Guinevere's Gift

by Nancy McKenzie

  How many times had she cursed that vile hag, Griselda, for her bold interference? Her dear father, King Leodegrance, bless his proud pagan heart, had believed every word the hill witch said. That was why he had sent his only daughter to Gwynedd when he felt death approaching. Gwynedd was a wide kingdom and King Pellinore a powerful king, although a Christian. She would find her future in Gwynedd, her father had told her at their parting. No one would see her light in small, dark, mountainous Northgallis. She must go to her mother's people in Gwynedd. Her destiny required it.

  Guinevere shuddered at the thought of destiny. Curse Griselda for putting such a notion into her dear father's head. She told herself sternly that there was no longer any need to fear the prophecy. It was all nonsense, and even if it wasn't, Queen Alyse was determined to foil it. That had been made perfectly clear. Far from resenting it, Guinevere found the knowledge extraordinarily restful.

  Elaine put down her stylus. “I can't write anymore. My hand hurts.”

  “Rest for a while,” Iakos suggested. “It will be better presently.”

  “Gwen's finished. I want to go. I will go. You can't stop me.”

  “Nothing is gained without effort, Lady Elaine. Come, we'll work through it together.”

  “No.” Elaine rose. “I don't want to. My head aches. I'm going to see my mother.”

  Iakos came to the bench and glanced at Guinevere's translation. He nodded, and she rose from her seat. “The queen is beyond your call at the moment,” he said. “She is meeting with the captain of her house guard.”

  Both girls paused, Elaine by the bench and Guinevere almost at the door. “What for?” Elaine asked.

  “I understand there was another theft last night. Four head of cattle.”

  Elaine whistled. “That's enough to ruin her temper for the rest of the week. You'd better not go out, Gwen, if there are thieves in the hills.”

  But it was too late. Guinevere had gone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Old Argus's Son

  Queen Alyse paced back and forth across her workroom. The looms were silent, the women gone. She had dismissed them before she met with her advisors: Linias, her steward; Gelston, the cattlemaster; and Regis, the captain of the house guard. The meeting had been a complete waste of time. Twenty-seven animals stolen since the herds were put out to graze, and not a man among them knew where they had gone. Ten cows, two bulls, eight heifers, three ewes, and four lambs—gone without a trace. The fools would have her believe they had vanished into thin air! In a temper, she had dismissed them from her presence and threatened to dismiss them from their posts if they could not provide her better information.

  She whirled and crossed the room again. She had been foolish to rely on such incompetents. She would take charge of the investigation herself. She would begin with Regis's second-in-command.

  Marcus, son of Argus, was a young man of twenty, fifteen years younger than his commander, Regis. As a son of one of King Pellinore's chief nobles, Marcus deserved a place in the king's fighting force but had been cheated of this honor by an accident of birth. His right arm was deformed, shriveled, and hung useless from his shoulder. He could not wield both shield and sword; he could not notch an arrow to a bowstring; he could not throw a spear or fight with cudgels as well as other men. But he had trained himself to handle a sword lefthanded, and he could throw a knife of any size and any weight with unerring accuracy. He was quick, strong, clever, and softtongued. These skills had earned him a place in the house guard. His ability, his obedience, and his even temper had won the king's favor, and over Regis's objections, he had been promoted to second-in-command.

  Queen Alyse watched him enter the room and make his reverence. He was a smaller man than his commander, and plain of face, but with a compact, muscular body and an air of quiet self-possession that Alyse found more formidable than Regis's customary displays of bravado. In the short time since his promotion, Marcus had developed a reputation as someone who could be trusted.

  As he rose from his knee and raised his head, she met his eyes directly. They were Celtic eyes, gray as the winter seas. She saw intelligence there, and self-command, and no fear at all.

  She beckoned him forward. “Sit down, Marcus. There's no need to stand at attention. This meeting is informal. I want your advice.”

  He came forward readily enough and took the bench she indicated.

  “Let me congratulate you on your promotion. I'm sure it was well deserved. You come from an old and honored family.”

  The young man bowed his head. “You are very gracious, my lady.”

  “I've known Argus of Oak Hill all my life. A brave and honorable man, a loyal soldier. And your brothers, all four of them, fight with Pellinore. An extraordinary family. There seem to be fewer and fewer such men born nowadays.”

  The gray eyes, clear as rain, regarded her with wary amusement. Alyse abandoned the indirect approach. This man was no fool and knew flattery when he heard it. Better to ask him straight out for his help.

  She leaned forward in her chair and began to speak. He listened attentively and without interruption as she laid out the problem of the cattle thefts. She told him everything she knew, including the actions she had taken, the reports she had received, the suspicions she had begun to form, and the possibilities that had occurred to her. When she finished, she knew her reading of Marcus had been correct. She had appealed to his intelligence and his loyalty, and both were now fully engaged. More, he had read between the lines and understood what she wanted of him without her having to come right out and commit herself to words. Alyse appreciated subtlety and looked upon him with approval.

  “If you are right,” he said, “ there is more at stake than livestock.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are asking me to risk my post.”

  “There is no gain without risk.”

  Marcus flashed her a brief but transforming smile. “I like risk, my lady.”

  “Good. Then you are the man for it, Marcus.”

  He rose and stood at the window, looking out. He made a neat figure, with his right sleeve tucked tight in his belt as if his withered arm did not exist. “And if I refuse?”

  “I will not hold it against you. King Pellinore will never know. But . . .”

  He turned to her, and for an instant, she sensed something fierce in him, something sharp as a dagger point and bright as the flash of a sword. “But I will know, won't I? And that might make me . . . uncomfortable to have about.”

  Queen Alyse wondered briefly if she had been wise after all. She had counted on loyalty from an offspring of Old Argus, but when it came to wits, the son was twice the man his father had been. An instant later, she realized that Marcus was laughing at her in his polite, reserved way and that his smile was genuine.

  “Your suspicions, my lady, run with my own. I would be happy to undertake the task. And whether I succeed or fail, you will never hear any mention of it from my lips.”

  The queen exhaled. She was too relieved to care if he saw it. “Thank you, Marcus. I will not forget it.”

  “One thing more.” He turned back to the window, where, beyond the castle walls, beyond the thatched roofs of the village, the cold green sea stretched to the horizon. “Your ward, Lady Guinevere, often rides out into the hills unattended. This must cease. Restrict her to the shore paths or provide her with an escort. Better yet, keep her safe indoors.”

  “Easier said than done,” Queen Alyse responded, rising to her feet. “What is it you fear? Abduction? No one would dare.”

  He shrugged. “Can you afford to take the chance?”

  An icicle of fear struck Queen Alyse. The shiver it produced lingered long after Marcus had gone. She sent to the schoolroom for Guinevere and returned to her workroom to oversee the cutting of the fabric for the girls' gowns. She was deep in a discussion with Leonora about sleeve lengths when the page returned with the news that Guinevere had completed her lessons early and had already been dismissed. Alyse glance
d out her window at the height of the sun. Again, that needle of ice in her chest caught at her breath.

  She left her women, threw on a cloak, and made for the stables. Stannic the stablemaster met her on the cobbled stones of the yard. He ducked his head politely.

  “My lady queen, what a surprise—”

  “Where is my ward? Where is Guinevere? Is she here? I must see her at once.”

  Stannic ducked his head again. “I'm sorry, my lady. The young princess is not here. She, er, she rode out more than an hour ago.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Daughter of Rhiannon

  “Hup!”

  Guinevere leaned low over the gelding's withers as the old horse thrust himself into the air, knees bent, and cleared a carefully stacked pile of logs and brush. She murmured to him sweetly as he landed, and one ear flicked back to catch her praise. Calm hands on the reins and firm legs against his sides urged him onward. He complied and opened up his stride.

  “One, two, three,” she counted under her breath each time his leading foreleg hit the ground. The chicken coop approached, festooned with pine boughs. She knew the coop held a secret terror for him, and she kept her voice and hands steady as she urged him toward it. “Come on, old boy, you can do it, five, six, here we go, and hup!”

  He gathered himself for the leap and threw himself over, hooves recoiling at the tickle of boughs against his fetlocks. She patted his neck for that and called him her darling boy. He bent his head and danced a little, playing with the bit in a burst of exuberance and pride as if he were a youngster and not an aging cavalry mount whose best years were behind him. She laughed and circled him patiently until he settled into his steady canter. At the top of the field, they turned and headed back. He took the last three obstacles in the even, ground-covering stride that had served him so well on the battlefield.

  “Well done, Peleth! Good job, old boy. There's nothing like it, is there? Flying through the air, as free as the wind—oh, you are a magnificent old beast!”

  His ears flicked back, and he basked in her affection. She dropped the reins so he could stretch his neck out, and when he did, she bent forward and hugged him, pressing her cheek into his mane and sliding her arms around his neck.

  The horse dropped his head into a patch of new grass, and Guinevere slid off his back. She led him into the woods toward a nearby stream. Out of the sun, the air was cool, and her eyes, unaccustomed to the dimness, could not see into the shadows. She glanced behind her once, as if she felt eyes on her back, but when she turned to look, there was no one there. Still, the hair rose on the nape of her neck, and she suppressed a shiver. The pagan part of her believed in evil spirits. In Northgallis, they had sown sickness, injury, and madness among the local population and could be driven off only by the most powerful charms and protections. Here in Gwynedd, a Christian kingdom, evil spirits were classed with faeries, elves, and shape-shifters, creatures of myth and fable, not of God's creation. No one paid the slightest attention to them. But something was raising the hair on her neck, and she hurried a little faster through the dark parts of the forest.

  At the stream's edge, she stopped. While Peleth drank, she hummed a tune to herself and let her eyes stray over the dappled shadows among the trees. She could see much better now, but still she saw nothing that did not belong to the forest of an April morning. Nevertheless, the prickle of fear between her shoulder blades refused to go away.

  When Peleth had finished drinking, she led him deeper into the woods to a place she knew, a clearing where grass and wildflowers grew rampant within a rough circle of oak and beech. The sun always seemed to shine inside that clearing. This day was no exception. She hobbled the horse and left him to graze while she took her customary seat on a flat rock to finish her song in a pool of sun.

  Looking carefully around one more time to make sure she was alone, Guinevere reached into her tunic and pulled out a little ivory figurine: fair Rhiannon the horse goddess, astride her ivory mare. She held it gently and rubbed a finger over its silken surface. It had been her father's parting gift five years ago on the day she had left Northgallis forever. She turned it toward the sun and watched the tiny sapphires of the divine eyes glimmer deep and blue. Beautiful Rhiannon, protector of horses and of women, so young, so radiantly powerful—this talisman had been her mother's once. And her mother had treasured it, even though she was a Christian, because it had been a gift from Leodegrance on their wedding day.

  Guinevere touched the figurine to her lips. It was warm from the sun and radiated warmth into her fingers. But for the sapphires, which her father had added to imitate her mother's eyes, it was very old and roughly carved. The features of the goddess were indistinct, and her white mare might have been any one of the mountain ponies that bred freely in the hills of Wales. Years and years of gentle rubbing by a long line of mothers and daughters had worn all the details away. To Guinevere, the featureless face of the goddess had one outstanding virtue: it could represent any face she wanted. Now, gazing down at the little carving, she gave it the face she imagined her mother might have had—a high-browed, oval face with delicate features and wise, all-knowing eyes.

  Again, as she had done a thousand times before, she wondered what her mother had been like. A courageous woman, surely, to grow up a Christian in Gwynedd and marry the much older, pagan Leodegrance. By all accounts, she had loved him. She must have, to leave home for him, to leave behind everyone and everything she knew and start a new life in a tiny mountain kingdom where her husband's was the only familiar face.

  Guinevere pulled the stopper from her waterskin and poured a small libation on the ground. Eyes closed, she uttered a silent, heartfelt prayer to Rhiannon to watch over her mother's spirit, wherever it was now, and protect it from harm. She ached to reach out to the woman who had borne her, to touch her spirit, to receive the blessing of her love, as she had already received the blessing of her life.

  She kicked at a stone and watched it land near Peleth's feet. He blew and raised a startled face to hers. She realized she had been thinking a lot about her mother lately. The thirteenth anniversary of her own birth—and of her mother's death—was only eleven days away, on the first of May. She did not look forward to it. Her own birthdays never brought her joy. She could not forget that if she had never been born, her beautiful mother might still be alive.

  Even her father, who had loved his daughter dearly, had felt the same. Though he had danced with Guinevere at every Beltane celebration on the first of May and showered her with gifts and kisses, his joy was bittersweet. She knew, as all Northgallis knew, that grief for his young wife still weighed his spirit down. Guinevere was almost glad he could not be here to see her turn thirteen and stand on the verge of womanhood herself. Would he be frightened for her? Would he wake in the night, as she did, filled with doubts about the kind of woman she would make?

  Guinevere rose to her feet and went to Peleth's side. She stroked his smooth coat, warm from the sun, and patted his neck, as if he were the one who needed reassurance. For her father's sake, she would do her best to be brave and face the future with confidence, even if it was not the future he had envisioned for her.

  All soldiers were superstitious men. Pagan or Christian, they believed whatever came to them from the stars, from the shadows, from the precincts of the Otherworld whose ways could not be understood. Guinevere herself had never believed a single word of the witch's prophecy. The hag had probably been drunk and wandered into the king's house to warm herself at the fire, earning a place at the hearth by telling the old king what he wanted most to hear. Highest lady in the land? The suggestion was ludicrous. Without parents, without land, power, rank, or backing, she would have to be ten times as pretty as Elaine even to attract the notice of a suitor. And she was not pretty. She knew this by Elaine's satisfaction whenever they looked at themselves in the queen's polished bronze. She knew it by Queen Alyse's condescension and by Ailsa's too-frequent reassurances that time would change everything. At leas
t her father had gone to his grave with his dreams intact and would not have to suffer the disappointment of his fondest hopes.

  Peleth's head jerked up, ears pricked. Guinevere whirled. Something had moved in the bushes behind her. She tucked Rhiannon carefully back inside her tunic and reached for Peleth's reins. She had wasted enough time sitting and brooding. The sun shone in a sky still free of clouds, and there was time for another gallop through the meadow.

  The horse snorted, nostrils sprung wide, his gaze still fastened on the woods behind her. She could hear nothing, but she knew without looking that this time, something was there. Trembling a little, but holding hard to her courage, she turned and followed the horse's gaze into the dappled shadows.

  A pair of dark eyes looked back at her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Llyr

  She blinked once, twice. The eyes were still there, holding hers. They were set into a narrow human face above a lithe body half hidden in the shadows. She bent down to release the horse's hobbles, grabbed a hank of mane with one hand, and prepared to leap onto the gelding's back.

  At once, the figure moved. He spread out empty-fingered hands in a conciliatory gesture and took one step forward into the light. He was a young man, lightly built, and no taller than she. His only garment was a wolf skin slung over his left shoulder and hanging halfway to his knees. On his feet, he wore slippers of animal hide and around his neck, his only ornament, a double-strung choker of wolf's teeth. His weapons—a small bow, a quiver of arrows, and a long, slender spear with a killing point—lay propped against the trunk of the oak behind him.