“You can’t run away in the middle of a storm,” the boy said, and his thin hand looked blue in the flashes of lightning as it closed around her arm.
At his touch a torrent of fire sizzled through Arianna, as if the power of the storm had been transferred into the boy. Or was coming from him …
Her mind shuddered at the thought even as it came to her. The light around the squire flared and shimmered, and his black eyes glittered silvery as if lit by the moon from within. Lightning flared again, crackling and spitting around them, so bright and hot it seared her skin. She screamed, instinctively flinging her hands over her head. She smelled brimstone and golden spots danced before her eyes. But when the spots faded and she focused onto Taliesin’s face, she saw only a boy, who looked even more frightened than she felt.
“Glory,” he said on a sharp intake of breath, his eyes wide. “That was close …”
She tried to calm the horse, which was now thoroughly panicked by the storm. She led it toward the open door. Taliesin kept after her with his tongue.
“If you will only pause to think, my lady. My lord is going to be very, very angry about this. It does not auger well for your future happiness, if you stab your husband on your wedding night and then run away a scarce week later. He will only have to go after you and it will put him in a foul temper.” Suddenly Taliesin threw himself in front of her. “Don’t do this, my lady, I beg of you.”
“Let me by, boy. Else you’ll only get hurt.”
The squire clenched his fists and ground his teeth. “Nay, I won’t try to stop you, for it isn’t allowed, goddess spare me. And curse you both, for she surely hadn’t reckoned on the pair of you when she made up the rules.”
“What rules? What—” Arianna nearly choked on a scream as Kilydd suddenly reared up out of the swirling, howling darkness.
And thrust the dagger to the hilt between Taliesin’s ribs.
The boy’s eyes opened wide and light flared out of them, like twin rays from a white sun. In that same instance lightning flashed, followed by a crack of thunder so loud the earth shook. Taliesin’s lids fluttered closed and he slumped forward, all jointless and floppy like a rag doll. Arianna caught him as he fell and his weight bore her down to the floor.
There was a wet, black stain on the boy’s tunic and his face was pale and still, like a wax statue. Arianna held him in her arms and looked up at her cousin. He was of her blood and she had betrayed Raine because of this man. “You’ve killed him,” she said, unable to believe it, not wanting to believe it. “You’ve killed Taliesin.”
“Good riddance.” Kilydd reached down and yanked Arianna to her feet. Taliesin’s body rolled over, his arms flinging out flat like a broken crucifix. “Let’s get out of here. It’s pouring hard enough to drown a duck out there. We could ride right through the front gate and no one would see us.”
Arianna jerked out of his grasp. “Then go, damn you.” She fell back onto her knees before the body on the floor. Taliesin … Oh, God, he’s killed Taliesin. Lightning flashed again, glinting wetly off the red, red blood on the boy’s tunic; the tunic was drenched with blood. If he bled still, perhaps he wasn’t dead yet. She should summon the castle leech. And Raine, she would get Raine. Except, Raine wasn’t here….
Kilydd hauled her up again, by the hair this time. “Oh, no, little cousin. You’re coming with me. You’ll bring me a pretty enough ransom to pay for a half-dozen armies.”
Arianna swung her fist at his head, but he ducked it easily. He twisted her hair around his forearm, pulling so tightly she had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. “Don’t be a fool. Raine hates me. He wouldn’t give you a sow’s ear to get me back.”
Kilydd laughed. “He’ll pay. For the sake of his pride he can do naught else.”
She struggled harder, though she was helpless against his strength. “Kilydd, please. I have betrayed my husband and destroyed all hope for my marriage to save your life. Don’t repay me in this way.”
“Arianna, geneth, forgive me, but there are some things a man must do …” The howling wind snatched away the last of his words as he swung her around.
She saw his balled-up fist in the second before it connected with her jaw.
An icy spray that tasted of salt slashed against Arianna’s face, reviving her. Kilydd had her mounted on the saddle in front of him, his arm wrapped like a smithy’s vise around her waist. They were by the river. She couldn’t see it, for the night was too black, but the sound of the rushing water battered her ears like the flapping wings of a million birds.
She thought Kilydd was making for the bridge that crossed from the Tegeingl into Rhos, but the storm was disorienting. The wind seemed to be coming from every direction at once, driving the rain at them in sheets that slammed against their faces, swirling up spume from the river, so that it felt as if they were being sucked into some giant tidal pool. Water burned Arianna’s eyes and clogged her throat. She wondered if it were possible to drown in rain.
Lightning snaked across the sky, making it suddenly as bright as a midsummer’s day. Arianna gasped, for the gentle Clwyd was now a raging torrent. The waters had burst over the banks, completely swallowing the piers and had almost reached the walls of the houses that fronted the quay.
The squat lump of the toll house wavered before them through a curtain of water. Arianna thought at first that the bridge had been washed away, for the pilings were completely underwater. But then the timbered span emerged for a moment, before being covered again by the rushing river.
Kilydd kicked his heel into the palfrey’s side. The horse reared, then stumbled, and Kilydd cursed. His arm squeezed Arianna’s middle, cutting off her breath.
She clawed at his smothering arm, fighting for air. The palfrey balked against crossing the bridge, then suddenly darted forward. They were nearly thrown from the saddle.
Lights pricked at Arianna’s eyes as she struggled to breathe. It felt as if her chest had been crushed by a boulder. She twisted, pulling against the arm that pinned her. But Kilydd thought she was trying to get away, and tightened his grip.
The horse’s hooves slipped on the wet planking of the bridge. Several inches of water swirled around his fetlocks. Suddenly the bridge heaved beneath them, as if the thing were alive and was trying to buck them off its back. The horse stumbled to his knees.
The abrupt movement broke the grasp Kilydd had around her waist, and Arianna sucked in a life-saving breath of air. Over the screech of the wind and the rushing of the blood in her ears, she heard the wail of splintering timbers. Suddenly, she was flying through the air. The world became a maelstrom of sucking, swirling water and splintering wood. Something brushed against her. She tangled her fingers in it, and thought it might be the horse’s tail.
She opened her mouth to scream, and swallowed blackness instead.
16
“Gwynedd! I’ve come for my wife!”
The Black Dragon sat astride his charger, facing a gate banded with iron and studded with wicked brass points. Behind him ranged a mere handful of men—men who sported bloodied limbs and dented shields and determined faces. The knight’s face was as blank as the bleak cliffs that surrounded him, but his challenge bounced off the rocky crags.
“Gwynedd!”
His wife watched from a window in the tower. Her hands pressed hard into the rough wood of the sill and her eyes were riveted on the knight seated tall on his charger. He was silhouetted against a fire- and blood-streaked sky, the setting sun at his back, his pennon snapping in the hot summer wind.
He had come for her. Never would she have believed his reckless pride would compel him to come after her.
Perched high like an eagle’s nest on a dramatic rocky outcrop, her father’s fortress of Dinas Emrys dominated the narrow defile and broken hills below. It was not the most luxurious of Owain’s royal llys, but it was one of the more impregnable. It lay hidden within a land of haunted forests and mist-enshrouded mountains, of steep peaks all jumbled together in c
onfusion, as if dashed to earth by the hand of an angry god.
Raine’s voice slammed against the castle walls. “Gwynedd! Send down my wife!”
“I hear you, Norman.” Owain, Prince of Gwynedd, emerged onto the battlements. He faced his son-in-law with his hands on his hips, his legs splayed wide. “You are far from home, Lord Raine of Rhuddlan.”
The prince’s scarlet mantle billowed in a sharp gust of wind and Raine’s horse reared. The muscles in the knight’s legs flexed as he turned the great beast in a tight circle, bringing it under control. He threw back his head, bare of any helmet, and his raven hair glinted blue under the dying rays of the sun. “Where is my wife?”
“She is here,” Owain answered, his words echoing down the narrow defile.
The two men stared at each other, unblinking, faces hard with challenge.
“Send her out to me.”
“Come and get her.”
No knight no matter how brave and reckless could take Dinas Emrys with so few men. But the Black Dragon merely laughed. His charger danced aside, and the wedge of men in back of him parted a moment to reveal Rhodri tied to a cob. The boy was unharmed but frightened, his eyes taking up the whole of his pale face.
And though it seemed he spoke softly, Raine’s voice carried clearly to Arianna in her chamber. “Aye, I will come, Owain of Gwynedd. Alone. And I will come out again. With my wife. Your son is simply here to ensure that you behave.”
Arianna held her breath. She knew Raine would never harm her brother, but her father would not be as sure, could never take such a chance. Her husband sat motionless on his charger, waiting. After a long look, Owain turned and signaled to his guards. The gate groaned open and the portcullis rope screamed as it was wound around the winch, drawing up the timber and iron-fitted grill.
Raine came on alone. The sun slid behind a mountain, and the world fell into shadows just as his horse’s hooves clattered across the drawbridge. Then he was inside the fortress, with her. There was nowhere left to run.
It was an irony when she thought about it, for she had never set out to run away from him in the first place.
The flooding river had thrown her up on a rocky slope, though she hadn’t known it at the time. When she opened her eyes it had been to warm sunlight and the smell of wet. It was as if the whole earth had been plunged into a wash trough and left to soak. Trees dripped water and the marsh grass was so soggy it could have been wrung out into buckets. Even the wind was damp. But the sky above was clear and as blue as a field of cornflowers.
The palfrey grazed among the rocks beside her, but there was no sign of her cousin. She searched for him among the tangled brush along the river, whose silty waters still rushed madly as if fleeing from the devil. She called Kilydd’s name until she was hoarse, but got only silence in return.
It was an empty silence, as if she and the horse were the only living things left on earth. The terrain was unfamiliar, which meant she had probably been carried several rods downstream from Rhuddlan. She had been dumped on the west side of the river, the wrong side for getting home.
It was strange, she realized suddenly, that she had so easily thought of Rhuddlan as home. Though it wasn’t so much those bloodred walls she belonged to now, as their master. But the combination of the freakish storm and high tides had swollen the Clwyd to three times its normal girth. It would be days before the river could be crossed, save by boat.
She sat down on the bank, hugging her knees, and looked across the river. The ground over there was much like the ground she sat on, lumped with lichen-mottled rocks and matted tangles of soggy weeds. So close, yet it might as well have been on a different world.
But then we have never been of the same world, Raine and I, she thought. The differences between them were ones of the heart, and could never be bridged.
In truth, she would have to be witless to go back to him. Because of her, his squire was most likely dead and Kilydd set free to stir up more rebellion. Raine would never want to see her face again, unless it was mounted along with the rest of her head on a spike atop his castle wall.
Nay, she would do better to go to Gwynedd and wait. If Raine still wanted her for his wife, she would soon know it. If he did not, which was far more likely, her father could petition Rome to dissolve the marriage. Doubtless they would never have to set eyes on one another again.
So she had ridden the palfrey overland to Gwynedd, to the fortress of Dinas Emrys, where her father usually spent the waning summer months.
She arrived in the middle of the night, exhausted and nearly fainting from hunger. Her mother had stopped her father’s shocked questions with a single, sharp command. She filled Arianna’s cramping stomach with a mild beef broth and bundled her aching body into a bed of warm, soft down blankets that smelled of sandlewood. The next morning, before the fortress awoke, Arianna had walked down to the nearby lake to be alone, to think, and to decide how best to explain to her father all that had happened.
A thick mist rose up from the water to wrap around the rocky shore like scarves of gauze. A grove of the sacred oak encircled the lake, and the gray-leafed branches, thick with mistletoe, seemed to weep and shiver in the wind. It was said that once, long ago, two dragons had fought to the death in this lake. She tilted back her head and stared up at jagged black and purple peaks that cut into a metallic sky. The wind screeched through the rocky crags. When dragons died, so it was said, they made such a sound. Sad and lonely.
Arianna shuddered, hugging herself.
“You’ll catch your death out here. ’Tis damp enough to rust gold.”
The mist curled around her father’s booted legs as he walked toward her. He was a big man, bigger than normal in his thickly padded leather gambeson. His gray-streaked hair fell unbound around his shoulders and fluttered like a banner in the wind. The face he showed her was carved in stern, forbidding lines. He looked more the warrior that morning than a prince.
He stopped beside her. At first they didn’t speak, but stared together out over the lake that was like a beaten silver platter beneath the cloudy sky. A sad ache squeezed her chest, a wrenching loneliness. Her father would tell her it was the hiraeth that haunted her, that wistful longing for things lost or left undone, for places far away but not forgotten. For a love and life that might have been.
A sob started deep in her chest, bursting out her throat before she could stop it. Her father turned and she went into his arms. “There, there, fy merch, my daughter, don’t cry. I will take care of you. Your papa will take care of you.”
Arianna poured out into her father’s chest the story of all that happened—Kilydd’s rebellion, her betrayal, the storm, Taliesin’s death. And Raine, Raine, Raine … When she had done, she pulled away, sniffling and wiping at her nose with the sleeve of her bliaut. “He will hate me now,” she said, “and who can blame him?”
Owain cupped her cheeks with his rough palms. “You are home, my daughter. You’ve nothing to fear from the Norman bastard, he can’t touch you here.”
She wrapped her fingers around his wrists and leaned back so that she could look into his eyes. “No, Papa. You don’t understand. I want to go back.”
He shook his head. “ ’Tis too late for that.” He reached up and stroked her head, his callused fingers snagging in her hair. “Don’t despair, sweetling. I can have the marriage annulled. I will find you another man, a better man this time. A Cymro, eh? One of our own.”
“But the treaty—”
“The treaty be hanged. The Norman isn’t likely to forgive what you have done. I will not send my daughter to her death. Not even for Wales.”
She thought of all the tales she had heard of the Black Dragon. Ruthless in battle, merciless in victory. She had seen this side of him, but she had seen another side as well.
“I know Lord Raine will be angry with me, very angry. Yet I don’t think he will hurt me. Not in any irreparable way.”
Owain searched her face. “You are sure of this?”
/> Arianna wasn’t sure. But for her father’s peace of mind, she nodded. “I want to go back to him, Papa. Please try to fix it so that I can go back to him.”
Owain turned aside. He tugged at the ends of his thick, drooping mustaches, a habit of his when he was deep in thought. “What is he like, as a man?”
“He is much like you. He is hard, yet fair. He is brave, yet he never boasts of it. He would growl at me for saying so, but at heart he is much the chivalrous knight: steadfast in his honor and loyalty, generous to those less fortunate.” Though she didn’t know it, a soft smile touched her lips. “And when he lets himself, he can be gentle, tender….”
Owain looked askance at her, pretending to scowl. “You compliment us both, and overmuch, I think.”
Smiling, she stretched up on tiptoe and kissed his weathered cheek. “Fy nhad … I compliment you, my father. I could be wrong about the Norman. But if I’m not, I think … I think that I could come to love him.”
His heavy hands fell on her shoulders and he turned her to face him. “Ah, geneth. I want so much for you to be happy.” He hugged her close to him, stroking her hair with his big hand, kissing the crown of her head. She ought to have been comforted, but she was not.
I want so much for you to be happy, he had said. Yet for Wales he had delivered up her and Rhodri as hostages to the English king. For Wales he had allowed his only daughter to be married to the enemy. For Wales he had sacrificed the life of one of his sons. For all his gentle ways, her father was a hard man. Hard as the granite cliffs above their heads, practical and ruthless when he had to be. There was nothing Owain of Gwynedd would not do for Wales, and the dream of freedom.
Now Arianna stood at the window of her father’s llys and watched the coming night swallow the last of the day. He had come for her, her black knight, a man just as hard, just as practical and ruthless as her father. He was here in the great hall below. She remembered his face the way it had been when last she saw it. Hard with anger. Hot with lust. Two weeks ago she had thought she would never look upon that face again. But he was here now, he was here, he was here, and she couldn’t wait a moment longer.
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