Keeper of the Dream by Penelope Williamson Read Free Book Online Page A

water.
    But the glowing mist remained and within it a slender figure began to take form, a wraith, floating in the air on a sea of luminescence. Light shot up in rays around its head, like the halos of the saints painted on the chapel walls.
    The Norman lord didn’t see the flickering wraith in the doorway. He had pushed himself to his knees, his hand groping up her leg. Hysterical laughter bubbled in Arianna’s throat. Of course he didn’t see it. It was her vision, her dream. She inched forward, stretching out her arm, and her fingers curled around the mill….
    The mist swirled and eddied and darkened to the color of blood. But the sea of light around the wraith glimmered, brightened. He lifted his arm and pointed … pointed right at the knight.
    The light pulsed, throbbed. It was so intense now, it burned Arianna’s eyes; all she saw was a piercing whiteness. She felt the knight’s hand close around her breast, and with the last visages of her conscious control, she swung the quern, aiming for the place where she hoped his head would be, though she could see nothing but the cold, white light.
    The quern thudded into something soft and she heard a grunt and a curse. “You’ll pay for that, you bitch.”
    Fingers tore at her clothes, kneading her breasts. The light shimmered, flared, she saw the figure of the vision so clearly she thought he must surely be real. A blue-white flame shot from the end of his pointing finger, a bolt of fire that leapt across the room to strike the knight, engulfing him in a sudden flash like lightning.
    In the second before darkness swallowed her, Arianna thought she heard the knight scream.

3

    It was the closest he had been to home in six years.
    If he could call it home. It was, at least, the place where he had been born, where he had lived the first fifteen years of his life. They had been years spent in the Earl of Chester’s stables, shoveling dung and dodging the marshal’s fists.
    He had been back only once since he had left. And on that day, that single day out of all the days of his life, he had been full of such hope that anything, even love and happily-ever-after, could come true if only you believed. It had been the same month as this, July. The sun had risen in a sky that was the exact lavender-blue of her eyes and the air had smelled of primroses and the sea, and …
    But, no, it was wiser, safer, not to remember at all.
    The man they called the Black Dragon rode with half his company of knights, moving at the fast pace of a good war-horse and well ahead of the main body of his army. Henry’s summons had not sounded urgent, but it was never politic to keep a king waiting.
    They traveled through the thick of the Coed Euloe, a forest of mountain ash, pine, and tangled oak thickets.The storm had blown away and the sun was out, but the world beneath the dense leafy bower was the dim gray of twilight. The air smelled of the damp earth, and their chargers’ hooves made no sound as they padded across a ground mulchy with leaves and rotting cones. The trill of a blackbird was the only thing to break the soft silence. Amid this quiet and peace, the knight tried not to think, because on the other side of these wooded hills lay the English border, and just across the border was Chester … and home.
    He could go there now. Now that his father was dead.
    If he went home now, Sybil would be there. She would greet him at the gate of the castle, and her face would light with joy, for it had been so very long. “Oh, Raine …” she would say. Just that.
Raine.
But the sound of his name falling from those lips would be sweeter than the song of an angel.
    She would send servants for food and drink, and she would lead him into the great hall. There, she would play and sing for him, just as she had when they were children. He would feast his eyes upon her—but only on her pale blond head as she bent over her psaltery, for then she couldn’t catch him looking at her and see the pain