Camelot's Blood (12 page)

“It is better than leaving Gododdin and Camelot open to conquest by Morgaine.”

He was watching her closely, adding her to his calculations.
What is it? What are you thinking of?

Then she saw it, slowly, that opening behind his shuttered eyes to show her the thin thread of self that was trust inside Agravain. It was fragile and new, the tiniest green shoot of spring, but it was trust nonetheless.

“I will speak to my uncle,” he said softly. “You will know which way it is decided when you hear the outcry.”

Laurel inclined her head. “I will be ready,” she said and she hoped that was the truth.

She expected him to get to his feet then, but he hesitated. “Will you go to Din Eityn or stay here?”

Laurel blinked. “I have already said, my lorde …”

Agravain waved his hand dismissively. “You spoke dutifully, my lady, without all the facts in hand. Now that you know more of what surrounds you, it may be that you would make another choice. If this is so, please speak. I will not require you to go.”

Trust waited. Fear waited. This was a test of sorts, and she knew it. That angered her, even though she understood why he put her to it. It was not the wife he doubted. It was the new ally he was uncertain of.

As he should be
. Laurel smothered that thought as quickly as it came to her.

“Thank you,” she answered. “But I will go. Gododdin is my land now. I will not neglect it when I may be of service to its peace or to the king, my husband.”

One muscle in his cheek twitched. “Thank you, my wife.”

For a moment, she wondered if he would make some mention of their night which had been so swiftly and thoroughly interrupted, but he did not. He got to his feet.

“Please excuse my haste. I must confer with the king. If your … plan is put into action, there are many things I myself will have to arrange.” He bowed, and once more he left her there.

As the door closed, exasperation, irrational to the point of being ludicrous, swirled through Laurel. Was this what it would be to be queen of Gododdin? A series of hasty exits that left her agape? Laurel rubbed her eyes.

Patience, she counselled herself. He goes to meet a dying father and a kingdom at war.

And what do I go to meet?

To her shock, Laurel found her hands trembling. One way or another, she would be leaving. She would go farther from home and family than she had ever been. No ally waited for her there, only strangers, and war, and enmity in the shadowed form of Morgaine the Sleepless.

Laurel had been born with the power of the unseen in her blood. She had always known it was there. But her mother who might have taught her the ways of the invisible and the divine had died when she was eight years old. So, she was left alone. She could hear the voice of the wind, and she could use it to carry word for her, making someone go or stay, though they knew not why they did so. Men spoke in her presence sometimes things they would rather keep silent about. She could see what was hidden if she tried, and she could bring fear if her anger reached deeply enough, and the sea would answer her if she spoke.

But for all that, she was not learned, not practised, not truly, not as Morgaine, who was as skilled in her art as any master smith or veteran soldier.

Laurel closed her eyes, and swallowed hard.

If you have no stomach for action, you should have kept silent, she chided herself. It is too late for your qualms now. You have begun. You must go on.

But how?

Laurel licked her lips. Steeling herself, she walked gingerly to the window, undid the latch and folded back the shudders.

The day beyond was bright. All the smells of the yard rushed in: straw and animals, hot metal and the distant stink of the tannery. The wind brushed her face. She smelled rain, and earth on it. Cold to come, perhaps, even at the height of summer. She reached within, opening the doors of her mind, letting the wind pass through, pass through blood and spirit and self. Let it see her questions, let it carry answers as it carried the scents and sounds of the wide world all around.

Too far, the wind and her own quieting heart told her. She looked too far. She needed to look closer. Look to herself, look to her own, to the woman of her home, the man at her hand, the one whose eyes had seen the most of this war that had been brewing for decades now.

Laurel closed her eyes, letting understanding and relief both seep in. The woman of her home. That was Queen Guinevere. The man at her hand. Agravain. The one whose eyes had seen the most … King Arthur? Sir Kai? No. That last meant the oldest of the players in this deadly game. The one she had not seen since the eve of her wedding.

Merlin.

Laurel breathed the fresh breeze deeply, thanking it, releasing it.

“My lady?”

Laurel opened her eyes. Meg stood behind her. Annoyance flashed through Laurel that Meg would have come back without being summoned. But in the next heartbeat, she realized Meg would have seen Agravain leave, and rightly assumed that she might be needed.

“My lady, the queen is waiting for you,” Meg reminded her diffidently

Laurel shook herself, ashamed at having forgotten so important a fact. “Yes, of course. Do we know where?”

“In the library, my lady.”

“Then let us go,” she said. I wish to speak with you as well, my queen.

• • •

The great library at Camelot had always been a wonder to Laurel. There did not exist in the whole of the isle another room such as this one. It rivalled the Round Table's hall for size. Scores of books bound in wood, bronze or leather lay on long tables. Box-like shelves held scrolls written in Greek and Arabic as well as Latin. Letters between kings, lords and commanders were bound with ribbons and wax and laid on its shelves in meticulously ordered piles. The silent, brown-robed monks sat at their high tables beside the open windows, carefully inscribing sheets of vellum and parchment with coloured inks. This was the place where her marriage contract would have been drawn up, and a copy would be left here as the official record of the act.

Queen Guinevere herself sat at a writing table, somewhat apart from the industrious monks. A beautifully drawn map of the Isle of the Britons was spread out in front of her. Each of its kingdoms had been picked out in a separate hue. The Dumonii lands, Laurel noted, were tinted blue and decorated with swans, the queen's own sigil. Yellow coloured the broad lowlands that were Arthur's native country, and a scarlet dragon wound through them. The valleys and broad firth overseen by Gododdin were all in green. Falcons dived there, wings folded, stooping to strike.

The queen turned her head towards Laurel, and belatedly Laurel moved to kneel. Guinevere, though, stopped her with a gesture.

“I am sorry this came upon you when it did.”

“It is not for us to order such things, Your Majesty,” replied Laurel. She had readied this polite piety while Meg braided her hair, anticipating she would need it as soon as she left her room. “We must trust in God's time.”

“Sometimes, however, one could wish the Almighty showed a little more delicacy.” Queen Guinevere's mouth twisted into a wry smile. “There. Now I will have to make confession to the bishop for blasphemy. Again. Sit, Laurel. Tell me what I can do to help you.”

A chair had already been brought, and Laurel sat down. She faced the queen, folding her hands in her lap. So decorous, so polite. So different from the matters she needed to discuss.

“I have only one question, Your Majesty,” she said. “Why is my husband so haunted by the sorceress Morgaine?”

Queen Guinevere stared at Laurel for a long moment. Then, the queen drew in a long breath through her pursed lips, letting it out again slowly.

“I should have known.” Guinevere's wry smile returned, but this time it did not reach her eyes, nor smooth the worried creases in her brow. “You were ever one to strike straight for the heart of the matter.” The queen eyed the library door, as if to satisfy herself that it was indeed closed, and was the only entrance to the place. The monks paid not the slighted attention to their queen. They bent to their work, their pens squeaking and scratching, accompanied by the soft click and clink of the nibs touching the ink pots.

“You should know this. It is right you know,” Queen Guinevere muttered, clearly attempting to convince herself. Her She twisted her fingers restlessly together. The queen's hands were long-fingered and strong. Some old, dark stain marred her soft palm, and had as long as Laurel had known her. Laurel had never been able ask what made the mark. It was not a question one addressed to the High Queen.

When at last Guinevere spoke, it was not in the language of the court. The words she chose were in the Dumonii tongue that she and Laurel shared. “You must bear with me, Laurel. What I say now I have never told another, saving Arthur and Agravain.

“You know that the daughters of Ygraine and Goloris of Tintagel were brought in secret to foster at Cambryn? I was seven years old when they came. They were a strange sight to me: two girls of my own age with features so exactly matched, one might have been a reflection of the other. The only difference between them was that Morgause had blue eyes while Morgaine's were black.

“But I soon came to see that their natures differed as entirely as their eyes, and those differences broadened as they grew older. Oh, they remain fiercely devoted to each other for many years, but when womanhood came, the breech broke open so wide there was no crossing it.”

Queen Guinevere watched her own hands as she spoke, rubbing her thumb back and forth across the darkened patch of skin. It was strange to listen to her halting words. Laurel had never known the queen to be less than confident in her ways. Harried yes, but never unsure.

“The wedge that had been planted between the girls was the death of their father, Goloris. My father said he was a hard man, a jealous man. He turned against the whole nation of the Britons because he believed his wife Ygraine had been disloyal with Uther Pendragon.

“Morgause grieved for her father, but found room in her heart to forgive, and to live with the scars. Morgaine could not do that. She nursed her hate. She would have vengeance.”

Laurel found herself once more in memory's grip. She stood beside the dais in her home hall. Her father lay sprawled on the stones, her brother's knife in his guts and the red blood pouring from him. She remembered looking into her brother's eyes and feeling the inferno of rage. She would have killed him, could have killed him easily, if law and imagination had not found a worse punishment.

“But it was more than that.” The queen's gaze was distant, looking out of the arched window down to the orchard beyond. Laurel saw blood, blood on her hands, blood on her sister's dress, on her father's corpse. What did the queen see? “Morgaine would have power. The workings of the world would never again sweep away what she wished to keep hold of.”

Laurel's hands closed in sympathy. She knew this too. Only power could meet power, only strength could stand against strength. After all, what did she fear now but her own weakness?

“I remember when word came that Uther was dead,” the queen whispered. Her voice was harsh and Laurel felt her own throat tighten. “Morgaine wept bitterly. Not because of the death, but because it was not her hand that struck him down. I think that was when I first truly became afraid of her.” Guinevere's hands stilled for just a moment.
Are you relieved or startled by this understanding?
wondered Laurel.

“After that, everything dissolved into chaos,” Guinevere went on, and the restless motion in her hands returned. “The Saxons were everywhere, burning, raiding, slaughtering. We withstood one siege, then another. We starved and we held, and there was talk that the Dal Riata and the Eire-landers would join the Saxons, and it seemed like the world must end. Then, the rumours began. There was a war leader, a young man, a true
dux bellorum
in the old Roman style. Some said he was the bastard son of Lord Ector. Others said he was the son of Lady Ygraine, raised in secret to protect him from the traitors and poisoners who had murdered his father, Uther.

“Morgaine listened to all of these rumours hungrily. She sought them out, collected them, stored them as another young woman might store up tales of the man she was to marry. It was horrible to see the light burning in her eyes whenever she heard word of this warrior.

“I spoke of this to Morgause. We were close friends, she and I, true sisters though we shared no blood. I was lonely. My brothers and sisters had all died so young … Morgaine accused me more than once of stealing her sister's love. Perhaps I did. I don't know.” The queen shook her head. Her eyes were bright.
Will you cry?
Laurel had to keep herself from cringing, selfishly not wishing to be near any tale that would cause the queen to cry.

“Then Arthur came to Cambryn, to seek my father's allegiance. In that moment, I saw my heart's love.

“Morgaine saw her enemy made flesh and brought within reach of her hand.

“It was then that Morgause had to make her choice. Would she choose to aid her sister or me? I don't know what road she walked to reach her decision … I never had the strength to ask, but in the end Morgause chose to side with me, and with Arthur.” Queen Guinevere slumped back in her chair, passing her fingertips over her brow. “What followed was a long and dark war between the sisters. I only knew some of it. Much of it was waged far outside my ken. I do know that it only ended when Arthur and Merlin worked with Morgause to deceive Morgaine, and trap her. Merlin and Morgause together bound her in the earth, for all time, so we thought.”

“Why did you not kill her?”

Guinevere's face tightened. “Merlin would not permit it,” she spat the words. “He claimed it would bring about a worse evil. I hope he was right, because what evil has been brought is fully bad enough.