Gwenhwyfar Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE - PRINCESS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  PART TWO - WARRIOR

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  PART THREE - QUEEN

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Afterword

  NOVELS BY MERCEDES LACKEY available from DAW Books:

  THE NOVELS OF VALDEMAR:

  THE HERALDS OF VALDEMAR

  ARROWS OF THE QUEEN

  ARROW’S FLIGHT

  ARROW’S FALL

  THE LAST HERALD-MAGE

  MAGIC’S PAWN

  MAGIC’S PROMISE

  MAGIC’S PRICE

  THE MAGE WINDS

  WINDS OF FATE

  WINDS OF CHANGE

  WINDS OF FURY

  THE MAGE STORMS

  STORM WARNING

  STORM RISING

  STORM BREAKING

  VOWS AND HONOR

  THE OATHBOUND

  OATHBREAKERS

  OATHBLOOD

  THE COLLEGIUM CHRONICLES FOUNDATION

  BY THE SWORD

  BRIGHTLY BURNING

  TAKE A THIEF

  EXILE’S HONOR

  EXILE’S VALOR

  VALDEMAR ANTHOLOGIES:

  SWORD OF ICE

  SUN IN GLORY

  CROSSROADS

  MOVING TARGETS

  CHANGING THE WORLD1

  Written with LARRY DIXON:

  THE MAGE WARS

  THE BLACK GRYPHON

  THE WHITE GRYPHON

  THE SILVER GRYPHON

  DARIAN’S TALE

  OWLFLIGHT

  OWLSIGHT

  OWLKNIGHT

  OTHER NOVELS:

  GWENHWYFAR

  THE BLACK SWAN

  THE DRAGON JOUSTERS

  JOUST

  ALTA

  SANCTUARY

  AERIE

  THE ELEMENTAL MASTERS

  THE SERPENT’S SHADOW

  THE GATES OF SLEEP

  PHOENIX AND ASHES

  THE WIZARD OF LONDON

  RESERVED FOR THE CAT

  And don’t miss:

  THE VALDEMAR COMPANION

  Edited by John Helfers and Denise Little

  Copyright © 2009 by Mercedes R. Lackey.

  All rights reserved.

  Leatherbound book: Getty (RM) Dorling Kindersley.

  Gold background: Gerrit Greve/Corbis.

  DAW Books Collector’s No. 1489.

  DAW Books Inc. is distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

  All characters in the book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14933-1

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  First Printing, October 2009

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  S.A.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Dedicated to Russell Galen, without whom none of this would be possible.

  PART ONE

  PRINCESS

  Chapter One

  The talk at the hearth of the high hall of her father’s castle was all of magic that wild evening. Harvest-time had come and gone, and Samhain not far off; the old men and women were muttering about a hard winter ahead. Truly, it had turned bitter very quickly, and the harvest, while not scant, was also not bountiful. All that little Gwen knew, though, was that tonight it sounded as if everything cold and evil in the world was trying to get in. She was glad that Castell y Cnwclas was all of stone. Nothing mortal could get past those thick walls and nothing uncanny past the women gathered at the hearth, especially tonight.

  Outside, the wind whined around the stone walls, and made the seats farthest from the hearth almost as cold as if the poor fellows relegated to them were sitting out on the walls. They were making up for the cold by drinking plenty of ale and mead. Inside, the drafts made flames of the torches on the walls flatten and dance, and even the huge open fire on the hearth in the center of the hall flickered this way and that, sending streamers of smoke into peoples’ faces unpredictably. Gwen was glad she was sitting on the stone floor, a bit of old sheepskin between her and the flags, where she was below the smoke. She hugged her knees to her chest and listened to the women of her mother’s circle with the wide eyes of a young owl. Firelight illuminated familiar faces and made them strange with shifting shadows and hectic light.

  The Hall was the biggest room in the castle, and served many purposes. By day it was in turn her father’s audience chamber, the place where meals were served, and the scene of most domestic work that wasn’t done in the kitchen. By night, her father’s men and servants slept there. The walls were as thick as Gwen’s arm was long, broken only by narrow windows too small for anyone but a child to climb through. Right now, heavy wooden shutters closed off the worst of the winds. The hearth-fire in the center gave most of the heat and light, supplemented by the torches on the walls. The stone floor was covered with rushes—newly changed just two days ago, so the herbs strewn among them were still sweet and the floor beneath still clean. The ceiling was lost in darkness and further obscured by the smoke rising to the louvered hole above the hearth.

  It smelled of dampness, of spilled ale, of herbs and cooked meat, of sweaty bodies and wet wool. Faintly, because it had only been two days since it had been swept clean, there was a taint of urine from the dogs and cats that ran free in here. But above all it smelled of smoke.

  The women had claimed the hearth itself, sitting about the fire on benches and stools or, like Gwen and her sisters, on the floor, and the men did not challenge them. No sane man challenged a Wise Woman, much less a gaggle of them. Behind them, on the mead-benches, were the men of her father’s following. He was Lleudd Ogrfan Gawr, called “The Giant,” and unchallenged king of these parts. There were no more Romans to contest his rule. The Romans had come and now gone from here; they mined their tin, lead, and gold no more, and the amphitheater they had built for their so-called games now echoed only to the wail of wild cats at night. And good riddance, said her mother. Her father’s words were more pithy and profane.

  The good-natured growling and grumbling of the men sounded like a muttering chorus of sleepy bears on the edge of hibernation, fat with autumn berries and nuts, and thinking mostly about sleep. Partly, that was the mead and ale of her mother Eleri’s brewing. She put herbs in it—she said to flavor it, but the women all knew it was to make the men calm and sleepy, and that was a secret that would never be breathed to the men, not even to the king her husband. There was little argument on Ogrfan Gawr’s mead benches, and no hot-tempered quarrels that could break into bloo
d feud. Eleri the Queen was a Wise Woman in the sense of knowing the ways of herbs as well as of magic, and she reckoned it worth the effort to keep the men from making more grief than there already was in the world. Bronywn, who served as her right hand and the children’s nurse, was the keeper of her secrets.

  Hunting and fighting and tall tales were the order of business on the mead-benches tonight. With the harvest over, it was hunting that would help keep the men busy until spring, and hunting would be needed to keep the hall fed if the winter was a harsh one. Magic was the subject on the hearthstone; it was the provenance of women—and a very few, very select group of men. The Druids. The bards. The occasional hermit-healer. Eleri had told Gwen that this was because men spent too much time around Cold Iron; wearing it in the form of weapons, crafting it, cherishing it. “Magic shuns Cold Iron,” she had said, with a decided nod. “Men might have the Gift, but while they cling to Cold Iron, they’ll never have the Power.”

  Gwen most especially watched her mother, listened to her words, for the Queen was also the chief sorceress here and high in the Councils of the Wise. Eleri had the Power and had it in abundance. Gwen had watched her, by full moon and waning, by Midsummer sun and Midwinter dark, weaving her Power into the spells that were the weapons she wielded to defend, protect, and nurture their people. There were two thrones in Lleudd Ogrfan Gawr’s High Hall: the one at the mead benches and the one at the hearth. And both were equal. The king guarded the people with his sword. The queen did so with Power.

  There were those that said the queen was Fae-touched. Certainly, despite having given birth to Gwen and all her sisters, she often seemed as young as any of the maids at her hearth. There were those that said the two youngest of the brood, Gwen and her younger sister, took after her. But those that said it did so with a touch of pride, not fear; if they were Fae-touched, then, that would be a good thing.

  Gwen’s sisters sat beside her, watching and listening just as raptly. Gynath who was almost twelve summers, Cataruna who was fourteen, and Gwenhwyfach a mere eight, the sister enough like her to have been Gwen’s twin, all listened and remained very, very quiet, lest they be remembered and sent off to bed. All the sisters had much the same look about them; they got their looks from their mother, who was slim and very fair—a rarity among dark people—and not the king, who was burly and, even rarer, had a head of hair like copper wire. They had a visitor this night, who would stay through Samhain to give their rites especial power. Eleri was concerned that the old men and women were right, that this would be a hard winter, and she would do whatever it took to keep her people safe through it.

  But it was not talk of the winter to come and the Samhain rites that occupied them now. It was talk of Arthur, the High King, and his court at Celliwig.

  “. . . and so the High King takes a bride, and the Merlin is making sure the land-rites are performed,” the lady visitor was saying; she was very important, a priestess and a sorceress, from the great school at the Well of the Cauldron.

  “And not afore time, too,” muttered old Bronwyn. “Asking for trouble it was, leaving it for so long! It’ll be a hard winter, thanks to all this dallying. As the king goes, so goes the land, and that’s a fact.” She made a sour face as the rest of the women nodded. “If the king be wifeless and childless, how can the land be anything but cold and hard? All very well to say the Merlin could make up for it, but he’s only a man, one man, and—”

  “Hush,” Eleri interrupted, chiding her woman, and the visitor nodded with approval.

  “What’s done is done; the land hasn’t suffered. The land has a long memory and longer patience. One hard winter will not ruin the land, and the Merlin has brought him round to the bride and the rites.” The woman sighed. “And now I am here to ask you, has the High King’s half-sister been among you?”

  “Morgana?” Eleri shook her head. “You surely do not mean Anna Morgause . . . I have not seen her in a year or more. The Orkney clan does not favor us with their attention, much. Why?”

  The visitor shrugged, but looked troubled. “It is Anna Morgause I mean. Morgana is hardly more than a child, for all her power, and she heeds the Merlin and the Council of the Wise. But Morgause . . . Anna is a woman grown, with four sons she would fain see raised high. She has the power and the willfulness, and she is wedded to Lot, who speaks the High King fair but watches through his fingers. And Morgause speaks the Council fair, but . . .”

  But Eleri shook her head. “Rhianu, be careful of what you say. Have you anything other than gossip and your own suspicions? Has the Cauldron shown a vision of the future?”

  The visitor looked away a moment. “No and no,” she admitted. Eleri smiled slightly. “Have done, then, and tell us of the bride. If gossip there will be, let it be of bright things and not dark, truth and not suspicion. Anna of the Orkneys will do as she does, and if the Cauldron gives you no visions, then that is the will of the Goddess.”

  Gwenhwyfar pondered the visitor. She did not seem like someone who would gossip to make trouble, and normally Eleri would have deferred to her judgment, since she was older and a very powerful Wise Woman indeed, one of the Nine who served the Cauldron of the Goddess. But her mother must know something that made her say what she had. Perhaps there was bad blood between Rhianu and Queen Morgause, and perhaps Eleri knew about it.

  Rhianu pursed her lips, then seemed to resign herself. “Well, her name is Gwenhwyfar, like your own daughter, and the name suits her, for she is very like to all of you, as fair as a Saxon and slender as a reed. She was not our first choice, but Arthur came to the aid of her father, Leodegrance, saw her firing arrows from the walls, with her fine gown kilted up and fire in her eye.” She shrugged. “He was smitten, and she is of the right bloodline and of our teaching. But—”

  Eleri raised an eyebrow. “But?”

  “She is her father’s only child. We question whether his blood grows thin. The Good Goddess knows Uther’s line—”

  Eleri looked speculative. “Hmm. One child only, Arthur himself—”

  “And never a by-blow by leman or lover, and it took the Merlin’s magic to quicken Arthur in Ygraine’s womb.” Eleri nodded. “Still, at least now Arthur has found a woman he wants, and all else is suitable. Passion has a magic all its own, and the rites themselves should ensure that there is at least one child.”

  Rhianu coughed. “We intend to make certain of that,” she said, and significant glances were shared among the women.

  “That is chancy, meddling in those matters,” Eleri murmured softly. “Have a care that your enterprise does not miscarry.”

  Gwen shivered at that moment, as an icy finger traced itself along her spine.

  “Has anyone troubled to scry the results?” Eleri continued, as Gwen shivered again.

  “There will be a son born to Arthur, within the proper season,” Rhianu replied, with confidence. “At least one.”

  “Sons!” said the king, cheerfully, coming up behind his wife. “Oh, sons are all very well, but a king’s wealth is in his daughters! A son may run off and pledge his service to another man in another crown, but a daughter remembers what is due her sire—what is that old saw, my sweet?” He set both hands on Eleri’s shoulders, and she reached up to squeeze one with affection.

  “ ‘A son is a son ’till he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter for all of her life,’ ” Eleri responded, tilting her head back to look at him and being rewarded with a kiss.

  “There, you see?” the king beamed at their visitor. “And there is my wealth. Fair daughters, strong and comely, and I know they will remember their duty to land and sire. If the High King wants loyal allies, let him have daughters to cement those bonds. If he wants magic to safeguard his kingdom, let him have daughters to spin him spells and speak for him to the gods. And if he is very lucky, he will also have a daughter that is a warrior-woman, for they make the most loyal shield-bearers.”

  Gwen noticed at that moment, that the queen looked as if she were harboring a pl
easant secret.

  But she said nothing, only again squeezed the king’s hand, and the king chuckled and went back to his men.

  “But what of Anna Morgause?” Eleri asked after a moment. “If there is anything about her you should be warning us against, it is your duty to make it plain.”

  The visitor grimaced with distaste, then looked pointedly down at Gwen and her sisters. Gwen sighed. If she had been just a little off to the side, there was a chance that the visitor would not have noticed her. That happened a lot. Then she tried concentrating very, very hard on not being noticed. Sometimes that worked—more and more as she got the knack of it. But not tonight,

  Much to Gwen’s dismay, her mother took the hint.

  “Off with you,” she said in a quiet voice that nevertheless brooked no argument. “Time for bed.” The girls didn’t even try to dissuade their mother, they just picked up whatever they had been sitting on and trudged off to the private rooms behind the dais.

  This was a grand, grand castle indeed. Behind the dais, through a wooden door, was a set of two small rooms where the royal family and their immediate servants slept, away from the tumble of bodies in the Great Hall. A pair of rushlights, one left burning in each room, lit the way just enough that the girls didn’t stumble over anything.

  The first room was theirs; it was smaller than the second, and it had just enough space for the big bed where they all slept and their clothing chests lining the walls. Mag, the servant woman they all shared, who had been their nursemaid when they were smaller, helped them pull off their outer clothing and fold it neatly, each on top of her own chest. Then they clambered into the big bed, which Mag had warmed with a stone she’d put near to the fire earlier. They had their own particular order for this. The two most restless, Gwenhwyfar and Gwenhwyfach, on the outside, and Cataruna and Gynath on the inside. The bed, with its woolen blankets woven by Eleri and her women, its fur coverlet from bearskins of the bears killed by their own father, could easily have slept two more. They even had a feather mattress, an immense luxury.