Charmed Destinies

by Catherine Asaro

  Gwynn had done her best to keep Robin from guessing how very much she hurt as she worked. She felt every bruise, not as a fresh injury, but as a bone-deep, grinding ache now. When they finished the night’s work, she was glad enough to fall into her little bed and to leave Robin to clean up, conceal her things in the bottoms of the chests again, unbar the door and extinguish the lights. If she had not hurt so much, she probably would have been asleep immediately. As it was, she drank down her potion and watched Robin busy herself with putting the room to rights, until darkness encompassed the room and she heard Robin settling into the trundle bed.

  She might have remained awake anyway, for what she had just set in motion was not to be taken lightly—but she could not.

  And perhaps that was all to the best.

  It was easy to tell now who were her friends here and who her foes—and who were disturbed by their lord’s actions, but too afraid of him to make any move that might be construed as a challenge to what he had done. Those that were her friends, or were afraid, pretended that nothing was wrong, that her bruises did not exist, while those who were pleased to see her so humbled smiled slyly whenever she passed.

  But as yet, no one disobeyed Gwynn’s orders when it came to the household matters, though Bretagne’s actions could well have signaled the time to revolt. The kitchen staff, perhaps, was responsible for that; the first time that a serving man had sneered and ignored what Gwynn had told him, the cook clouted him across the back of the head with an enormous ladle, and since then, any order she gave belowstairs was obeyed with alacrity.

  Ursula sat in Gwynn’s seat at meals now, beside Bretagne, and rather than challenge the woman, Gwynn took her food in her room. Which was not so bad when it came down to it; she didn’t have to sit through Bretagne’s gobbling, the shouting, the wrestling matches and cock and dog fights. And as for that other duty—once her courses were over, she presented herself dutifully in her husband’s bedchamber, only to discover that Ursula was there ahead of her.

  She stood regarding the interloper gravely; Ursula was stark naked, curled up indolently in the bed. As Gwynn stared, the creature smiled maliciously and let the blanket she held to her chest drop, tossing her hair back over her shoulder, displaying her breasts proudly.

  Gwynn noted without dismay that they were vastly larger than her own—and beginning to sag. With the same insolence that Ursula displayed, she ran her gaze over everything that was visible, refusing to be intimidated, making her regard cool and analytical.

  If she was any judge of such things, Ursula’s days were numbered. Either she would get with child and be discarded, or someone younger, with a firmer body and the advantage of novelty, would take her place. There had been, so rumor claimed, a long line of women in Bretagne’s bed before Ursula, and there would be a succession of them to follow, unless Ursula was more clever than Gwynn thought. But there could only be one wife.

  She let some of that come through in her expression, and Ursula’s face began to change, to grow petulant and a little angry.

  And perhaps, just a little afraid.

  When Bretagne arrived a few moments later, he looked from one to the other and roared with laughter at the sight of wife and leman confronting one another like this. “Out for a moment, wench,” he ordered his leman. “This won’t take long.”

  With a smirk, Ursula slid from the great bed, wrapped herself in a blanket and flounced out the door. Bretagne slammed it behind the wench, but Gwynn did not doubt that Ursula lingered on the landing, waiting, trying to hear what went on through a crack in the door.

  Bretagne did not even bother to get Gwynn to disrobe, and his attentions were mercifully brief. He bent her over the bed, pulled up her skirts, and was quickly done. The act was so full of anger that there was no room left in him for anything else, and as for her, she endured the ordeal, sustained by her loathing. She was bound to this man in law, but nothing could make her submit anything but her body to him. When he was finished with her, he stood up and stared down at her with a loathing that must match hers.

  “Be here every night that you’re fit,” he said with a sneer. “I’ll plant a babe in your belly yet. But I won’t share a bed with a cold stick this winter, by God, so get you up to that nun’s cell you’ve taken over.”

  “Yes, my lord,” she replied without any expression whatsoever. She got up, straightened her gown and walked out.

  Ursula had been waiting on the landing. The woman laughed as Gwynn went past, on her way up the steps, and it would have been humiliating if she had not been so grateful. For once she had escaped Bretagne’s attentions without much injury, and with all of the precautions she was taking, it would require a miracle for him to get his wish.

  It did occur to her somewhat later that it was odd he hadn’t cautioned her against taking a lover…but perhaps it hadn’t occurred to him that she would, or that any man would find her attractive. Or perhaps he knew very well what would happen if she did—there would be a hundred tongues more than willing to tell, and it would be drowning for her. Whatever the reason, she vowed to give him no excuse to accuse her. Any time there was a man in her chamber, she would be chaperoned, and the door would be open.

  Ursula was not minded to usurp her place as housekeeper, apparently, for she made no move to countermand the orders that Gwynn gave. Gradually the keep returned to a place that was fit to live in—gradually, for she was careful not to pile too much work on the younger servants who were only obeying her because Bretagne apparently still gave her support for this position. The rest, the older ones, she was determined not to overburden, either—first, it was not fair, and second, she was not going to do anything to make them regret supporting her. And even though her lord appeared not to notice the changes in his surroundings, Gwynn noted that even her foes were not trying to undermine her work. Perhaps that was Ursula’s doing, after all; even if Bretagne didn’t notice, Ursula was sufficiently luxury-loving to be enjoying the improved state of things. Fireplaces that had ceased to smoke, fires that burned hot and clean, decent food, rushes underfoot that didn’t stink like a midden—yes, even Ursula was not going to cut the neck of the goose that had laid that particular golden egg.

  5

  As the keep settled into a routine, and as the weather tended to close everyone in within walls for days at a time, she could not help but be thrown into Sir Atremus’s way more often. In a way, the manner in which he was treated was a parallel to her situation. The younger knights—more numerous than the older—regarded him with unveiled contempt. But the older ones gave him full deference, even though in years he was more their junior than she had thought. And the pages and squires—all of them, though there were fewer of them than there should have been, given the number of knights—turned to him and not their own knights for help or guidance. Now that was curious. She had thought at first that it might have been because he was serving in part as the seneschal, and it was part of the seneschal’s duty to see to the discipline of all the pages and squires in the keep. But no, in fact, that was not the case at all, for there was no seneschal, only a steward, who oversaw the affairs of the lands belonging to Clawcrag. Atremus ordered the boys, not because it was his duty, but because it was in his nature. When one was ordered to do a task beyond his strength or skill, Atremus saw to it that he had help, and somehow did it without making the younger feel inadequate, or the older helper feel put-upon. And she could not help but think that it should have been the lord of the keep who was doing all this and not one of his knights.

  And Gwynn noted something else
that was curious. For all of Bretagne’s swearing, and all of the clerkly types at his table, he was remarkably lax in his observances of holy days. The keep’s tiny chapel was usually empty but for a few old servants, her, Robin and Sir Atremus, nor did the fat priest who officiated there do more than mumble his way through his Latin to get the service over with as quickly as possible. She often wondered if the priest was a true priest at all, or only a self-taught charlatan, eager to claim a place where the living was easy. There was no change at Christmastide, either; in fact, curiously enough, that festival came and went with next to no difference to the keep. No Yule log, no caroling, no feast, no Christmas Eve Mass, and no orders for any such thing. It could have been any other of the dark days of winter; Gwynn would have suspected that she had missed the day altogether, but the stars told her that she had not. She and Robin made an exchange of small gifts, and that was all.

  Except that, the day after Christmas, when Gwynn’s courses came on her again, she celebrated the season with a second beating.

  It was not so violent as the first, but only because she had taken the precaution of serving ale mulled with spices to the High Table—spices that covered the taste of the additional distilled spirits she put into Bretagne’s cup. Much though she would have liked to have poisoned him, all she dared to do was to impair his abilities temporarily. As a result, he was truly drunk by the time he discovered her state, and more than half his blows landed on something other than her body.

  He ended his beating by aiming a great clout at her head, overbalancing and falling over onto the bed, where he lay snoring like a rooting boar. At least she had the satisfaction of leaving him that way for Ursula’s pleasure.

  This time she was able to go up to her room under her own power. She came away with another blackened eye and split lip, however, and Robin glared at her with anger and dismay as she entered the solar.

  Since she had known what would happen when Bretagne discovered the signs that she had failed to quicken, she had gotten a bucket of snow ahead of time. Robin made snow packs and helped Gwynn treat her injuries and fumed the entire time.

  “Now?” Robin demanded when Gwynn said nothing except to thank her for the pack.

  “Not yet,” she replied, applying the pack to her lip.

  Robin glowered and sulked for the rest of the evening. But she was not too angry to take part in the evening’s painting, however.

  It was progressing slowly, but that was not bad; whatever Gwynn decided to do, the diagrams would have to be perfect, or it all might go awry. Better slow and careful now.

  The outer circle was complete, and Gwynn had found true north to bisect it into the four quarters, so the inner square was done, as well. The circle that fit within the square had been completed last night, and tonight she began the pentangle that lay within the inner circle. When those figures were done, the real work would begin, work that Robin, willing though she might be, could not help her with. Magic took talent as well as learning; many who had studied long and hard could not master it, and a few, a very few, who never studied it at all could call upon it with concentrated will alone, though the cost was very high. Certain signs needed to be inscribed in the points of the square and the pentangle—and more pentangles would have to be painted on the walls. These, however, would be laid out in the white of an egg, invisible to the naked eye, and they would not have to be so perfect. She would lay them out with a string, following the line of the string against the wall rather than a charcoal-drawn outline, for she would want to leave no trace of her work to be discovered.

  She remembered her mother, also, drawing pentagrams like these, late at night, when she thought that no one was watching. Her mother, also named Gwynnhwyfar, with green eyes and golden hair….

  Her father had willfully pretended that nothing of the sort was going on. He loved his wife so deeply, and he was so afraid that what she did was rooted in deviltry and shadow, not light, that he simply elected not to see, not to know. And so, in the end, he had not known why his wife died, for he had not known she had died to protect him and her little daughter. But Gwynn knew…Gwynn knew.

  Well, she was her mother’s daughter. She would have been so happy to discover another such as her father in Bretagne. Why was he as he was, anyway? What had turned him into a brute that beat women, allowed his court to degenerate, lived like a pig? His parents, by all accounts, had been decent folk—the little she had heard of them from the old servants gave her no reason to think otherwise.

  But he had been the unlooked-for child of their old age, and they had fostered him, early, to another Border Lord, keeping his older brother at home and training him to become the next baron. Only when that young man died of a fever, had they brought Bretagne, now fully of age, home again. Perhaps it had been when he was in fosterage that the damage had been done….

  Or perhaps there was some truth to the tales of changelings, and he was a demon in human guise. God, He knew the truth of it; it was too deep for her to unravel.

  All this tumbled through her thoughts while she and Robin painted. She kept Robin awake a’ purpose until her half sibling was yawning, then sent Robin to bed first and did the cleaning and straightening herself. Much more of that resentful silence and she would have been tempted to say something she would later regret. She fully intended to sleep through the worst of the aching on the morrow, for the servants had had their orders before she went up to Bretagne—she could tell by the looks that they gave her on getting those orders that they had known what was coming, as well.

  She ached, but did not need her potion, only wine and willow; bitter, but not as potent. This she drank down and put herself to bed, locking herself inside the shelter of the cupboard bed with the shutters closed so that daylight would not wake her.

  But sleep eluded her and her blackened eye and battered head hurt worse, once she was lying down, than she had thought they would.

  That was when, with Robin lying asleep, and the shutters and the pillows muffling her sobs, she wept for the pure grief of her situation for the first time since she had come here.

  Oh, she had wept before, but it was with physical pain rather than heartsickness. Now, though—this one hour she claimed for herself and for her grief.

  So many hopes, dead, since she had come here! So much she had given up, and for what? The only difference between this beast and Anghus was that Bretagne was no magician! And she had been so completely willing to make something of the situation! If Bretagne had shown her the least kindness, had given any indication that he saw the work she had been putting into his comfort and appreciated it, if he had shown that he cared for any thing other than himself and having his lusts satisfied, she would have fought to find whatever scrap of heart he had and nurtured it.

  So why had there been nothing there for her to nurture? All things happened for a reason; she had to believe that, or go mad, but why was she suffering so?

  Was this how her life was to be from now on? An endless series of beatings and loveless, brutal couplings while she fought to keep from being brought to bed with a child that, given his lord’s behavior toward her, would surely kill her—and while she labored like a serf in what should have been her own household?

  She wept, her whole being an aching, empty cry of Why? to the heavens, until she had no more tears left, and lay, wretched and feeling utterly alone, all emotion spent.

  Now, if ever an answer was to come to her, she would have thought that it sho
uld have come then. But there was nothing, only the sound of the wind whining through the myriad crevices in the keep’s walls, wailing softly like the lost soul that she had become.

  And finally, the only thing that came was sleep.

  She woke to voices, one Robin’s, one muffled. The second one sounded like a man’s voice, but it could not have been Bretagne’s for Bretagne would have bellowed and this man spoke in low and reasonable tones. She wondered, sleepily, if the cook could have come up, needing more orders about some minor kitchen or household emergency.

  But if it was an emergency, it was not sufficiently imperative that Robin came to wake her, and she fell back asleep again, for the dreams she had awakened from were disturbing and not at all restful.

  She woke a second time feeling more like herself and opened the shutters. Robin was not there, but her dress was waiting, warming by the fire, and she was not so helpless that she couldn’t get it on by herself. She felt stiff and sore, and without doubt her blackened eye was swollen, but she was better, much better, than after that first beating.

  A quick wash in the cold water from the basin made her feel more awake, and she dressed herself quickly and warmly. Robin came in with a flat basket of food after she had sat herself down at her loom, for she had not felt up to trying to manage the fine detail of her embroidery.

  “Bretagne has a head like a lightning-struck oak,” Robin reported with grim satisfaction. “And a stomach that can’t hold more than dry bread. He spent half the morning abed, moaning about his gut and now lurks in the hall, complaining about the agony in his skull. He doesn’t blame the ale, though—”