Gwenhwyfar (46 page)

So the villa was probably just a remote hideaway, and one with no village, no farms, nothing outside its walls. And while Medraut could probably force or bully cooperation from those living near the place, it was unlikely he even bothered to try to rule anyone living more than a day’s ride away.

She began listening carefully for the distant sounds that would tell her there was human habitation—the crow of a rooster, the sound of a dog barking, the echo of an ax on wood.

But the faint sounds she heard first were nothing so peaceful. They were the metal-on-metal clash of swords, faint, far, but not all that far away . . .

And she didn’t even think, she reacted. She ran toward the sounds, aided by the fact that the game trail she was on went in the same direction. Whoever was fighting, the odds were good that one side or the other would be friendly to
her.
The brief pang of regret that her strange idyll of freedom was over was lost in the fierce wash of glee that at last, at long last, she was going to be able to strike back at
someone.

But as she stopped just before the clearing where four men were being held off by a single, incredibly skillful fighter, she froze in shock for a moment. She
knew
that fighter.

It was Lancelin, with his back up against the trunk of an enormous tree so that they couldn’t ring him. And from the look of things, he was tiring. She didn’t recognize the four men who were clearly trying to kill him, but they were well-clothed and well-armed, and the odds were good that they were Medraut’s.

She assessed all this in no time at all, dropped her bucket, picked her target, and leaped to Lancelin’s aid, ax held in both hands as she raced in for a killing stroke before they realized she was there. She aimed not for the body, which might be protected by riveted metal plates inside the jerkin, but for the back of the man’s neck, where the helm ended. She couldn’t see his neck beneath the hair, but she didn’t need to. She knew there was no protection there.

She hit that spot with all her momentum and all her strength.

The ax struck home against bone; the handle shivered in her hands as the axhead severed the spine and went halfway into his neck; it lodged in there, but she had already let go of it and was reaching for the sword his powerless hand had dropped. As if she had practiced the move a hundred thousand times, she snatched it out of midair, and throwing herself into a half spin, slammed the flat of the blade into the belly of the man next to him. She hadn’t enough time to hit him with the edge, but she didn’t need to; she just needed to buy time for a better attack.

As she had expected, there was metal under the leather, but she knocked the breath out of him and drove him back a little. And the shock and surprise of her appearance had given Lancelin the opening to drive his own sword into the third man’s throat. That man went down with a strangled gurgle.

Now the odds were two to two.

The two men left glanced at each other, shocked.

Lancelin and Gwen didn’t pause even for a heartbeat. As if they were linked together, they both acted and grabbed the moment of that glance to attack.

And in the time it took to draw a quick breath, the second pair were down—Lancelin’s from a thrust into his eye, Gwen’s from a deadly and accurate swing at his legs, where he wasn’t armored.

There were great advantages to being shorter than your enemy, sometimes; she spun again, this time able to aim, and took him across the back of his legs at the knee.

Her man went down, too shocked to scream, hamstrung. And in the next instant, Gwen stepped on his sword arm, keeping him pinned, while Lance put a foot on his chest and a sword point at his throat. She reached down and wrenched the sword out of his hand.

“Whose men are you?” the Companion panted. “What do you want?”

“Medraut’s!” the man gasped. “He sent us to hunt for her—”

Lancelin looked at Gwen, his mouth a thin, grim line. She nodded. They had no way to keep this man prisoner without risking themselves. And to let him go would be suicide. Granted, he was hamstrung, but it was possible he would be found.

And if he wasn’t found . . . they would be leaving him to die slowly and painfully. Lancelin thrust the sword home, removing the risk.

Then he collapsed back against the trunk of the tree, spent. Wordlessly, she went back for her precious bucket, emptied the contents out beside him, and went in search of water. He might as well eat the food that was in there; it wouldn’t keep much longer.

Water was never very far away here—wherever “here” was. She found a stream quite soon and filled the bucket. When she returned with it, he was no longer alone.

But his company was not human. The horse had a familiar look to it, and she was fairly certain it was of her father’s breeding, and it was clearly Lancelin’s, since it was nuzzling him as he fed it bits of her baked mallow root. She put the bucket down beside him; he didn’t bother with the dipper, just picked the whole thing up and poured the water down his throat. Only after he had drunk half the bucket and poured the rest over his head did he finally say something.

“You are the real Gwenhwyfar,” he said, in a tone of weary satisfaction. “You could only be the real one.”

“The false one can’t fight,” she said wryly, sitting on her heels beside him. “She prefers that unpleasant things are all taken care of for her, preferably where she can’t see the unpleasantness and can pretend it is not happening. Are you injured?”

“Bruises aplenty. Maybe a cracked rib. Those churls might have had horses somewhere about, though they attacked me afoot when I stopped to let Idris graze for a bit.” He tried to stand up and winced.

She got back to her feet. “Stay there. I’ll have a look about for them, but don’t hope too much. I don’t think Medraut lets too many of his men have anything as costly as a horse.”

A brief look didn’t turn up any horses, nor any sign of them. She wasn’t surprised. Even afoot, they’d had plenty of time to get ahead of her;
they
hadn’t needed to stop to fish and cook and try to make some makeshift equipment for themselves.

When she came back to him, he’d gotten his armor off, and he looked as if he’d been put in a barrel full of stones and rolled downhill in it. But he wasn’t cut anywhere significant—a shallow gash across the ribs, a couple across the backs of his hands, and another over one eye. And careful probing proved that he hadn’t actually cracked his ribs.

So now she asked the question that had been burning on her tongue. “Were you looking for me?”

He nodded. “When we came back from trouncing the Saxons with Arthur, the queen—the false one—didn’t seem . . . right. She looked like you, but . . . there were too many things that weren’t like you, at least, not to someone who’d fought beside you.” He grimaced. “This will sound rude—”

“So be rude,” she replied. “We’ve fought together, and more than once.”

“She was too womanly.” He glanced at her, apologetically. “I don’t mean that you are not womanly, but she—she was like the king’s second wife; she reveled in luxury. You were indifferent to it, at least it seemed that way to me. She spent hours in the bath, and when she wasn’t in the bath, she was fussing over gowns and hair, and when she wasn’t doing that, she was all over Arthur like a camp whore.”

He said that last without thinking, then flushed a deep crimson, glancing at her. But she just nodded, grimly. “She’s my sister,” she replied, around clenched teeth. “Schooled by Anna Morgause and Morgana, and Anna Morgause was . . . insatiable. Those weren’t just rumors you heard about her legion of lovers, they were facts. We called my sister Gwenhwyfach, ‘Little Gwen.’ She’s married to Medraut.”

He blinked at that, and blinked again. “But—”

She snorted. “Oh, Medraut is perfectly happy to have her where she is. He may think he’s nothing like Lot, but he has no trouble playing his wife’s pander. The only difference is that he does it for power, not pleasure. He has several plans afoot to be named Arthur’s successor, and he’s using Gwenhwyfach to open the door for him.”

Lancelin’s mouth made a shocked little “o,” then he cleared his throat self-consciously and continued. “I couldn’t get anywhere near her, of course. And Arthur . . . well, Arthur was . . . rather pleased . . .” He flushed again. “He said, now and then, that his wife must have missed him a—very great deal.”

“Arthur is a man,” she said dryly.

He coughed. “Yes, well . . . the thing is, Gildas turned up around Midwinter, and she acted as if she had never seen him before, and when he tried to converse with her, she just turned him away. Arthur wouldn’t hear that there was anything wrong, of course . . .” He coughed again. “So Gildas talked to a few of us who knew you. Asked us to try to find out what was going on—if maybe the queen had been possessed or enchanted or—well, then he had another idea. Gwenhwyfar, this sounded mad to me at the time: He asked if maybe it wasn’t you at all. He pointed out that the Merlin had enchanted Uther to appear as Ygraine’s husband, and that was how Arthur was conceived in the first place. He thought that maybe someone had enchanted another woman to look like you.”

She blinked at that, because it was so near the truth. Gildas was great deal more observant, and more clever, than she had thought. “And you thought—”

“I knew something was wrong. That queen wasn’t the warrior I knew. Her hands were smooth and fair, and she was . . .” He groped for words. “She was
petty.
Instead of wanting to know about King March’s schemes, or what the Saxons were about, or even peaceful things like the state of the harvest, she only seemed to care about gowns and gems and how to be amused. So I watched her, and I saw that she stole away now and again to speak privily with Medraut. I told that to Gildas, who suggested that the next time Medraut went on one of his excursions from court, I should follow him to find out where he went. So I did, and then I went to the Isle of Glass and told him about Medraut’s villa. And the next thing I knew, Gildas had rounded up some of his monks and gone trotting off to see what Medraut was up to.”

She stared at him for a moment, then began to laugh. Because she could, all too easily, imagine Gildas doing just that, trusting in his god to keep him safe. And then she laughed even harder, because she knew now what had caused the commotion that allowed her escape. It had to have been Gildas pounding on the gate, demanding hospitality, which Medraut would not at all have been willing to give him—but which, he would have known, he had to.

Lancelin looked at her as if he was afraid she had gone mad until she explained why she was laughing. “He must have been the one that distracted everyone so I could get away.”

She sketched in something of what her captivity had been like, and her escape. She left out the part about being fairly sure Medraut had amused himself with her unconscious body until that palled on him. It would probably only make him angry, and in the long run . . .

In the long run, there isn’t much difference between how I feel about Arthur’s using me and how I feel about Medraut doing the same . . .
Horrible . . . but true. Which was something Lancelin, who adored Arthur, did not need to know.

“It must have been Gildas, the brave fool.” He smiled a little. “I was a day or two behind him, he set off so suddenly, and I am ashamed to say, I stupidly assumed no one would attack someone as well armed and armored as I am.” He shook his head ruefully, and a lock of hair fell into his eyes. He brushed it away. “And then you came to the rescue . . . this is a rather inglorious end to the story.”

“I don’t think—” she began, then abandoned what she was going to say. “We should get away from here. There will be more of those men out looking, and some might come this way too.”

He nodded at her ruined gown. “Take what you need from them; I’ll get into my armor again.”

And there it was, exactly what she had wished for; her pick of trews, tunic, armor, sword, bow. Medraut was fastidious about his person and just as fastidious about the men that served him. The first man she’d downed had bled very little, for she hadn’t cut the major blood vessels. She took his armor and shirt, the trews from the first man Lancelin had killed, since he hadn’t voided himself when he died and they were unsoiled, and the boots from the last one, which were almost a fit. She made it all into a bundle rather than getting changed; when he looked at her askance, she raised an eyebrow. “I can ride in this, and it will take some time to cut myself out of it; I’d rather put more space between us and Medraut than stop to change.”

Without a pause, he nodded, mounted his horse, and offered her a hand. She used it to pull herself up behind him, settled herself over the bare rump of his horse, then put her arms around his waist tightly, so that he wouldn’t hesitate to get some speed from Idris. He nudged his horse into a canter, and they were off.

She became increasingly self-conscious as they rode—and conscious of him. The feel of his body under her hands, the smell of him—horse, and clean sweat, a little blood, and what smelled like rosemary in his hair. And she became aware that her body was responding to his in a way it had never responded to Arthur.

It’s the fighting,
she scolded herself.
I’ve heard the men talking about it. I’ve seen them afterwards, they can’t get to the camp whores quickly enough. It’s the fighting and the fear of death and then the realization when it’s all over, that you didn’t die. That’s all.

But it wasn’t all, and she knew it. From the first time she’d seen Lancelin, she had wished, without admitting it to anyone but herself and Bronwyn, that he would look at her not as a fellow warrior but as a woman. That he would give her the kind of glances that men gave Gynath and Cataruna. That he would touch her not with friendly indifference but with pent-up passion.

Which was about as likely to happen as for this horse to sprout wings and fly them to Celliwig. She was a warrior.