Lord God, she did so want to take him in her arms and tell him how her life and heart were now linked with his, as tight and intricately as the rings of steel on his coat of mail. Yet something stopped her. Perhaps it was because she’d never heard the words from him. Oh, she knew he loved her, she had felt it in his touch, heard it in his voice the night of Nesta’s birth, when he had kissed her and called her his little wife. Perhaps the words themselves weren’t necessary.
But she wanted them just the same.
“Did you see what Hugh and Sybil gave her?” Raine said, holding up a jewel-encrusted silver christening cup.
“It is beautiful,” Arianna said, though in truth she thought it a bit gaudy.
It was evening now, and they were alone together. It seemed odd, after all those days and nights without him, to have him suddenly here. She felt awkward around him, unsure of what to say, sensitive to his every word and expression. They had been too long apart, and now they were strangers again.
He wandered over to the cradle and bent to study his daughter, who was fussing. He pushed the rocker with his toe and sang in a smoky voice:
“Dinogad’s speckled petticoat
Was made of skin of speckled stoat
Whip, whip, whip along …”
He looked up and caught Arianna watching him. The song died on his lips and Arianna would have sworn that he blushed. “Dame Beatrix says that rocking a babe will make the fumes from the humors in her body mount to her brain and thus help her to sleep,” he said gruffly.
Arianna hid a smile. Raine was taking fatherhood so seriously. One would think he was the first of his species to procreate.
“Will you leave off gloating over your daughter for a moment, and come kiss her mother?”
He sat down on the bed beside her and gathered her into his arms.
His mouth was hot and moist, and it moved easily beneath hers, letting her lead the way. But not for long, for soon she felt his tongue slide into her mouth. She let him end the kiss when he was ready, though she almost passed out from lack of breath.
“You should rest now,” he said.
He started to pull away, but she held him to her. She had her face buried in the crook of his neck, her fingers threading through his hair. “Lie next to me, husband. I want to know you lie beside me whilst I sleep.”
He said nothing, but she felt him tremble as he held her, and she thought she heard him sigh.
She wormed her hand beneath his tunic and chainse. She pressed her palm against his bare flesh, felt his stomach muscles spasm. She inched her fingers lower, beneath the belt that held up his braies, her nails scraping along the edge of his pubic hair. His sex stretched and thickened, pushing against the back of her hand.
His breath hitched, and the hand that had been stroking her hair clenched, pulling at her scalp. He started to shift his hips away from her, then didn’t.
“Arianna, we can’t … Ah, Jesus. If you don’t stop I’m going to spill my seed all over your hand. I’ve been too long a time without you.”
“My brother Cynan says a hand is better than a whore because it can’t give you the pox.”
He started to laugh, and then his breath caught again. For she had moved lower to lightly, lightly caress the inner skin of his thighs. He leaned back on his hands and she saw the muscles in his arms quiver. “Are you offering to perform a perversion on me, wife?”
She merely smiled.
She wanted to pleasure him slowly, so she moved back up his stomach, to his chest. The smell of him, tangy and male, seemed to enter through her skin. His rib cage expanded as he took a ragged breath. She could feel the pumping of his heart beneath her palm. She rubbed her hand across his finely molded flesh and felt the ridge of a fresh scar. It was a long diagonal cut, left by the slash of a knife or the glancing blow of a spear or …
An arrow.
She pushed away from him so hard that he rocked back on the heels of his hands. “He did shoot at you! Your brother tried to kill you and yet you ask him to stand godfather to our Nesta. How could you?”
He stared at her with glazed eyes, his chest heaving. “Hugh wasn’t trying to kill me. He’s never been any good with a bow and I left it until too late to duck this time. It’s a game we play—” He broke off and his eyes narrowed.
In one swift movement he was over her. He pressed her down into the pillows, bridging her shoulders with his hands. His eyes turned the bleached gray of a winter sky as he studied her face. “How did you know it was Hugh who gave me this wound?”
“Taliesin told—”
He moved his head back and forth once, slowly. “Taliesin doesn’t know. He thinks I got it during the battle.” His fist snaked out, grabbing her hair, yanking her head back so hard that tears started at the corners of her eyes. “Did Hugh tell you? I wondered why he went running home as soon as his forty days were up. Mayhap, it was to visit my bed? Was it?” His hand tightened and jerked, pulling at her hair. He brought his face so close to hers she could see the black specks in his eyes and feel the heat of his angry breath. “If you’ve put horns on me, sweet wife, I will strangle your pretty neck. But first I will bring my brother’s balls to you on the tip of my sword.”
She dug her nails into his wrist, trying to loosen his grip. “God’s death. I have waddled about your hall fat as a stuffed goose for months. How can you seriously think I would take a lover?”
He searched her face, trying to decide whether to believe her, until she wanted to punch him right between those opaque gray eyes. “You are a fool,” she shouted. “And you make me so cursed angry sometimes that I could spit!”
He leaned back, letting go of her hair. He took a deep breath, then another, closing his eyes. “Then how do you come to know of an incident that took place unwitnessed between my brother and myself in a forest in France? Explain this to me, Arianna.”
She would have to tell him the truth, and he would hate her. He would feel invaded, his very soul exposed and flayed. No man with any pride at all would be able to accept what she was about to tell him.
She sucked in a deep breath as if she could draw courage from the air. “You know that I am filid, a seer. I have visions, and in them I can see the future and sometimes the past. Usually they come to me in pools of water. Lately they’ve come most often in my golden mazer. I saw you in the battle. It was fall and they charged at you out of the trees and you killed a man with your lance and four more with your sword. And then Hugh came, with his bow …”
His gaze had jerked over to the mazer where it sat on the chest beside the window. She wondered if he could see the way it pulsed and glowed, if he could feel the beckoning force of its power.
“What else?”
“There is nothing else.”
“What other times have you spied on me with that damned thing?”
“It isn’t like that! I can’t control what I see.”
“What else have you seen then?”
She couldn’t look at him, afraid of what she would find in his eyes. She kept her gaze on her hands, which clutched and twisted the sheets in her lap as she told him about the first time she had seen him, charging her with his lance. “I knew you would bring me pain,” she said. She wanted to add: I couldn’t know how I would fall in love with you, but he would be able to accept, she knew, only one confession at a time.
Instead, she spoke of the other visions, of being with him in the bailey here at Rhuddlan on the day they had come to put out his eyes, and that fall morning in Chester when he had asked for a pony and gotten a beating instead.
Only when she was finished did she raise her eyes … to find him looking at her as if he were looking into the face of the devil.
“Raine … It doesn’t have to be what you’re thinking. To be that close to another—it can be a beautiful thing. More beautiful than—”
He pushed himself up from the bed and walked away from her, his back stiff. He went over to the cradle and looked down at his sleeping daughter. The
n he turned abruptly and started for the door.
“Raine!”
He stopped with his hand on the latch. He did not turn around.
“I know what every inch of your body tastes like. I have taken you inside of me, inside my womb and my mouth. Is it so awful to think that for a moment I dwelled in your mind, that I felt a bit of your pain?”
His fist slammed into the door, shoving it open. “Stay out of my past and out of my head, Arianna. Just stay the hell away from me.”
22
Arianna couldn’t help smiling as she watched her husband’s fingers weave the bell heather into a tiny garland. The baby, swaddled tightly in folds of soft linen, swung between them, hanging from a low branch of a big horse chestnut tree. They had stopped beneath it, she and Raine, for an outdoor nooning on their way to the summer’s fair at Chester.
Raine finished twisting the flowers into a circle. He stretched up onto one knee to put it on Nesta’s head as if he were crowning a queen. A little too big, it drooped over one eye. Laughing, he dipped his head, rubbing her tiny nose with his. “Now don’t you look like a saucy May Day wench?”
Arianna laughed, too, and leaned against him, pressing her breasts into his back. “And where, husband, did you learn to plait a lady’s chaplet so prettily?”
He moved away from her so that they were no longer touching. He sat down, his back against the trunk, one leg bent, his wrist resting on his knee. She thought he wouldn’t even bother to answer her, but then his head swung around and his eyes were as hard as the sunbaked hill they sat upon. “I used to make them for Sybil when we were children. But then I’m surprised you didn’t see that, Arianna. When you were peeping into my past.”
“I’ve never had a vision of you and Sybil.”
His lips pulled back from his teeth in a travesty of a smile. “How fortunate for you. For I doubt you would have liked what you’d seen.”
A rush of tears stung Arianna’s eyes, and she looked quickly away so that he wouldn’t see them. When they got to Chester they would stay in the castle there as guests of his brother. And Sybil.
A conker fell into her lap from the branch above her head, startling her. She picked up the big glossy brown seed. There was another on the ground beside Raine’s hand. She stared at it, and at the hand, at those long brown fingers that could wield a sword and plait a garland of flowers. And caress a woman’s breast.
She reached for the conker, letting her fingers brush his.
To be touching him, even in so small a way, made her ache with a fierce longing. After a moment he moved his hand away, but it didn’t matter, for she had seen the hairs rise on his arm and the swift hard jerk of his chest.
The white sun blazed down so hot that even the tree, with its wide, palm-shaped leaves, managed to cast little cool in the shade. Sweat trickled down between her breasts. She pulled at the front of her bliaut, flapping the silk like a fan, trying to stir up some cooling air.
She felt Raine’s eyes on her, but when she glanced up, he looked away.
Her mouth felt dry. She picked up a costrel of wine from among the scattered remains of their dinner. The liquid sloshed in the cask as she tilted back her head and drank. Some escaped out the corner of her mouth, running down into the hollow of her throat. She caught the wine with her fingers and stuck them in her mouth, sucking them clean.
Again she felt Raine’s eyes on her, but this time she did not glance his way. Let him look, she thought. Let him want….
She stood up, shaking the burrs and hooked seeds off her tunic. She started off down the road, in the direction of England.
Several rods or so from where they had stopped to eat, a great ditch slashed diagonally across the land. On the east side of the deep trench an earthen barrier rose up twenty feet high. It spread as far as she could see in either direction. Taliesin had told her it was called Offa’s Dyke, after a Saxon king who had dug the great ditch to shut out the Welsh from England. Now it divided her husband’s land from that of his brother.
As she stood on top the escarpment, looking down into the deep trough, Arianna felt a hankering to go exploring as she would have done were she still a young girl with nine brothers to impress. But it was choked with knee-high brambles and saw grass, and the only male she wanted to impress now didn’t seem to care anymore what she did with herself.
A lone cloud passed across the sun, casting a shadow upon the withered yellow grass. Shading her eyes, Arianna turned and looked back at the chestnut where it stood lonely upon the rise. Some distance away was the retinue of servants, men-at-arms, and sumpter beasts they had brought with him. But Raine still sat alone beneath the tree, but for Nesta, swinging on her bough.
Was it a marriage, Arianna wondered, if you slept in the same bed but did not share it? She was healed now, but she didn’t know how to tell him. She was afraid to turn to him at night, for fear that he would turn away.
Her ears picked up the sound of gurgling water. Among the sunbaked browns and grays was an oasis of bright color—of purple speedwell and white charlock and more bell heather. She walked toward the splash of flowers, her skirts swishing through the tall grass. The water sounded cool and wet.
She disturbed a bird that flew off with a flash of white-barred wings. The grass was green here, the bright green of new growth. The spring must have surfaced recently, she thought, as she knelt among the grass and flowers. She cupped the water and brought it up to her face. How odd, she thought, for it smelled of oranges.
He bit down and juice exploded against the roof of his mouth. Sweet and tangy, cool and wet. He had never tasted anything so fine. He looked at the girl and grinned. Except maybe for your lips, sweet Sybil …
“Do you like it?”
“Aye. Give me another.”
She put another section of the strange, exotic fruit against his lips. He sucked it in, then sucked in her finger as well. He cupped her neck and pulled her face to his and kissed her mouth. She tasted of the orange, tangy and sweet, cool and wet.
“Another.”
“You are greedy, sir.”
“You never complained before.” He kissed her again, and then again.
“Do you love me, Raine?”
“Yessss …” The word came out in a hiss, for her hand had just closed around his sex. She stroked him down to the root. The ache was sweet and tangy, like the taste of orange, the taste of her mouth. Fine, so fine …
“Then don’t leave me,” she said.
He bore her down to the yellow summer grass. He worked at the laces of her bliaut. Her breasts filled his hands.
But he would leave. If he stayed he was afraid, so afraid that he would never get out of the stables.
She spoke into the side of his neck, her breath warm, fruity. “Will you marry me?”
He lifted his head. He stared deep into her eyes. Lavender-blue, the color of a summer sky at dusk. “You are Hugh’s. You cannot stand against your father and mine.”
“I can and I will.” She beat her balled-up fists against his back. “I am yours, Raine. Yours!” She cupped his cheeks, giving his head a little shake. “I asked the priest. He said a girl cannot be married against her consent. I lied. I told him I wished to be a bride of Christ.” Her laughter lilted, curling up at the ends like rose petals. “Oh, Raine, can you imagine me as a nun?” Her mouth softened, became pouting. He didn’t kiss it, though he wanted to. “When you leave, I shall go with you.”
“Aw, Sybil, sweetling … You can’t come with me. I go to join Matilda’s army.”
“And do you think when you walk up to this great queen in your rags and your bare feet that she will make you a knight?” She tried to sound scornful but her voice trembled. “They will put a spear in your hand and make you a foot soldier and you will die in your first battle.”
His sex throbbed against her belly and his chest felt heavy. He rubbed his face in her hair, breathed in her scent, sweet and tangy. Oranges. He would never be able to think of this day without smellin
g oranges.
He rolled off of her onto his back and looked up at the sky. It was clear, empty, as big as the world. “I won’t die. And I will come back again, but when I do it will be as a knight.”
She touched his cheek, turning his face until their gazes met. “And I shall be here, Raine. Waiting …
“Waiting,” Arianna said.
“We’re in no hurry. Don’t sit up until the dizziness passes.”
Her head was in Raine’s lap. His thighs were hard, warm, and somehow comforting. But he was angry with her. It seemed that lately he was always angry with her. “What happened?” she asked, and in the next instant remembered it all.
“You fainted.” He hauled her half-upright, his grip so hard she missed the fear in his voice. “Jesus God, Arianna, you toppled over like an axed tree, face first into the spring. You would have drowned if—”
She jerked, trying to pull away from him and sit up. “Quit shouting at me.”
The abrupt movement brought nausea rising in her throat. She rolled aside onto her knees and threw up into the grass.
His fingers were in her hair, smoothing it back from her face. He put something white and dripping wet into her hands. It was a piece of swaddling cloth. She felt an irreverent urge to laugh. God’s death. The Black Dragon, most fearsome knight and champion jouster in all of Christendom, was going about the countryside with swaddling cloths tucked about his person.
“You just had another of those cursed visions, didn’t you?” he said.
She buried her face in the wet cloth, so she wouldn’t have to look at him.
“Whose soul did you possess this time?” he said.
She pushed her face harder into the cloth, shutting out the bitterness in his voice.
He had been crouched down on one knee beside her. Now he stood up abruptly. Only when she heard the sound of his boots crunching through the grass did she raise her head.
She watched his broad back walk away from her. A hot wind bathed her wet face. It held within it the smell of oranges.
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