Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [1]
The Hall was the biggest room in the castle, and served many purposes. By day it was in turn her father’s audience chamber, the place where meals were served, and the scene of most domestic work that wasn’t done in the kitchen. By night, her father’s men and servants slept there. The walls were as thick as Gwen’s arm was long, broken only by narrow windows too small for anyone but a child to climb through. Right now, heavy wooden shutters closed off the worst of the winds. The hearth-fire in the center gave most of the heat and light, supplemented by the torches on the walls. The stone floor was covered with rushes—newly changed just two days ago, so the herbs strewn among them were still sweet and the floor beneath still clean. The ceiling was lost in darkness and further obscured by the smoke rising to the louvered hole above the hearth.
It smelled of dampness, of spilled ale, of herbs and cooked meat, of sweaty bodies and wet wool. Faintly, because it had only been two days since it had been swept clean, there was a taint of urine from the dogs and cats that ran free in here. But above all it smelled of smoke.
The women had claimed the hearth itself, sitting about the fire on benches and stools or, like Gwen and her sisters, on the floor, and the men did not challenge them. No sane man challenged a Wise Woman, much less a gaggle of them. Behind them, on the mead-benches, were the men of her father’s following. He was Lleudd Ogrfan Gawr, called “The Giant,” and unchallenged king of these parts. There were no more Romans to contest his rule. The Romans had come and now gone from here; they mined their tin, lead, and gold no more, and the amphitheater they had built for their so-called games now echoed only to the wail of wild cats at night. And good riddance, said her mother. Her father’s words were more pithy and profane.
The good-natured growling and grumbling of the men sounded like a muttering chorus of sleepy bears on the edge of hibernation, fat with autumn berries and nuts, and thinking mostly about sleep. Partly, that was the mead and ale of her mother Eleri’s brewing. She put herbs in it—she said to flavor it, but the women all knew it was to make the men calm and sleepy, and that was a secret that would never be breathed to the men, not even to the king her husband. There was little argument on Ogrfan Gawr’s mead benches, and no hot-tempered quarrels that could break into blood feud. Eleri the Queen was a Wise Woman in the sense of knowing the ways of herbs as well as of magic, and she reckoned it worth the effort to keep the men from making more grief than there already was in the world. Bronywn, who served as her right hand and the children’s nurse, was the keeper of her secrets.
Hunting and fighting and tall tales were the order of business on the mead-benches tonight. With the harvest over, it was hunting that would help keep the men busy until spring, and hunting would be needed to keep the hall fed if the winter was a harsh one. Magic was the subject on the hearthstone; it was the provenance of women—and a very few, very select group of men. The Druids. The bards. The occasional hermit-healer. Eleri had told Gwen that this was because men spent too much time around Cold Iron; wearing it in the form of weapons, crafting it, cherishing it. “Magic shuns Cold Iron,” she had said, with a decided nod. “Men might have the Gift, but while they cling to Cold Iron, they’ll never have the Power.”
Gwen most especially watched her mother, listened to her words, for the Queen was also the chief sorceress here and high in the Councils of the Wise. Eleri had the Power and had it in abundance. Gwen had watched her, by full moon and waning, by Midsummer sun and Midwinter dark, weaving her Power into the spells that were the weapons she wielded to defend, protect, and nurture their people. There were two thrones in Lleudd Ogrfan Gawr’s High Hall: the one at the mead benches and