Keeper of the Dream (53 page)

“Not only are you a dead man, Gwynedd. You’re a dead man that stinks of horse piss!” Taliesin hooted and cackled some more.

Rhodri let out a bellow of rage and launched himself at the squire.

The boys tumbled together, end over end, like a bucket rolling down a hill. Taliesin kicked himself free, and both boys stood up, but Rhodri’s fist shot out, quick as a bolt from a crossbow, smacking into the squire’s nose and knocking him back onto his rump. Mud splattered into the air.

Arianna cried out, starting toward them, but Raine held her back. “Let them fight. It’s time they got it settled between them.”

Rhodri tried to settle it by kicking Taliesin in the groin. But the squire nimbly spun aside, rolling back onto his feet. He grabbed Rhodri by the hair and threw him to the ground, and Rhodri plowed a furrow in the mud with his nose.

Arianna winced and covered her eyes with her hands. But then Raine caught her peeping through her fingers.

The knights and other boys had gathered around to watch the fight, and wagers flew through the air. Amidst all the shouting at first no one heard Edith’s screams. She ran across the fields, her skirts hiked up around the knees, her coif hanging askew on her head, her face twisted with fear.

“Milady! Oh, milady, come quickly. ’Tis Nesta. She is … oh, milady, she is so very sick.”

Raine stood alone in the deepening twilight of the deserted tilting ground. His eyes, black in the hollowed-out flesh of his face, stared at the window of their bedchamber. No glow from cresset lamps bled through the shutters. Beyond them, hidden away from the air and the light, in a red cradle gaily painted with vines and flowers, lay Nesta. Six months she had lived and now she was dying.

Oh God, God, God … But there was no God, and there was no mercy. And he was no brave and honorable knight, no knight in silvered mail. He couldn’t make himself go in there and face this particular dragon, not this one. His own death—hell, that was easy. But not his Nesta, not his baby.

Still, he had taken a step toward the castle when a tortured scream floated out the opened doors of the hall. Raine jerked to a stop, his eyes squeezing shut as anguish closed around his heart like a fist. Eventually, because he had to, he began walking again, toward the hall that now, after that single unearthly scream, was silent.

The air inside the darkened chamber was close and still. Arianna stood beside the cradle, rocking it and singing to Nesta as if she still lived.

Edith laid a hand on his arm. Her cheeks were thick with tears, her eyes nearly swollen shut. “The Lady Arianna
has gone mad with grief, my lord. She cannot accept—”

“Get out,” he grated, and the maidservant, sobbing, scurried out the door. He did not go all the way up to the cradle. Nothing was going to make him look at Nesta dead. Nothing.

He stood in the middle of the room, unable to breathe for the pain that squeezed his chest. A fierce and terrible anger gripped him, anger with Arianna. He had trusted her with his heart and now he was hurting again, and this time the pain was unbearable, and it was all her fault. Somehow she had wormed her way in under all his careful armor, she had made him start caring about things again, even though he knew better. Start caring, even the least little bit, and he knew he was just asking for a kick in the guts.

Even in the midst of his agony he knew his thinking wasn’t rational, that Arianna could not be blamed for Nesta’s death. Still, he could not stop it from coming out his mouth. “How could you let this happen?”

She turned her head and looked at him out of lifeless eyes. “Don’t worry, Raine. It’s only a little cough.”

He could feel his face hardening.
Stop it,
he told himself.
Stop it now.
But he could not. “You’re so good at
seeing
things, Arianna. Why didn’t you see this?” He flung his arm out in the direction of the cradle. “Why did you give her to me in the first place, if you were only going to let her die?”

She made a fluttering motion with her hand. She turned back around and looked at the crib, blinking as if dazed. Her hands wrapped around the edge of it, and she hunched over. A sob tore out of her, and then another and another and another, until the sound of her tearing, broken weeping smothered the room.

“I’ll go speak to the wainwright about a coffin,” he said to no one in particular.

He turned and walked toward the door, not really seeing
where he was going, lost in a hell he knew there was no coming back from. “Raine!”

He kept walking. She twisted around, falling onto her knees, one hand reaching out for him. But he didn’t know, for he had not looked back.

A crucifix lay across her tiny chest. She rested upon a bier, draped in a black pall. Around her tall candles burned. Flames flickered in the empty darkness, glowing off the wooden rood and glinting in the gilt of the saints’ effigies and the gems in the reliquary.

Beside her, Arianna stood and grieved, alone.

She tried to pray, but the words were a jumble in her mind. Every time she breathed, the sweet smell of incense made her want to choke. She felt as if red hot awls had been thrust into her eyes. They were empty sockets now, incapable of any more tears.

I cannot bear this,
she thought.
God must end this right now, for I cannot bear it.

The chapel door creaked open. Slowly, she turned, wanting it, needing desperately for it to be Raine.

Candlelight glinted off red hair. Taliesin walked down the chapel’s squat nave on silent feet. He stopped before her, his young face grave, his eyes glittering and old. “Oh, my lady …” he said, that was all. But there were worlds upon worlds of sorrow in those three words.

Arianna turned back to the bier. Tears … there were fresh tears on her cheeks. God, where were all these tears coming from? Grief was endless, she knew that now. It didn’t stop, it just went on and on and on.

“We must bury her soon … Oh, God, Taliesin. Where is he?”

“He loved her, my lady.”

She whipped around. “But I loved her too! Can’t he see how …” She stuffed a fist into her mouth.

“He is hurting, my lady.”

“Does that give him the right to hurt me?” She pounded her chest with her fist. “I love him and he is
killing
me.”

“Love always hurts, my lady. Even at its most wondrous there is that sweet agony underneath—the knowledge that to risk loving, is to risk losing and hurting. To risk sometimes destroying the one you love … or being yourself destroyed.”

Raine felt things too deeply, she understood that now. It was his one weakness—when he loved, he loved too hard. “He will never risk that sort of pain again,” she said.
More loss,
she thought.
More tears. Without him, without his love, I cannot bear it. But with me, with my love, he is the one being forced to give more than he can stand.

Taliesin touched her shoulder. A soft heat flowed into her, a golden light. She felt it deep within her, in her soul.

“He will love again, for you will show him how. Go to him, child. He needs you and this time it is you who must be the strong one.”

She wasn’t sure how she knew where Raine was. Perhaps Taliesin had put the place in her mind.
Go to him, child,
he had said. Yet the words hadn’t sounded strange coming from someone younger than she. But then he was not really a beardless squire, he was
llyfrawr,
a shape-changer, and he was older than time.

Dark gray stones against a pale gray sky, the
meinhirion
stood as they had always stood, anchored to the earth, reaching for the stars. The wind moaned through the dry grass, buffeting the stones. Yet still they stood.

One night they had come together here in shattering passion and possession, and it had seemed their love was older than the stones. A love so strong that even the passing of centuries could not kill it. Like a boulder on the beach, she thought. The sea came and swallowed it, but
when the tide left again, the boulder remained—endurable, enduring. Forever standing, like the
meinhirion.

He was on the beach, at the very edge of the sea. The waves reached for him, nearly touched, then receded. He stood with his hands fisted at his sides, his head thrown back. As if he were screaming, though she heard no sound.

She did not call his name. Yet he turned.

Something had broken inside of him. His face had shattered, his eyes bled pain. He could hide nothing from her anymore. He stood naked before her, down to his soul.

She took the first step, but he was the one who came stumbling to her across the sand. He fell to his knees and pressed his face into her thighs, turned his cheek over and over against her thighs, like someone blinded.

Her hand hovered over his hair, and then she touched him.

“Oh God, God, Arianna … hold me.” A silent sob shuddered through him, and then another. And then they were no longer silent—but the harsh, tearing sobs of a man who had never learned how to weep. “Please hold me …”

“Raine!”

She ran up the hill, skirts held high, bare legs whipping through the grass.

Ox-carts carrying timber and stone groaned to a halt; big wooden hammers paused in midair over chisels and stone; diggers leaned on their shovels and laughed—all work on the lord’s new castle stopped, while the men watched the Lady Arianna run.

“Raine!”

He waited for her, legs spread, hands on his hips, his mouth fighting a smile. “There are forty men working here, and every one of them just got an eyeful of your legs,” he said when she had danced to a halt in front of him.

Her head tilted back, her eyes laughed. “And a piddling lot of men they are if they’ve never gotten a look at a woman’s legs before. Quit scowling at me, Raine. I’ve wonderful news. I tossed up my breakfast into the chamber pot this morning.”

“Shall I send out the heralds?”

“Not for eight months or so.”

But the significance of what she’d said had just struck
home to Raine. Joy blazed across his face. “Morning sickness!”

She opened her mouth to give him all the details, but he seized her around the waist and pulled her up to crush his lips to hers. He whirled her around and around, mouths locked together, her toes skimming the ground, her hair billowing away from her head like a sail.

He stopped spinning, and they clung together a moment while the world went on whirling dizzily around them. He laughed against her neck and she twisted her fists in his tunic, and his heart was hammering so hard he thought his chest would crack.

She touched his cheek. “Let’s go for a walk by the river.”

Their feet crunched on the frozen mud along the shore, crushing the ice into star-burst patterns. The river ran flat and gray, reflecting the pale winter sun like polished mail.

A biting wind carried the smell of burning lime, which was used for the mortar. And sounds as well, the hawing and chiseling of stone, the screech and groan of pulleys, the shouts and curses and the hoarse laughter of men at labor. From here, looking up at the bluff, he could barely see the beginnings of the bailey wall and mural towers. The main keep, already two man-lengths high, was embraced by a scaffolding of ropes and sapling poles. Twelve feet of stone a year it took to build a tower.

It surprised him sometimes to think that he had dared to start a project that would take so long to see to fruition. He had always been a man who had measured his future in hours, not years.

They walked along the riverbank hand in hand. She rubbed her thumb along the calluses on his palm, then stopped and turned into him and brought his hand up to her lips and kissed his curled knuckles.

“Raine, I’m afraid.”

He threaded his hands through her hair, tilting her face. He knew what she feared; he feared it as well. That the
child would die. His own fear was compounded—she, too, could die.

He let his hands fall to her shoulders, then worked them up over the neck of her bliaut until he touched the bare skin of her throat and felt her pulse. “It will be all right,” he said, and drew her to him, held her tightly against him, stroking her back. Her arms went around his waist.

They were empty words, yet she took comfort from them, or from the arms that held her. God knew, he took comfort from hers.

They stood that way for a long time, wrapped in each others arms, chest pressed against chest. She drew apart. She looked up at him, and he saw the truth in her eyes before she spoke it.

“I love you, Raine.”

The warmth, the sweet, soft warmth, enveloped him, and he knew that at last, at last, he had come home. No, that was wrong. He’d never had a home before, and now he had found one.

He tried to tell her he loved her, too, but the thought got stuck somewhere between his heart and his throat. So instead, his lips came down to caress hers in a tender, endless kiss.

He walked her back to the castle, the old one. But he did not go with her up to their chamber. He went to the chapel.

Once, in a field in France that was already stained red with the blood of men who’d died the day before, a priest had told him it wasn’t necessary to have faith, only to pray and that God would heed the words. He hadn’t believed it at the time. The God he knew never listened.