Gwenhwyfar Read online

  Gwydion was a famous bard in actuality, something that his sister seemed to have forgotten as he regaled her and her court of mostly women with song and story. But behind the storytelling, there was magic afoot; Gwen felt the Power stirring, could almost see it as Gwydion wove it into the tales of battle and tragedy that he chanted. She felt the Power stretching the very fabric of the air tight, as a drumhead was stretched tight, until at last it took shape from those very same tales just as Gwydion had intended.

  The roar of an assaulting army shook the walls of the castle; startled into panic, Arianrhod and her women screamed in fear—as well they might considering how few men were in Arianrhod’s retinue. In terror, Arianrhod turned to the “bard,” who could be expected to have some idea who might be attacking her all unprovoked and who might well have some strong magic to defend his hostess. “I have given you my hearth and bread!” she cried. “I beg you, help me!”

  Gwydion had only been waiting for this, and he thrust Lleu toward the queen. “This fellow is a doughty fighter,” he said, “Worth ten of any normal man. Arm him, my lady, and I will strive to make magic in your aid.”

  Arianrhod called for a sword and armor to be brought, and with her own hands buckled sword and scabbard onto Lleu. In that moment, the clamor from outside ceased, and the seeming dropped from both Lleu and Gwydion, and Arianrhod’s fear turned to fury.

  “Three times tricked!” she spat. “But this, I swear, will pay for all. Never, Lleu Llaw Gyffes, will you have lover or leman or wife that is a mortal woman! Enjoy that sword you got of me, for that is all the bedfellow you shall ever have!”

  But Lleu did not care, for now, at last, he had the arms he needed to slay the man who had tried to slay him. His face was alight with a fierce exaltation, so that it outshone the sun, and his eyes burned so brightly that for a moment, Gwen was blinded.

  When her sight came back, the scene had changed. A dark but handsome man cowered before Lleu, the treacherous Goronwy, who had plotted with Lleu’s faithless wife to slay him.

  But now it was Goronwy’s turn to be slain. Standing where Lleu had stood, he pleaded for his life. “I have no magic to protect me as you did!” he was begging, as Gwen took in the scene. “Let me at least have a paving stone between us!”

  Lleu laughed. “Never let it be said that I was less than fair!” he replied mockingly. “You may have your stone.”

  Desperately Goronwy pulled up a flat stone and huddled behind it, as if behind a shield. And Lleu stretched his arm back—

  As the sun stretches his strength come the Year Turning—

  And flung his spear with all his strength—

  As the warming spring is flung against the cold and weakening winter—

  —and the spear hit the flagstone so hard that it pierced straight through and killed Goronwy in the instant.

  Lleu’s shout of triumph shattered the world into a thousand, thousand bright splinters.

  And with that, Gwen fell back into herself and found herself once again hiding in the shadows of three massive oak trees, watching the rite take place within the circle of standing stones.

  Chapter Six

  Driving a chariot—merely driving it, and not doing any of the tricks that the experienced drivers did—was a lot harder than it looked.

  To begin with, there were two sets of reins, each set going to a different horse, each of whom had its own ideas about how a good driver handled those reins. Then there was the fact that you were standing on something that was moving, so your balance was constantly shifting, and that caused tugging on the reins if you weren’t careful, and that gave the horses signals to do things you hadn’t intended.

  She was just lucky that her pair were so experienced, so steady, so calm. They reacted to bad signals not by obeying them but by stopping dead in their tracks and waiting patiently for her to sort herself (and them) out.

  Gwen had never been happier. Braith was right. This was what she had been born to do.

  There was so much more to learn! She’d had no idea, not really, when she first started down this path, how much there was to it. She supposed now that it was all a matter of seeing . . . that she’d only really paid attention to the warriors, who were the end of all the training, and not to the milling lot of half-finished people still in training. But now that she was in the middle of it all, she had at least a sense of how much more there was to being a warrior.

  And even knowing how much work there would be, how far she had to go, she still wanted to learn it all.

  Today she guided her team carefully around a course laid out by the horsemaster; they’d been at the walk, then the fast walk, then the trot. Now he signaled to them to move straight into a full charge. She slapped the reins on their backs and shouted, bracing herself against the chariot back as they surged forward in the traces.

  The chariot bounced and bucked; she kept her knees flexed as she had been taught and kept her balance, although it was a fight to do so. Here is where it was so important for the young warrior to be “trained” by old, experienced horses. If she fell, she knew she could count on them to stop dead, because they had done just that in the early stages of her driving training. She got bruised, but she didn’t get as badly hurt as she would have if the team had kept going.

  This was far more frightening than riding. Anyone with any sense would be terrified, with the flying hooves of the horses so close to you, with the chariot bouncing like the featherweight thing that it was, and you trying to guide the horses around turns that slung it sideways as well as sending it bounding into the air.

  And for that reason it was all the more exciting and exhilarating.

  The horsemaster let them run the course three times before signaling her to slow, then stop. He walked up to them and slid his hand up the shoulder of the mare under her mane and nodded with satisfaction. She was no warmer than she should be; she showed none of the signs of fighting with her driver. Without a word, he waved Gwen off and signaled to the next to come onto the course. She hopped down out of her chariot, her legs wobbly with fatigue but determined not to show it, and walked them back to the paddock, where she backed her chariot into its place in line, unhitched them, and led them off to cool. Once they were fit to turn loose, she unharnessed them, gave them a quick rubdown, and let them out into the field. She turned then, to find her mother at the fence, waiting patiently for her to be finished. She looked in her pregnancy like the pregnant Goddess must look: ridiculously young, face glowing and beautiful as the sun.

  She was startled to say the least. Not that Eleri was an utter stranger to the stable; she had driven a chariot herself in the past, though she hadn’t done so in several years and certainly could not in her current state. She was, perhaps, two moons from giving birth, which made it even odder that she should have come down here to the stables, when her increasing girth made such a long walk uncomfortable. And there was no doubt who she had come to see; Gwen was the only person here at the moment.

  She recollected herself quickly. Here she was not the queen’s daughter; here she was nothing more than a warrior-in-training, and as such, she bowed low and did not raise her eyes. “My lady,” she said, and nothing more. It was for Eleri to give an order and for her to obey it without question.

  “Gwen, walk with me.” The queen’s voice made that a command. A gentle one, but nevertheless, a command. Obediently, Gwen went to her mother’s side and set her pace to the queen’s slower one.

  The did not go far, only to a bit of stone outcropping overlooking the chariot course that made a convenient seat. Eleri eased herself down onto it, while Gwen remained standing until her mother patted the stone beside her. Still puzzled, but grateful, Gwen took a seat beside the queen, and Eleri put one arm around her daughter, hugging Gwen close, and with that gesture, Gwen became the princess again, and not the young warrior.

  “I’m sending Cataruna to the Ladies,” Eleri said, out of nowhere. “I know you wanted that yourself, and perhaps in time we shall s
end you, but—your mentors tell us that you are doing well. So well that they have urged me not to send you until you are much older, and your training is complete.” Gwen turned her head up to look at her mother in astonishment, to see the queen gazing down at her with an anxious look in her eyes. “This kingdom needs as many with the Blessing as powerful as I have been given, as Cataruna has been given, as we can manage to get properly trained. Cataruna leaves today, in fact, in company with two of the village girls who also have the Blessing; the king and I wanted to send her off before she made any serious attachments to a boy, and there are several now with whom she might. I hope you are not upset.”

  Now Gwen was even more astonished. “No!” she blurted. “Braith was right. This is what I want!”

  Eleri sighed, and her face took on an expression of regret. “Your father said that you would say that.”

  Gwen’s brows creased. “Is that bad?”

  The queen hugged her again. “Not at all. But you know that the hand of the goddess was strong on you when you were born, and I was sure that there was nothing that you would want more than to take up the Power. Now—” she sighed more deeply “—now you are around Cold Iron so much that the power is fading. I begin to think, as Braith does, that there were two goddesses bestowing their Blessing on you, and one of them was Epona. I cannot fault you at all for choosing her. And I know I will not have to ask you twice; you want this, more than anything.”

  Gwen nodded solemnly.

  “Then my blessing on you, and Cataruna will take your place. There is Cataruna, and perhaps your other sisters.” The queen got ponderously to her feet. “I have been watching you at your training, and your mentors are right; your hand was made for the chariot reins, for the bow, and perhaps for the sword. I will sleep well of nights, knowing that you will be a strong guardian to your little brother as he grows.”

  “I promise!” she said firmly. In fact, she could not think of anything more delightful. She would guard him until he was old enough to take up these first lessons himself, and then she would help to teach him. And when he was a man, she would be one of his chosen Band, and fight at his side.

  The queen’s hand rested briefly, caressingly, on her head, warm and tender. “Go back to your lessons, young warrior,” she said fondly. “Be wise as the salmon, crafty as the fox, valiant as the wolfhound, and fierce as the hawk.”

  Then she turned, and as she did, Gwen felt something quite peculiar, a sense that something had been loosened between them. Not broken—not at all—but it felt very much as if the queen had opened a door to her and was letting her go through it all on her own, like the first day a young falcon was taken off the creance and allowed to fly free.

  She looked up into her mother’s eyes. “I will,” she repeated, making a pledge of it. “You’ll be proud of me.”

  “I already am,” her mother replied, and turned to make the slow journey back to the castle.

  Gwen couldn’t stand to be indoors that night, sandwiched in the big bed with her sisters. She wanted to be completely alone with her thoughts, she wanted nothing to interrupt, and above all, she did not want Little Gwen to sour everything with poking and prodding—

  Little Gwen had an uncanny instinct for when Gwen wanted to think. During the day, of course, Little Gwen didn’t come anywhere near her. But during the day, Gwen was too busy to stop to think. That moment when the queen had come to speak to her had been the only pause in the entire day, and Gwen was pretty certain she would not have had that much if it had not been the queen who had taken her aside. Gwen’s day, like that of her fellows, always began before anyone else but the servants were up, and it was filled with chores, exercises, practices, lessons, and duties. It only ended when the steward, who was the one in charge of Gwen and her fellow squires and pages, said that the day was over.

  But she loved it. Not every moment of it, of course—but even in the most tedious parts, the knowledge that after this, I’ll have archery practice or we’ll be learning to wheel in formation kept her willing to work through the tedious, or the difficult, or the downright onerous. Or she would be thinking hard about something she was supposed to master, which made the time pass so much faster when she was mucking out, or grooming, or cleaning weapons and armor. And of course, when she served at table, she had to stay on her toes. The Great Hall was a lot more crowded when you were counted among the servitors. Not that all the squires served every night, far from it. Most meals were very informal. But they all took it in turn to serve at the High Table to keep in practice. Gwen was never allowed to serve the king—the steward told her from the beginning that a squire was never, ever allowed to serve someone he was closely related to. But at some point or other, she did serve each of the other men at the king’s side of the table—his three captains, the steward himself, and any important guests he might have.

  That, too, put her out of Little Gwen’s reach. And usually she was so tired by the time the Steward dismissed them all that she went straight to bed and was asleep by the time Little Gwen—who was always trying to put off her bedtime—came back to the room. But on those rare occasions when Gwen wasn’t exhausted and did want to lie awake thinking for a while, Little Gwen seemed to sense, somehow, that she was feigning sleep and would poke and prod her, “accidentally,” or pretend to be tossing and turning, interrupting her thoughts.

  So tonight she took a sheared sheepskin rug and a blanket out to that little sheltered corner where she used to pick over the feathers. She nodded at the sentry standing guard at the door. “Too hot to sleep inside,” she told him, and he grinned and nodded. Of course he wouldn’t have grinned and nodded if she had been old enough for boys to be interested, as they were in Cataruna. He would have asked quite sternly if the king knew she intended to sleep out, and if she was sleeping alone, and then he would have made certain that the king did know and knew who she was with. Not all her willing him not to see would have stopped him from spotting her if she had been Cataruna’s age. Although things were changing elsewhere, it was still the expected thing here that boys and girls, even when the girl was the king’s daughter, would make their first fumblings together without there being any formal promises binding them. A swelling belly generally meant a wedding, of course, but Gwen knew vaguely that there were ways of preventing such a thing. If there hadn’t been, there would have been a great many more princesses than just four. In the village, at least, the girl that went to her marriage a virgin was a rarity.

  Nevertheless, for the king’s daughters . . . there were some things expected. You might keep the identity of the boy you were with from your parents if you were an ordinary girl, but the king’s daughter—well, there were always going to be complications. That had been carefully explained to them once they were old enough to notice that not all the bodies in the great hall of nights were quiet ones. If you went with a boy, Mother and Father had to know about it, know who he was, and to that end, the king’s men would be asking questions if you went slipping out to meet one. And you had better go to your betrothal, if not your wedding, still virginal or at least able to pretend to that state.

  But she was still young enough that it didn’t matter. He probably thought that he was going to go meet up with some of the squires for an illicit berry feast, perhaps, or some night fishing, or even for the sharing out of too much stolen ale or mead. He still had to know, of course, and he followed her for a bit. But under his watchful eye, she went right where she said she was going, laid the hide down over the grass, rolled up the blanket into a pillow, and laid herself down to stare up at the night sky. Satisfied, he went back to his post.

  What the queen had told her still warmed her heart and gave her a thrill of pride. It was one thing to have her father beaming at her—she was doing just what he had hoped one of his children would, she had joined the ranks of the warriors, she was doing well at her duties, and it was only natural that he was proud of her. Perhaps it was a mild surprise that it was Gwen in particular, but Braith was a t
rusted member of his elite fighting force, and the last thing he would do would be to prevent Gwen from following in the footsteps of such a valued warrior and driver.

  But she was doing precisely the opposite of what the queen had planned for her. She’d avoided thinking about it, but underneath everything, she’d been certain that Eleri must be disappointed in her. Maybe angry.

  But she wasn’t—so not only was Gwen proud and happy, she was relieved. It wasn’t often that Eleri changed her mind or her plans; it wasn’t often that she needed to. Gwen had felt the weight of Eleri’s expectations weighing her spirit down with dread; now that weight was gone, and she felt light enough to fly up to the moon.

  Underneath all that was one thing more; the farther her duties took her from the women’s side of castle life, the less time she had to spend in Little Gwen’s company. That was a relief too. In fact, it was entirely possible that at some point she would be expected to move from that comfortable bed to a pallet in the great hall with the others. Little did they know that she would gladly trade that warm bed and its unruly occupant for relative discomfort and peace!

  In the morning Gwen returned to the bedchamber, intending to leave the blanket and rug and go straight out to her duties, only to walk into a storm. And at the center of that storm was Little Gwen.

  Cataruna stood with her arms crossed and her lips pressed tightly together as Little Gwen tore through the two packs she had carefully made up, hissing angrily that Cataruna had stolen her things. “Where is my comb?” she demanded, her voice getting louder with each moment. “You took it! And my ribbons! And my top!”

  Quietly, Gwen edged into the room and dropped her burdens in the corner. She would have liked to edge out again, but by this point, Little Gwen’s tantrum was turning into a full blown tirade when she didn’t find any of the things she was claiming were “stolen.” Cataruna’s belongings were scattered all over the floor as if tossed by a whirlwind, and Bronwyn, awakened by the fuss, appeared at the door curtain—