Gwenhwyfar (8 page)

A strange chill ran up Gwen’s back, and she shivered. It seemed absurd to look at Little Gwen lording it among the other small children and talk about her in the same breadth as Lot’s queen. And yet . . .

She watched Little Gwen, and despite the absurdity of the crown and the troupe of little boys about her . . . there was no doubt. Her sister was more than just pretty. When you put aside what you knew about her, and just let your eyes follow her, she had something about her that made everything about her a little
more.
Both of them had white blond hair, but Little Gwen’s was glossier, and even when tousled, it looked pretty instead of messy. They both had blue-green eyes, but Little Gwen had a way of looking sideways out of them that made you think she was looking at you in particular. Her cheeks were the pink of wild roses, her chin adorably pointed. And that was now, as a little girl. What would happen when she got to be Cataruna’s age?

She sipped her cider and wondered why Braith was telling her all this.

“I tell you this because I had a sister like her. By the time we were twelve and eleven summers, she had the best in the house, and the rest of us got what she didn’t want or hadn’t a use for. ’Twas a rare good thing for me, she didn’t like the horses and they didn’t like her; every lad one of us fancied, she took, only to toss aside for the next. M’brothers, m’parents, they fair doted on her.” Braith shook her head. “When I got taken up by Chief Hydd’s horse tamer, no one even noticed I was going. Never went back, not even t’visit, but I’ve no doubt she made plenty’f mischief before fever took her. An’ she was only a farmer’s get. Reckon what mischief yon’ll make, bein’ the king’s.” Braith sipped thoughtfully at her mead. “So … best get ye gone from here, afore there’s summat ye hold dear that she comes t’fancy. Or be doin’ somethin’ she never will.”

After that, Braith seemed to have nothing more to say, and they sat in silence. Gwen watched the dancing and listened to the music for a while, then when she looked up again, Braith was gone, leaving as quietly as she had come.

By that time the long day and a full stomach were both catching up with her. She was having trouble keeping her eyes open, and she finally decided that going to bed was a better idea than nodding off and having someone have to put her to bed like an overtired baby.

Besides, the queen and her women had just come back from the Working, and the queen had a strange, wild look about her. Gwen wasn’t sure she liked the way her mother looked right now: eyes as bright as someone a-fever, cheeks flushed, looking scarcely old enough to be the mother of one, much less a brood. If you didn’t know her, you’d take her for Cataruna’s sister, not her mother. And the way her father was looking back at her . . . made her very uncomfortable for reasons she really didn’t understand.

So as the queen drew the king into the dancing, taking his hand and pulling him up from his seat as if he was light as a bit of down, then pressing close against him, Gwen picked herself up and turned her back on the fire and her face to the castle.

The Great Hall was full of murmurings in the shadows; she took the straightest path through the middle of it and ignored what was going on; really, the only difference between tonight and every other night was that the Hall was a great deal fuller.

The bed was cold, and she shivered for a while before her body warmed up the hollow; she was almost asleep when half-running footsteps, murmurs, playful growls and breathless giggling heralded the passage of the king and queen into their bedchamber. The sounds made her uncomfortable all over again, but it wasn’t just the sounds, and it wasn’t just knowing that her mother and father were going to do what all those people in the shadows were doing. It was something else, something she couldn’t put a finger on, a feeling that . . . that something was turning wrong that had been right. Like a blight on grain; this wasn’t just a matter of her parents, it was bigger than that.

The feeling held her pinned in her bed—

Until she woke suddenly to find that it was dawn, and her sisters were all curled up with her, and, as usual, Little Gwen had stolen the covers.

The king was in a rare good mood; after breakfast he gathered up Gwen—with Little Gwen predictably trailing behind, unasked—and took her down to his horsemaster. “Braith says the lass is ready to be trained and to give her a wise old warhorse to train her,” he told the old man. The horsemaster looked down at her critically. Gwen looked him in the eyes. There were scars all over him, at least, everywhere that she could see, and a pair of spectacular knife- or sword-cuts marred a craggy face still further. “I know ye,” he said, finally, his voice a low growl. “And a goodly work ye make of the pony. Braith thinks ye ready for a horse now?”

Gwen nodded. “Aye, sir,” she said quietly.

“I
want a horse!” Little Gwen interrupted imperiously. The horsemaster turned to look at her, then Gwen saw him suddenly look up at her father. Something passed between them, and the horsemaster smiled. Gwen got a shiver of pleasure when she saw that smile. It promised that Little Gwen was going to get what she wanted and not like it.

“Well, then, ye’ll have a horse,” the horsemaster said, “An ye’ll follow me?”

Gwen followed obediently at his heels. Little Gwen marched imperiously in front of them all. When they got to the stables, the horsemaster addressed Gwen in a quiet voice while Little Gwen surveyed the horses in the paddock as if she owned all of them.

“And which of these do ye think suits ye,” he asked.

Gwen ducked her head deferentially. “You should pick, sir,” she said. “Braith said, old and wise. I don’t know which are old and wise.”

He smiled. “Then pick I shall—” he began, when Little Gwen interrupted.

“I want
that
one!” she declared, pointing at a showy young gray. The king made a choking sound. Gwen caught the horsemaster making a soothing motion with his hand.

“All right,” he replied agreeably. “Let’s us get him saddled, then.”

He ordered the astonished grooms to catch, saddle and bridle the high-tempered beast, and put a lead line on the bridle. Little Gwen was practically bouncing with excitement, but she frowned at the line. “I don’t
need
that!” she announced grandly. “I can ride!”

“Indeed,” the horsemaster said, but kept the rope clipped to the bridle. “But every rider needs the lead to try the paces.” He swung her up onto the saddle, where she perched as if she were on the old pony, legs slack, hands clenched on the reins. The horse reacted poorly to the latter; he tossed his head, and his mane lashed her face, cutting right across her eyes.

She shrieked. The horse reacted to
that
by lurching into a run.

Or trying to. The horsemaster had been ready for that. He kept a tight grip on the lead and pulled inward while pivoting on one heel, which forced the horse to stay in a trot in a tight circle around him. Little Gwen bounced in the saddle in a way that made Gwen wince for what seemed a very long time, her shrieks now coming out as painful
“Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!”
sounds as she bounced and hit the saddle. Three times she went in a circle around the horsemaster, each time making more and more noise and making the horse try to break into a run. How the horsemaster kept him to a trot, Gwen could not imagine.

It was a relief when she fell off.

She immediately scrambled to her feet, face red with pain and rage. She looked about for something to hit the horse with but fortunately found nothing. The horsemaster pulled up on the lead and soothed the ruffled stallion, but he made no move to soothe Little Gwen.

Interestingly, neither did the king.

Neither man said anything to her as she stared at them in a fury. Gwen prudently backed away from everything and everyone until she had a horse or two between her and her sister. Best to not remind her just who had inspired this desire to have a horse.

Finally, Little Gwen erupted in the tantrum that Gwen knew was inevitable. “I don’t
want
your old horses!” she screamed, making every horse in the paddock shy or lay its ears back. “I
hate
horses! You should kill them
all
and make
soup
out of them!”

Then she burst into angry tears and ran off. Gwen slowly emerged from hiding. The king and his horsemaster were both shaking their heads. “She’s not hurt, is she?” the king asked.

“Only a bit of bruising.” The old man gestured at the straw-strewn paddock. “That be why I kept her on the lead. And I grant ye, I could’ve made a longer affair of this, picked a horse fit for her, tried to get her to tend it as I know yon girl
will,
an’ the end of that’d be more work for
me
when she didn’t. So instead, I cut across country, give her what she wanted, and—”

He shrugged. The king laughed ruefully.

She’ll find something to take this out on,
Gwen thought sourly. But then the horsemaster turned to see her standing there, and she tried to make her expression pleasant. “Nah, Braith’s girl, let’s find ye a proper horse.”

In the end, it came to two, and the horsemaster couldn’t make up his mind which. One was a mare, one of the cavalry duns; the other was a stallion of the famous gray line, now almost a pure white, that had been both a chariot horse and a mount. After looking them both over for a long time, the horsemaster sighed and threw up his hands. “Naught for it,” he said. “Mun let
them
choose.”

He put Gwen at one end of the paddock and turned the two horses loose. “Call ’em, Braith’s girl,” he told her, and stood away from her so that they would not react to his presence but to hers.

Now alone in the paddock with them, her mouth went a little dry. They were
very
big, twice the size of the pony. She swallowed, licked her lips, and made the little chirruping sounds she made to call the pony to her.

They both looked at her, ears and heads up.

“Come!” she urged. “One of you has to teach me, now, so come!”

The stallion snorted; the mare shook her head. Both of them started forward at the same time, but before they were halfway across the paddock, the dun mare shouldered the stallion aside with a snort of her own and laid-back ears. She picked up her feet in a trot that brought her to Gwen while the stallion slunk sheepishly off to one side.

Gwen held out her hand and the mare nuzzled it, then put her head down and butted Gwen in the chest, blowing hay-scented breath into her tunic, surprising a delighted laugh out of her.

The horsemaster brought saddle and bridle but waited while Gwen put them on, only giving her a hand when something was too far for her to reach. “Ye mun find ways t’be doing this on yer own, Braith’s girl,” he told her gravely. “I dun help the boys, I shan’t help ye.”

She nodded. That was reasonable. So taking the hint, once the mare—Adara was her name—was saddled and bridled, on her own she took her over to a stump that had been incorporated into the paddock fence and used that to get herself into the saddle. Once there, she found it not as dissimilar to the pony as she had feared. She was a
lot
higher off the ground, it was true, but the pony was so fat that his girth wasn’t a great deal smaller than Adara’s. She couldn’t imagine why Little Gwen hadn’t been able to sit the saddle better, unless it was that her youngest sister really hadn’t learned to ride properly. She fitted her feet into the leather stirrups and was relieved that the horsemaster had judged the length right. She was even more pleased when he didn’t clip a lead rope to her bridle.

Since he was waiting expectantly, she chirruped to Adara, tightened her legs in the right places, lifted the reins a trifle, and nudged her a little with her heels. Adara moved out in a walk, circling the paddock, then increased her pace from a faster walk into a trot.

Gwen bounced for a few paces before she found her seat again. Adara’s ears flicked back and forth and she looked over her shoulder with what
looked
like amusement, and she moved into a canter.

Now this was the fastest she had ever ridden, and it was both thrilling and terrifying. The pony had never gone this fast, not even at a gallop. But the mare had another pace in her, and without Gwen doing anything, she lengthened her stride into a gallop.

The world blurred. All Gwen was conscious of was her own breathlessness, her heart racing, and the horse moving under her. And it was glorious. Like flying.

The mare gave her only a taste of this before slowing, first to the canter, then the trot again, and finally into the walk. She stopped on her own at the side of the horsemaster.

“Ye’ll do,” was all he said. Then he left her to make sure the mare was walked cool, unsaddled and unbridled, rubbed down, and put up in her stall with her tack with her. Gwen moved in a kind of happy dream. She had thought that yesterday was the best day of her life. But no. Today was.

One of the grooms came to tell her when she was finished that she was to report to the novice trainer. She thanked him and trotted off to the yard where all the boys, and the odd girl or two, got their first lessons in warcraft. Or rather, their first lessons in making their bodies strong enough for weapons; it seemed that handling a sword or a bow or even a knife was a long way off. Gwen had never thought of herself as lazy, but after what seemed like an age of lifting small leather pails of water over and over, of swinging weighted sticks against a padded pole over and over, and many other similar exercises, she was hot and sore and grateful to be dismissed for the day to go back to the paddock and commence another round of riding, this time under the eagle eye of one of the grooms, in the company of the rest of the beginners. She got no help in saddling and bridling this time, but neither did the others. No help, that is, from the
groom;
she was not the only undersized person among the beginners, and they helped each other reach girths under bellies, pass breastbands around chests, and persuade the canny old horses to bend their heads for the bridle. Gwen was especially good at the latter, so no one begrudged her the help it took to get a saddle that seemed a hundred times heavier than it had been this morning onto Adara’s back.