Gwenhwyfar Read online

  If the little ferret could be tamed . . .

  Thinking that, Gwen fell asleep.

  She was up before dawn again and was attending to the Merlin’s wants before the old man was even awake. Now well acquainted with his habits, she brought fruit and bread and clear spring water instead of the small beer and meat that the king’s other guests would expect. She didn’t actually expect Little Gwen to turn up until the sun was high, but to her shock, as soon as the Merlin had broken his fast, she and Bronwyn turned up to wait on the Merlin’s pleasure. Gwen’s eyes nearly jumped out of her head with shock. Little Gwen had never been up this early on her own, ever!

  After Bronwyn had been dismissed, the Merlin also sent away his manservant and sat Little Gwen down on a stool at his feet. Then he looked at Gwen.

  And once again, she found herself held prisoner by his eyes. It happened even faster this time, and when the Merlin told her that she would hear and see nothing that went on, she nodded vaguely, though her mind battered itself against the fetters he placed around it like a wild thing in a trap.

  Then he turned to Little Gwen. And try as she might, Gwen could only make out scraps of what passed between them.

  Some things did manage to penetrate the fog that the Merlin had put around Gwen’s thoughts. The Merlin asked about the coming heir, and Little Gwen replied with such venom, such hatred, that even Gwen was a bit shocked. And then—

  Then the Merlin turned back to her and looked deeply into her eyes. “You fight me, girl,” he said with a little admiration and some regret. “But this is not for the honest ears of one such as you. Sleep. And remember nothing.”

  And that was all she knew—

  She came to herself with a start. I must have been more tired than I thought! With a touch of alarm, she looked covertly about the tent, but the Merlin did not seem to have noticed her lapse. He was giving Little Gwen a small carved box and smiling with satisfaction. “So, use that as I told you, and your future will be clear,” he said.

  “But the Druids will call for me?” Little Gwen pleaded, with something like urgency in her tone.

  “I pledge you that someone will. You have Power, you will have more, and teachers seek such students out.” He passed a hand over his eyes, as if he were suddenly weary, then looked up at Gwen. “Escort your sister back to her nurse, then tell your father that this child is indeed Blessed with Power but that the time is not right for her to leave her family.”

  “Aye, my lord,” Gwen replied, feeling disappointed that Little Gwen was not going to be taken off far, far away—at least not for some time. Little Gwen looked even more disappointed, but she allowed herself to be led off, clutching her little box.

  “What is that?” Gwen asked, as soon as they had left the tent.

  “Something secret,” her sister said, a sly look coming over her.

  “I’m not to tell.”

  Gwen shrugged. “Then I won’t ask any more.” Her sister looked disappointed at that response; half of the value she placed in a secret was that she could torment her older siblings with it.

  But she didn’t have any time to come up with a new tactic, for Bronwyn was waiting for them at the edge of the encampment and looked with curiosity at the box.

  “Tis a secret thing between her and the Merlin,” Gwen said shortly. “So let her do what he wishes her to do with it.”

  Bronwyn nodded and took Little Gwen in charge, while Gwen went off to find her father and fulfill the second half of her duty.

  Her father seemed a little disappointed as well but said only, “At least we know she has a Blessing. But it must not be something the High King needs. Ah, well.” He waved Gwen off. “We’ll let her age, like mead. Mayhap she’ll turn out as sweet with the help of whatever it is the Merlin gave her.”

  Privately Gwen rather doubted any such miracle could occur, but this was a case when the squire served best by keeping her lips sealed. “Aye, my lord King,” she said carefully, bowed, and went back to her duty.

  Chapter Nine

  The guests were all gone, the Merlin with them, without his making a display of any kind of magic—much to the bitter disappointment of most of the young squires. This time Gwen had not had the slightest wish to spy on the Midsummer Rites. She spent that evening as usual in attendance on the Merlin, and when he retired to join the Rites, she sat quietly with the other squires, on her best behavior. They were all rewarded by a share of mead each, which warmed her belly and made her sleepy. When the Merlin and the women returned, she was surprised, for she had not thought that much time had passed. She was glad when he dismissed her, and she was happy enough to go to bed, even while the young women and men were still leaping the fire, dancing, or making sheep’s eyes at each other. Of course, not all of them were confining themselves to that, for it was Midsummer after all, but they were out in the hayfields or the meadows or little bowers under the bushes, and not tumbling and panting in the Great Hall, so she didn’t even think of them, but of the soft mattress and how good it would be to get there.

  The truth of the matter was, that between serving the Merlin and seeing that her horses were tended perfectly, her gear in good order, and the gear of the older warriors attended to, she fell into the bed and slept like a stone every night, and she simply didn’t have the will to sneak out for a clandestine look. Besides, her curiosity the last time had resulted in a vision that, while exciting, was also somewhat frightening. She’d spied upon the gods that night, and she rather hoped that she was below their attention. At least, until she was old enough to start earning some glory in battle.

  Little Gwen had finally found something to occupy her besides tormenting her sisters, and for that, Gwen was so profoundly grateful to the Merlin that she would have run twice the number of errands he asked of her. Whatever it was that he had told the child, and given her, kept her captive and quiet in her own thoughts. And meanwhile, now that he was sure of her, the Merlin sent his assigned squire out into the fields and woods to acquire any number of herbs and bits. Mushrooms both poisonous and tasty, baskets of bark, roots, leaves, owl pellets, bones and teeth . . . there seemed no end to the odd things he wanted her to find. It wasn’t capricious either; part of the reason he was sending her for these things was that he was graciously sharing his lore of curative things and homely spells with the queen and her women, showing them how he compounded remedies for all manner of injuries, curses, and diseases. The women loved him for this, but of course, this was not the conjuring of dragons or the summoning of demons that the squires hoped to see, so it was all terribly boring to them. In this, Gwen didn’t agree; some of the things that the Merlin could cure were downright miraculous.

  But at last, everyone was gone, and Gwen was back to duties that seemed light in comparison with the double burden she had carried while the guests were about. Now she knew why the squires had always looked so harried and haggard during festivals and had never had time for games or gamboling. In a time of feasting and leisure, they got none of the latter and only the leftover ends of the former.

  It was about a week after the last guest had left that a traveling bard arrived, having spent Midsummer at the festival King Lot of Orkney held. Like all bards, he was as full of news as he was of music, and the women swarmed him to hear his largest burden, that Anna Morgause had been brought to bed of yet another son, her fifth. Four more she had, two older than Arthur—Gwalchmai, Gwalchafed, Gwynfor, and Agrwn. Gwalchmai and Gwalchafed were said to be as alike as she and Little Gwen, and the younger served the elder as a squire. She only hoped Gwalchmai’s younger brother had a better temper than her younger sister.

  “Thin, small, and sickly looking this one is,” the bard said, with a little smirk that made Gwen frown. This man was angling for rewards from Queen Eleri, she thought. But she kept her head down over her task and held her peace. She was not allowed to completely escape the training of a maiden amid all the work of a squire; she still had to mend, if not make, her own clothing.

&nb
sp; The king counted on his fingers, and chuckled. “So old Lot made sure of his wife by quickening her before he took her to Arthur’s wedding. Very wise of him.”

  “Well, if a man knows he’s like to wear the horns,” said one of the men with a leer, “That’s the best way of knowing he won’t be raising another man’s brat.”

  Ribald laughter spread around the benches. Anna Morgause had a reputation that was none too savory. It was said she had even bedded a Northman once, and it was whispered that she did not confine her couplings to humans. And here, far from the reach of her magic, it was safe enough to gossip about it.

  “I’ve half suspected old Lot of being her pander, a’times,” said another with a snort. “And she, his.”

  Queen Eleri was shaking her head as she cradled her belly with one hand. “Four living sons, and what does she need with a fifth?” she wondered aloud. “Well, what’s the poor wee thing’s name? No matter what kind of mother he has, I’ll ask the Lady’s blessing on him that he shall thrive. It is hardly his fault what he was born to. And he is the High King’s nephew, as she is the High King’s half-sister.”

  “Medraut, gracious Queen,” the bard said with a bow. “She calls him Medraut. Her little sister Morgana is much enamored of him.”

  “Little and sickly, and with the Orkney lot! He’ll need Morgana to look after him,” old Bronwyn predicted sadly. “If they don’t bully him a-purpose, they’ll still worry him like a lot of unwhipped pups with a rag they tug between each other.”

  “Little and sickly, perhaps Anna Morgause will tend to him as she did not her healthy boys. We will hope.” Eleri raised her chin, signaling that the subject was concluded. “Did the Merlin come to visit them, as he did us?”

  The bard shook his head and went on to other things. Gwen had felt an odd and uneasy interest in the subject of this unknown boy child, but maybe that was only because her mother had taken on an odd expression when she spoke of him. After more gossip concerning Lot, his wife, and their followers, Eleri asked the bard to give them some music, preferably a war song, for there were rumors the Northerners were moving again. Old Bronwyn made a face of disappointment at this; she took a particular delight in the bad behavior of Anna Morgause, to the point where Gwen found herself wondering what the queen of the Orkneys could ever have done to Bronwyn to make her so sour against her.

  Little Gwen had been surprisingly good, although she looked as disappointed as Bronwyn when the queen changed the subject away from the Orkney clan. Gwen was relieved. Perhaps all the attention she had gotten from the Merlin had done her good. She certainly had been on excellent behavior this evening, fetching the queen anything she asked for and not even trying her coy little tricks on the bard. It was rather too bad in a way that Eleri had changed the subject; the bard was not very good, and Gwen found her interest straying away from the war song that was less song and more toneless chanting, mostly in praise of a nebulous leader who, she supposed, was intended to resemble her father. That was often the way with these bards; trying to flatter their hosts in hopes of a rich present, rather than earning the rich present by honestly performing to the best of their ability. Sadly, her father didn’t seem to see the ploy for what it was; he nodded to the monotonous strumming and looked as if he were going to interject an approving grunt on the chorus, when suddenly Eleri clutched her swollen belly and screamed out in pain.

  It was not just a “cry”—this was a sound that Gwen had never heard from her mother, and from the look of it, neither had any of the other women, not even Bronwyn, who had been with her through all of the births of her children. The look of startled alarm on Bronwyn’s face, made a stab of fear go right through Gwen. Swiftly, Eleri’s women surrounded her and half-carried her into the royal chamber, as the king tried to make light of the situation.

  “You see, Bard, your song has roused my son, and now he wants to come forth and do battle!” He stripped off a bracelet—only bronze, to the bard’s swiftly covered disappointment—and tossed it to the man, looking distractedly at the entrance to the chambers, now covered by the curtain. “Let us drink to him and to the safe delivery of the queen! And let us take our drinking outside, so that we do not disturb the women at their work!”

  The rest of the men were nothing loath to do so, taking up their cups and moving with unseemly haste to the fire outside. And Gwen had to go with them, in her capacity as a page.

  And of course, even though they were all outside and the cries were muffled, when the screaming began, everyone knew that something was going horribly wrong. It was bad enough that this was far too early for the baby to be coming. Two weeks more, better still, a month—not now. But the awful sounds that Eleri was making—she didn’t sound human anymore, she sounded like an animal in pain. The men all raised their voices and gabbled about nothing at all to try to cover it, but the king was pale and sweating, and Gwen wanted nothing more than to run away, far away, and curl up in a ball with her hands over her ears.

  It was worse when the terrible screaming stopped, and a cold silence took its place.

  They came to get her, two of Eleri’s women, sobbing. Gwen didn’t want to go with them, but they took her hands and pulled her along into the room that smelled of stale sweat, and blood, and something else, something sweetly sickening. Poison, she would have said, if they had asked, but no one actually asked her anything. Gynath was already there, sobbing as she wrapped something small in long bands of white cloth. They made her go to the side of the bed, but the thing in the bed with the twisted, agonized face was not her mother, could not have been her mother. Eleri had never looked like that.

  But, like Gynath, she cried as she did what she was told to do. Eleri’s women did most of the work, washing, dressing, and laying out the body, trying to smooth that tortured face, carrying her and the wrapped infant that had never breathed to the bier in the Great Hall. Gwen and Gynath gathered flowers, herbs, boughs of sacred oak and ash to make the bier. Once, Peder stopped her as she was gathering meadowsweet and made her look up into his face. “You are a warrior,” he said. “You must grow used to death.”

  That only made her burst into tears again, and he awkwardly patted her head. “You must,” he said, then, after a moment, his own voice choked. “But you never do.”

  After that, Peder kept her with him except when she was fetched by one of the women. He gave her hard things to do, things that forced her to concentrate, like splitting a wand with an arrow, or braiding a horsehair halter in an intricate pattern for a foal. Then he would give her things that exhausted her body, like carrying water and chopping wood. For the most part, though, she seemed to exist in a haze of disbelief, interrupted by the same anguish that caused Gynath and Bronwyn and some of the other women to kneel beside the bier and howl.

  That was not for her, though. She couldn’t let herself do that.

  But it made her feel torn into a thousand pieces to see her father sitting there beside the bier, eyes dull, hands dangling, face almost gray.

  It seemed a hundred years. It seemed no time at all. It seemed as if she had thrown herself down, exhausted with weeping and work and woke to find herself at the side of a barrow. The king’s barrow, of course. She knew it; she visited it dutifully and left offerings of fruit and flowers and thought no more about it. Now there was a hole in the earth beside it, and at the bottom of the hole was Eleri. She had been draped with a linen cloth so fine that her features could be seen through it, and in her arms was the son she had died trying to give the king.

  Gwen stared down at her, numb. There was no Lady here now, and they could not wait for one, so Bronwyn said the words for the women, and the bard, who had stayed, shaken, but there was some bravery in him to have stayed, said the words for the men.

  Gwen wanted to run away as they all began, handful by handful, to throw dirt and flowers into the grave. She wanted to scream, to throw herself down there and beg her mother to return, to do anything but what she was doing—tossing in the meadowsweet and ange
lica she had picked, watching Gynath crumple to the ground, seeing her father look as if he were going to collapse at any moment.

  All her anguish centered, at last, on that tiny bundle in Eleri’s arms. The cause of all this grief. The brother she had intended to serve.

  She didn’t hate him. How could she? She had loved him for months. It wasn’t his fault this had happened.

  But with a stab of grief so deep it felt as if her heart had been ripped from her body, she swore a silent vow to Epona.

  I will never, never, never have a baby just to please a man.

  Even when they were putting Eleri in the ground, Gwen couldn’t believe she was dead. And now that the wake was long past, and there were even little pinpricks of green poking through the brown earth mounded over the queen’s grave, Gwen still couldn’t make herself believe it.

  She felt numb, and her thoughts were muffled by a thick fog of grief and disbelief. She kept thinking that it was all some sort of nightmare, and she would wake up, and everything would be normal again. But she didn’t, and it wasn’t. Nothing would ever be normal and right again.

  The rest of the family was no help. Gynath was utterly inconsolable; she and Bronwyn spent most of their time collapsed in each others’ arms.

  The king looked . . . shrunken. And old. He’d aged a dozen years in a night, it seemed. He still went through his day, doing all the things that a king had to do, but there was neither life nor light in what he did. He was a king, and he acted as a king, because it was his duty to be a king, although the man in the king wanted only to mourn.

  Little Gwen was as mute as a stone; her face had a closed look about it, and she hadn’t shed a single tear. She just went about, doing what people told her to do without saying three words in the entire day, like a little ghost girl.