into her lips. “Did you have to maul my mouth as if you were mashing grapes?”

  “Hellfire, Arianna, you’ve been wanting me to do that to you for years. Don’t tell me now you didn’t like it.”

  “You kiss like a boy, all soft and mushy.”

  Kilydd snarled and shoved her in front of him. He followed in fuming silence down the long wooden stairs of the keep, across the drawbridge and into the bailey.

  They paused within the black shadow cast by the hulking tower at their backs. The night was so clear that the stars looked close enough to gather in baskets, and the moon, though only a quarter full, bathed the yard with such light it seemed that hour before dawn when the sun was but a promise away.

  “I couldn’t drug the entire castle, and the gatehouse is crawling with guards. But you can slip out through the postern door,” Arianna said, and had started forward when Kilydd seized her arm, drawing her up short.

  “Give me your knife.”

  “I haven’t got one.”

  His hand snaked out, reaching under her tunic and whipping her dagger from its sheath before she could draw breath to protest. His teeth flashed white in a grin. “You forget, we had the same teachers, cousin. Now, where’s that soulless bastard you call husband? I’ve a score to settle with him.” “He’s not here.”

  He stroked Arianna’s cheek with the flat of the blade. “You wouldn’t be lying to me, would you, Arianna geneth? You wouldn’t, perchance, be trying to save your husband’s handsome neck? Do you like his kisses, eh? Mayhap you’ve grown fond of his perverted French ways.”

  Arianna’s fingers wrapped around his wrist, pulling the knife away from her face. “He isn’t here, I tell you.” She gave him a little shove. “The postern door is over yon, between the farrier and the mews. Get you gone before someone else wakes up needing to piss and stumbles upon us standing here, flapping our jaws as if we’ve nothing better to do.”

  He pinched her chin between his fingers, giving it a rough shake. “Have you pease porridge for wits, woman? I can’t walk all the way back to Gwynedd. I’ll need a horse. I’ll keep an eye out whilst you fetch one from the stables.”

  “God’s death,” she hissed at him, jerking her chin from his grasp. “I’m beginning to wish I had left you to hang.”

  Arianna did as he bade, anxious now only to be rid of him. She found the palfrey she’d been using during the past month—a chestnut gelding with a soft mouth and just enough fire in his disposition to make him a challenging ride. The horse felt enough like her own that it didn’t seem so much of a thievery to be giving it to Kilydd. She had the horse saddled and bridled in no time. She nuzzled its neck with her cheek as she gathered up the reins.

  “I just knew you’d be up to something like this.”

  Arianna whirled, her hand to her throat, where her thudding heart now resided. When she saw who it was, her heart pounded even harder. “What in God’s mercy are you doing frightening me like that?”

  Taliesin stood in her path. His long, lanky legs were spread in a stubborn stance, his full mouth turned down sulkily at the corners—looking no different than one of her brothers in a pout. But there was something strange about him. The stable was shadowed in the bit of muted moonlight that managed to filter through the cracks, but his body seemed outlined in a faint luminescence, as if a lamp burned brightly at his back. He wore a simple squire’s tunic over leather leggings, but the golden helmet on his head shone as brightly as the noon sun. For a moment Arianna thought the helmet pulsed and shimmered. But she blinked and the illusion disappeared.

  A low growl, like thunder, rumbled in the distance. Arianna heard the sound but her mind instantly rejected it, for the sky had been filled with stars a moment ago; there hadn’t even been the thinnest wisp of a mist, let alone a cloud.

  “You mustn’t run away, my lady,” Taliesin said.

  Arianna opened her mouth to tell the boy she had no intention of running away, then slammed it shut. How else would she explain the need for a horse in the middle of the night? Her hands clenched around the leather reins. She hoped Kilydd would have the sense to stay out of sight until she had dealt with the squire. And damn Taliesin, anyway. Surely she had seen him ride out the castle gate at Raine’s side, yet here he was. It was just like the wretch
ed boy to pop up like a weasel when he was least wanted. If only she could get by him and out the stables with the horse, perhaps Kilydd could manage his own escape after that.

  So she now thought to try the same trick on the squire that she’d plied so often and to such good effect on her brothers whenever they’d tried to deny her something she wanted.

  She made her lips go all trembly and her eyes all soft and imploring. “Oh, Taliesin, I do truly fear for my life. Earlier this night Lord Raine beat me.” When the squire appeared unmoved, she embellished on her lie. “Beat me most cruelly so that I’m covered all over in bloody welts and near faint with pain. He thinks me a traitor along with my cousin and there was naught I could say to convince him otherwise.”

  All the while she spoke, Arianna nudged the horse forward. Thunder rumbled again, closer this time, and the wind had kicked up. It rattled the barn door that the squire had failed to latch behind him, and whistled around the eaves.

  Taliesin’s teeth had sunk into his lip and his eyes narrowed with uncertainty. Arianna had started to think her ruse was succeeding when his chin jutted stubbornly. “Lord Raine wouldn’t have beaten you if you hadn’t provoked him. He is not by nature a violent man.”

  “Not a violent man!” Arianna nearly shouted, only stopping herself in time, so the words came out in a strangled growl. They were drowned out anyway by the howl the wind was making outside. Lightning flared so brightly it penetrated through the cracks in the warped wooden walls. A loud crack of thunder followed, ripping through the air, and the palfrey shied.

  Taliesin stepped in front of her. “You’ll not be leaving the castle.”

  A gust slammed against the stables and the unlatched door flew open, banging against the wall. The palfrey reared and Arianna clung to the reins as she gaped open-mouthed at the fury of the elements outside. Lightning flashed again and she saw a milking stool go tumbling across the yard. The sky was as black as the pit of hell. The clouds suddenly opened and water poured down on the ground of the bailey turning it into an instant sea of mud.