Gwenhwyfar

by Mercedes Lackey

  It appeared that the Water Horses hadn’t “abandoned” her after all, since this shelter was no more than fifty paces from where they had left her on the shore.

  For the first time since she had stormed into Arthur’s chambers, she smiled. Triumph tempered with caution made her spirits rise. She had done it; she had escaped, and although she’d had some help in getting away and had certainly benefited by good luck, she was the one that had rescued herself. That triumph eased the aches of over-used and too tired muscles, warmed her all over, and, finally, let her ease down into the first real sleep she had had since she left Castell y Cnwclas.

  It was the sound of a small wren peeping inquisitively not a foot from her ear that woke her. She knew exactly where she was; a warrior got into that habit of waking with full knowledge fairly quickly, and it wasn’t one that was easily lost. The sound of the bird was reassuring. If anyone or anything had been snooping about, that bird would not have been poking through the brush that hid her sleeping spot.

  She stayed right where she was, though; she could not afford a single wrong step out here. Her resources were too thin to allow for mistakes, and even though she had a head start on those hunting her, they had the advantage of numbers and mobility. She had no time at all to waste. Everything must be carefully planned.

  She needed food; it was too early for berries, finding a cache of nuts was chancy, and she didn’t want to wait here to see if she could snare rabbits. Roots were possible, especially those of water plants, but the best idea was to fish. In the spring, fish were hungry. The best use of that toweling was to make a fishing line. She could carve a hook easily enough, and a bit of twig would serve as a bobber. She knew exactly where to dig for grubs and worms. So, unravel a long woof thread from the toweling, make a hook, get bait, fish. That was the first order of the day. Next, try to find a flint or other sparking stone; they were often enough found among the pebbles in streams and lakebeds. She had the ax, so she could make a fire if she could find a piece of flint.

  Cautiously, she pushed the brush out of the way and took a careful look around before emerging into the dawn.

  By the time the sun was overhead, she was full of fish, she had a hook and line, a flint, and had even found a way to sew the “shoes” together, padding the bottoms for a little more protection. They were only cloth, so they wouldn’t last long, but she only needed them to last until she managed a better substitute, or found someone she could trust, or stole something.

  With more cooked fish, cress, and some baked cattail and mallow roots in the bottom of her bucket, protected by a bit of cloth, she headed west.

  She was very glad now that she had taken the bucket. It was proving as useful as the knife. It now held food, dry tinder, and the flint she had found among the stones at the lakeshore, as well as the rest of her meager belongings. The Water Horses had not made another appearance, and she assumed they had either forgotten her or had given her all the help they were inclined to. So before she left the lake, she had left three nicely cooked fish and some baked cattail roots on a rock beside the water by way of a thank you gift.

  As she cautiously threaded her way through the forest, using streams as often as possible to keep her trail broken, she made a mental inventory of things she wanted. Real shoes and real trews were both high on the list, and so was a bow. She tried very hard not to think too much about the fact that she had no idea where she was. She was a scout, and an expert one at that. She knew all of the signs that showed where people were, and the farther she got from Medraut’s villa, the more likely it was that it would be safe to approach them.

  She also kept her eyes open for anything edible, and she gleaned some early mushrooms and a squirrel’s cache of nuts that way.

  It was not until she found another good place for a camp, this one a hollowed out but still standing, tree, had set several snares made with more raveled thread from her towels, had eaten and made herself comfortable for the night that she realized something.

  Even though this was real hardship and was only going to get harder, she didn’t care how long it took to find her way to friends.

  For the first time in her life, she was free. There were no demands, no duties she was obliged to perform. She answered to no one out here, and her own skills and her own two hands were enough to keep her fed and safe.

  As she restlessly shifted, finding a comfortable position in the hollow she had scooped dry in the rotted wood, the inescapable thought came to her. What if I never went back?

  She immediately scolded herself for being impractical, if nothing else. She was well enough equipped to stay healthy and fed in the spring and summer, but winter would surely kill her. She did not have enough in the way of protection or hunting gear to survive even a mild winter.

  But what if—what if she could find a way to live out here? Never go back to Arthur? And for just one heady moment, she entertained a daydream of complete freedom. Perhaps she could find an old hermit’s hut—she wouldn’t need much. If she were settled, she could spend her time hunting and tanning the hides of what she caught. She pictured herself making serviceable garments from rabbit hide, then, making a crude bow, bringing down deer . . . living out a life with no obligations to anyone but herself.

  She sighed, the fantasy dissolving almost as quickly as she had conceived of it. I’d go mad. Although she liked her own company well enough, she knew she was not the sort for a hermit’s life.

  And aside from all that . . . Gwenhwyfach was masquerading as her, and that could have no good ending, not for Arthur and not for anyone else, either. She had to get back and expose the treacherous bitch. Medraut had had a very long time to plan whatever it was he was going to do, and he probably would not have kidnapped her if his plans weren’t close to fruition. She owed Arthur that.

  The weight of duty and responsibility descended on her again, as if someone had piled heavy stones on her heart. And she cried, just a little, as she settled in for sleep.

  After two days of almost direct westward movement, Gwen relaxed a little, and began to look for signs of human beings. While it was true that Medraut’s control extended this far, practically speaking, she didn’t think he was all that interested in anything that went past the immediate boundaries of his villa. Medraut was, at heart, disinclined to trust anyone but himself. Governing land required a great deal of work—work he couldn’t perform if he wasn’t physically present. She had the feeling that the reason he had, as time passed, left her alone for so long, was that was still cultivating his place as one of the King’s Companions. The work her father did day to day meant he was always dealing with his chiefs and nobles, sometimes over details as small as the harvest from an individual farm. Medraut couldn’t possibly oversee extensive property himself, yet it was work he would never trust to anyone else.

  So the villa was probably just a remote hideaway, and one with no village, no farms, nothing outside its walls. And while Medraut could probably force or bully cooperation from those living near the place, it was unlikely he even bothered to try to rule anyone living more than a day’s ride away.

  She began listening carefully for the distant sounds that would tell her there was human habitation—the crow of a rooster, the sound of a dog barking, the echo of an ax on wood.

  But the faint sounds she heard first were nothing so peaceful. They were the metal-on-metal clash of swords, faint, far, but not all that far away . . .

  And she didn’t even think, she reacted. She ran toward the sounds, aided by the fact that the game trail she was on went in the same direction. Whoever was fighting, the odds were good that one side or the other would be friendly to her. The brief pang of regret that her strange idyll of freedom was over was lost in the fierce wash of glee that at last, at long last, she was going to be able to strike back at someone.

  But as she stopped just before the clearing where four men were being held off by a single, incredibly skillful fighter, she froze in shock for a moment. She knew that fighter.<
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  It was Lancelin, with his back up against the trunk of an enormous tree so that they couldn’t ring him. And from the look of things, he was tiring. She didn’t recognize the four men who were clearly trying to kill him, but they were well-clothed and well-armed, and the odds were good that they were Medraut’s.

  She assessed all this in no time at all, dropped her bucket, picked her target, and leaped to Lancelin’s aid, ax held in both hands as she raced in for a killing stroke before they realized she was there. She aimed not for the body, which might be protected by riveted metal plates inside the jerkin, but for the back of the man’s neck, where the helm ended. She couldn’t see his neck beneath the hair, but she didn’t need to. She knew there was no protection there.

  She hit that spot with all her momentum and all her strength.

  The ax struck home against bone; the handle shivered in her hands as the axhead severed the spine and went halfway into his neck; it lodged in there, but she had already let go of it and was reaching for the sword his powerless hand had dropped. As if she had practiced the move a hundred thousand times, she snatched it out of midair, and throwing herself into a half spin, slammed the flat of the blade into the belly of the man next to him. She hadn’t enough time to hit him with the edge, but she didn’t need to; she just needed to buy time for a better attack.

  As she had expected, there was metal under the leather, but she knocked the breath out of him and drove him back a little. And the shock and surprise of her appearance had given Lancelin the opening to drive his own sword into the third man’s throat. That man went down with a strangled gurgle.

  Now the odds were two to two.

  The two men left glanced at each other, shocked.

  Lancelin and Gwen didn’t pause even for a heartbeat. As if they were linked together, they both acted and grabbed the moment of that glance to attack.

  And in the time it took to draw a quick breath, the second pair were down—Lancelin’s from a thrust into his eye, Gwen’s from a deadly and accurate swing at his legs, where he wasn’t armored.

  There were great advantages to being shorter than your enemy, sometimes; she spun again, this time able to aim, and took him across the back of his legs at the knee.

  Her man went down, too shocked to scream, hamstrung. And in the next instant, Gwen stepped on his sword arm, keeping him pinned, while Lance put a foot on his chest and a sword point at his throat. She reached down and wrenched the sword out of his hand.

  “Whose men are you?” the Companion panted. “What do you want?”

  “Medraut’s!” the man gasped. “He sent us to hunt for her—”

  Lancelin looked at Gwen, his mouth a thin, grim line. She nodded. They had no way to keep this man prisoner without risking themselves. And to let him go would be suicide. Granted, he was hamstrung, but it was possible he would be found.

  And if he wasn’t found . . . they would be leaving him to die slowly and painfully. Lancelin thrust the sword home, removing the risk.

  Then he collapsed back against the trunk of the tree, spent. Wordlessly, she went back for her precious bucket, emptied the contents out beside him, and went in search of water. He might as well eat the food that was in there; it wouldn’t keep much longer.

  Water was never very far away here—wherever “here” was. She found a stream quite soon and filled the bucket. When she returned with it, he was no longer alone.

  But his company was not human. The horse had a familiar look to it, and she was fairly certain it was of her father’s breeding, and it was clearly Lancelin’s, since it was nuzzling him as he fed it bits of her baked mallow root. She put the bucket down beside him; he didn’t bother with the dipper, just picked the whole thing up and poured the water down his throat. Only after he had drunk half the bucket and poured the rest over his head did he finally say something.

  “You are the real Gwenhwyfar,” he said, in a tone of weary satisfaction. “You could only be the real one.”

  “The false one can’t fight,” she said wryly, sitting on her heels beside him. “She prefers that unpleasant things are all taken care of for her, preferably where she can’t see the unpleasantness and can pretend it is not happening. Are you injured?”

  “Bruises aplenty. Maybe a cracked rib. Those churls might have had horses somewhere about, though they attacked me afoot when I stopped to let Idris graze for a bit.” He tried to stand up and winced.

  She got back to her feet. “Stay there. I’ll have a look about for them, but don’t hope too much. I don’t think Medraut lets too many of his men have anything as costly as a horse.”

  A brief look didn’t turn up any horses, nor any sign of them. She wasn’t surprised. Even afoot, they’d had plenty of time to get ahead of her; they hadn’t needed to stop to fish and cook and try to make some makeshift equipment for themselves.

  When she came back to him, he’d gotten his armor off, and he looked as if he’d been put in a barrel full of stones and rolled downhill in it. But he wasn’t cut anywhere significant—a shallow gash across the ribs, a couple across the backs of his hands, and another over one eye. And careful probing proved that he hadn’t actually cracked his ribs.

  So now she asked the question that had been burning on her tongue. “Were you looking for me?”

  He nodded. “When we came back from trouncing the Saxons with Arthur, the queen—the false one—didn’t seem . . . right. She looked like you, but . . . there were too many things that weren’t like you, at least, not to someone who’d fought beside you.” He grimaced. “This will sound rude—”

  “So be rude,” she replied. “We’ve fought together, and more than once.”

  “She was too womanly.” He glanced at her, apologetically. “I don’t mean that you are not womanly, but she—she was like the king’s second wife; she reveled in luxury. You were indifferent to it, at least it seemed that way to me. She spent hours in the bath, and when she wasn’t in the bath, she was fussing over gowns and hair, and when she wasn’t doing that, she was all over Arthur like a camp whore.”

  He said that last without thinking, then flushed a deep crimson, glancing at her. But she just nodded, grimly. “She’s my sister,” she replied, around clenched teeth. “Schooled by Anna Morgause and Morgana, and Anna Morgause was . . . insatiable. Those weren’t just rumors you heard about her legion of lovers, they were facts. We called my sister Gwenhwyfach, ‘Little Gwen.’ She’s married to Medraut.”

  He blinked at that, and blinked again. “But—”

  She snorted. “Oh, Medraut is perfectly happy to have her where she is. He may think he’s nothing like Lot, but he has no trouble playing his wife’s pander. The only difference is that he does it for power, not pleasure. He has several plans afoot to be named Arthur’s successor, and he’s using Gwenhwyfach to open the door for him.”

  Lancelin’s mouth made a shocked little “o,” then he cleared his throat self-consciously and continued. “I couldn’t get anywhere near her, of course. And Arthur . . . well, Arthur was . . . rather pleased . . .” He flushed again. “He said, now and then, that his wife must have missed him a—very great deal.”

  “Arthur is a man,” she said dryly.

  He coughed. “Yes, well . . . the thing is, Gildas turned up around Midwinter, and she acted as if she had never seen him before, and when he tried to converse with her, she just turned him away. Arthur wouldn’t hear that there was anything wrong, of course . . .” He coughed again. “So Gildas talked to a few of us who knew you. Asked us to try to find out what was going on—if maybe the queen had been possessed or enchanted or—well, then he had another idea. Gwenhwyfar, this sounded mad to me at the time: He asked if maybe it wasn’t you at all. He pointed out that the Merlin had enchanted Uther to appear as Ygraine’s husband, and that was how Arthur was conceived in the first place. He thought that maybe someone had enchanted another woman to look like you.”

  She blinked at that, because it was so near the truth. Gildas was great deal more ob
servant, and more clever, than she had thought. “And you thought—”

  “I knew something was wrong. That queen wasn’t the warrior I knew. Her hands were smooth and fair, and she was . . .” He groped for words. “She was petty. Instead of wanting to know about King March’s schemes, or what the Saxons were about, or even peaceful things like the state of the harvest, she only seemed to care about gowns and gems and how to be amused. So I watched her, and I saw that she stole away now and again to speak privily with Medraut. I told that to Gildas, who suggested that the next time Medraut went on one of his excursions from court, I should follow him to find out where he went. So I did, and then I went to the Isle of Glass and told him about Medraut’s villa. And the next thing I knew, Gildas had rounded up some of his monks and gone trotting off to see what Medraut was up to.”

  She stared at him for a moment, then began to laugh. Because she could, all too easily, imagine Gildas doing just that, trusting in his god to keep him safe. And then she laughed even harder, because she knew now what had caused the commotion that allowed her escape. It had to have been Gildas pounding on the gate, demanding hospitality, which Medraut would not at all have been willing to give him—but which, he would have known, he had to.

  Lancelin looked at her as if he was afraid she had gone mad until she explained why she was laughing. “He must have been the one that distracted everyone so I could get away.”

  She sketched in something of what her captivity had been like, and her escape. She left out the part about being fairly sure Medraut had amused himself with her unconscious body until that palled on him. It would probably only make him angry, and in the long run . . .

  In the long run, there isn’t much difference between how I feel about Arthur’s using me and how I feel about Medraut doing the same . . . Horrible . . . but true. Which was something Lancelin, who adored Arthur, did not need to know.

  “It must have been Gildas, the brave fool.” He smiled a little. “I was a day or two behind him, he set off so suddenly, and I am ashamed to say, I stupidly assumed no one would attack someone as well armed and armored as I am.” He shook his head ruefully, and a lock of hair fell into his eyes. He brushed it away. “And then you came to the rescue . . . this is a rather inglorious end to the story.”