“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.
He hesitated at the chapel door, knowing himself for a hypocrite. The smell of incense and burning candle wax wafted out the opening, black like the mouth of a cave, bringing with it a jumble of memories, of childhood hours spent going through the motions of a worship he had never believed in. The sculptured saints that flanked the portal seemed to smirk at him as he entered.
Though it was the lord’s duty to set a good example, he rarely attended the Mass, and so he had not often been in here. The paintings on the walls glowed like brocades, but he could not feel God in them, or in the sacred vessels of silver and gold. He laid on the floor before the altar in the attitude of prayer, arms stretched out from his sides. The stone was cold against his face and smelled dank, like a grave.
He thought he would have a hard time with the words, but they poured out of him, silent, beseeching, from the heart.
Dear Lord … Don’t take her. Do anything else, take everything else, but leave me Arianna. Don’t take Arianna from me.
Two months later, Arianna found herself leaning against a cruck that supported the thatched roof of a hovel, dripping rainwater into the dirt.
Christina, the draper’s daughter, dipped a ladle into a black iron cauldron that hung by a chain over the fire. She spooned soup into wooden bowls and cast a nervous smile at Arianna over her shoulder. Then her gaze slid to the tawny-haired man who lay, sweating and flushed with fever, on a straw pallet against the wall.
Rain cascaded like a cataract over the lintel of the door, left open to let in the day’s meager light. Gusts of wind sent water splashing across the threshold that had been whitewashed, as they were in all Welsh homes, even the most humble, to keep the devil from entering. This home was indeed humble. It was a hafod—a summer hut used by Welsh herdsmen. It was not a pleasant place to spend a winter’s day.
Circular in shape and made of tightly woven osier reeds, the hut had no hearth. But a makeshift one had been scooped out of the floor and vented through a hole in the roof, that let in more rain than it let out smoke. The fire of wet vine branches crackled and spat. In spite of the open door, the air inside was close, smelling of wood smoke and soup, and underneath, of wet sheep.
From his pallet in the corner, Kilydd, his brow lowered into a frown, watched his woman carry the bowls of soup and wooden spoons over to the table. His eyes flashed to Arianna and his scowl deepened.
Christina set the bowls onto the scarred, ringed-marked boards, then she cut off hunks of brown bread from a stale loaf. There were two other men in the hut. One already sat at the table, a battered harp in his lap. His fingers moved nimbly over the strings, picking out a plaintive melody. His voice, dark and rich and so very Welsh, like the smell of the soup, filled the tiny hovel:
“No one shall dare to trod on my mantle,
No one without bloodshed shall plough my land …”
The other man tapped into a barrel of ale and brought two brimming leather jacks to the table. He started to straddle the bench.
Kilydd’s voice, weak but irritable, came from the pallet. “Get out of here.”
The man stopped, half crouched over the bench. “It’s bloody pissing out there!”
“Out!” Kilydd bellowed, and the men, grumbling, picked up their food and left. “You, too, Christina,” Kilydd said. Then he added, his voice softer, “Please.”
The girl gave him a look that was halfway between hurt and anger. Taking a mantle from a peg off the wall, she stepped out into the rain.
“They’ll get wet,” Arianna said.
“There’s another hafod just down the hill.” Kilydd’s gaze took in the slight swell of her stomach and his honey-colored eyes narrowed. “You’re breeding again. You shouldn’t have come out in this weather.”
“It wasn’t pouring good Welsh sunshine when I left.”
He started to laugh, but then the laugh turned into a tearing hack that jerked at his chest, leaving his face purple. “Did you bring something for this bloody cough?” he said when he had gotten back his breath.
Arianna pushed her fur-trimmed chaperon off her head and reached within the folds of her mantle for her medicine bag. She poured a jack of ale and mixed into it a measure of horehound.
She sat beside him on the pallet, putting the jack into his hands. The wind coming in through the open doorway lifted the sweat-dampened hair on his brow. This close to him she could see that he was sicker than she had thought. His flesh burned with the fever, and his skin had a papery look, like a dried-out husk. But she no longer felt love for him, not even pity. She would never forget or forgive how he had thrust a knife between Taliesin’s ribs.
She made both her face and her voice hard. “I wouldn’t have come to you, cousin, even knowing that you were ill. But I am here because Christina said you wanted to talk about surrendering to my husband. Did she lie?”
Kilydd’s head fell back weakly onto the pillow. “Nay, she didn’t lie. But I’m not committing suicide, Arianna. I’ll want a guarantee of mercy first. Can you get it for me?”
“Would you swear to give up all claim to Rhos and go away, leaving us to live in peace?”
“To him I would swear.”
“No, to me. You must swear it to me. Your blood kin.”
He flushed, his eyes shifting away from hers. He would break his oath to Raine, this she knew. But not an oath given to blood kin. No Welshman would dare, for on Judgment Day, it was said, the Welsh would have to answer to God in Welsh.
“Aye, curse you,” he said. “I’ll swear.”
“Now. I’ll hear your oath now, Kilydd ap Dafydd. On peril of your soul.”
He glared at her. “On peril of my soul I swear before God that I will give up all claim to Rhos and make no more war on that Norman bastard you call husband, God rot his wretched soul.”
“That was a very poor oath, and I don’t think I believe it. Why do this at all if you are so unwilling?”
His fist thudded on the cot. “It’s Christina, damn the wench. She’s latched herself to my side like a leech.” His wide mouth spasmed, and he swung his hand in an arc. “Look at this place. Another month up here and her beautiful white skin will start to look like a ham cured in a smokehouse. She’s rail-slat thin as ’tis and wasting away even as I look at her. I told her she should leave me the hell alone and go back to her shop in Rhuddlan.” He looked down, punishing the blanket with his fists. “We had a fight.”
“Small wonder, that is. I would have clouted you with a broom for such sweet words.”
Kilydd’s head came up, and he flashed a smile. “She poured a jack of ale over my head.”
Arianna contemplated her cousin. In truth, he was handsome, with his flowing blond mustaches and soft, golden eyes. But there was a spitefulness in him, and a cravenness that Arianna didn’t like. There was no accounting, she thought suddenly, for some women’s tastes.
But she did still like Christina, and so she tried to explain to Kilydd what he was being too obtuse to see. “When a woman loves a man all she wants is to be with him, to spend her life with him and bear his children.”
“Pity then that your papa the prince married you to a Norman bastard,” he said, a sour curl to his mouth.
Suddenly, through the splashing rain, they heard the rumbling thunder of approaching hooves followed by a thin scream like a trapped hare. Arianna ran to the door, while from the pallet, Kilydd blistered the air with his oaths.
Rhuddlan knights surrounded the hut. Kilydd’s men al ready lay flat on the ground, their arms trussed behind their backs. Two horsemen had bracketed Christina against a tree. She had her hands to her face, weeping, but she was not being hurt.
Arianna turned from the doorway and looked at Kilydd. His face, even with the fever, was blanched with fear. “And a pity it is that my Norman bastard has captured you, cousin … before you had a chance to surrender.”
She stepped out into the rain.
The black knight looked down at her from the height of his horse, menacing in his dark armor. She wondered if he had expected to find her here, for he did not appear surprised to see her. Perhaps he had followed her.
Without a word, he dismounted before her.
With his face like this, wiped free of all expression, he looked as he had on the day they first met—ruthless and cruel. But she knew him now, as surely he must know her. He must know that if she were here with Kilydd, then there was a reason for it, and that she would tell him.
One of the men brought over her horse. Raine made a step of his clasped hands and boosted her into the saddle. “Sir Odo, take the Lady Arianna back to Rhuddlan,” he said, his voice flat. He still had not spoken a word to her.
“Aye, sir.” Sir Odo’s face was as blank as his liege lord’s. But not his eyes. The last time something like this had happened, the big knight had looked at her with disgust and disillusionment. This time she saw only worry in his kind eyes.
He, at least, thought Arianna, no longer believes me capable of betrayal.
The clouds had emptied themselves for the moment. A cold wind flattened the grass and whipped at the edges of Arianna’s mantle. The scudding storm cast shadows on the land. The cries of the crows were brittle in the air.
She gathered up the reins and urged the horse into a canter, leaving Sir Odo to follow.
It was evening before Arianna sought out her husband. She appeared at the door to their bedchamber, as he was just stepping into a copper-banded, wooden bathing tub. He had his back to her. Steam wafted up from the tub to wreathe him in a perfumed mist. The only light in the room came from the brazier and a single wall cresset, so that a soft, golden glow bronzed his skin.
Edith stood beside the tub, there to assist with his bath. With a silent jerk of her head, Arianna sent the maidservant from the room.
She knelt behind him, and taking up a cloth, began to lather his back.
He flexed his shoulders, sighing. She lowered her head and planted her lips on the nape of his neck.
“A little lower, Edith, love … ah, that’s it.”
She nipped his ear, hard.
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her around. Her chest landed with a splat in the water and her face wound up bare inches from his. Hot water lapped around her breasts.
“You knew it was me.”
“I smelled you, little wife.”
“Are you saying I stink?”
He showed his teeth in a strange smile. “Not at all.”
He let her go, and she straightened. Cooler air bathed the warm, wet silk of her bliaut and she felt her nipples tighten. She wondered if he saw them, and glanced up to see that he did. But no warmth softened his eyes. They remained as hard and flat as the flint that was their color. Her eyes locked with his, she lathered her hands with the soap and rubbed them over his chest.
His flesh was hot. The steam, smelling of violets, rose between them, so that the features of his face blurred and softened. The water lapped against the sides of the tub. Rain rattled against the shutters. A single bead of sweat trickled down her neck into the valley between her breasts.
Her rubbing, stroking palms moved steadily lower, across the planes of his chest, over the ridges of his stomach, and lower still. He grabbed her hands, pushing, and they slid off his flesh with a soft, sucking sound.
“You have not asked me what I will do with him,” he said.
“You will do what you must…. You have not asked me how you came to find me there with him.”
“He wanted you to arrange for his surrender.”
“He told you that.”
“Aye.” He let go of her hands and cupped her cheeks between his wet palms. “I trust you, Arianna. You are my staunchest vassal. But I have come to think that I was wrong to force you to chose between me and your blood kin, your people. It is an unnatural thing—”
She stopped the flow of his words with her fingers. “I have chosen.” She moved her fingers back and forth, once, across his hard mouth. “I love you above all others, Raine. I always will.” She replaced her fingers with her lips, giving him an unhurried, deep kiss.
She ended the kiss first, saving more for later. She began to wash him again, her hands moving over his legs. But only going so far up between his thighs. Still, she heard the catch in his breathing.
“I put him and the girl on a ship for Ireland,” he said.
He had spared Kilydd for her, and she loved him all the more for it because she knew he had done it against his better judgment. He believed he risked future trouble, yet to please her, he had been willing to take that risk.
“You might come to regret it,” she said. “He probably won’t stay there.”
“Aye, in that you are right. He probably won’t.”
She rubbed her thumb across the sharp angle of his hipbone, following it to the meeting of his pelvis. But her eyes were fastened onto his. “If he does not stay there, if he comes back to make war on you again and you must hang him,” she said, “then I will stand by your side and watch you do it, and I will not weep for him.”
He said nothing. He had already said it—she was his staunchest vassal.
Her hands moved down between his legs. “There is, I think, a soft side to you, husband.”
“Like hell. I have no soft sides.”
Her hand enveloped him, and she smiled.