Gwenhwyfar

by Mercedes Lackey

  The ax thudded into another log. The two halves fell to either side of the chopping block. “Whoever this ‘Kai’ is, he cannot possibly know what they can do! I am not even sure he knows how to properly use scouts, much less my men!”

  “He is the High King’s foster brother, and no, he cannot know what they can do, nor do I think from what I have heard of him that he is a particularly good war chief.” Lleudd sighed. “He is usually in charge of the squires and the court. He is not terrible . . . but he is not particularly good, either. At least they will not be misused. The High King fights with Roman tactics, and your men do not charge into battle like Saxons with no strategy. They will be just one more scouting troop among another dozen.”

  “But they will get no chance to use all the things we have worked out together,” she said angrily. “They will get no chance to harry the Saxons as we did this winter.”

  “No, because Kai will think such things unnecessary. But at least, because you trained them, they will know to be clever. They will know how to fight with the Roman style that the High King uses.” Lleudd sighed again, heavily. “I am sorry, my daughter. I am sorry that their command has been taken from you. But the High King prefers to use his own commanders.”

  “And the High King does not trust a female warrior,” she said, bitterly. “He does not think such a one as I can command anything. Younger men than me have been put in command. Younger men than me are his warleaders.” Thunk. The ax split another log. “He thinks that I am only a chief because I am your daughter, and he does not trust my ability.”

  “Probably not,” King Lleudd agreed.

  “And Lancelin did not see fit to argue for me.” Thunk. That was another sore point. He spoke with her as if they were equals. He seemed to consider her a friend. He knew she was intelligent. And he had not spoken up for her.

  “Possibly not. I cannot say. Possibly he did. Possibly he did not try because he did not want to remind the queen of his presence.” Lleudd shifted his weight on the stump. “I do not know, because I was not there. It is hard for a young man when he is caught between a man and his wife.”

  She finally stopped and turned to face her father.

  “Which makes him a coward?” she asked, angrily. “I had not thought him a coward.”

  “It makes him . . .” The King sighed. “It makes him a man torn. On the one hand, he knows what you can do, even if he did not consider himself your friend. Which, I believe, he does. He knows you are not only a good leader, he knows that you know your men as no one else, and you are always thinking of the best way to use them with the best outcome. And as your friend, he would desire to advance you. On the other hand, the one thing he desires above all else is to serve his lord, his king, and his friend. Someone he has known far longer than you. You have seen that with your own eyes.”

  Reluctantly, she nodded. She could tell; every moment he had been here, his heart had been with his king. She had been wrong in thinking him heart whole. He was a man driven by duty, and protective of his friends. He mistrusted the queen. There was nothing else that would have so great a part in his life. Not even, maybe, a lover.

  “Perhaps, perhaps, there is also a touch of wariness there,” Lleudd continued. “You bargained with the Folk of Annwn. You are being served by them, in a sense. You are known to be subject to the Sight at times. Most warriors are uneasy in the presence of magic. And, yes, the Merlin has served the High King for longer than Lancelin, but the Merlin has ever been secretive about his magic. Few have ever seen him actually use it.”

  Slowly, slowly, the king’s calm reason overcame her fury. Tears started into her eyes, and she dashed them angrily away. “You are not uneasy in the presence of magic!”

  “I was wedded to Eleri,” he pointed out dryly. “I have a Lady for a daughter, a bard for a son-by-marriage. Even so, I have never seen the Folk of Annwn. No one I know has, until now. This is more than mere magic, my daughter. This is meddling with the Spirit Realms.”

  And this was her fault, how? “I didn’t know they would come! I only wanted to make a swamp to last for a fortnight or two!” Her eyes burned, her stomach tightened. “They wanted to treat with me, not the other way around!”

  “I know that.” The king pointedly ignored her reddening eyes. “But . . . you are like your mother. You look much younger than your years. You are fair, and most of them are dark. And now this; it makes people wonder if you have the blood of Annwn in your veins yourself. Now, this is unfair. It is unjust. But it could have been predicted, I think.”

  She stared in unhappy outrage—and some guilt, for had she not thought these very things herself? “What can I do?” she asked, controlling herself with an effort. Again, she tried not to wail.

  “First, we do not speak of the Folk of Annwn in your swamp. Your bargain means that they will not harry our people; likely will not show themselves.”

  She nodded. That was good sense. “You think maybe people will forget?”

  He shook his head. “But we can put it about that it was Ifan they treated with, and I will say I granted him the lands you gave them. Only my war chiefs know the truth. Ifan is a bard. Everyone knows that the Folk of Annwn favor bards.”

  Again she nodded. “And—”

  “And as for the rest, this will be hard, but you have done harder things.” He smiled at her. “The High King has never had a female among his warriors. And if you are to break past that, you must remember that you are a warrior first, last, and always. That you are a woman is merely . . . an inconvenience. Do you understand?”

  She was very glad that the other war chiefs were not here to see her fighting to hold back tears. The last thing she needed at this moment was to seem weak. Womanly. Her father was right, very right, and he was only reminding her of what she had known herself.

  “Yes, my King,” she replied, straightening her back.

  “Good.” He smiled. “Now, any warrior thus supplanted could be expected to be angry. I have seen many of my own chiefs in a rage over such an insult. Chopping wood is a good way to relieve that anger. Is your anger relieved?”

  She took several deep breaths and blinked her eyes dry. “Yes, my King.”

  “And since the High King has seen fit to leave one of my ablest strategists behind, I expect War Chief Captain Gwenhwyfar to take command of all of my men that have been left to me.” He waited a moment for the meaning of what he had just said to come home to her. And the moment it did, her eyes widened in shock.

  “But—I—”

  “My remaining chiefs do not think as quickly as you do. For that matter, your king and father does not think as quickly as you do.” He gave her a look of warm approval. “You have a knack for solutions where others see only that there must be fighting. You dealt with March on our border in a way that cost us only a little land and no men. Should March double back, or the Saxons desert him to attack here, we will have to defend our lands with less than half the men we should have. All of my chiefs agree that you are the fittest to lead in that case. Now. Make me a defensive strategy.” He stood up. “In fact, make me several. Think like that madman. Think like a Saxon. Find a way to make ten men fight like forty.”

  She gave him the fist-to-shoulder salute of the Romans. “Yes, my King.”

  “That is my war chief.” He patted her shoulder with approval.

  “That is Eleri’s daughter. You fight with your head. My chiefs only know how to fight with their swords. Now come.” He beckoned to her. “Let us go back to the maps. Arthur is my High King and possibly the greatest leader I have ever seen, but no one has ever said he was incapable of being a fool. Though in this case . . . I am not the loser by his foolishness.” He laid one hand on her shoulder. “In fact, he has done me a great favor, in leaving me the finest sword still in my armory.”

  And that was enough to take most of the sting out of the insult.

  Chapter Seventeen

  No one ever said Arthur was incapable of being a fool.

 
Never had Gwen thought that those words would come back to haunt all of them. But they had. Arthur’s current actions had brought them all to a stalemate.

  A chill mist hung knee-high above the ground around a lake and billowed higher above it. It was very quiet; a little splashing somewhere out there in the mist and an occasional call of a loon or some other water bird only made the silence deeper. For some reason, even the frogs were quiet. Gwen glanced uneasily at the great tor that loomed over them all in the predawn light. There was Yniswitrin, the Isle of Glass, rising above that mist that always hung over the lake that surrounded it. At the top, if you knew what to look for, you could see a squat stone tower. That was the abode—or at least, the visible part of the abode—of Gwyn ap Nudd, one of the Kings of the Folk of Annwn, so it was said. Either there beneath that tower, or beneath the waters of the lake, or both, were entrances to Annwn, the Otherworld, itself. On the shores of the lake were two more poles of power. On the one side, a church and abbey of the priests of the White Christ that was over three hundred years old. And on the other, the Cauldron Well, hidden, secret, guarded by the Ladies who had their school here, where it had stood for far, far longer than the church. The three formed a triad of balancing powers, and managed a sort of uneasy truce.

  But that was not why they were all here, this army of the High King’s allies. Before them, also on the island, was that reason. Built into the side of the tor, its top barely visible above the mist, was a stronghold made of stone. The fortress of Melwas of the Summer Country, a man who had once been one of Arthur’s Companions, whose blood was at least as old as Arthur’s, and who might have a touch of the Folk of Annwn about him.

  A man, and a king. A man and a king who had taken Queen Gwenhwyfar when Arthur was off skirmishing with the Saxons, carried her off to this fortress and was using her as his claim to supplant Arthur as High King. He had every intention of wedding her, according to all the sources, and using the claim of his old blood and hers to take the throne.

  And there was rumor about the camp that Gwenhwyfar might not have gone unwillingly.

  Gwen rubbed her aching head; this was all a hideous tangle, and it was only getting worse. Arthur had tried to get across the lake any number of times and had not even landed more than a handful of his men at the base of the stronghold. The mist would come up and bewilder them all, the boats would land anywhere but where they should, once a storm nearly drowned them all by all accounts, and the one time he did get some men at the foot of the castle, they’d been successfully repulsed.

  She had not actually seen the High King in person, but she could well imagine the tone of his temper.

  And what had happened to the Merlin did not help matters at all.

  Oh, the Merlin . . . if there was anyone who might have been able to find a way to get Arthur’s men onto the island, it was he. He had purportedly worked greater feats of magic in the past. He could probably have disguised Arthur as Melwas and gotten him into the fortress that way, or somehow built a bridge to the island out of the mist itself. There was only one small problem.

  The Merlin was no longer in a position to conjure anything.

  Though rumors were flying throughout the camp about just what, exactly, had happened to him—the wildest of which featured him being locked inside a cave, a rock, or most improbably, an oak tree, by the Lady Nineve—one of Ladies had come to Gwen as soon as she had made camp and told her precisely what had befallen the Merlin.

  “He was elf-shot,” the woman had said. “Though whether it was a curse, or some cruel weapon bought of the fae by Melwas, we cannot say. But as Melwas was fleeing, with Queen Gwenhwyfar as his captive, the Merlin was looked for in vain. He was found at last on the floor of his room, taken with a fit. And now he lies as one made of oak, with Nineve tending him. He cannot speak, and only his eyes seem alive.”

  She could not help but wonder, although she did not say, if this was the punishment for all those innocent infants he had ordered killed so long ago. Certainly now he was as helpless as an infant, as trapped within an unworking body as if he had in truth been encased in a tree.

  So much for the Merlin. The Ladies, of course, did not have any sort of magic that could be used to solve Arthur’s problem. And if Gwyn ap Nudd was inclined to help, well, he had not even so much as showed a light in his tower.

  Gwen had turned up at the head of King Lleudd’s contribution to the army; she shortly thereafter discovered that in some ways, her arrival had made things even more complicated. To begin with, there was her name. It had caused rumors to fly through the camp when she first arrived, that Arthur’s queen had escaped, that she had arrived at the head of her own warriors, that she was, in fact, the ghost of Arthur’s first queen come from beyond the grave to help him. It seemed that everyone and his dog needed to come look at her to be sure that she was only herself, Lleudd Ogrfan Gawr’s daughter. It had gotten to the point by sunset that she simply left her own encampment and with a small escort made a tour of Arthur’s entire forces, introducing herself to all the war chiefs and making sure that everyone got a good long look at her.

  That solved one problem, anyway, though now scarcely anyone called her by name. “The Giant’s Daughter,” they mostly called her. That was maddening, but understandable. What else were they going to do? Two Gwenhwyfars was one too many in this situation. And it wasn’t as if she had yet earned one of those clever descriptive names some warriors got.

  More vexing was the unspoken assumption that Gwyn ap Nudd was simply going to appear and declare himself for Arthur just because she had turned up.

  And oh . . . what a mixed set of expectations that was. Because not everyone here wanted a King of Annwn to turn up and make himself an ally. First and foremost of those that would object were the Christ priests.

  With the abbey so near at hand, it was not surprising that there were monks wandering about the camp; and since the abducted queen was a follower of the White Christ . . .

  Well, she supposed they were finding it necessary to make it clear that they favored Arthur. If the queen had, indeed, turned her coat, then they certainly would want to show by their presence that they still favored Arthur. Although, of course, there was a further complication because Melwas himself was Christian.

  Gwen felt, rather cynically, that it was possible these priests were trying to play both sides; although they were praying ostentatiously for the return of the queen, if Melwas won out, they would also be right here to be the first to proclaim him the new High King.

  Whatever was on their minds, they did not approve of anyone who consorted with “demons” as she was said to do—and evidently, a “demon,” in their eyes, was any creature that was not mortal and not an “angel.”

  The monks, therefore, did not like her, and the rumors that Queen Gwenhwyfar was not an unwilling captive were making them uneasy. And that made them even more unhappy with her presence. She was a living reminder of everything the queen wasn’t—including, it seemed, loyal to the High King.

  Then there were the followers of the Old Ways, who evidently expected her to conjure up Gwyn ap Nudd, who would then divide the waters of the lake, or build a bridge of rainbows across it, or fly the entire army through the air to take it to the fortress where the queen was. And then, of course, more magic would breech the walls, and in the conquering army would go, stopping only for enough combat to make them all heroes.

  After all, hadn’t she won allies of the Folk of Annwn already?

  Oh, it was irritating; here she had foregone the credit for striking that bargain in her marsh, only to have everyone turn right round about and decide that of course she had done it after all.

  It made her head hurt. And she wanted to swat them all for being so foolish.

  Well, she had gotten another summons, this time from Lancelin, to meet with him, some of the Companions, and some other, unspecified, leaders. And where once she would have been excited to meet with these warriors who were famed from the Channel to the Wester
n Sea, now—

  Well, she just hoped they weren’t expecting any magic out of her.

  She nearly jumped out of her skin when the first person she saw as she entered the fire-circle was Medraut. She restrained herself however, and by the time he turned away from the person he was talking to, a huge, broad-shouldered man who looked just about as angry as if he had strapped on a helmet full of hornets, she had composed herself.

  Lancelin had spotted her by then and welcomed her, giving her a seat between himself and the angry man, who turned out to be Gwalchmai. Gwalchmai actually was as angry as if he had strapped on a helmet full of hornets, and with good cause. He had been out in a boat trying to find a place to land; Melwas mocked him from the battlements.

  And so did Gwenhwyfar.

  Now, according to Lancelin, at best Gwalchmai had what might, at the kindest, be charitably described as a prejudice against women.

  Of course, given his relationship with Anna Morgause . . .

  But this was a great deal more insult than a warrior and one of Arthur’s Companions could be expected to bear with an unruffled temper, even if that warrior was the next thing to a statue. Gwalchmai had, by all accounts, a nature so hot that he got into quarrels merely because he thought someone had looked at him oddly.

  He glared at her as she sat down. She gave him the most sympathetic look she could muster.

  His glare turned to suspicion. She shrugged and put on a rueful expression, trying to convey that she not only sympathized with him, she had no sympathy whatsoever for the queen. She caught Medraut watching them with veiled amusement.

  This meeting turned out to be mostly Arthur’s chief Companions. Lancelin, of course. Gwalchmai, Kai, Bors, Peredur, Geraint, Bedwyr, Trystan, Medraut, Caradoc, Dinadan. The firelight made moving shadows on their faces, these famous men, Arthur’s closest comrades. Square and narrow, bearded and beardless, dark-haired, most of them, a few lighter. She supposed she should have felt intimidated by them, but they looked no different, really, from the men she had fought with and beside for all these many years. Experienced, yes, but so was she. Kai looked petulant, as if he forever labored under a grievance. Bors seemed weary, as did Bedwyr. Trystan, the nephew of March—oh, now that one gave her a chill. There was a look of doom about him, and a melancholy, as if he felt it too. Dinadan was impatient: clearly a man of action and few words. Caradoc was sardonic, and Geraint looked as if he considered everything something of a joke.