She paused on leaving the chamber and met the jeweled eyes of the saint’s statue that guarded the door. He was Dafydd, patron saint of Wales, and the expression on his wooden face was one of stern disapproval. “I don’t care,” she told the saint. “I want him and I shall do anything, bear any punishment, if only he will take me back.”
Raine walked down the length of the hall, his hand on his sword hilt. Members of Owain’s teulu lounged around a central hearth, which crackled and hissed in the silence. Their swords and spears glinted in the firelight, and they watched, with narrowed eyes, as Raine approached their prince.
A bard took up his crwth and began to play, his mournful lament floating up into the smoky rafters:
Our hall is dark tonight,
No fire, no bed.
I’ll weep awhile and then be silent….
His voice, Raine thought, was not near as fine as Taliesin’s.
The hall was aisled like a church, with a lofty ceiling supported by double rows of wooden posts. The ancient carvings on the pillars and the paintings on the walls were like images from a nightmare: disembodied heads, writhing snakes, and monsters with forked tongues and curled claws. He walked by a mounted horned head that looked half-stag, half-human, and Raine could have sworn the beast’s yellow eyes followed him, its red lips pulling back into a snarl.
Prince Owain sat on a raised dais, on a massive faldstool beneath a purple canopy. In his late fifties, the prince’s face was shaped like a rache hound’s, long and thin-boned and scored by lines. Gray streaked his flowing brown hair and drooping mustaches—legacies of battles fought, sacrifices made to keep his land free from the Norman conquerors. He watched Raine from beneath heavy lids that concealed his thoughts. There was a Welsh word for the elusive color of his eyes—glas, meaning neither green nor silver nor blue, but a little of all three. The color of the sea reflecting a cloud-whipped sky.
Raine’s sharp voice snapped the prince’s guard to attention, their hands flying to their swords. “Where is my wife?”
Owain said nothing, but he signaled to a servant to bring forth the mead horn. His men relaxed then, for the hirlas was a symbol of Welsh hospitality, brought out only for family and friends, not foes.
The servant placed the ancient blue buffalo drinking horn into the prince’s hands, and he in turn passed it to Raine. The vessel was intricately carved and ornamented with silver that flashed in the rushlights.
Raine was about to drink when his gaze was caught by a movement in the smoky haze that hung over the clerestory that ran along the upper part of the hall. He saw a flash of blue silk disappear behind a pillar and a slender shadow cast on the wall behind.
“It is my daughter’s intention and her wish to honor the vows of her marriage,” the prince said. “Else you would not be here, in this hall, drinking from my hirlas, Norman.” His mustaches lifted in a slightly disdainful smile. “Regardless of your threats.”
“She is my wife, and she will remain my wife.” Raine’s lips curled in an answering sneer, though he pitched his voice for the listening ears above. “Regardless of her intentions or her wishes.”
He tilted the hirlas and poured a good draught down his throat. The spiced, fermented honey burned as it flowed into his gut. Again his gaze flickered up to the patch of blue in the clerestory.
You are mine, Arianna. Mine.
Arianna carefully closed the door behind her. She pressed her forehead onto the smooth wood, her heart pounding so hard it hurt to breathe.
She is my wife, he had said. And she will remain my wife.
When, what seemed like a long time later, she heard the clink of spurs on the stairs, she backed away. And continued backing up until her legs bumped against the carved and ivory-studded bedstead.
The door flung open, bouncing off the wall, and the wooden saint rocked on his wooden feet. “Goddess save me,” she gasped, drawing unconsciously on Taliesin’s favorite incantation.
He filled the doorway. She searched his face for some sign of the extent of his anger, but Saint Dafydd bore more expression on his wooden countenance than Raine did on his.
He ducked his head, stepping into the room, shutting the door behind him with the heel of his boot. He took a step toward her. To Arianna’s utter humiliation her stomach rumbled loudly with fear, sounding worse than a pair of rooting sows.
His gaze moved over her in an insolent manner that caused Arianna’s chin to jerk into the air. She spoke to him in a fierce, proud voice. “I will not plead for forgiveness, my lord, for I would do it again. Aye, and again and again, if I must. You are my husband before God, but before God I could not watch you hang my cousin.”
A draft caused the rushlights to flare, throwing light on his face and casting black shadows beneath the sharp bones of his cheeks. He looked as cruel as a painting of the devil. He took another step and she clenched her hands behind her back, her nails digging into her palms.
“Because of you,” he said, and his voice was colder than midnight in the dead of winter. “Because of you, I had to leave my lands at a time when they are most vulnerable to attack. Because of you, one man is dead, and four are wounded fighting through this godforsaken country to get you back. Does this please you, Arianna? Do you think yourself worth this trouble?”
“Taliesin is dead, then? Oh, Raine, I am so sorry—”
“Sorry? Do you think sorry is fair exchange for a brave man’s life?”
Arianna pressed her lips together and shook her head.
He spun around and took a step away from her, as if he could bear to look at her no longer. He stopped, his back moving with his jerking breaths as he fought for control.
“Taliesin isn’t dead.” He pivoted to face her again, and she almost winced at the blaze of fury from his eyes. “Though you ran away and left him there to bleed his life onto a stable floor.”
“I did not run away! I drugged your guard and helped Kilydd to escape, this is true. But I would have stayed to face your punishment. I am no coward, my lord. Whatever else you think of me, you must know that. I would never willingly have left that boy to die.”
He stared at her down the length of the room, his expression remote but for the bitter slant of his mouth. She wanted to scream at him to say something, to do something. But when he finally did speak, her heart stopped, and then began to beat again in unsteady lurches.
“Come here,” he said.
The rushes crackled beneath her feet as she walked down the length of the room. She stopped when she was right before him and made herself lift her head and look him full in the face.
The room fell so quiet that she heard a pile of embers collapse in the brazier and the scratch of mice behind the walls. There was a fine sheen of sweat on his face, and a feral smell to him—of horses and hot metal and anger. There was no feeling in those hard gray eyes. None at all.
He reached between them and grasped his sword hilt. It made a hissing sound, like shears cutting through silk, as he whipped it out the scabbard. “Kneel.”
For a moment she had the wild thought that he was going to execute her with his sword. That he would cut off her head and put it on a spike where it would rot and the crows would pluck out her eyes.
And the words poured out of her before she could stop them, though immediately afterward she felt immensely foolish. “You can’t kill me in my father’s own house!”
His eyes widened a bit and a strange expression flitted across his face. “Kneel,” he repeated in a strained voice.
Arianna didn’t know whether she knelt willingly or her legs simply collapsed beneath her.
“Put out your hands.”
It wasn’t her head he was going to chop off, it was her hands. She would be an outcast then, doomed to go from castle to castle, begging for food with nothing but gory stubs for appendages. She’d heard how the heathen Saracens mutilated their wives for misbehavior. He must have seen it done in his travels and marked it as a most efficient way to discipline a recalcitran
t wife.
She had to fight a wild impulse to laugh. “If you would but think a moment, my lord husband. I cannot fulfill my wifely duties without hands,” she said. “What will you lop off when next I anger you? Mayhap my nose will be the next to go, or my feet …”
He almost smiled that time, she was sure of it. She knew then that whatever troubles they would face in their turbulent marriage, she trusted him. Against all logic, and because of a smile that never quite happened, she trusted the Black Dragon not to hurt her.
“Arianna, put out your hands.”
Arianna held out her hands, and she was pleased to see they only shook a little.
Yet though a moment before, she had felt like laughing, now she almost wept from some feeling she couldn’t name when his callused palms enveloped hers. Then he was wrapping her fingers around the hard, cold metal of his sword hilt. His deep voice drummed through her. “You will swear homage to me, Arianna.”
It took a moment for her to understand. And a moment longer for the full impact of his words to sink in. Homage to me … Swear homage to me …
His hands tightened their grip, pressing her flesh into the hard metal. “Swear your homage to me, Arianna. Swear this and as your liege lord I will protect you, care for you, keep you safe from hunger and cold and harm, I will give you my loyalty and my trust, and you will give me yours. You will serve me and give me counsel and fight with me against the world if you must. You will stand by my side, Arianna. By my side.”
If she swore her fealty, then she would be a true wife to him. She would share his bed and give birth to his babies. She would be the chatelaine of his castles, spend her life at his side—and at the end of it she would have still her honor and her pride. But she would have to surrender so much in return. She would have to place in the hands of this man, this Norman, her loyalty and her trust.
But there was no shame in the act of homage. The squire gave it to his knight, the knight to his lord, the lord to his king. It was a system of mutual respect and loyalty that had bound men for centuries. But no women had ever been asked to swear fealty, for no woman was thought to have honor or pride or any value beyond the use of her womb and the lands she could bring as her dower price. No man had ever taken his wife as his vassal, for she would be not a chattel in his eyes then, but his equal in honor. And no man surely would want to look at his woman in such a way.
No man except this one.
“Swear it, Arianna, say the words.”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
He started to pull away.
“Wait, my lord!” She recaptured his hands, looking up into his face with blurring eyes. “Wait. I will do it…. I want to do it.”
Tears, hot and salty, rolled down her cheeks and into her mouth, and she didn’t care. She looked down at their hands clasped together around the sword hilt—hers small and white, his larger and brown. Flesh pressing against flesh, yet it was more. It seemed as if her blood flowed into him and his into her. She could feel his heart beat within her own breast.
She spoke the simple oath of homage, changing only one word.
“I, Arianna of Gwynedd, enter into your homage and become your … woman. And I swear by God and all his saints to keep faith and loyalty to you against all others.”
He pulled her to her feet, and she lifted her face to receive the ritual kiss of peace. But he tossed the sword aside, and snagging his fist in her hair, he yanked her up on her toes to meet his descending mouth. His lips slanted roughly back and forth across hers, pressing hard, forcing her mouth open. He tasted of warm mead, and of himself, and Arianna thought she could kiss him forever.
He bent, and catching her behind the knees and back, he swung her off her feet. He carried her over and fell with her across the bed.
They rolled over and over, back and forth across the broad width of it, their mouths locked together in a kiss. He ended up on top, straddling her. He raised his head and looked down on her with eyes that were no longer cold and remote, but bright and hot with hunger.
“You are mine,” he said. “My vassal.”
“Aye, my lord. I am your vassal.”
He started to lower his head to kiss her again, then stopped, casting a glance back over his shoulder. He rolled off her and strode across the room.
“Raine?”
“I don’t want a pious audience for what I’m about to do,” he said, turning Saint Dafydd around to face the wall.
Laughing, she welcomed him back within the circle of her arms. “Does this mean you are about to perform a French perversion on me?”
“Mayhap,” he answered with the smile, that wonderful smile, that never failed to pull at her heart. “And mayhap, if you are an obedient and most deserving vassal, I will teach you how to perform a French perversion on me.”
* * *
The prince of Gwynedd pressed a hirlas brimming with mead into Raine’s hands. The knight’s long brown fingers wrapped around the ancient drinking horn and he smiled at his father-in-law. There was a challenge in that smile, though no word passed between the two men. The hall quieted as they stared at one another, then Raine tilted back his head and drank of the fiery, fermented brew.
Arianna watched the muscles of his strong throat move as he swallowed. He lowered his head, wiped his mouth with the back of wrist, and met his wife’s eyes down the length of the hall. His eyes glinted at her, silver in the smoky torchlight, hot and intimate as a kiss.
Arianna flushed and looked away.
She sat with her mother in front of the central hearth, skeining wool. Arianna held two short sticks between her outstretched hands. Her mother twisted and wound the yarn around the sticks, her small hands quick and deft and looking in the firelight like the fluttering white wings of doves.
Skeining wool was not a task Arianna particularly enjoyed, yet it brought back sweet memories to her, of winter afternoons spent working at household tasks, while her brothers fenced and wrestled and practiced their archery. She was always torn between wanting to join her brothers in their boisterous games and spending that precious, private time with her mother. In such a large and politically important family, one rarely got Cristyn of Gwynedd alone.
Even with a tapestried screen in front of the blaze, the roaring log fire was hot. Smoke drifted up to hang in floating clouds among the painted and gilded rafters. The bardd teulu wandered the hall, singing about a red dragon who lived in a cave on the great mountain, Yr Wyddfa Fawr.
“Do you remember,” Cristyn said, as the last haunting notes of the bard’s crwth wafted upward to mingle with the smoke. “Do you remember how when you were little, you would awake screaming in the middle of the night convinced that there was a little girl-eating dragon skulking beneath your bed?”
Arianna laughed and nodded. Oh, aye, she remembered. She remembered, too, the soft comfort of her mother’s arms holding her in the dark, remembered pressing her face into her mother’s neck and smelling roses. She remembered the brush of her mother’s sun-bright hair, the feel of cool lips on her cheek.
“You would always give me peony seed in hot wine to put me to sleep again.”
“But before that I would take your hand and together we would look under the bed. We never found a dragon.”
Raine’s husky voice floated down the hall. Arianna looked at him, where he sat beside her father on the dais. The wariness between the two men had eased. They were deep in conversation. The flaring tapers cast their shadows onto the wall behind them, creating a monster—a two-headed dragon.
“I think I know what you’re trying to tell me,” Arianna said.
Cristyn’s laugh tinkled brightly, like silver chimes. “I’m pleased that you do, since I’m not sure myself what it was that I was trying to say.”
“You’re saying there is no such thing as a dragon, except in my mind.”
Raine turned his head and again his gaze met hers Arianna felt a warmth in her belly, a tingle, as if she were the one drinking the mead
. Again she looked away.
She felt her mother’s eyes upon her and glanced up There was a faint crease between Cristyn’s pale brows; it was a look she wore when she was worried. In that one moment, Arianna felt a kinship with the older woman that went beyond blood. A kinship that went back to the first woman that walked the earth … and loved a man.
There had never been any doubt in Arianna’s mind of the fierce love her parents bore for one another. Cristyn had never been too busy to spare a word or caress for any of her children and stepchildren, but they had all known that Owain was the sun of her world. When he was home she blossomed like a bright gold sunflower; when he was gone she faded and drooped.
Cristyn removed the sticks and passed one end of the skein of wool yarn through the loop at the other. Arianna looked down at her mother’s bent head. “When you first married Papa—did you love him?”
Cristyn glanced up. There was a softness to her face now, as if Arianna saw her through a veil of mist. “Love him?” Cristyn said. “Oh, no. Not at all, for I scarcely knew him and he frightened me. He seemed so distant, so severe. Yet I wanted him to bed me, almost from the first moment he touched me.” She stared into the distance, a faint smile on her lips. “It was like an oil fire—hot, raging, melting. Impossible to put out by any ordinary means.”
Arianna was disconcerted by this revelation, and a little shocked. She turned aside, unable suddenly to meet her mother’s eyes.
Her gaze was drawn up to the dais. Her father sprawled in his high seat, one hand draped over the chair’s carved back, the other nursing the mead horn. Raine laughed at something her father said. His hands flashed with surprising grace, dancing through the air as if he waved an imaginary sword. No doubt he was reliving one of his many tournaments.
She could still feel a warm, wet tenderness between her thighs, the legacy of his lovemaking. She tried to picture her parents doing the things that she and Raine had done that afternoon, but her mind shied away from the thought. Before, she had always looked at Owain and Cristyn of Gwynedd from the perspective of being their daughter, and they were like gods to her, all wise and invincible. Now she suddenly saw them as human, beset with human frailties, driven by human passions.
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