Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [112]
She had not actually seen the High King in person, but she could well imagine the tone of his temper.
And what had happened to the Merlin did not help matters at all.
Oh, the Merlin . . . if there was anyone who might have been able to find a way to get Arthur’s men onto the island, it was he. He had purportedly worked greater feats of magic in the past. He could probably have disguised Arthur as Melwas and gotten him into the fortress that way, or somehow built a bridge to the island out of the mist itself. There was only one small problem.
The Merlin was no longer in a position to conjure anything.
Though rumors were flying throughout the camp about just what, exactly, had happened to him—the wildest of which featured him being locked inside a cave, a rock, or most improbably, an oak tree, by the Lady Nineve—one of Ladies had come to Gwen as soon as she had made camp and told her precisely what had befallen the Merlin.
“He was elf-shot,” the woman had said. “Though whether it was a curse, or some cruel weapon bought of the fae by Melwas, we cannot say. But as Melwas was fleeing, with Queen Gwenhwyfar as his captive, the Merlin was looked for in vain. He was found at last on the floor of his room, taken with a fit. And now he lies as one made of oak, with Nineve tending him. He cannot speak, and only his eyes seem alive.”
She could not help but wonder, although she did not say, if this was the punishment for all those innocent infants he had ordered killed so long ago. Certainly now he was as helpless as an infant, as trapped within an unworking body as if he had in truth been encased in a tree.
So much for the Merlin. The Ladies, of course, did not have any sort of magic that could be used to solve Arthur’s problem. And if Gwyn ap Nudd was inclined to help, well, he had not even so much as showed a light in his tower.
Gwen had turned up at the head of King Lleudd’s contribution to the army; she shortly thereafter discovered that in some ways, her arrival had made things even more complicated. To begin with, there was her name. It had caused rumors to fly through the camp when she first arrived, that Arthur’s queen had escaped, that she had arrived at the head of her own warriors, that she was, in fact, the ghost of Arthur’s first queen come from beyond the grave to help him. It seemed that everyone and his dog needed to come look at her to be sure that she was only herself, Lleudd Ogrfan Gawr’s daughter. It had gotten to the point by sunset that she simply left her own encampment and with a small escort made a tour of Arthur’s entire forces, introducing herself to all the war chiefs and making sure that everyone got a good long look at her.
That solved one problem, anyway, though now scarcely anyone called her by name. “The Giant’s Daughter,” they mostly called her. That was maddening, but understandable. What else were they going to do? Two Gwenhwyfars was one too many in this situation. And it wasn’t as if she had yet earned one of those clever descriptive names some warriors got.
More vexing was the unspoken assumption that Gwyn ap Nudd was simply going to appear and declare himself for Arthur just because she had turned up.
And oh . . . what a mixed set of expectations that was. Because not everyone here wanted a King of Annwn to turn up and make himself an ally. First and foremost of those that would object were the Christ priests.
With the abbey so near at hand, it was not surprising that there were monks wandering about the camp; and since the abducted queen was a follower of the White Christ . . .
Well, she supposed they were finding it necessary to make it clear that they favored Arthur. If the queen had, indeed, turned her coat, then they certainly would want to show by their presence that they still favored Arthur. Although, of course, there was a further complication because Melwas himself was Christian.
Gwen felt, rather cynically, that it was possible these priests were trying to play both sides; although