Keeper of the Dream (26 page)

Raine’s head snapped back, his eyes widening. “
Moldy-
tongued?” he said, and for a moment she thought he was actually going to laugh. She couldn’t keep up with his abrupt change of temper; she wanted to hit him. Irrationally, she still wanted to kiss him. Or for him to kiss her. God’s death. She didn’t understand him, and she didn’t understand herself.

He gripped her jutting chin between his thumb and forefinger and brought his lips close to hers. “You would have a Norman bastard’s child?”

“Whom else’s would I have? You are my husband.”

For a moment he did nothing, simply stared at her. Then he brushed her lips with his. “Take off your clothes and get into bed.”

She pulled away from him and backed up a step. Her lips burned and she had to resist an impulse to lick them. “I will not.”

He said nothing, nor did he move. But his face had
assumed that hard look, the look of a conqueror who would not be denied.

She backed up three more steps until her thighs bumped into the table. She crossed her arms over her breasts. “I am no longer in the mood to mate with you, my lord.”

He stood up. “It matters not whether you are in the mood. I could strip you naked and tie you to the bed and have my way with you and there is none to gainsay me.”

“Aye, that you could, for you are stronger than I. But afterward mayhap you ought to purge the entire castle of daggers. Aye, and the whole of England, too, while you’re about it. Else you had better leave me tied to your bed forever.”

“The suggestion has merit.” He took a step toward her and she scooted around the table, putting it between them. “I’m beginning to think that naked and tied to my bed is the only place for you.”

She had never seen anyone move so fast. He didn’t come around the table, he came
over
it. Arianna grabbed the back of the chair, but he snatched it away and sent it flying. Whirling to run, she tripped over the clawed foot of the empty brazier. She was back on her feet in a second, but Raine snagged her arm. He hauled her around and slammed against her, pinning her back against the table.

A scream erupted past her lips before she could stop it. He stopped it with his mouth.

And she was lost. She returned his kiss with all the passion she had felt the night before but held back. He let go of her arm and pressed his palm against the back of her head to kiss her deeper. His tongue thrust, slowed, then stayed, filling her mouth, and he turned his head back and forth, slanting his lips across hers.

Arianna’s heart thundered in her ears and her legs trembled so violently that only the edge of the table and his hand on the back of her head kept her upright. She
rubbed her breasts against his chest and plunged her hand into his hair, twisting her fingers in it, pulling his head back to plant little sucking kisses along the line of his jaw. Her other hand rubbed over his chest. She felt the erratic beat of his heart and his low moan was a vibration against her palm. His hands went around her waist, and he ground his hips against her. He was hard for her.

She flung her head back, her eyes opened wide onto the painted beams that spun and whirled like cartwheels above her. He pressed his lips to the throbbing hollow in her throat and his voice thrummed like a harp string in her blood. “You are mine, Arianna. Mine.”

“No …” she said. But it wasn’t Raine she was trying to deny. It was her own raging need.

He let go of her, so abruptly that she had to grab the table to keep from falling. There was a wildness in his eyes as he stared at her. A sort of bewildered anger. Then he spun around on his heel and left her.

She actually took a step after him before she stopped herself. She looked around the room with glazed eyes, then stumbled back to the chair. She straightened it, then lowered herself into it with careful movements, as if she’d just been stricken with an ague. Her lips felt swollen and bruised and she wet them with her tongue, tasting him.

Her hands fisted on her thighs. There was a yawning, aching hunger low in her belly and he had caused it. He had made her want him and then he had left her.

It matters for naught, she told herself. Aye, it matters not at all. I will show him that I care as little for him as he cares for me, and it will be true, for I care for him not in the least.

Her fingers trembled as she picked up the pen, but she pretended not to notice. She saw that the quill’s end had split and she searched through the clutter on the table for the penknife. She slit through a piece of the horny stem, fashioning a new point.

“My lady …”

The knife jerked, slicing through the pad of her thumb. She watched, mesmerized, as bright red blood welled from the cut and dripped onto the ledger, and it was odd, for she didn’t feel a thing. She looked up into the beautiful face of her husband’s squire. “God’s death, Taliesin, you fool, look what you’ve done.”

“Milady, ’Tis you who have done it. One who is as clumsy as yourself ought not to be allowed around knives.”

“Shut your insolent mouth, boy, and fetch me water and a cloth.” She wasn’t clumsy. She’d never been clumsy in her life until she’d been forced to marry that cursed Norman. If the man wasn’t upsetting her inner humors, his wretched squire was popping up out of nowhere and scaring the sin right out of her.

Her thumb began to throb now with pain. Suddenly a white film formed before her eyes and her whole body trembled. Surely she wasn’t going to faint over a little cut. She gripped the table with her good hand and looked up to see Taliesin walking toward her. He carried the golden mazer in his hands.

Oh, please, no
… she said, except the words had not come out her mouth. And Taliesin was holding out the mazer, only it wasn’t Taliesin, it was an old man, withered and with yellow skin and sunken eyes, but the eyes … the eyes belonged to Taliesin, jet black and shimmering.
Why are you doing this to me?
she cried without sound.
I don’t want to see any more.

But the mazer was in her hands and it was pulsing and hot, and she was looking down into a golden mist that swirled and eddied, enveloping her mind. The mist cleared, became the yellow glare of a morning sun, but the air was cool, the crisp air of autumn. She heard the squeal of a stuck pig and smelled blood, and she laughed

He laughed as the pigsticker thrust a knife into the hog’s neck. The animal thrashed and squealed and blood spurted into the air. It splattered in the dirt and on his bare feet and legs, and then his mother shoved a steaming kettle of boiled oats beneath the hog’s neck, to catch the blood.

His mouth watered. There would be blood pudding for supper this afternoon and maybe, if there was enough left over, there would be some for him.

“Raine!”

At the sound of his name, he looked up. His brother, Hugh, rode across the bailey on a pony. A magnificent white pony with a long blond mane and tail The pony was too big for Hugh; his legs could barely grip its fat back. But I am taller than Hugh, he thought. And he wanted that pony. He could taste the wanting of it even more than he could taste the blood pudding.

Hugh laughed. “See what my father the earl has given me for my birthday!”

The earl is my father, too, he wanted to shout, but he didn’t dare. Because he was a bastard, a whore’s son. He knew what the words meant, exactly what they meant. But he still could not understand why his father didn’t like him,
was always so angry with him. Why his father should give Hugh a pony and nothing to him.

Hugh shouted and pointed toward the great hall. A knight came down the steps, a man in sparkling silvered mail with hair the color of the ravens that scavenged in the midden, a man so tall and broad he blocked the pale autumn sun. Someday I will be that big, he thought, as big as my father, a knight like my father, and his guts twisted with the bewildered mixture of fear and longing he always felt when he saw the tall, hard-faced man. But then the knight strode toward him and he was smiling, and suddenly he was sure the smile was for him.

“Father!” he cried and he ran, and he wrapped his arms around the man’s steel-armored legs. “When is my birthday? Can I have a pony too?”

He didn’t see the fist until it was too late. It snatched him by the scruff of his tunic and hauled him high into the air until he looked into a pair of pale-gray eyes.

“You are never to call me that again. I am ‘my lord earl’ to you, you whore’s whelp, and you are never to forget it.”

“But will you give me a pony too? When it’s my birthday?”

The back of a hand smashed into his mouth and he hit the ground with a smack that drove the air from his chest. He skidded along the hard-packed dirt and into the butchered hog, knocking over the kettle. Blood-soaked oats slopped over him and his mother screamed at him and Hugh laughed. But it was his father’s voice, harsh with anger, that squeezed his chest with pain.

“Shut your mouth, boy, or I’ll have the flesh flogged from your bones. Aye, I’ll have you flogged anyway. Impudent whelp …”

His chest heaved as he fought for breath and tears burned his eyes, but he didn’t cry because knights never cried.

His mother bent over him. Her hair fell across her face and into her mouth that was red and open with laughter.
She cackled and prodded him with her toe. “ ‘When is me birthday?’ he asks. Well, it’s been an’ gone and we all forgot it. Tried to forget it, mayhap, ’cause we never wanted ye born in the first place. Paid me an old witch thrupence to purge ye. Puked and bled me guts out for three days, I did. Near killed me, it did. But ye hung on, ye stubborn, tough lil’ bastid. ‘When’s me birthday?’ he asks. Well, we forgot it, we did.”

But he didn’t care about his birthday anymore, because he had seen the marshal coming with his knotted rope, and he turned and pressed his face against the ground that was wet and sticky with the hog’s blood and the spilled mush.

The rope slashed across his back, but he didn’t cry because knights never cried….

“I won’t cry,” Arianna said.

“Well, I should hope not, my lady. It’s only a little cut, after all.”

Arianna blinked against the haze of a bloody sun that dimmed and became the green-spangled walls of her chamber. For a moment she felt a burning pain across her back and she was confused, for Taliesin was pressing a cloth against her thumb. She had opened her mouth to tell him it wasn’t her thumb that hurt, when nausea suddenly cramped her stomach and the painted walls tilted and blurred. She clenched her jaws, squeezing her eyes shut. She thought she smelled boiled oats and hog’s blood, but that couldn’t be, for it was late July, not slaughtering time, and she had ordered no pigs butchered this morning. And then no sooner did she think that then she remembered.

The old bard had put the golden mazer in her hands—no, Taliesin had startled her and she had cut her thumb with the penknife, and that fool boy brought over the mazer and she had made the mistake of looking into it and she’d had a vision. That was all, simply a vision. She had watched a hog being butchered in a strange bailey that must have been Chester, for the old earl was there;
she had recognized him, for he looked so much the way his son did now. And Hugh was there, he had been given a pony for his birthday and when she saw it she wanted one too….

No,
Raine
had wanted the pony. He had been the one in the bailey and she had just seen that brief moment out of his past. Except that she had done more than see it, she had
been
him, been Raine as a small boy and everyone had forgotten her birthday—no,
his
birthday. It had been Raine’s birthday that was forgotten. There had always been a fuss made over her on her birthdays.

Arianna clenched her teeth against a shudder that racked her body. These visions were becoming too real. To be in someone else’s mind and heart like that, it was too frightening to contemplate, for what if she lost herself and never came back?

“You’re not going to faint over a little bit of blood, are you, my lady?”

She opened her eyes. Taliesin had ripped off a piece of the cloth and was tying it around her thumb. A curtain of flame-colored hair obscured his face. “Why are you doing these things to me?” she demanded. She still felt queasy inside, all hollow and sad.

His head came up, and he brushed the hair back with a pale, thin hand. His eyes glimmered at her, like a cat’s eyes at night. “Because the cut must be cleaned,” he said. “Else it will putrefy and your arm will rot off.”

He had hold of her hand still, and it trembled in his. “Don’t play the fool with me, boy. Why are you making me see these things … feel them …?”

“What things? If you mean startling you so that you cut your thumb, you must acquit me, my lady, for I knocked ere I entered. I feared something was amiss, for my lord had come thundering into the hall, all wild-eyed like a charger with a burr beneath its saddle, nearly knocking me down, and bellowing at
me
for being in his way. I pray you haven’t bungled things again, my lady.” He heaved a
long-suffering sigh. “For, the goddess be my witness, I am being worn to the bone trying to keep the peace between you.”