Charmed Destinies

by Catherine Asaro

  This was the way of things in a well-run keep; trust as deep as instinct sent underlings running to the lady, sure that no matter what the crisis, she and she alone could solve it. At that moment, Gwynn knew she had come into her own sort of power here.

  “The baby…the baby—” it was all the maid could get out around her tears, but she seized Gwynn’s hand and dragged her in the direction of the servants’ quarters with surprising strength.

  “What about the baby? Which baby?” Gwynn gasped as the maid hauled her through a part of the keep that she had not yet been to, one that housed most of the lower servants. There were babies enough here, she supposed, but she didn’t see most of them; they were kept well out of the way of the adults, or at least, the adults of any rank. Some of them supposedly were Bretagne’s get—another and more compelling reason to keep them out of Lady Gwynnhwyfar’s way, she supposed….

  “My baby—oh, milady—” she wailed, and that was all that Gwynn got from her before they reached the site of the trouble, at the back of the keep, in a windowless little room—and then, all she had to do was to point—

  Point to a hole in the floor of a tiny little alcove of a room, from which a thin, weak wail arose.

  “The well—” the maid sobbed. “He fell down the well!”

  It was easy to see how—there was a wooden cover that was supposed to shut the well up, but either someone had carelessly left it to one side or the child himself had been just old enough and strong enough to drag it off. In either case, it would take very little to send a young and curious child tumbling down into the depths. Gwynn seized a torch from the wall and dropped to her knees, her heart in her mouth, to peer down the rock-carved shaft—

  A contorted face looked up at hers, red, tear-streaked, and another wail echoed up to her. Too young—oh, blessed Jesu, far too young to grab and hold to a rope dropped to it, and heartbreakingly out of reach.

  The walls of the well shaft must have been hard to cut, for they narrowed abruptly right at the point where the baby had lodged. Unfortunately that was a good four yards down, and even though the baby had both fat little hands stretched up to her, there was no way in which to get hold of its wrists to haul it out.

  And there was always the danger, increasing with every moment, that whatever had caught the baby would give way at any moment, dropping it into the water below, where it would surely drown.

  But Gwynn was her mother’s daughter—

  Gwynn spun and faced the maid. “Run!” she snapped, breaking through the maid’s hysterical tears. “Find the cook and Sir Atremus. Get more help. Now!”

  Without a word, the maid turned and ran.

  “What on earth—” Robin stammered as Gwynn fumbled at the laces of her gown.

  “Help me get this off—I can’t go down there wearing this—I’ll get down as far as I can, then you’ll have to hold my ankles and lower me as far as you can—”

  “And then what?” Robin demanded, even as she obeyed, stripping the heavy woolen gown from her mistress and leaving her standing there in her linen undergown, her skin already prickling with gooseflesh. “You can’t reach the baby even with me holding you!” Then, “Oh,” she said numbly as she realized what Gwynn meant to do.

  “Yes. And I daren’t have any witness,” she said flatly, then pulled the undergown over her head and dropped it on the floor. “Now, hold my ankles and lower me over.”

  Robin made no further objections. Gwynn edged over the side of the well, crawled down the shaft, then felt Robin’s powerful hands grasping her ankles. She waited until Robin was well-braced and slipped down into the dark shaft without any support but Robin’s hands. Dark, damp, cold and with the child’s frantic wails coming up to her, it was like falling into a pit of the damned for just a moment.

  But of course, with a whisper, she called up a witch light, a dim, blue orb that was enough to show her the claustrophobic confines of the shaft and the baby below her, but not enough to dazzle her vision.

  This would drain her past anything she had ever done before; it didn’t matter, not when there was a child’s life at stake.

  She concentrated on the baby and began to whisper, to chant under her breath; the chant of the magic mill—the rhythm of magic itself, in time with the heartbeat pounding in her ears.

  “Air breathe and air blow, make the mill of magic go, work my will and spin my charms, bring the babe safe to my arms—”

  She felt the air begin to move around her, spinning up the power of air to answer her need. A good sign; the magic moved freely here, open to her will.

  “Fire seethe and fire burn, make the mill of magic turn, work my will and spin my charms, bring the babe safe to my arms—”

  Above her, in the keep, all the flames in all the fires would be spinning now, whirling up the chimneys, adding their power to that of air.

  “Water freeze and water boil, make the mill of magic toil, work my will and spin my charms, bring the babe safe to my arms—”

  There was water enough here and more, in the breath of the well alone, to add that element to the threefold power that she had woven; she sensed it moving below as the well water began a slow spin deosil to match the air in the well shaft.

  “Earth without and earth within, make the mill of magic spin, work my will and spin my charms, bring the babe safe to my arms!”

  She felt it—felt strength and energy draining out of her—she heard it, heard the little grate, the scraping below her. And she saw it, saw the child shake a little, then saw him start to rise, slowly spinning with the air, magic spinning around it, scraping along the wall, his little skirts tearing loose from the rocks that the fabric had caught on—

  She continued to whisper the charm, willing the baby closer, closer—until…

  With a yell of triumph that started the child into fresh wails, she caught its wrists with her outstretched hands. The magic snapped then, but no matter; she could hold him and the weight pulling her arms was welcome, welcome—

  And just in time; she heard the noise of a crowd, shouting and running footsteps rushing up above where Robin still held her. She extinguished the witch light, lest they catch sight of it, and now with the light gone, the baby howled in fear.

  “Pull me up! Pull me up!” she shouted to Robin.

  But at that moment she felt more hands than Robin’s grabbing her; on her ankles and calves, then hauling at the hem of her shift, pulling her and the baby out of the well shaft together in a tumbling of hands and bodies.

  Her body, and that of Robin’s—and Sir Atremus. His had been the extra hands on her legs that she had felt pulling her up so quickly!

  But she still had the baby as she rolled over. She pulled it to her chest, only half hearing the stammering apologies for the “insult” the men around her had done in placing their hands on a lady, and let them get her to her feet again, still clutching the wailing child, looking for its mother in the crowd.

  There! She shoved the baby at the maid who had called her, but it was one of the men-at-arms who snatched the howling child up, as Robin swiftly, and with some indignation, bundled her back into her gown. Of course, the servants had seen far too much already, for there wasn’t a great deal of concealment available to one wh
o was dangling head-down in a well, dressed only in a shift….

  Her head was swimming, but she fought back the need to collapse onto Robin. The man who had taken the child, though—when Gwynn’s head emerged from the folds of the gown, she saw with some surprise that it was—

  The captain of the set of guards that had come to bring her to Clawcrag in the first place, who she now knew was named Wulfred. He was—great heavens!—he was cuddling and comforting the boy like a nursemaid, his own face tear-streaked, one large, scar-seamed hand on the child’s back, the other arm supporting him as if this was something he was entirely used to doing, while the maidservant clung to both of them and wept in relief.

  “Wulfred?” she said incredulously. “Is this your lad?”

  He looked up at her with eyes, not cold and calculating, but full of—blessed Mary!—something very like worship. “Aye, my lady. God bless you, my lady. God bless—”

  But that was the moment when it all caught up with her, for every bit of power she had needed to haul that child into her own arms had come from her, of course. The four elements—the air and the water, primarily—had only been the extension of her will, something like her arms; the strength had come from her. Only magic that had been planned in advance, calculated, scribed into words of power and shaped into glyphs and figures, using wands and talismans, crystals and potions, came “without effort.” “Without effort”—hardly that, but the effort was spaced out over days, weeks, months, even years. Hasty magic, the kind she had just performed, came from the heart and the soul—

  —and, unfortunately, the body.

  So just as Wulfred set his baby into the mother’s arms and went down on one knee to her, she felt her eyes roll up into her head, her knees buckle, and she fainted dead away.

  7

  She woke in her own little bed, in her firelit solar, with no idea of how she had gotten there. “Robin?” she faltered.

  “I’m right here,” came the familiar, friendly voice. “And cook will have my head if you don’t eat this and drink this, right this instant.”

  As she sat up, taking support from the head of the enclosure around her cupboard bed and the pillows, Robin walked over from the fireside with a bowl and spoon in one hand, a cup in the other and a great smile on her face.

  “What are they? Oh, never mind, I’m hungry enough to eat what passed for food our first night here,” she replied, and took the cup first and took a sip. “Good heavens! I hadn’t known there was mead to be had in this benighted place!”

  “Cook’s private stock, or so I was told,” Robin replied, and handed her the bowl. “You have made an unconscionable number of allies today. I think if you told Wulfred to lead his men over the side of the keep, he’d do it without looking down.”

  The bowl held another surprising serving of custard, a much better version than the last—but then, cook had the knack of it now, after her careful teaching. It was topped with beaten cream sweetened with honey, and just the thing for someone who had done the equivalent of running up to the top of a mountain this afternoon. Her hands were even trembling with fatigue as she handled the spoon. It had been this sort of instinctive magic that had killed her mother—but then, her mother’d had no warning of Black Anghus’s sorcerous attack, and her mother’s magic had been needed to accomplish a far greater goal than lifting a child twelve feet up a well shaft.

  “Let us hope it never comes to that,” she replied soberly. “Please, tell me that no one told Bretagne what happened this afternoon!” She could just imagine her husband’s reaction—rage, of course. He would be angry that she had “exposed herself” in the course of the rescue, angry that she had bothered about a lowborn child, and absolutely enraged that she had won the devotion of the men-at-arms, especially his captain.

  “Be easy. No one is foolish enough to have breathed a word of this to Baron Bretagne,” Robin said tartly, making her heave a sigh of relief. “Nor has Ursula heard aught. His men know him and his tempers better than you, my lady, and as for you—well, all that Bretagne knows is that you are ill. He was told that you swooned for no particular reason, as delicate ladies are often known to do, and both the baron and his leman have been loud in the scorn that you are such a poor stick of a woman. Neither of them, of course, took any thought as to whether his last beating might have caused you some lasting injury.”

  “Or perhaps they have,” Gwynn corrected with a tightening of her lips.

  Robin frowned. Gwynn finished both the mead and the custard without further comment. She discovered that she was still fully clothed, though, and decided to assess her own recovery by climbing out of bed. “I hope that you have brought me stronger fare than custard,” she continued after a step or two proved that she was strong enough to stand on her own—and anything more would be easily remedied with food and rest. “I still hunger, let me tell you!”

  Robin had brought plenty of food, of course, for this was not the first time Gwynn had depleted herself in such a manner, and Robin knew well what Gwynn would need afterward. But as she ate, she realized that she had escaped her husband’s attentions for another night. And that seemed reward enough.

  At that moment a tapping on the door frame made her look up with dread, fearing that Bretagne had decided to see what ailed his wife himself. But that dread turned to delight when she saw that the visitor was not Bretagne, but Atremus, peering anxiously from the doorway, his face clearing as he saw that she was all right.

  He entered the room when she beckoned, and then, unexpectedly bowed low to her.

  “How now, Sir Knight!” she said with surprise. “What means this?”

  “My lady, were you my esquire, I would have knighted you this day for your valor,” he replied, bending to kiss her extended hand. “As it is, I can only offer my acknowledgment, small thing though that be. And—if you will take this as the great compliment that it is—my humble assertion that you truly are worthy of your blessed mother’s memory.”

  She felt herself blushing and withdrew her hand slowly from his. “I accept the compliment, with gratitude, though I fear that you rate me overhigh. But I wish that you join me in a chess game, sweet friend,” she replied, to which he laughed and agreed.

  They spent a pleasant evening there by the fire, though Gwynn was wrapped in a great fur coverlet and would look every bit the invalid if anyone should come spying. As it happened, there was little enough chess played that night and a great deal of conversation. She learned more about Atremus than she ventured he would have guessed….

  And the only unfortunate aspect of this was that she was only confirmed in her feeling that if she could have been wedded to this man, rather than the one she was, she could have been a very happy woman.

  But that was of no matter. A marriage to Atremus would not have bought her father protection. Only marriage to Bretagne, or someone like him, could have.

  It had, evidently, been Atremus who had brought her up here to the solar when she had swooned, despite the handicap of his bad leg, just as it had been Atremus who had been first on the scene when Robin summoned help.

  She bade him farewell for the evening feeling sad and wistful, though she took pains not to show it.

  But she could not help but wonder, as she retired to her bed after another night of painting, if Atremus knew just what that special compliment about her mother’s memory meant—to her.

  Then, just before s
leep, it suddenly occurred to Gwynn, as a bolt from the blue, if perhaps the question she had asked of the Almighty not long ago was the wrong one. Perhaps she should not have asked “Why do I suffer?” but “Why am I here?”

  For there might be a reason for her being here—perhaps beyond the simple one, that she had bought her father’s protection with her own sacrifice. Perhaps—

  Well, that would lead to a further question, wouldn’t it? And it was the question that the faithful heart should have asked in the first place.

  “What must I do?”

  And in the stillness of the winter night, she heard a single word in the depths of her heart.

  Listen.

  She knew, knew, that this was no echo from her own mind. This was the “still, small voice” within one’s heart, but from the Source outside of oneself.

  There it was, the answer to the question. This time, the right question. She must listen, and she would learn what she must do, for there was another purpose to her being here that went beyond the simple bargain she had struck.

  As the days of winter dragged on to spring, she sometimes wondered how she could bear her life a moment longer—then something small would happen to prove to her that, if nothing else, she was needed here, if only by the common folk of the keep. She was not the only one to suffer from Bretagne’s black moods, but sometimes she could deflect his rage onto herself, or find something that would distract him. Unfortunately there was not much she could do to protect any woman of the keep or village that Bretagne found attractive.

  She could only pick up the pieces afterward—but at least, she could do that much. And she could advise anyone likely to catch Bretagne’s eye how to avoid it, or how to make themselves look unattractive, at least as long as he was about. Binding generous breasts was the least of her lessons, which included the creative use of dirt and the making of temporary warts and blemishes. She knew that her efforts were bearing fruit when she overheard Bretagne complaining how ugly the women of his lands seemed to have become. “Half of ’em are squint-eyed hags, and the other half are poxy,” he growled to one of his knights.