Keeper of the Dream (34 page)

Arianna poured out into her father’s chest the story of all that happened—Kilydd’s rebellion, her betrayal, the storm, Taliesin’s death. And Raine, Raine, Raine … When she had done, she pulled away, sniffling and wiping at her nose with the sleeve of her bliaut. “He will hate me now,” she said, “and who can blame him?”

Owain cupped her cheeks with his rough palms. “You are home, my daughter. You’ve nothing to fear from the Norman bastard, he can’t touch you here.”

She wrapped her fingers around his wrists and leaned
back so that she could look into his eyes. “No, Papa. You don’t understand. I want to go back.”

He shook his head. “ ’Tis too late for that.” He reached up and stroked her head, his callused fingers snagging in her hair. “Don’t despair, sweetling. I can have the marriage annulled. I will find you another man, a better man this time. A Cymro, eh? One of our own.”

“But the treaty—”

“The treaty be hanged. The Norman isn’t likely to forgive what you have done. I will not send my daughter to her death. Not even for Wales.”

She thought of all the tales she had heard of the Black Dragon. Ruthless in battle, merciless in victory. She had seen this side of him, but she had seen another side as well.

“I know Lord Raine will be angry with me, very angry. Yet I don’t think he will hurt me. Not in any irreparable way.”

Owain searched her face. “You are sure of this?”

Arianna wasn’t sure. But for her father’s peace of mind, she nodded. “I want to go back to him, Papa. Please try to fix it so that I can go back to him.”

Owain turned aside. He tugged at the ends of his thick, drooping mustaches, a habit of his when he was deep in thought. “What is he like, as a man?”

“He is much like you. He is hard, yet fair. He is brave, yet he never boasts of it. He would growl at me for saying so, but at heart he is much the chivalrous knight: steadfast in his honor and loyalty, generous to those less fortunate.” Though she didn’t know it, a soft smile touched her lips. “And when he lets himself, he can be gentle, tender….”

Owain looked askance at her, pretending to scowl. “You compliment us both, and overmuch, I think.”

Smiling, she stretched up on tiptoe and kissed his weathered cheek.
“Fy nhad
… I compliment you, my
father. I could be wrong about the Norman. But if I’m not, I think … I think that I could come to love him.”

His heavy hands fell on her shoulders and he turned her to face him. “Ah,
geneth.
I want so much for you to be happy.” He hugged her close to him, stroking her hair with his big hand, kissing the crown of her head. She ought to have been comforted, but she was not.

I
want so much for you to be happy,
he had said. Yet for Wales he had delivered up her and Rhodri as hostages to the English king. For Wales he had allowed his only daughter to be married to the enemy. For Wales he had sacrificed the life of one of his sons. For all his gentle ways, her father was a hard man. Hard as the granite cliffs above their heads, practical and ruthless when he had to be. There was nothing Owain of Gwynedd would not do for Wales, and the dream of freedom.

Now Arianna stood at the window of her father’s
llys
and watched the coming night swallow the last of the day. He had come for her, her black knight, a man just as hard, just as practical and ruthless as her father. He was here in the great hall below. She remembered his face the way it had been when last she saw it. Hard with anger. Hot with lust. Two weeks ago she had thought she would never look upon that face again. But he was here now, he was here, he was here, and she couldn’t wait a moment longer.

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:

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 recalcitrant 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.