Gwenhwyfar (18 page)

“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 angelica 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.

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.

The night it had happened, Gwen had stumbled over the box that the Merlin had given her little sister, open, cast aside, and empty. Gwen had numbly picked it up and put it on Little Gwen’s chest; when she looked again, it was gone. For the first time ever, she felt sorry for Gwenhwyfach. Whatever charm the Merlin had given her, Little Gwen must have tried to use to bring their mother back, and it had failed. Not even the strongest magic could bring back the dead, of course, but Little Gwen wouldn’t have believed that until she tried it for herself. Probably her faith in the Merlin and his promise had been discarded in the moment, like the box.

Gwen herself spoke only when she was spoken to, and she spent as much time as she could in the company of Dai and Adara, weeping into their manes.

Nor was the king allowed to grieve in relative peace. No, first the lords and the chieftains, then the messengers had descended. And now, here were come the Queen of the Orkneys and her brood. Supposedly to tender condolences and help, but . . . something in Gwen roused angrily at the look in Anna Morgause’s eyes. There was a satisfaction there, a kind of gloating, that was ugly.

She came with an entourage, but without King Lot or any of her older boys. Gwen had to admit, the only word for her was “enchanting.” Her lush figure would have been the pride of a much younger woman, her raven hair must have stretched out on the ground when it was unbraided, for the single plait that stretched down her back brushed her heels, and was as thick as a strong man’s wrist. Her little face reminded Gwen of a fox. Her clothing would have aroused immediate envy in every woman there, if they had not all been so wrapped in grief.