Keeper of the Dream (17 page)

Afterward, she couldn’t remember repeating the marriage vows, though she must have, for the next thing she knew the bishop was blessing the ring. Raine took the gold band and slipped it in turn on the first two fingers of her left hand, but when he went to put it on the third finger, the ring stuck on her knuckle. Arianna was possessed with an hysterical desire to laugh, for folklore said that how goes on the ring so would go the marriage—easily and the wife would be docile; with difficulty and she would be a shrew.

She looked up at him. His eyes glittered at her now with an enigmatic promise.

“With this ring, I thee wed,” he said, as he thrust the ring onto her finger, hard enough to scrape the skin.

“And with my body I thee worship….”

A fanfare of trumpets smacked against the hot summer air and bounced off the flowing waters of the river Clwyd. Arianna jumped at the harsh blast of sound, but the man beside her didn’t even blink. He sprawled in the chair, one arm hooked over the back, his long legs stretched out beneath the table. He looked relaxed, but she could feel the tension in him, like a banked fire.

They had yet to exchange a word since their marriage vows.

The wedding feast was taking place beside the river, within the shadows of the castle walls, for it was cooler there beneath the shade of the sycamores. Trestle tables, covered with gleaming white cloths, spread over the grassy banks. A canopy of yellow silk sheltered the bridal dais.

As the shrill notes of the trumpets faded away, the marshal of the hall marched toward the dais, holding aloft a white staff. He was followed by a procession of servants bearing ewers and basins and towels for the ritual washing.

Taliesin dumped an enameled bronze basin onto the table with a clatter. The boy looked miffed, as if such
servitude was beneath his dignity. He gave his liege lord an impatient nudge. “Sire, if you will …”

Arianna watched the water pour over her husband’s hands. Though marred by calluses and scars and browned by the sun, they were the hands of a nobleman. Long and fine-boned, and strangely graceful.

“My lady …” Taliesin waited, the ewer poised to pour. She held her hands over the basin. The water was warm and smelled of roses.

The squire handed her a fresh towel. For a moment she was sure his jet eyes glittered at her with the same strange light she had seen earlier. But he blinked and the light faded. “My lady, do you wish to dry your hands, or no? Otherwise you’ll be dripping rosewater into the cook’s splendid ginger-sauced lampreys.”

Arianna snatched at the proffered towel, and he answered her with an impish smile. “You make a beautiful bride, my lady,” he said. “Is she not beautiful, my lord?”

The knight turned his head. He looked at her in a weighing manner, the way a man would judge horseflesh for sale at a fair, and in spite of herself, Arianna felt the blood rush to her face. But whatever his opinion of her, he didn’t voice it.

“She is a quest worthy of a brave knight,” Taliesin persisted. “Do you not think so, my lord?”

Raine shot his squire a hard look. “Give it up, Taliesin.”

The boy heaved a beleaguered sigh. “Aye, my lord …”

He picked up the basin, then slammed it down again, spilling oily water onto the cloth. “But I ought to point out that the trials you must suffer to be worthy of the Lady Arianna’s love grow more arduous by the moment. I fear the goddess is now so wrathful over your stubbornness that you’ll be stripped of your pride completely ere your destiny is concluded to her satisfaction.” The boy put his hands on his hips, his head snapping like a scolding
alewife’s. “And I can only do so much for you, after all, so don’t go saying later that I didn’t warn you.”

Throughout his squire’s odd speech Raine looked at her, and Arianna watched, fascinated, as his eyes changed color from pale ice to the dark gray of thunderheads just before a storm. “And do you love me even a bit, little wife?”

Arianna was so startled that the arm she had resting on the table jerked, sending a spoon spinning across the white cloth. Raine’s hand lashed out, trapping the spoon. He held it out to her, handle first. The action reminded Arianna in the strangest way of a defeated knight surrendering his sword to the victor. Their gazes held and the silence stretched between them.

“You haven’t answered my question,” he finally said.

Arianna couldn’t understand why she found it so hard to speak. It was as if the devil had snatched away her breath. Her hand trembled as she reached for the spoon. “Nay, I love you not at all.”

“You heard her, boy. She loves me not at all, so this quest you keep prattling about is pointless. Now, bring me some wine.”

Taliesin’s fiery brows met in a straight line over the bridge of his nose as he shot Arianna a look of aggravation before he whisked away the ewer and basin. Raine went back to staring with shadowed eyes at the walls and keep of his castle. Another blast of trumpets announced the serving of the first course.

Arianna wanted to ask him about the boy who was his squire, this Taliesin who had strange, moonlit eyes and claimed to be a bard, and spoke of a goddess as if he truly believed in such nonsense.

Her father’s
bardd teulu
had often sung prose tales about a race of beautiful goddesses who once dwelled in a city of gold beneath the ocean waves. It was said that when the tides and the mist were just right, a bridge would rise up from the watery depths connecting their
magical city to the land, and in those times the goddesses often crossed the bridge to take mortal lovers. Through the love of a goddess, these men, brave and handsome knights all, were given the gift of eternal life—though only after they had overcome the most difficult of quests. Of course, these were only stories, passed down from the time of the ancient ones. Such pagan beliefs had died out long ago. Arianna had heard of no one who still swore by the goddesses …

Except, she remembered suddenly, for the old bard who had given her the golden mazer. But then he had been such a very old man, all yellow-skinned with the barest wisps of white hair on his wizened skull, so old in truth that his mind had seemed to wander when he spoke. Oddly, his name, too, had been Taliesin.

“Eat, eat, my lady.”

The boy named Taliesin appeared suddenly at her side, bearing a swan with an almond-silvered body that swam in a green-gravy pond. He dumped the gilded tray beside Arianna, and the bird rocked in its pea-colored lake. “You must eat, my lady, for you’ll need all your strength later …” He paused, then added with a wicked grin, “For the dancing.”

Arianna gave him her haughtiest, mistress-of-the-castle look. Though a bit strange, he was still a boy. No different from her brothers at that age.

Raine wasn’t eating either. In truth he was supposed to be feeding her. They shared a bread trencher and goblet and he was supposed to be picking out the choicest morsels from the bowls and platters and putting them to her dainty lips.

He must have felt her eyes on him, for just then he lifted the wine goblet. It was of bronze and fashioned into a fanciful shape—a dragon with its scaly tail forming one handle, its curved neck and fanged head the other. He took a long drink. Then he held out the goblet, turning it so that she could place her lips where his had touched.

Arianna took the cup, and deliberately turned it to drink out the other side. The wine was warm and heavily spiced. As she passed the goblet back to him she glanced up from beneath her lowered lids.

He dipped his head toward hers. His breath was warm and smelled of the wine. “You don’t surrender easily, do you, wench? It is going to be a pleasure to tame you to the bit.”

“There is not a Norman alive man enough to tame me.”

He leaned into her, so close she felt the heat of him. Their shoulders touched, and his thigh brushed hers. “But even the most finely bred mare is always the better mount when she is under the hand of a firm master.”

“As is a stallion,” Arianna shot back. She raised her head until their eyes met. She could feel the blood beating in her neck. “Perhaps it will be the other way about. Perhaps I will be the one to master you.”

He moved and she almost flinched. He drew his fingers along her cheek and down her neck and a tenseness began to coil inside her, seeping into her flesh like smoke. He stopped when he touched her throbbing pulse. “Perhaps I will let you …”

He looked as if he would say more, but instead he let his hand fall, and he turned away from her again. Arianna felt a strange disappointment, as if she had been on the verge of discovering the answer to a riddle that had been eluding her her entire life.

“For shame, big brother. Married scarce hours and already you ignore your lovely bride.”

Startled, Arianna jerked around as the splendidly attired Earl of Chester eased onto the bench beside her. His lake-blue gaze roamed over her with blatant appreciation. “By my troth, there isn’t a woman in England to match you, sweet Arianna. And the pity of it is you are utterly wasted on my brother.”

Raine didn’t move, but his voice went flat and cold.
“Nevertheless, she is mine, Hugh. And if you even think of swiving her, I will kill you.”

Arianna stared straight ahead, her hands clenched into fists in her lap. He had spoken of her, her own husband had spoken of her as if she were a whore, a thing with no honor who would lie with any man. But this was a matter that must be settled between them in private, not before their wedding guests.

If the earl was moved by his brother’s threats he didn’t show it. Instead he laughed and reached across her for the flagon of wine, brushing her breasts with his arm. He filled the empty cup he carried in a hand laden with jeweled rings. Unlike his brother’s, the earl’s hand was white and smooth. But his nails had been chewed to the quick.

Hugh’s eyes were focused on his brother. He raised the cup, tilting it in Raine’s direction, and some of the wine slopped over to stain the cloth. “Such a brave and glorious knight … is our Raine. It’s hard to believe he had to follow along behind me when we were lads, sweeping up my pony’s droppings.”

“If you hope to cut at my esteem in the lady’s eyes, then you might as well save your breath, Hugh. For I can hardly sink much lower…. Can I, little wife?”

She looked up at him in surprise, to be fixed by a pair of opaque gray eyes that told her nothing. Yet she thought she had heard something in his voice. A challenge, perhaps.

His gaze fell to her mouth and she saw his eyes darken. His face hardened, as if the skin across his sharp cheekbones had somehow drawn tauter.

What she saw in his face frightened her. She sucked in a deep breath, and she didn’t need to follow his gaze to know her breasts had lifted, straining against the thin silk of her bliaut. The air suddenly pressed down, moist and heavy.

She pushed up from the table, nearly upsetting the wine goblet in her haste to get away. “I—I believe I will seek
out my cousin Kilydd. It’s been months since we’ve seen each other….”

Her chair rocked on its legs, nearly tipping over. They reached for it at the same time and his hand closed down over hers. For a moment she stood frozen, staring at that long, brown hand. She could feel the strength of his grip, the rough calluses earned by hard work with a sword, and she thought that he now had the right to put that hand on her body. Anywhere on her body.

She snatched her hand from beneath his and took off, practically running, for the river. “For shame, Raine,” she heard Hugh drawl. “You’ve frightened the poor girl away with all your black scowls.”

It was sultry down by the river, and smelled of rotting fish. Her chest heaved as she fought for breath. She closed her eyes, trying to call forth the image of the golden knight as she had seen him in the vision that morning. She smelled the hyacinth and felt the hot wind on her cheeks as she ran down the hill and into her golden knight’s strong arms, and heard the words, I
love you, Arianna,
I
love you, love you …

Tears burned the backs of her eyes.
He
should be her future, her golden knight. Not the Norman upstart she had married. But tonight … tonight it would be the Norman who would put those rough, brown hands on her body….

“Arianna,
geneth …”

Arianna spun around to confront two men, one tall and lean and tawny-haired, and the other gray and scowling and shaped like a squat ale keg. A smile started to break across her face, but she stopped it when she remembered how her cousins had both scorned her earlier.

“I am
geneth
no longer,” she said. A girl no longer, but a wife. God help her, a wife …

The older man, Ivor, looked her over from head to toe with unblinking eyes that were tiny and dark, like olive pits. “What did you want to go and marry the Norman
bastard for, Arianna? I’d have never thought you’d stoop so low.”

“God’s death, you think I did it willingly! I did it for Gwynedd, for you—”

“Bah!” Ivor hawked and spat in the dirt.

Kilydd laughed. “Ivor has never understood the whys and wherefores of politics. He thinks the only thing to do with a Norman is to kill him—”