Gwenhwyfar

by Mercedes Lackey

  His wife interrupted him, glancing with some concern between herself and Gwenwhyfar. “Do you think that anyone will notice that she was wearing those—things—and I am wearing her gown?”

  Medraut shook his head. “Only the guards and the servant saw her. Besides, she can always say that she changed her clothing after her spell of illness. I dismissed the servant that dressed her to the kitchens, and no man ever remembers what a woman is wearing.”

  “Only what she isn’t.” Gwenhwyfach said mockingly, and Gwen felt chilled to hear her own laugh coming from her sister’s throat. “Oh, I am looking forward to this. You may be sure I will well bewitch the High King, my love. Arthur will have such a greeting when he returns as will make him never want to leave my bed again. I will use every wile your mother ever taught me.”

  “It would greatly please me if you managed to dispose of him there, my love,” Medraut smiled. Incredibly, he was not the least bit disturbed at hearing his own wife describe how she intended to seduce another man! Then again . . .

  . . . he was certainly Lot’s son in spirit, if not in actuality.

  “But if you do not, when the Saxons finally kill the old man, or the Ladies give up and let me spill his blood for the Land, the Old Stag will give way for the Young Stag, and I will be High King. Just as mother promised.” His eyes glittered, and inside her, she grew cold with fear. How had she never seen this before? How had she never seen how ruthless he was, how he would do anything, use any tool, to take the High King’s throne? Now, of course, it was far too late.

  “I’m sure by now you are also wondering, ‘But what about the Druids?’ Since it was the Merlin who was so very eager to kill me in my cradle.” He laughed. “And of course, the Merlin managed to imprint his desires on the entire Druidic Council. I thought about that, too, well in advance of putting my plans in motion. I have been working at this for years. All of the Merlin’s cronies have tottered off to the Summer Lands, and I hold the young ones in the palm of my hand.” He spread his hands wide. “And now it all comes together. You, the High King’s queen, disposed of. The Druids, mine. The Ladies so concerned with fighting the encroachment of the Christ men that they ignore me. My wife in your place. All of it, building the stair that will take me to the highest place in the land.”

  She was fighting hard now to even stay conscious. Her vision narrowed, darkened. There was a roaring in her ears. She couldn’t hear him anymore. Couldn’t see him.

  So this is death, she thought bitterly.

  And then she had no more thoughts at all.

  She hadn’t expected to wake, so when she did, it was with a shock as great as the blast of cold air that struck her in the face. She struggled to move, to open her eyes, and plunged into despair when she couldn’t. Wave after wave of nauseating emotions washed over her. Panic. Terror. A deeper despair. She tried to force calm on herself, tried to get control, only to have fear wrest it away from her. Her ears were still full of a roaring sound, but under that, she heard the clopping of hooves, and her body was bouncing on a hard, flat surface, and rolling about a bit. So she was in that cart Gwenhwyfach had mentioned. She’d been incompletely poisoned. But she still couldn’t move. She was being carted off, to be buried alive. The thought of the frozen clods falling on her face, the earth filling her throat, her lungs, choking her—

  She thought she would be submersed in terror forever.

  But even the terror wore itself out. It ebbed, slowly. And that was when she realized that she could open her eyes again. And she could—barely—move her fingers and toes.

  When she forced her eyes open, she couldn’t see anything but light filtering through a coarse cloth that covered her face. And she was tied firmly hand and foot—tied, in fact, to a pole that ran past her head and feet, so she couldn’t bend or kick. But she was awake, and she could move. That counted for something.

  And that was when she realized that even if her hands and feet were bound, her mouth was not.

  “Help,” she croaked, weakly. Then, “Help!” she yelped, louder. “Help! Help! He—”

  The cart stopped. The cloth covering her face was pulled back, roughly.

  “Now, now,” said Medraut, making no attempt to hide his gloating. “Surely you don’t want to leave my company so soon, Gwen?” He gave her no time to do more than gasp at seeing him. He reached down and wrenched her head back by the hair, stuffing one end of a horn into her mouth. “You’ll just need to go back to sleep for now. We have a way yet to go.” He let go of her hair and pinched her nose shut, then poured more of that cloyingly sweet mead down the horn. “Drink or drown, my love.”

  She had no other choice. Choking, coughing, she drank. Some of it got into her lungs, where it burned terribly. As soon as he was sure the drugs were taking hold of her, he pulled the horn out of her mouth and smoothed her hair with a tender hand, wiping the tears of pain and rage from her eyes, and fastidiously cleaning some of the slopped mead from her mouth.

  “There we are. That’s better, isn’t it.” His eyes were alight with a strange look of pleasure. “What? You thought I was going to kill you? I told you years ago that you were going to be mine; why would I want to kill you? I only married your sister because she was so like you.” He patted her cheek, while she shrank back inwardly in horror. “And now I have you all to myself. Your sister will be so concerned with keeping Arthur happy, she won’t have time to worry about what I am doing. Besides, she thinks I am going to throw you in a river or bury you, not that I am taking you off to—well, it doesn’t matter where. All that matters is that I prepared it for you years ago. Oh, you don’t like me now, I know. But you’ll learn to love me. I know you will. You won’t be able to help yourself.”

  He laughed, and pulled the coverings over her head again. And mercifully, the roaring, and the blackness came back, and she was carried away by them and hid inside them.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Gwen sat cross-legged on her pallet on the floor, patiently braided her own hairs into a thread. A few threads and she could make a cord. If she had a cord, she might be able to strangle Medraut with it . . .

  There was not much else to do. She lived in a small room with a high window in one wall and a mattress heaped with furs on the floor. The floors were stone, the walls were stone, and the timbers of the ceiling could not be reached by any means from the floor. Without a knife, it was not possible to cut up the furs or the canvas cover of the mattress. She was wearing heavy woolen gowns of material too tough to tear and too closely woven to pick apart, without any fastenings or cords. She was barefoot.

  The latrine was a heavy stone basin in the corner with a hole much too small to stick anything down. The huge guard that brought her food sloshed a bucket of water down it when he came in.

  Medraut had gone to great lengths to make sure that there was nothing in here she could use as a weapon. Her food was served in a grass basket, and she ate it with her fingers; her drink came in a blunted drinking horn that wouldn’t serve as a weapon itself and wouldn’t smash to give her something with a point or edge. Those were taken away when she was finished, and the guard stayed there until she finished.

  This place, whatever it was, must have been built on the Roman style, for the floor was warm, though not nearly as warm as Arthur’s palace.

  She was not sure how long she had been here. Weeks, certainly. Months . . . probably. For most of the early part of this ordeal, she had been unconscious for long stretches thanks to Medraut’s potions.

  Medraut visited her from time to time; his visits were irregular, and the only way that she knew one was going to occur was when she began to feel dizzy after eating. He made sure that she couldn’t move long before he unlocked her door. She had been completely unsuccessful in detecting whatever he was putting in her food; she’d tried not eating altogether, but eventually hunger drove her to eat. After all it wasn’t as if she wanted to die—that was the last thing she wanted. She wanted to get free.

  She was pretty
certain that on the last several visits, Medraut hadn’t touched her, although she knew very well he had done whatever he liked early on. Probably he had found that lying with someone as unresponsive as a corpse was rather unsatisfying. Instead, of late, he had a chair brought and sat in it, talking at her until she lost consciousness. That might actually have not been so bad if he had given her any real information. She knew far more than she wanted to know now about how he had gotten rid of Arthur’s sons, how he had hoodwinked Arthur into trusting him, what most of his late childhood had been like—and far, far too much about how he had been certain she was destined for him from the moment he saw her.

  But a very, very strange thing also happened when she was drugged—and sometimes, when she was asleep.

  Visions—maybe. If visions they were, she could hardly credit them. But if they were not, why on earth would her mind have made such a thing up?

  She got glimpses into the life Little Gwen was leading in her place, and at first, everything happened as she would have predicted. Little Gwen absolutely reveled in her place as queen, wallowing in the baths and the preening, gossiping viciously with her ladies and for mischief setting them against each other, ordering gown after sumptuous gown, and entertaining Arthur in her bed with a wanton abandon that made Gwen blush with shame.

  But then something happened. A new Arthur began to appear in that bedchamber of nights. An Arthur that she had never seen, a man who, despite his years, seemed more vibrant, more alive, than she had ever seen him. And under the charismatic spell of that Arthur . . . Little Gwen softened. Gradually, she ceased tormenting her ladies. Gradually, her demeanor took on a cast that Gwen couldn’t really identify at first.

  And when she did . . . that was when she simply couldn’t believe the dreams. Because—if she was right—Arthur was taming the untamable Little Gwen, winning her to him the way he won his men’s hearts. And she simply could not believe that anyone as self-centered as Little Gwen could come to care for anyone other than herself.

  She’d had another of those dreams last night. It seemed just as impossible as the ones before it. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought that Little Gwen was having second thoughts about betraying Arthur.

  Impossible.

  As she braided, she began to feel the tingling in her lips that signified he had slipped a potion into her again. With a resigned sigh, she thrust the thread she was braiding with the others she had made under the mattress, then stretched out under the furs and waited for the paralysis—and Medraut—to arrive. She stared up at the ceiling and the tiny bit of sky that was all she could see through the window.

  She was almost beginning to look forward to this. It made for a change in the endless sameness of her days. She had thought she was bored as Arthur’s queen; here she had nothing whatsoever to do except exercise, comb her fingers through her hair, and braid what came out.

  At least she was still fit. She did every exercise she could remember, practiced fighting moves even if she didn’t have a weapon, stretched and flexed until she was more limber than she had ever been in her life except as a small child. She had learned how to run and tumble in these wretched gowns, even if she couldn’t run very far in the tiny cell.

  She even practiced that meditation that the Ladies did, though she wasn’t very good at it. She prayed a great deal. She recited what she could remember of bardic ballads and epics.

  She did that now, waiting for the potion to take effect, staring upward, because when she couldn’t move, she really didn’t want to be frozen in a position where she had to look at Medraut.

  The room began to spin, even though she was lying down. Beneath the furs, she tried, experimentally, to move her arm, and couldn’t. So . . . he should be entering at any moment.

  This was when she heard the bar on the outside of the door slide aside, and the door scraped open. Footsteps on the stone followed as Medraut entered the room, followed by a servant with a comfortable chair; who placed the chair and washed out the basin with a bucket of water. She could just see Medraut out of the corner of her eye; he made a face, and waved a hand in front of his nose.

  “Time for another bath and a new gown, my love,” he said. “You’ll like that, won’t you?”

  She felt a little sick inside. Yes, she liked being clean. No, she did not like the fact that it happened while she was unconscious. Not one bit. She would wake up with her hair washed and braided, completely scrubbed, and in a new clean gown. She had no idea who or what was doing this, nor what, if anything, happened besides the washing. What was the most disturbing, perhaps, was the level of detail; her fingers and toes were neatly manicured, the nails trimmed, and even buffed to a soft polish. There were none of the perfumed oils of Arthur’s baths, but there was a faintly pleasant scent on her skin afterwards. Any tiny abrasions or bruises were anointed with a balm, and calluses were sanded.

  “Well, now, where were we?” Medraut asked, rhetorically, since she couldn’t answer. She turned her attention back to the ceiling. In a way, since she was forced to listen to these monologues, she was glad even her expression was frozen. At least he didn’t know how revolted she was most of the time by his confidences. And why did he ever think that this would make her care for him?

  Maybe because Gwenhwyfach used to hang on his every word?

  “Ah, I don’t believe I ever told you how Lot told me that I wasn’t his.” She heard him move a little as he settled himself in the chair. “It was one of those rare moments when he was sulking about being Mother’s pander, rather than gloating about it. Possibly his temper was because she was lying with someone he hadn’t picked himself, and she wasn’t allowing him to watch. So when I interrupted him to show him the results of the sacrifice and blood spell I had done all by myself, he knocked me into a wall and called me ‘Arthur’s unnatural bastard.’ ”

  At this point, likely, Gwenhwyfach had been cooing with sympathy to him. Oh, how she wished she could stop her ears. The images that his narrative called up made her feel even more ill. Her imagination—given what her visions had shown her of Anna Morgause and her past—created scenes of Medraut’s mother disporting herself with a lover all too vividly. And it was hardly that she disapproved of lovemaking—though her own experiences were not inclined to make her crave it herself. It was how Anna Morgause had used it: as a tool, a weapon. Even with Arthur. Especially with Arthur.

  “I knew better than to move. Lot is entirely unpredictable, and there was no telling how he would react. He glared at me a moment, then stormed off. I went to ask Morgana what he meant.” Gwen couldn’t turn her head to see his expression, but his tone was casual, as if he were telling a tale about someone else. This had probably hurt him—yes, even him—if it was true. If. There was no telling, with Medraut. Perhaps the reason for his casual tone was that it actually had never happened at all.

  “She told me that what Lot had said was entirely true. Even the ‘unnatural’ part.” He chuckled. “She explained it all to me, that Mother was Arthur’s half-sister, and that even though the gods themselves often mated with their siblings, or daughter with father and son with mother, small-minded mortals thought this was wrong. A very enlightened woman, is Morgana. None of that really mattered to me, either.” His voice took on a faint tone of gloating. Now this, this she could believe. Very little mattered to Medraut, so long as he got what he wanted. “All that did matter was that Lot, whom I hated and despised, even at so young an age, was not my father. My real father was the man who was King over Lot, who had the Folk of Annwn as his allies, and the Merlin as his servant. My real father was Arthur, the High King. What Lot intended to be the moment of my humiliation became the moment of my release and elevation. That was the moment that I knew that I was destined for great things. I would either create something unparalleled, or destroy it. Either way, my name would never be forgotten.”

  She would have shivered at his words if she had been able to move. She believed this, too, believed fervently that Medraut hate
d Lot and Lot hated him—and that Medraut craved fame or infamy and didn’t care which he got, so long as he had it.

  “Mother sensed that I had learned the truth and questioned me about it. I told her, but only in Morgana’s presence, because I wanted Morgana to know I had told, and I wanted Mother to know that we were together on this.” He let out his breath in a long sigh of reminiscence. “Mother was always a little afraid of Morgana, and I didn’t know why at the time, but I felt that with Morgana there, she wouldn’t dare punish either of us. I found out later, of course, just why Mother feared her. Morgana had pledged herself to the Morrigan when her woman’s blood first began to flow.”

  That meant nothing to her—well, except that if Anna Morgause was wary about this Morrigan, it would be wise to be even more wary. He laughed softly, mockingly. “You’re puzzled, of course. You wouldn’t know of the Morrigan. She is the Dark of the Moon to Cerridwen’s Full Moon. They know her well in Eire, though, and it was a wise woman of Eire that taught our Morgana of her. She is the chooser of the dead, the storm crow, the washer at the ford. She is power and chaos, and she suits our Morgana most perfectly. Even Mother was afraid of the Morrigan’s power.”

  Gwen felt a cold that had nothing to do with the potions or her paralysis. It wasn’t wise to mix with the gods, the dark ones in particular. “Lot himself has always left Morgana alone, even though he lusts for her to this day. I often wonder if that wasn’t why Morgana pledged herself in the first place.”

  Well, Gwen couldn’t fault Morgana for protecting herself from Lot, whose excesses rivaled those of his wife. But dealing with the dark side of the moon goddess—risky, risky business. Everyone knew there were always two sides to every Power, but dealing even with the bright side of the changeable Goddess of the Moon was a great deal like trying to bargain with the Folk of Annwn. Cerridwen was fickle enough; what was the Morrigan like?