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

in his eyes. She would ask him what he had done, the sights he had witnessed these last six years. She would laugh in all the right places, and tears would form in those lavender-blue eyes when he spoke of the sad times.
    But eventually the evening would end. Then he would watch as the girl he had once loved climbed the stairs without him, to enter her bedchamber. The chamber where she had spent every night of the last six years … sharing his brother’s bed.
    Raine cursed savagely beneath his breath. He should have had the sense to stay away from this corner of England. Maybe he shouldn’t ask the king for the Honor of Rhuddlan. It was a marcher lordship, true enough, and like the other borderland fiefs it could be parlayed, if itslord was ambitious enough, into one of the more powerful baronies in England. It was all he wanted now, all he needed, but for one thing—it was too damned close to Chester.
    The silence was suddenly shattered by the sound of a large animal in panic crashing through the trees, and Raine pulled up just as a riderless war-horse burst through the underbrush in front of him. Blood spurted from a wound in the charger’s neck. It wheeled, rearing, tossing back a head that was all flaring nostrils and red, burning eyes. Close on its heels followed another horse, this one with a man in chain mail on its back.
    The knight thundered by Raine and his men. “Ambush!” he shouted over his shoulder. “The Welsh have attacked and the king is down!”
    Raine spun around to take his shield and lance from his squire. “Taliesin, ride back—” The order stopped midway out Raine’s mouth as he stared into the frightened fawn eyes and thin, freckled face of Sir Odo’s ten-year-old page. “What in hellfire are you doing here, and where is my squire?”
    The boy quailed beneath Raine’s fury. “B-back at Rhuddlan where you l-left him, sire. He said there was something there you w-wanted to keep from falling into the earl’s hands.”
    There was nothing at Rhuddlan that Raine wanted to keep from Hugh, beyond the castle itself. More likely Taliesin had spotted that green-eyed wench he fancied. Women would be the death of that boy.
He
would be the death of the boy, when next he got his hands on him.
    Raine sent one of the other squires back to alert the rest of his army. He had started to touch his spurs to his destrier, when he spotted Sir Odo’s page hunched over his cob, trying to blend inconspicuously into the middle of the pack of knights. He glared and pointed at the boy. “And you, lad … you keep away from the fighting. If Icatch you trying to be a hero, I’ll blister your backside with my sword belt afterward. Is that clear?”
    They rapidly pressed single file along the path created by the fleeing horses. Before long they could hear muted sounds of fighting—neighing horses, screams and curses, the hysterical bleat of a trumpet. They emerged into a clearing atop a small rise, and Raine took in the flux of the battle at a glance.
    Below them King Henry and a small band of knights were trapped in a narrow wooded defile. The way ahead was blocked by felled trees, their retreat cut off by the enemy, who sniped at them from the protection of the forest. The knights in their cumbersome armor were no match for the fleet-footed Welsh and the deadly, mail-piercing arrows of their longbows. Already the narrow path and stream were clogged with the bodies of men and horses.
    “The king is dead!” someone screamed, and at that moment the king’s men broke, running for the dubious safety of the forest. Raine saw the royal standard fall.
“A moi, le Raine!”
He shouted his battle cry and spurred his horse down the rise.
    Bellowing like a man possessed, Raine rallied the fleeing royal troop. He paid no attention to the arrows that came at him from all sides, fighting his way toward the place where he had last seen the king. He found Henry on one knee trying to fend off a battle-ax with a shattered