Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [138]
“There we are. That’s better, isn’t it.” His eyes were alight with a strange look of pleasure. “What? You thought I was going to kill you? I told you years ago that you were going to be mine; why would I want to kill you? I only married your sister because she was so like you.” He patted her cheek, while she shrank back inwardly in horror. “And now I have you all to myself. Your sister will be so concerned with keeping Arthur happy, she won’t have time to worry about what I am doing. Besides, she thinks I am going to throw you in a river or bury you, not that I am taking you off to—well, it doesn’t matter where. All that matters is that I prepared it for you years ago. Oh, you don’t like me now, I know. But you’ll learn to love me. I know you will. You won’t be able to help yourself.”
He laughed, and pulled the coverings over her head again. And mercifully, the roaring, and the blackness came back, and she was carried away by them and hid inside them.
Chapter Twenty-One
Gwen sat cross-legged on her pallet on the floor, patiently braided her own hairs into a thread. A few threads and she could make a cord. If she had a cord, she might be able to strangle Medraut with it . . .
There was not much else to do. She lived in a small room with a high window in one wall and a mattress heaped with furs on the floor. The floors were stone, the walls were stone, and the timbers of the ceiling could not be reached by any means from the floor. Without a knife, it was not possible to cut up the furs or the canvas cover of the mattress. She was wearing heavy woolen gowns of material too tough to tear and too closely woven to pick apart, without any fastenings or cords. She was barefoot.
The latrine was a heavy stone basin in the corner with a hole much too small to stick anything down. The huge guard that brought her food sloshed a bucket of water down it when he came in.
Medraut had gone to great lengths to make sure that there was nothing in here she could use as a weapon. Her food was served in a grass basket, and she ate it with her fingers; her drink came in a blunted drinking horn that wouldn’t serve as a weapon itself and wouldn’t smash to give her something with a point or edge. Those were taken away when she was finished, and the guard stayed there until she finished.
This place, whatever it was, must have been built on the Roman style, for the floor was warm, though not nearly as warm as Arthur’s palace.
She was not sure how long she had been here. Weeks, certainly. Months . . . probably. For most of the early part of this ordeal, she had been unconscious for long stretches thanks to Medraut’s potions.
Medraut visited her from time to time; his visits were irregular, and the only way that she knew one was going to occur was when she began to feel dizzy after eating. He made sure that she couldn’t move long before he unlocked her door. She had been completely unsuccessful in detecting whatever he was putting in her food; she’d tried not eating altogether, but eventually hunger drove her to eat. After all it wasn’t as if she wanted to die—that was the last thing she wanted. She wanted to get free.
She was pretty certain that on the last several visits, Medraut hadn’t touched her, although she knew very well he had done whatever he liked early on. Probably he had found that lying with someone as unresponsive as a corpse was rather unsatisfying. Instead, of late, he had a chair brought and sat in it, talking at her until she lost consciousness. That might actually have not been so bad if he had given her any real information. She knew far more than she wanted to know now about how he had gotten rid of Arthur’s sons, how he had hoodwinked Arthur into trusting him, what most of his late childhood had been like—and far, far too much about how he had been certain she was destined for him from the moment he saw her.
But a very, very strange thing also happened when she was drugged—and sometimes, when she was asleep.
Visions—maybe. If visions they were, she could hardly