Gawain (22 page)

“Yes. Do you think there is some connection?”

“I cannot see what it would be,” Morgause said, frowning. “But you can be sure I will have the truth of it before long! I must say, you are not at all what I expected! What a comfort it is to find you so sensible and well-informed.”

“Thank you,” Guinevere said, touched and flattered by the praise, which was of a sort she did not often hear. “But you were going to tell me something about another danger, were you not?”

Morgause regarded her a moment, then nodded decisively. “I meant to give Arthur this news privately, but now that I have met you, I would like to ask your counsel first.”

“Oh, yes,” Guinevere breathed. “Do tell me! Lately I have felt so uneasy—as if something threatens my lord—”

Morgause’s reddish brows lifted. “Do you have the Sight?”

“Me? Oh, no, I do not meddle in sorcery!” Guinevere exclaimed, then was stricken with embarrassment when she remembered to whom she spoke.

But Morgause did not seem offended. “I forgot that you were convent-bred. Oh, what a pity, for I really do believe—but no, I’ll say no more, dear Arthur might not like it. Only . . . do pay heed to your intuitions, Guinevere. They may be more important than you know.”

“I shall,” Guinevere promised earnestly. “But do tell me of this danger!”

Morgause sighed. “It begins with a lady who served me before her marriage. When she came to me some five or six years ago, a widow in the most desperate straits, I took her and her children in.”

Guinevere nodded. Of course Morgause had. She would have done the same herself for any loyal servant.

“The elder proved to be a sad trial,” Morgause continued. “She was quite lovely, and not without intelligence, but she drowned herself over a broken love affair. The younger, Launfal, seemed more promising, though always somewhat heavy of spirit, for he could not be reconciled to the loss of lands and riches that were once his family’s. It seemed to me he fixed upon Arthur as the culprit, and blamed him, as well, for the sister’s death. It was all nonsense, as I told him more than once, but he brooded upon his imagined wrongs until I feared for his reason.”

“What did you do?” Guinevere asked.

“I put him under restraint, still hoping he could be saved, but with the cunning of his kind, he managed to escape.”

Guinevere shivered and peered into the shadowed garden. “So he—he could be anywhere!”

“That is the reason I came in such haste, to warn the king against him. Arthur must be brought to understand that Launfal, for all his youth and charm . . . My greatest fear is that my brother . . .”

She put her hand on Guinevere’s. “Forgive me if I speak bluntly. You must have noticed that your lord does not keep such state as was common in his father’s day. Arthur walks freely among his subjects and opens his hall to every sort of churl on feast days. It is all very admirable, of course, but I would not have his kindness be his undoing.”

“We must tell him,” Guinevere said. “Warn him of this danger. He will know what is to be done.”

“Yes, of course, but . . .” Morgause cast her eyes down and sighed. “It cannot have escaped you that men—even the best of them—tend to shrug off warnings from a sister or a wife. They pat us on the head and tell us not to fear and then go off and do exactly as they meant to all along. They are all boys at heart, the dears, always so anxious to prove their courage! I fear it sometimes falls to us women to take the sensible view. To protect them from themselves.”

Guinevere had never thought of it thus before. Arthur was both good and wise—so good and so wise, in fact, that she was often driven to reflect unhappily upon the many flaws in her own nature. The thought that she, by virtue of her sex, possessed a wisdom he could not was too thrilling to resist.

“Yes, indeed,” she said to Morgause. “Tell me what
you
think should be done.”

“Perhaps if Arthur’s knights—or perhaps your knights, those who came with you from Cameliard, whom I am sure can be trusted with your confidence—were to be made aware of this danger to their king . . .”

“Yes, I see your point, and I agree completely. Can you describe this man—this Launfal—to me?”

Morgause smiled slowly. “I would be happy to.”

ONCE Aislyn crept through the castle gates, she had to feel her way along the road, helped only by the occasional flash of lightning to the east and a faint, far-off glow from the market square at the foot of the hill. She went through the stalls carefully, keeping away from the lanterns hung by the merchants readying their wares for the morrow.

Once she was through the market, though, the darkness was a living thing, pressing round her like a muffling cloak. If not for the white stones marking the edges of the road, she would have given up entirely, though even so her progress was agonizingly slow.
At this rate, I won’t make it a mile,
she thought, but kept on walking, one careful step after another, until her breath came short and her legs began to ache.

Don’t think about that. Think about Gawain and what he’ll do and say when he discovers I am gone. He’ll be a bit sad, but likely he’ll be relieved, as well, though for form’s sake, he’ll send someone out to look for me. Or no, I’m wronging him,
she thought.
He’ll come himself.

That spurred her on, and when the clouds began to break, she took new heart. There was no moon tonight, but even the faint starlight seemed a gift, for it was enough to make out the whitewashed stones lining the broad road.

Aye, he will be sad,
she thought,
though not nearly so sad as I am to leave him. And at least Gaheris is there to cheer him.

She thought of the first day of Gawain’s visit home five years ago, when Gaheris had been chided by the queen for some imagined want of courtesy to his brother. Gaheris, who usually bore the queen’s rebukes in silence, suddenly announced to the entire hall that Gawain was not a deity, and he, for one, refused to worship at his shrine. Morgause was livid, but Gawain only laughed and said Gaheris was obviously a sensible lad and he looked forward to knowing him better.

His words had not sprung from any deep affection—he and Gaheris were all but strangers—but only an instinctive desire to help his brother out of a scrape. At the time, Aislyn had been faintly amused, and then annoyed when for the rest of Gawain’s visit, Gaheris hardly left his side.

One careless comment. One kind word. And look how warmly they had greeted each other earlier. She thought of her own brother Launfal and tried to imagine how he would greet her in the unlikely event of their meeting again. But the two cases were hardly comparable. She and Launfal had never been close. Or rather, she thought, she had not allowed him to get close to her. She had always been too busy, too wrapped up in her own concerns, to regard her sickly younger brother as anything but a nuisance.

The last time she had seen him was in the practice yard at Lothian. Launfal had been smiling when he disarmed a boy who overtopped him by a foot. Had she ever told him how proud she was that day? She didn’t think so. For Gawain had been there, too, and when he looked at her, all else had been forgotten.

She should have said something to Launfal. There was no one else to do it. Their mother never cared for him; he’d been conceived when Aislyn was still an infant, and the pregnancy had been difficult from the first. At seven months, he’d come into the world, and Mother nearly died of it. Aislyn knew that everyone assumed it was a late miscarriage, for she’d heard the story often from Nurse, who liked to tell it every time she’d had a drop too much of ale: how the child was forgotten in the worry over the mother until Nurse realized that the faint mewing sound coming from the corner was a living babe, though such a puny one that no one expected him to live.

Mother found the entire experience revolting, including the child that had come of it. It was an aversion that deepened over the years when it became clear that her sickly son was to be the last child she would bear.

Their father was no better. Always disgusted by any form of illness, Sir Rogier ignored Launfal’s existence completely, while Aislyn simply thought her brother tedious. He spent most of his time hovering between life and death, and by the time he finally spoke, the family had already dismissed him as an imbecile. Even when he began to resemble a human, he was so fragile that he was no good for any sort of game.

But on that day in the practice yard Launfal had not looked fragile. He’d looked strong and healthy and happier than Aislyn had ever seen him.

She wished she had spoken to him. There were so many things she should have said, but only one that really mattered: don’t trust the queen. Four words, that’s all, and she’d had plenty of opportunity to speak them between the time she’d fully understood the extent of Morgause’s wickedness and her disastrous meeting with Gawain. But she hadn’t. She hadn’t even thought of it. And now it was too late.

Aislyn doubted anything remained of the sweet-tempered little brother who had trailed after her for so many years, waiting vainly for her notice. He’d been so patient— annoyingly persistent, she’d thought then—and on the few occasions she had been bored enough to play with him, so grateful. Her heart burned with an emotion she did not at first recognize, but then she realized it was shame.

Of course he had turned to Morgause—who else did he have? A father who’d spoken to him perhaps a dozen times before expiring, a mother who actively disliked him, a sister who had not even cared enough to say the four words that might have saved him.

The long years she had spent alone, nursing her solitary grudge against the world, no longer seemed a punishment undeserved, but the inevitable result of her own self-absorption. Had she but an ounce of Gawain’s generosity, Launfal would have gone with her into exile. He would have followed her to the ends of the earth if she had only showed him some small kindness.

“Watch over him. He’s not a bad lad, he’s only fallen into evil ways,” she muttered as she walked along, and smiled wryly, thinking she could as easily be speaking of herself. Speaking
to
herself, as well, for much as she longed to believe someone listened to her prayers, she could not force her mind into obedience.

These reflections carried her into the utter darkness of the forest. When she could no longer trust her ability to find the path, she sank down on a boulder and eased off her shoes, groaning as she massaged her swollen ankles and throbbing toes.

Time to think. On the night of the king’s Midsummer feast she must be back in Camelot to find Morgana. Between now and then, the only sensible thing to do was to go back to her hut and wait.

But tonight she had gone as far as she could manage. Her heart was doing an odd little hitch and skip, and it was some time before she managed to rouse herself long enough to crawl off the boulder into a patch of ferns, where she fell asleep to the night call of an owl above her head.

GAHERIS perched on the edge of Gawain’s bed and watched his older brother exchange his fine robe for a leather tunic and leggings. He had not said a word as Gawain told him the story of the king’s meeting with Somer Gromer Jour, though he had thought many things, and wondered even more, and liked neither his questions nor his suspicions. When Gawain explained about Dame Ragnelle and how he had come to marry her, Gaheris was hard put to hide his shock.

Was this really Gawain talking? Gaheris had never subscribed to the common wisdom that put Gawain only slightly below God’s own son, but he had always thought his eldest brother too sensible to land himself in such a humiliating mess. Of course, it wasn’t Gawain’s fault, not really—what else could he have done but marry her? Gaheris even understood why Gawain had kept the reason for his marriage hidden from the court. He wasn’t sure that he agreed with that decision, though he might well have done the same in his brother’s place. It was all perfectly understandable—even noble—but God in heaven, what a mess! And the oddest part was that Gawain seemed completely unaware of the gravity of the situation.

Gaheris drew one knee up and rested his chin upon it. “Is she as ugly as I’ve heard?”

“I don’t know what you’ve heard,” Gawain answered, tossing his robe into the trunk. “But I’d wager it falls far short of the mark.”

“She’s that bad?”

“Worse,” Gawain assured him, laughing.

It was one thing to bear up bravely under what could only be considered a disaster, but laughter seemed to be taking things a bit too far. In fact, Gawain was behaving very oddly altogether.

“Have you considered,” Gaheris said, “that this Dame Ragnelle could well be a witch?”

“Oh, she is,” Gawain answered, pulling the tunic over his head. “She told me so herself. But there’s no harm in her.”

“And what,” Gaheris asked carefully, “leads you to that conclusion? Exactly?”

Gawain frowned, then shrugged. “There just isn’t.”

“She forced you to marry her—”

“She did
not
. I wish people would stop saying that!”

“Who else has said it?”

“Arthur. He’s taking all this very badly, and just between the two of us, I’m getting a wee bit tired of his moaning.”

Gaheris blinked. That was the closest he had ever heard Gawain come to a criticism of the king, and it made him uneasy. So did the fact that Arthur, too, was clearly troubled about Gawain.

“Let me be sure I understand,” he said. “You married a woman you had never laid eyes upon—one who appeared out of nowhere and offered you a choice you could not possibly refuse—a hideous crone who is, moreover, a self-confessed witch. She has now vanished back into thin air—and you are going to
look
for her?”

“Aye.” Gawain slung his sword over his shoulder and began to buckle the straps across his chest.

“Gawain, sit down a moment, and give me one reason— one
good
reason—why you are not on your knees thanking God for your escape.”