Keeper of the Dream (22 page)

Arianna dismissed his apology with a wave of her hand. “With nine brothers I’ve heard words foul enough to curdle the devil’s blood. But what happened? Surely the knight is no longer an excommunicate.”

“Nay, Henry used his influence to get the ban lifted and thought it a right good jest too. Until he found out none of the lord’s tithing had been collected either. The knight we speak of had to sell everything he owned then, down
to his sword, to pay Henry back, not only for what he never took in as bailiff, but for what he gave out to the serfs that winter from the castles’ own stores …” His large brown eyes fastened onto her face. “Leastways, that’s how the story goes.”

Arianna looked back at the empty pens. She felt strangely light and gay. She hadn’t danced at her wedding yesterday; she felt like dancing now.

Smiling, she turned to the big knight. “Thank you for telling it to me, Sir Odo. And I would ask a favor of you.” She informed him of her plan to become, in effect, steward of her husband’s dominion within the bailey walls.

“I would welcome it, milady,” he answered readily. “What with worrying about harrows and hedges and pigs and fodder, my head’s near splitting as ’tis.” He kneaded his brow with thick, knotty fingers. “’Struth, I’d rather be fighting a war somewhere.”

Arianna brought Sir Odo a tonic of peony root for his headache, which earned her a hearty kiss on the cheek that nearly knocked her over. For the rest of the morning she threw herself into the considerable task of setting Rhuddlan Castle to rights.

The stores of wine and ale in the butteries of both the keep and the great hall had been sorely depleted by the wedding feast, and Arianna decided to spend the hour after dinner taking inventory of the stocks in the cellar.

She threw herself into the task of counting the tuns of wine. She had just rolled aside a keg of ale when she saw something that made her pause. A name had been etched into the wall of the vault. She tried to make out the letters, but the carving must have been done years ago for it was begrimed with dirt. Taking up the torch she had stuck into a bracket near the door, she leaned over to spell aloud the crude letters.

“R … A … I … N … E.”

She leapt back, so startled that she dropped the torch, and she spent a few anxious moments coaxing the flame
back into life. With the torch wavering in her hands, she bent over to read the name again. She touched the first letter.

A tide of raw terror washed over her—
his
terror. She was locked in this cellar and waiting, waiting for …
Eyes.

A pain stabbed behind her eyes, so fierce that she clenched them shut.
They’re going to put out my eyes.
“No …” she sobbed. But the sound came not from her throat, but his.

For the flash of a second she saw him—a dark-haired boy huddled in the corner of the vault, tears streaming unheeded down his dirty cheeks. She felt his terror and his pain as surely as if they had sprung from within her own breast. He threw back his head and screamed. “I
am your son, damn you! Your son! How could you do this to me, your own son?”

“Oh, please, don’t,” she cried, and reached for him….

She was falling into a whirling vortex of howling wind and white, pulsating light. She smelled wood smoke and rain. She heard the croaking of ravens and harsh laughter and a man’s voice, thick with excitement …
“After this morning’s work, Chester’s bastard will be making no bastards of his own.”

The sea of light swirled, darkened to the color of blood. The blood flowed, flared, turned into tongues of flame, became a fire in a stone forge in a castle yard, a yard she knew, cast in shadow by a hulking shell keep, and …

A raven wheeled overhead, black wings flashing against the dim light of a stormy dawn. The air was cool and smelled of rain, but sweet, so sweet after so many weeks shut up in the dank cellar. Then he saw it … a forge glowing ruddy, the fire hissing as it was splattered with the first drops of rain.

Fear walloped into his chest like a battering ram, and his legs almost gave out beneath him. He stumbled, but didn’t
fall. They dragged him toward the forge and he set his teeth on begging words. They might take by force his sight and his manhood, but only he could give away his pride.

A man in a black leather hood turned then … a long iron staff, burning red, red, pointed at his eyes. He would have begged then if he could have, if he could have gotten the words out past the choking fear. Eyes. Oh, God, how could a man live without eyes?

A knight in scarlet stepped in front of him. “No, cut off his balls first. Make that be the last thing he sees….”

Rough hands tore at his braies. A gust of wind and nervous laughter. Ravens screeched, already smelling blood. The flash of a knife pressed, cold against his shrinking flesh. God, God, don’t do this to me, he prayed. But he didn’t believe in God, and he’d never known mercy, so he had no hope. He thought of the girl he loved and felt sick to think of what they were taking away from him.

The knight in scarlet pushed his face against his, snarling, “Tell your father, the earl—this is what we do to the sons of traitors.”
My father doesn’t care,
he wanted to scream.
The Earl of Chester doesn’t care what you do to me.
The knight waited, waiting for him to break. And he was breaking, inside, where it didn’t show. “Christ, boy. Are you made of stone?”

Not stone. Blood. And flesh. Flesh of his flesh. He couldn’t believe that his own father had abandoned him to such a fate … could love him so little …

He found the words he sought, and somewhere the courage to speak them. “Afterward … will you give me a knife?”

Surprise showed on the knight’s face. Triumph. “So that you may kill yourself?”

I am your son, damn you! Your son! How could you have condemned me to this, your own son?
“Nay … So that I can kill him … my father.”

Hate ate at his guts. Hate and a sick despair. He felt unwanted, unworthy … unloved. A raven croaked, the
wind blew. Rain fell on his face. He lifted his gaze toward the bloodred walls of Rhuddlan keep and waited for the pain….

Rain splashed on her face. The ravens croaked her name as she fought through luminescent mists that clung to her mind like silver webs. She brushed the sticky strands aside and touched smooth skin instead, and the ravens’ cries changed, became a boy’s voice. “My lady …”

She felt hard dirt beneath her back and dampness seeping into her clothes. She looked into two eyes, black as bruises. A white hand flashed across her face and water flicked onto her cheeks. “Taliesin?”

She tried to sit up, but the world spun around and darkened. Nausea rose in her throat. She clutched at the front of his leather tunic and struggled not to gag.

“Now, don’t you be spewing up all over me, my lady,” he said. “This is a new tunic I’ve got on and it cost me all my winnings at dice.”

Arianna started to laugh and choked instead. Eventually the dizziness subsided, along with the nausea. She leaned back. Taliesin was wearing his golden helmet and it seemed to glow within the darkness, lighting his face so that his eyes shone like twin stars.

She released her grip on his tunic. “What are you doing here? Has Lord Raine returned?”

“Nay, not till nightfall. Milady, you are trembling.” His head dipped forward until his face was only inches from hers. He had the strangest eyes she had ever seen. It was almost as if they were lit from within, but with a cold light, like moonshine. “You saw,” he said. “You saw what happened to my lord here.”

His eyes drew the truth from her. “I saw …” she whispered, “but I don’t understand.” Suddenly the memory of the vision was so fresh that she could taste it, salty and rusty, like blood. She hadn’t just witnessed what had happened in Rhuddlan’s bailey that day, she had
been
Raine. “Eyes … oh God, Taliesin, they were going to put out his
eyes.”

Somehow she was pressed against his chest and he was stroking her back. He no longer seemed like a such a boy. Perhaps it was the strength of the arm that held her, or the deep musical tones of his voice. “Hush now. It didn’t happen, for you know how my lord grew to manhood whole and hearty.”

She shuddered again, pulling away from him. “But it almost happened, didn’t it? Taliesin, do you know why? What was he doing here?”

Wisps of hair had come loose from her braids. He brushed them back from her face. “It was before your father took back Rhuddlan Castle from the Normans, back when the old Earl of Chester was overlord of this part of the marcher lands.”

“Raine’s father?”

“Aye, back when Stephen and Matilda were fighting over England’s throne and all the barons were forced to take one side or the other. The old earl seemed to have a knack for knowing which side would emerge the victor at any given time and he switched his allegiance often. But one day he outguessed himself, jumping over to Stephen when he should have stuck with Matilda. The mistake cost him several castles, one of which was Rhuddlan.

“The castle was taken over by one of Matilda’s favorite barons, Roger de Bessin. The Earl of Chester also agreed to give up his son to this new Lord of Rhuddlan, as a hostage to ensure his future neutrality. But the earl had the last laugh because the son he delivered was not Hugh, as everyone expected, but his bastard. Who was and is, as you know, my liege lord, Raine.”

“So they kept him locked up here in the cellars.” Arianna’s heart ached as she thought of the letters painstakingly carved into the stone. It would have taken weeks, months …

“For the whole of that summer and autumn,” Taliesin
said, as if he had read her thoughts. “And Roger de Bessin vowed that if the old earl broke his neutrality, he would pluck out Raine’s eyes and … well, do worse in retaliation.”

Terror filled her mouth, acrid and hot. She was in the bailey, waiting, waiting for them to cut him, to put out her eyes—no,
his
eyes.

“But it didn’t happen,” she said. Her head throbbed. He had been so hurt, so bitterly hurt to think that his father had abandoned and betrayed him. The pain,
his
pain, was so still raw and fresh it was as if she had a gaping hole in her heart. She pressed her hand to her chest. “He was wrong, you see,” she said to Taliesin, desperate to set this one point straight, for it seemed important. Important to that boy in the cellar. “It never happened, so his father must have loved him after all.”

Taliesin shook his head, and Arianna saw within his moonstruck eyes a wisdom that was old and battered and worn like the earth itself. “Roger de Bessin was so awed by my lord’s courage that he couldn’t bring himself to carry out the deed. ’Tis that simple, milady. And that difficult.”

The pain grew worse. She ground her fist into her breast. “And his father—”

“Laughed. When he was told what they would do to his son, the Earl of Chester laughed. They vowed to blind the boy, to cut out his manhood, and all he did was laugh and laugh.”

Arianna was at the window, waiting, when the trumpeter of the guard sounded the lord’s approach.

The sky was a deep indigo blue, with only a thread of light on the horizon. A new moon, thin and sharp as a sickle, hung above the gatehouse. At the bottom of the stairs to the hall, a varlet was just lighting the torches. The flames flapped like banners in a gusty wind.

Two horses trotted into the pool of light. Arianna saw a
flash of fox-red hair. Somehow she was not surprised to find Taliesin at his master’s side, as if he had never left there. That afternoon he had vanished from the wine vault when her back was turned, like a wraith fading back into a crypt. Already she wondered if she had imagined him, a codicil to her vision.

She watched from the window as Raine dismounted. He glanced up as soon as his foot touched the ground. She almost backed away, but then she didn’t. Torchlight glimmered off the sharp bones of his face; the wind ruffled his hair, causing it to stand up like devil’s horns.

Someone hailed him from the door of the hall. With one last look at her, he mounted the stairs. Fear and excitement unfurled deep within her belly, like coils of hot smoke that became entwined until she couldn’t tell one from the other.

She looked around the bedchamber while she waited for him to come. A fire burned in the brazier and nearby stood a bathing tub, perfumed steam coiling into the air. A carpeted dormant table had been laid out with simnel and oat cakes, fruit and cheese, and ewers of wine and ale. Dried herbs smoldered in a bowl to sweeten the air. The rushes had been changed. Even the bed curtains had been taken down and had the dust beaten out of them.

He was a long time in coming. She was pacing by the time she heard the clink of spurs and scuffling sound of boots coming up the stairs. She noticed that her hands were clasped together like a penitent nun’s and she forced them down to her sides. Her palms were sweating; she wiped them on her skirt.

The door swung open on newly tallowed hinges and he entered, bringing with him the coolness of the night and the smell of the sea.

He was not alone. Sir Odo came with him, followed by three other men, all speaking at once, vying for his attention. She poured a jack of ale and put it into his hand, but he was talking at the time and acknowledged her with
only a nod. She felt in the way, but when she started for the door, he said, “Stay, Arianna.”

When he spoke to his men there was a tone of quiet command in his voice, and they made their respect, their admiration, of him obvious. As she watched him she thought of how, with a title and lands even half the size of Chester’s, a man of his talents could have made himself powerful enough to rival the king. Yet he had been given nothing from his father. Nothing but betrayal. No wonder he wore his base blood like a shirt of pitch, when it had brought him nothing but pain.

The men left and at last they were alone.

He turned from shutting the door, and his gaze roamed the length of her. His eyes grew dark and heavy lidded, and a tautness came over his face. Within her the strange tension coiled, warm and moist like the steam from his bath.