No man except this one.
“Swear it, Arianna, say the words.”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
He started to pull away.
“Wait, my lord!” She recaptured his hands, looking up into his face with blurring eyes. “Wait. I will do it…. I want to do it.”
Tears, hot and salty, rolled down her cheeks and into her mouth, and she didn’t care. She looked down at their hands clasped together around the sword hilt—hers small and white, his larger and brown. Flesh pressing against flesh, yet it was more. It seemed as if her blood flowed into him and his into her. She could feel his heart beat within her own breast.
She spoke the simple oath of homage, changing only one word.
“I, Arianna of Gwynedd, enter into your homage and
become your … woman. And I swear by God and all his saints to keep faith and loyalty to you against all others.”
He pulled her to her feet, and she lifted her face to receive the ritual kiss of peace. But he tossed the sword aside, and snagging his fist in her hair, he yanked her up on her toes to meet his descending mouth. His lips slanted roughly back and forth across hers, pressing hard, forcing her mouth open. He tasted of warm mead, and of himself, and Arianna thought she could kiss him forever.
He bent, and catching her behind the knees and back, he swung her off her feet. He carried her over and fell with her across the bed.
They rolled over and over, back and forth across the broad width of it, their mouths locked together in a kiss. He ended up on top, straddling her. He raised his head and looked down on her with eyes that were no longer cold and remote, but bright and hot with hunger.
“You are mine,” he said. “My vassal.”
“Aye, my lord. I am your vassal.”
He started to lower his head to kiss her again, then stopped, casting a glance back over his shoulder. He rolled off her and strode across the room.
“Raine?”
“I don’t want a pious audience for what I’m about to do,” he said, turning Saint Dafydd around to face the wall.
Laughing, she welcomed him back within the circle of her arms. “Does this mean you are about to perform a French perversion on me?”
“Mayhap,” he answered with the smile, that wonderful smile, that never failed to pull at her heart. “And mayhap, if you are an obedient and most deserving vassal, I will teach you how to perform a French perversion on me.”
* * *
The prince of Gwynedd pressed a
hirlas
brimming with mead into Raine’s hands. The knight’s long brown fingers wrapped around the ancient drinking horn and he smiled at his father-in-law. There was a challenge in that smile, though no word passed between the two men. The hall quieted as they stared at one another, then Raine tilted back his head and drank of the fiery, fermented brew.
Arianna watched the muscles of his strong throat move as he swallowed. He lowered his head, wiped his mouth with the back of wrist, and met his wife’s eyes down the length of the hall. His eyes glinted at her, silver in the smoky torchlight, hot and intimate as a kiss.
Arianna flushed and looked away.
She sat with her mother in front of the central hearth, skeining wool. Arianna held two short sticks between her outstretched hands. Her mother twisted and wound the yarn around the sticks, her small hands quick and deft and looking in the firelight like the fluttering white wings of doves.
Skeining wool was not a task Arianna particularly enjoyed, yet it brought back sweet memories to her, of winter afternoons spent working at household tasks, while her brothers fenced and wrestled and practiced their archery. She was always torn between wanting to join her brothers in their boisterous games and spending that precious, private time with her mother. In such a large and politically important family, one rarely got Cristyn of Gwynedd alone.
Even with a tapestried screen in front of the blaze, the roaring log fire was hot. Smoke drifted up to hang in floating clouds among the painted and gilded rafters. The
bardd teulu
wandered the hall, singing about a red dragon who lived in a cave on the great mountain, Yr Wyddfa Fawr.
“Do you remember,” Cristyn said, as the last haunting notes of the bard’s crwth wafted upward to mingle with the smoke. “Do you remember how when you were little,
you would awake screaming in the middle of the night convinced that there was a little girl-eating dragon skulking beneath your bed?”
Arianna laughed and nodded. Oh, aye, she remembered. She remembered, too, the soft comfort of her mother’s arms holding her in the dark, remembered pressing her face into her mother’s neck and smelling roses. She remembered the brush of her mother’s sun-bright hair, the feel of cool lips on her cheek.
“You would always give me peony seed in hot wine to put me to sleep again.”
“But before that I would take your hand and together we would look under the bed. We never found a dragon.”
Raine’s husky voice floated down the hall. Arianna looked at him, where he sat beside her father on the dais. The wariness between the two men had eased. They were deep in conversation. The flaring tapers cast their shadows onto the wall behind them, creating a monster—a two-headed dragon.
“I think I know what you’re trying to tell me,” Arianna said.
Cristyn’s laugh tinkled brightly, like silver chimes. “I’m pleased that you do, since I’m not sure myself what it was that I was trying to say.”
“You’re saying there is no such thing as a dragon, except in my mind.”
Raine turned his head and again his gaze met hers Arianna felt a warmth in her belly, a tingle, as if she were the one drinking the mead. Again she looked away.
She felt her mother’s eyes upon her and glanced up There was a faint crease between Cristyn’s pale brows; it was a look she wore when she was worried. In that
one
moment, Arianna felt a kinship with the older woman that went beyond blood. A kinship that went back to the first woman that walked the earth … and loved a man.
There had never been any doubt in Arianna’s mind of the fierce love her parents bore for one another. Cristyn
had never been too busy to spare a word or caress for any of her children and stepchildren, but they had all known that Owain was the sun of her world. When he was home she blossomed like a bright gold sunflower; when he was gone she faded and drooped.
Cristyn removed the sticks and passed one end of the skein of wool yarn through the loop at the other. Arianna looked down at her mother’s bent head. “When you first married Papa—did you love him?”
Cristyn glanced up. There was a softness to her face now, as if Arianna saw her through a veil of mist. “Love him?” Cristyn said. “Oh, no. Not at all, for I scarcely knew him and he frightened me. He seemed so distant, so severe. Yet I wanted him to bed me, almost from the first moment he touched me.” She stared into the distance, a faint smile on her lips. “It was like an oil fire—hot, raging, melting. Impossible to put out by any ordinary means.”
Arianna was disconcerted by this revelation, and a little shocked. She turned aside, unable suddenly to meet her mother’s eyes.
Her gaze was drawn up to the dais. Her father sprawled in his high seat, one hand draped over the chair’s carved back, the other nursing the mead horn. Raine laughed at something her father said. His hands flashed with surprising grace, dancing through the air as if he waved an imaginary sword. No doubt he was reliving one of his many tournaments.
She could still feel a warm, wet tenderness between her thighs, the legacy of his lovemaking. She tried to picture her parents doing the things that she and Raine had done that afternoon, but her mind shied away from the thought. Before, she had always looked at Owain and Cristyn of Gwynedd from the perspective of being their daughter, and they were like gods to her, all wise and invincible. Now she suddenly saw them as human, beset with human frailties, driven by human passions.
Owain stood up suddenly and bellowed down the
length of the hall. “Cristyn, my love! Rhuddlan and I are going raiding! Merfyn ap Hywel has a herd of sheep that I’ve had my eye on all this summer. Plump sheep they are, and with fleece white and thick as clotted cream.”
The two battle-hardened warriors helped each other step down from the dais as if it were the sheer face of Yr Wyddfa Fawr itself that they were descending. They walked very slowly and carefully toward the hearth, but stools and benches took a malevolent pleasure in leaping up into their path, so that there was a lot of banging and swearing before they finally arrived, safe but breathless, at the hearth.
Owain laughed and the fumes of his meady breath nearly made Arianna swoon. “A rogue like Merfyn doesn’t deserve such a nice herd of sheep. ’Tis against the laws of nature, is it not, Rhuddlan?”
He gave Raine such a hearty slap on his back that the younger man swayed on his feet. Raine was smiling lazily at Arianna, undressing her with hot, and slightly unfocused, eyes.
“The Norman and I,” Owain proclaimed loudly, “have decided that it is our duty as Christian knights to restore order to the natural … uh … order of things.”
They didn’t wait for permission to leave, but began to pick their way through the sleeping servants and warriors who had bedded down in the aisles of the hall.
“Do not forget your sword and buckler, husband,” Cristyn called out after him.
Arianna turned on her mother. “How can you encourage him in this foolishness? They are so drunk they will never be able to sit a horse, let alone ride all the way into Llyn and do battle with Merfyn ap Hywel.”
“If I forbid him to go, he will turn stubborn. His manly pride will demand that he prove to your Norman husband that the Prince of Gwynedd wears the braies in this hall.’ She lifted her slim shoulders in a shrug. “Besides, they won’t get far.”
Arianna scowled after them. “They are behaving like children.”
“That is the way of men. Girls grow up, you see. We become wives and then mothers. But men remain forever at heart little boys. A wise wife learns when to humor her man’s childish whims. And when not to.”
There was a firm set to her mother’s small pointed chin that Arianna had never noticed before. Arianna couldn’t remember many arguments between her parents, but on the few occasions when her mother had gone nose to nose with her father, it was Owain, the mighty Prince of Gwynedd, who had backed down. Arianna made a resolution that before she left Dinas Emrys with Raine, she would speak with her mother and learn all she could about how to tame a black dragon.
Suddenly a loud splash disturbed the quiet of the hall, followed by a string of bloodcurdling curses.
“God’s death …” Arianna stifled a giggle with her hand. “They’ve fallen into the moat!”
Mother and daughter carefully laid aside their skeins of yarn and went to the rescue of their men. They went slowly, as if taking a stroll on their way to Mass. By the time they arrived at the gatehouse, some of Owain’s
teulu
had already fetched a rope and were preparing to haul the men out of the slimy water. Putting a finger to her lips, Cristyn relieved them of the rope and waved them inside.
It was a dark night, deep and still, with only a few fading stars and a sliver of a moon to cast any light. Cristyn, looking small and slender as a girl, danced over to the thick chain that raised and lowered the drawbridge. She slung the coil of rope over the chain, but she didn’t lower it.
“What in God’s wounds is happening up there?” Owain bellowed. “Where did everybody go? We’re freezing down here, man. And it stinks!”
Grasping the chain with one hand and raising her skirts with the other, Cristyn lowered herself so that she was
sitting on the edge of the bridge, her legs swinging free. Smiling to herself, Arianna did the same. The moat stank of stagnant water and rot. Fortunately for the two warriors now floating down there in the sludge, the castle’s sewage did not drain into the moat, but was carried away instead by an underground stream within the bailey.
Cristyn put her weight on her outstretched arms and leaned down to peer into the darkness. “Owain, my love. Why have you decided to go swimming this time of night? I thought ‘twas your intention to steal Merfyn’s sheep.”
“Cristyn, sweetling, is that you? Do not natter at me, woman. Fetch a rope and be quick about it. And for the Virgin’s sake, cover up your legs!”
Cristyn pulled her skirts up higher, revealing the tops of her stockings. The pale skin of her knees were like two silver oranges in the dim moonlight. “It seems these big, brave knights need our help, daughter. Shall we give it to them?”
Arianna looked down into the moat, but, although she could hear a lot of splashing going on, she could see nothing. “Nay, why should we? If they are such big, brave knights, they ought to be able to help themselves.”
Raine’s voice drifted up to her from out of the black hole beneath her feet. “Arianna, my sweet vassal. Remember this afternoon and the oath you gave me.”
Arianna remembered the afternoon, all of the afternoon. In truth, she felt hot and weak and slightly dizzy whenever she thought of that afternoon. “ Tis my thought,” she said to her mother, though she spoke loud enough to be heard above all the splashing and cursing, “that a night in the moat will go far in teaching them both that to go a-raiding with a belly and a head full of mead is a dangerous undertaking.”
“Arianna!” Raine roared, abandoning all pretense of the gentle lover.
Her father spoke in a wheedling tone that she’d never heard before. “Cristyn, wife of my heart, love of my life
… surely you do not mean to leave me to drown?” When this elicited no response, he changed tactics. “Woman, if you don’t help us out this instant, when I do get out I will make you very, very sorry.”
Cristyn began to hum a lilting little song. From below there came a lot of loud whispering, like the rustle of crows in a corn field. The men were no doubt plotting their next strategy. Arianna wondered whether it would take the form of promises or threats.
“Arianna, are you listening?” Raine demanded.
Arianna swung her legs. “Very well, I’m listening. Since I’ve nothing better to do.”