Gwenhwyfar Read online

  The groom finally led them back to their original paddock, but of course, the work was not over. The horses had to be unsaddled, walked cool, rubbed down, and put in their proper stalls, with saddle arranged on a stand and bridle hung on a peg. Then, and only then, were they allowed to go.

  It was sunset, and suppertime, by the time she limped back to the Great Hall. The servants had brought in the kettles of stew and the remains of last night’s feast, and people were settling onto the benches and tucking in. The Hall was nowhere near as crowded as it had been last night; at least half the guests had packed up and headed homeward this morning, and the rest would leave tomorrow. Gwen was not altogether sorry to see them go; she was already tired of being polite and always on her good behavior even when some of the boy guests behaved outrageously.

  Her father and mother were already seated at the High Table—on the day after a feast, no one really stood on ceremony—when a shriek and a wail arose from the back of the hall where the bedrooms were, and a moment later Gynath and Cataruna came storming out of the room, the one angry, the other lamenting, with ruin in their hands.

  “My best slippers!” shouted Cataruna, her cheeks aflame with rage.

  “My belt! I just finished embroidering it! I only wore it once!” wept Gynath, consumed with grief.

  The pretty leather slippers had, very clearly, been given to the dogs to play with. They were chewed to shapelessness, and the seams had come half unsewn.

  As for the belt, someone had taken it out and trodden it into the mud until nothing of the bright colors that Gynath had so painstakingly sewn into beautiful patterns could be seen for the dirt and stains.

  A sinking feeling in her stomach, Gwen walked slowly to the bedroom. She dreaded what she would find. Which of her possessions had been taken and ruined? Behind her, she could hear her sisters telling their parents how they had found their things—and Cataruna added shrilly that Little Gwen was nowhere to be found.

  Little Gwen. Of course it was her. She’d wanted something, gotten it, and didn’t like it—so her first thought was to take whatever her sisters took pleasure in and ruin it. Gynath’s new belt had been the admiration and envy of the other girls, for Gynath was the best needlewoman in the castle. And Cataruna’s slippers had made her feet look very handsome indeed in the dancing; more than one young man had said something about them in ways that had made the blood rise to Cataruna’s cheeks last night.

  “. . . it was no accident, Father!” Cataruna snarled. “The slippers were in my chest, on top of my kirtle, right where I put them last night. She took them and gave them to the dogs, then put them back!”

  Gynath was sobbing too hard to be coherent. She had been working on that belt all summer. Gwen didn’t blame her for weeping.

  But Gwen didn’t have to look far to find Little Gwen’s revenge on her. There in the corner where she had been left was Gwen’s poppet. Or rather, what was left of her poppet.

  The doll had been torn limb from limb, scalped, and decapitated. Her clothing had been shredded. Mutely, Gwen gathered up the pitiful remains in both hands, and went out into the hall where her mother was trying to soothe a disconsolate Gynath, and her father to placate Cataruna with promises of a new pair of slippers even prettier than the ruined ones. She waited until Gynath’s sobs had quieted into sniffs and hiccups, and Cataruna had run out of names to call their sister. That was when the king and queen finally became aware that she was standing there. When their eyes fell on her, she silently held out her hands. It took them a few moments to realize what it was—or had been.

  “Oh, no—” It was Gynath who realized it first, and it came out in a moan. “Oh, no, oh, Gwen, your poppet, your poor doll!”

  Cataruna’s cheeks flamed anew. “That—that—” she spluttered. “Oh! I am going to shake that brat until her head falls off and her teeth fall out!”

  Eleri’s eyes narrowed with anger. The king put up a hand. “You’ll not touch her. When she’s found, she will be whipped, and she’ll be living on bread and water for a fortnight, and put to whatever work Bronwyn deems suitable. There will be no playtime for her until the snow flies, and perhaps not even then if I am not convinced of her repentance.” He looked to his queen. “I’ve spoiled and indulged her overmuch, as you said time and again, and this is what comes of it. I am sorry that you, my good daughters, have fallen victim to her mischief.”

  “And her poppet will be yours, Gwen,” the Queen began—

  “Lady Mother—no,” Gwen replied, feeling dimly that if she were given something of Little Gwen’s rather than just a replacement, her youngest sister would only see it as a reason for more vengeance. She straightened her back, gently piled the pathetic remains of the doll on the table, rubbed the back of her hand across her stinging eyes, and looked up at her mother and father. “I’m a warrior now. Warriors don’t need poppets. I won’t have time to play with it, anyway.”

  Her mother gave her a skeptical look, but her father relaxed and beamed his approval. “Well said,” was all he replied, but Gwen felt that approval fill her and ease some of the sadness she felt at losing her plaything.

  “Bronwyn,” Eleri directed, “Take these things and see what, if anything, can be done with them. The belt especially. Then look for Gwenhwyfach, and when you find her, see she is put in the guard closet to await our pleasure. And let us eat. There is no reason for a nasty child to spoil our supper, nor make us wait until our meat is cold.”

  Gwen ate slowly, feeling the ache of every overworked muscle, every bruise. She actually didn’t mind it; concentrating on that made everything else secondary. And while Eleri consoled Gynath and Cataruna with the most golden-crusted of the pies and the last of the honeycakes, the king directed his server to give Gwen all of the leftover goose and with his own hand poured her cup full, not of cider, but of honey-mead. “You’ll be aching, young warrior,” he said in an undertone. “This will help you sleep.”

  The mead was sweet but with a fire under it. It burned its way pleasantly down her throat as she slowly ate slivers of goose, spread a surprise bit of goose liver on some bread, and sopped up the last of the goose fat with the rest of the bread. And it did start to make the aches go off into the distance and give her a warm and soft-edged feeling, as if she were falling asleep. Halfway through dinner, Bronwyn returned and reported that a sulky and unrepentant Gwenhwyfach had been put in the guard-closet, with one of the turnspits as a guard on the door.

  The guard-closet was a tiny little windowless niche in the stone walls, with a single hard stone bench in it, that the king used to keep single wrongdoers in while he debated what punishment to mete out to them. From time to time all of the girls had been confined there for mischief, but never had he done what he did now.

  “Here,” he said, carefully picking out the hardest and most stale piece of trencherbread and a leather cup that he filled with water. He handed both to Bronwyn. “Give her those, and tell her she will be staying in the closet until morning. In the morning, my dogmaster will whip her. And then for the next fortnight, she will sleep in the rushes with the dogs and the scullions. I’ll not have her sharing a soft bed that she did nothing to deserve. I’ll not have her sleeping comfortable beside the sisters she wronged. When she is repentant and ready to act like a king’s daughter instead of a low-born brat, we will see if she may sleep like one.”

  Gwen’s astonishment woke her up from a half-drowse. Eleri nodded approval.

  “I put you in charge of her, Bronwyn, to direct her as you like,” the king continued. “While she sleeps on the hearth, you will give her work to do so that she learns the evil of idleness. She’ll have nothing but bread and water. At the end of that time, she will apologize, and if I am convinced she is repentant, she may go back to the bed and the board.”

  Bronwyn bowed silently, took the bread and water, and disappeared into the shadows.

  Gwen sopped up the last of the fat, ate the last bite of bread, drank the last swallow in the bottom of her cup.
She felt the fatigue of the day settle on her like a weight; she begged permission to leave and plodded back to the bedroom.

  On the way there she passed the turnspit guarding the door to the guard-closet. There were muffled sobs coming from inside. But they didn’t sound repentant, or frightened, or sorrowful.

  They sounded angry.

  Chapter Five

  Winter did not stop the training. Even when conditions were too foul to ride, it was the responsibility of the warriors-in-training to take the horses out to the paddock, turn them loose, clean the stalls, then give their feet a thorough cleaning and put them up again. Normally the grooms did this, but when the horses were confined to the stable, rather than running loose, the stalls fouled that much faster. A horse standing in a fouled stall was in danger of thrush. And a horse with thrush was in danger of having to be put down. As the horsemaster told them all sternly the first time they were set to this task, “Every horse in this stable’s worth three of the likes of you, an’ ne’er ye forget it.”

  It was true, too. So foul weather only meant another sort of work with the horses.

  As for warrior training . . . well, foul weather meant that some of their “training” involved ax work . . . against the firewood. The trainers had very clever ways of making sure that every stroke accomplished some wood-splitting. Gwen built quite a set of muscles over the winter. And once they could be safely trusted with bows and arrows, they became part of the army of hunters that provided meat for the king’s table. And a miss there, against rapidly moving targets, had more serious consequences than a miss at a wand. Gwen learned to appreciate every bite of rabbit pie and to look on goose, duck, venison, and boar with an appreciation she’d never felt before.

  After a month of punishment, Little Gwen finally broke down and repented . . . or at least made the motions of repentance. Gwen was expecting some other form of retaliation, but at least where she was concerned, nothing happened. In fact, Little Gwen left her alone for the first time in memory. Perhaps it was nothing more than the fact that from Gwenhwyfach’s perspective, Gwen’s training regimen was worse than any sort of revenge. It hardly mattered, really; the only time she ever saw her little sister was at meals and bedtime and often not even then. Gwen ate early, rose early and went to bed early, so tired from the physical work that she was dead asleep from the moment she got under the blankets.

  But once back in the king’s good graces, Little Gwen seemed to be putting most of her effort into becoming his favorite—and to making herself as unlike Gwen as possible. She began walking and talking as daintily as any girl trying to catch the eye of a boy, kept herself fastidiously neat, and for the first time volunteered to do things, as long as they were womanly. The king found this very amusing; as for Eleri, she was too preoccupied with her own matters to pay much attention. And Gwen was just relieved that Little Gwen had finally found something to keep her from plaguing her older sisters.

  The winter was not as harsh as everyone had feared, and most took that as a sign that the High King’s marriage had had the desired result on the land. Certainly at the Year Turning and Fire Kindling, the Midwinter Solstice, word crept across the kingdoms that the new queen was properly increasing, and that was a good omen indeed.

  Someone else was increasing as well, although the queen had kept it to herself until almost February, revealing it only when her women threatened to tell the king themselves. But again, this had little impact on Gwen’s life; now one of the warriors-in-training, she was effectively out of Eleri’s household.

  Strangely enough, now that she spent less time within the household, she came to know more of her older sisters. In many ways, she saw them now through the eyes of the older boys, hearing things from them she would never have guessed. That made her watch them, pay attention to them, in a way she had not before.

  All four of the girls were fair, like their mother. This alone set them apart among most of the darker-haired people her father ruled. And now that she came to think about it . . . it was very possible that Eleri’s blood was all, or part, Saxon. But if that was true, no one even whispered it; she was the queen and their Wise One, and those two facts eclipsed any mere question of blood.

  Or . . . just maybe . . . there was other blood entirely in her. But if that was the case, no one would even whisper about it.

  Gwen and Little Gwen were the fairest of the lot, with Gwen’s hair now mostly shorn off, and Little Gwen’s waist-length locks being tightly braided every morning by old Bronwyn. Cataruna had more than a flavoring of their father’s red hair, but she did not have the high temper to go with it. She also had his square face, where Gwen and Little Gwen had inherited their mother’s pointed chin and tiny nose, and Gynath had something in between. Cataruna was usually grave and quiet; Gynath was usually merry, and while not a flirt exactly, had discovered that young men were very interesting a year before her older sister did so.

  And both of the older girls fitted into the domestic and busy life of the household as Gwen, increasingly, did not.

  She found she did not miss it; she did not wish herself back in skirts nor regret trading the chores she used to do for the harder—in the physical sense—labor of the training and the sort of work the boys were expected to do. Even in the worst weather, cleaning the stable, cleaning out her horse’s hooves with bare, freezing hands, chopping wood as she practiced her ax swings, she would not have traded this for sitting and learning the making of clothing, how to weave, spin, and embroider, the lore of herbs (other than those needed for battlefield medicine and horse doctoring), the management of a household. No, not even for learning magic.

  She found that last growing less and less attractive with every day that her body strengthened, her skills with weapons sharpened, and her ability to understand her horses deepened. Not that magic revolted her, far from it—but where once she had longed to see herself in the rites, taking the part of the Maiden in the Circle beside her mother, learning to control and use the Power . . . now that grew distant. Just as she could look at Little Gwen playing with a lapful of poppets and feel not even a twinge of envy, now she would watch her mother beckon Cataruna off into a conversation with the other Wise Women and no longer even wonder for very long what they were talking about.

  Perhaps her mother was right. Perhaps it was being around so much Cold Iron in the form of the swords and axes had blunted her need for magic. Perhaps it had even driven the magic from her.

  Or perhaps Braith was right, and she never really was suited for that sort of magic in the first place.

  And on the Midwinter Solstice, that change in her position was solidified, when she celebrated the night with the other young would-be warriors and not among the women. She thought her mother looked obscurely disappointed, but the queen had two other daughters both of an age to go to the Ladies. Three, if you counted Little Gwen.

  And after Midwinter Solstice, Cataruna’s demeanor toward Gwen changed.

  Mostly, the eldest of the siblings had ignored Gwen, which was fine. They weren’t even close in age, after all. Even before Gwen had gone to the squires, they hadn’t had much in common. But now, as if the Solstice had signaled some change in Cataruna’s mind, she began to do small kindnesses for her sister. When Gwen came in with half-frozen hands, Cataruna would beckon her over to a pot of warmed water to thaw them. When she went to bed, far earlier than anyone else, all worn out with the work, she found that Cataruna had put a fire-warmed stone in her place. When it was her turn to serve at table, Cataruna saw to it that her portion was kept warm at the fire and kept Little Gwen’s greedy fingers off it. Some might have been by Eleri’s orders, but not all of it. Gwen found herself exchanging grateful and slightly conspiratorial smiles with her eldest sister, and she got them in return. Cataruna’s square face seemed unaccountably happier this winter than Gwen had ever seen it before. Whatever was the reason for it, it made Gwen unaccountably happy too.

  While the days lengthened again, and winter lost its grip on the c
ountryside, Gwen found herself outstripping the group of youngsters she’d started with. Not drastically, but enough that by Gwyl Canol Gwenwynol, the Spring Equinox, she was given her second horse.

  All warriors had more than one horse. Charioteers needed two, of course, but riders had more than one as well. If your horse was lamed, or killed, or ill, you couldn’t count on one of the chariot drivers to be able to take you to the battlefield. The chariot was already considered by some old-fashioned, although Gwen’s father used it, and used it well. Many commanders were slowly abandoning it in favor of purely mounted cavalry, following the lead of the High King, who fought Roman fashion. Chariots broke, they needed highly skilled drivers, when accidents occurred they could be terrible and generally involved more than just the driver and his horses. And a single mounted man was always faster than a chariot.

  Nevertheless, King Lleudd wanted his cavalry trained in chariot work, and that required two horses. All the more reason for every warrior to have two, or more than two, if he or his lord could afford it. So just before the Equinox, the horsemaster Bran came himself for her and presented her and her mare with the gray stallion that had been one of his two original choices for Gwen.

  This time when she called him across the paddock, the mare was at her side. The stallion stepped carefully toward them both and diffidently bowed his head a little at the mare. Adara looked the poor fellow over with thinly veiled arrogance, as was to be expected in a lead mare of the herd, then snorted and perfunctorily touched noses with him. The stallion Dai was to be permitted to partner with Gwen. It was very hard for Gwen to keep a sober face and not laugh out loud at the two of them, but poor Dai had been humiliated once by Adara, and he wasn’t going to forget that in a hurry.

  So now Gwen would learn chariot driving and the trick of switching from one horse to another when riding. The High King Arthur had made a name for himself with his mounted knights who could move swiftly to any part of the land where trouble was brewing by doing just that—stopping for only the briefest periods, or not at all, by switching from a tiring horse to one that was fresher. Though her father might favor the chariot, he was no fool, and as a good commander he could easily see the advantage this brought him.