Gwenhwyfar (12 page)

Lleu’s shout of triumph shattered the world into a thousand, thousand bright splinters.

And with that, Gwen fell back into herself and found herself once again hiding in the shadows of three massive oak trees, watching the rite take place within the circle of standing stones.

Driving a chariot—merely
driving
it, and not doing any of the tricks that the experienced drivers did—was a lot harder than it looked.

To begin with, there were two sets of reins, each set going to a different horse, each of whom had its own ideas about how a good driver handled those reins. Then there was the fact that you were standing on something that was moving, so your balance was constantly shifting, and that caused tugging on the reins if you weren’t careful, and
that
gave the horses signals to do things you hadn’t intended.

She was just lucky that her pair were so experienced, so steady, so calm. They reacted to bad signals not by obeying them but by stopping dead in their tracks and waiting patiently for her to sort herself (and them) out.

Gwen had never been happier. Braith was right. This was what she had been born to do.

There was so much more to learn! She’d had no idea, not really, when she first started down this path, how much there was to it. She supposed now that it was all a matter of seeing . . . that she’d only really paid attention to the warriors, who were the end of all the training, and not to the milling lot of half-finished people still in training. But now that she was in the middle of it all, she had at least a sense of how much more there was to being a warrior.

And even knowing how much work there would be, how far she had to go, she still wanted to learn it all.

Today she guided her team carefully around a course laid out by the horsemaster; they’d been at the walk, then the fast walk, then the trot. Now he signaled to them to move straight into a full charge. She slapped the reins on their backs and shouted, bracing herself against the chariot back as they surged forward in the traces.

The chariot bounced and bucked; she kept her knees flexed as she had been taught and kept her balance, although it was a fight to do so. Here is where it was so important for the young warrior to be “trained” by old, experienced horses. If she fell, she knew she could count on them to stop
dead,
because they had done just that in the early stages of her driving training. She got bruised, but she didn’t get as badly hurt as she would have if the team had kept going.

This was far more frightening than riding. Anyone with any sense would be terrified, with the flying hooves of the horses so close to you, with the chariot bouncing like the featherweight thing that it was, and you trying to guide the horses around turns that slung it sideways as well as sending it bounding into the air.

And for that reason it was all the more exciting and exhilarating.

The horsemaster let them run the course three times before signaling her to slow, then stop. He walked up to them and slid his hand up the shoulder of the mare under her mane and nodded with satisfaction. She was no warmer than she should be; she showed none of the signs of fighting with her driver. Without a word, he waved Gwen off and signaled to the next to come onto the course. She hopped down out of her chariot, her legs wobbly with fatigue but determined not to show it, and walked them back to the paddock, where she backed her chariot into its place in line, unhitched them, and led them off to cool. Once they were fit to turn loose, she unharnessed them, gave them a quick rubdown, and let them out into the field. She turned then, to find her mother at the fence, waiting patiently for her to be finished. She looked in her pregnancy like the pregnant Goddess must look: ridiculously young, face glowing and beautiful as the sun.

She was startled to say the least. Not that Eleri was an utter stranger to the stable; she had driven a chariot herself in the past, though she hadn’t done so in several years and certainly could not in her current state. She was, perhaps, two moons from giving birth, which made it even odder that she should have come down here to the stables, when her increasing girth made such a long walk uncomfortable. And there was no doubt who she had come to see; Gwen was the only person here at the moment.

She recollected herself quickly.
Here
she was not the queen’s daughter; here she was nothing more than a warrior-in-training, and as such, she bowed low and did not raise her eyes. “My lady,” she said, and nothing more. It was for Eleri to give an order and for her to obey it without question.

“Gwen, walk with me.” The queen’s voice made that a command. A gentle one, but nevertheless, a command. Obediently, Gwen went to her mother’s side and set her pace to the queen’s slower one.

The did not go far, only to a bit of stone outcropping overlooking the chariot course that made a convenient seat. Eleri eased herself down onto it, while Gwen remained standing until her mother patted the stone beside her. Still puzzled, but grateful, Gwen took a seat beside the queen, and Eleri put one arm around her daughter, hugging Gwen close, and with that gesture, Gwen became the princess again, and not the young warrior.

“I’m sending Cataruna to the Ladies,” Eleri said, out of nowhere. “I know you wanted that yourself, and perhaps in time we shall send you, but—your mentors tell us that you are doing well. So well that they have urged me not to send you until you are much older, and your training is complete.” Gwen turned her head up to look at her mother in astonishment, to see the queen gazing down at her with an anxious look in her eyes. “This kingdom needs as many with the Blessing as powerful as I have been given, as Cataruna has been given, as we can manage to get properly trained. Cataruna leaves today, in fact, in company with two of the village girls who also have the Blessing; the king and I wanted to send her off before she made any serious attachments to a boy, and there are several now with whom she might. I hope you are not upset.”

Now Gwen was even more astonished. “No!” she blurted. “Braith was right. This is what I want!”

Eleri sighed, and her face took on an expression of regret. “Your father said that you would say that.”

Gwen’s brows creased. “Is that bad?”

The queen hugged her again. “Not at all. But you know that the hand of the goddess was strong on you when you were born, and I was sure that there was nothing that you would want more than to take up the Power. Now—” she sighed more deeply “—now you are around Cold Iron so much that the power is fading. I begin to think, as Braith does, that there were two goddesses bestowing their Blessing on you, and one of them was Epona. I cannot fault you at all for choosing her. And I know I will not have to ask you twice; you want this, more than anything.”

Gwen nodded solemnly.

“Then my blessing on you, and Cataruna will take your place. There is Cataruna, and perhaps your other sisters.” The queen got ponderously to her feet. “I have been watching you at your training, and your mentors are right; your hand was made for the chariot reins, for the bow, and perhaps for the sword. I will sleep well of nights, knowing that you will be a strong guardian to your little brother as he grows.”

“I promise!” she said firmly. In fact, she could not think of anything more delightful. She would guard him until he was old enough to take up these first lessons himself, and then she would help to teach him. And when he was a man, she would be one of his chosen Band, and fight at his side.

The queen’s hand rested briefly, caressingly, on her head, warm and tender. “Go back to your lessons, young warrior,” she said fondly. “Be wise as the salmon, crafty as the fox, valiant as the wolfhound, and fierce as the hawk.”

Then she turned, and as she did, Gwen felt something quite peculiar, a sense that something had been loosened between them. Not broken—not at all—but it felt very much as if the queen had opened a door to her and was letting her go through it all on her own, like the first day a young falcon was taken off the creance and allowed to fly free.

She looked up into her mother’s eyes. “I will,” she repeated, making a pledge of it. “You’ll be proud of me.”

“I already am,” her mother replied, and turned to make the slow journey back to the castle.

Gwen couldn’t stand to be indoors that night, sandwiched in the big bed with her sisters. She wanted to be completely alone with her thoughts, she wanted nothing to interrupt, and above all, she did not want Little Gwen to sour everything with poking and prodding—

Little Gwen had an uncanny instinct for when Gwen wanted to think. During the day, of course, Little Gwen didn’t come anywhere near her. But during the day, Gwen was too busy to stop to think. That moment when the queen had come to speak to her had been the only pause in the entire day, and Gwen was pretty certain she would not have had that much if it had not been the
queen
who had taken her aside. Gwen’s day, like that of her fellows, always began before anyone else but the servants were up, and it was filled with chores, exercises, practices, lessons, and duties. It only ended when the steward, who was the one in charge of Gwen and her fellow squires and pages, said that the day was over.

But she loved it. Not every moment of it, of course—but even in the most tedious parts, the knowledge that
after this, I’ll have archery practice
or
we’ll be learning to wheel in formation
kept her willing to work through the tedious, or the difficult, or the downright onerous. Or she would be thinking hard about something she was supposed to master, which made the time pass so much faster when she was mucking out, or grooming, or cleaning weapons and armor. And of course, when she served at table, she had to stay on her toes. The Great Hall was a lot more crowded when you were counted among the servitors. Not that all the squires served
every
night, far from it. Most meals were very informal. But they all took it in turn to serve at the High Table to keep in practice. Gwen was never allowed to serve the king—the steward told her from the beginning that a squire was never, ever allowed to serve someone he was closely related to. But at some point or other, she did serve each of the other men at the king’s side of the table—his three captains, the steward himself, and any important guests he might have.

That, too, put her out of Little Gwen’s reach. And usually she was so tired by the time the Steward dismissed them all that she went straight to bed and was asleep by the time Little Gwen—who was always trying to put off her bedtime—came back to the room. But on those rare occasions when Gwen wasn’t exhausted and did want to lie awake thinking for a while, Little Gwen seemed to sense, somehow, that she was feigning sleep and would poke and prod her, “accidentally,” or pretend to be tossing and turning, interrupting her thoughts.

So tonight she took a sheared sheepskin rug and a blanket out to that little sheltered corner where she used to pick over the feathers. She nodded at the sentry standing guard at the door. “Too hot to sleep inside,” she told him, and he grinned and nodded. Of course he wouldn’t have grinned and nodded if she had been old enough for boys to be interested, as they were in Cataruna. He would have asked quite sternly if the king knew she intended to sleep out, and if she was sleeping alone, and then he would have made certain that the king
did
know and knew who she was with. Not all her willing him not to see would have stopped him from spotting her if she had been Cataruna’s age. Although things were changing elsewhere, it was still the expected thing here that boys and girls, even when the girl was the king’s daughter, would make their first fumblings together without there being any formal promises binding them. A swelling belly generally meant a wedding, of course, but Gwen knew vaguely that there were ways of preventing such a thing. If there hadn’t been, there would have been a great many more princesses than just four. In the village, at least, the girl that went to her marriage a virgin was a rarity.

Nevertheless, for the king’s daughters . . . there were some things expected. You might keep the identity of the boy you were with from your parents if you were an ordinary girl, but the king’s daughter—well, there were always going to be complications. That had been carefully explained to them once they were old enough to notice that not all the bodies in the great hall of nights were quiet ones. If you went with a boy, Mother and Father had to know about it, know who he was, and to that end, the king’s men would be asking questions if you went slipping out to meet one. And you had better go to your betrothal, if not your wedding, still virginal or at least able to pretend to that state.

But she was still young enough that it didn’t matter. He probably thought that he was going to go meet up with some of the squires for an illicit berry feast, perhaps, or some night fishing, or even for the sharing out of too much stolen ale or mead. He still had to know, of course, and he followed her for a bit. But under his watchful eye, she went right where she said she was going, laid the hide down over the grass, rolled up the blanket into a pillow, and laid herself down to stare up at the night sky. Satisfied, he went back to his post.