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She got glimpses into the life Little Gwen was leading in her place, and at first, everything happened as she would have predicted. Little Gwen absolutely reveled in her place as queen, wallowing in the baths and the preening, gossiping viciously with her ladies and for mischief setting them against each other, ordering gown after sumptuous gown, and entertaining Arthur in her bed with a wanton abandon that made Gwen blush with shame.

But then something happened. A new Arthur began to appear in that bedchamber of nights. An Arthur that she had never seen, a man who, despite his years, seemed more vibrant, more alive, than she had ever seen him. And under the charismatic spell of that Arthur . . . Little Gwen softened. Gradually, she ceased tormenting her ladies. Gradually, her demeanor took on a cast that Gwen couldn’t really identify at first.

And when she did . . . that was when she simply couldn’t believe the dreams. Because—if she was right—Arthur was taming the untamable Little Gwen, winning her to him the way he won his men’s hearts. And she simply could not believe that anyone as self-centered as Little Gwen could come to care for anyone other than herself.

She’d had another of those dreams last night. It seemed just as impossible as the ones before it. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought that Little Gwen was having second thoughts about betraying Arthur.

Impossible.

As she braided, she began to feel the tingling in her lips that signified he had slipped a potion into her again. With a resigned sigh, she thrust the thread she was braiding with the others she had made under the mattress, then stretched out under the furs and waited for the paralysis—and Medraut—to arrive. She stared up at the ceiling and the tiny bit of sky that was all she could see through the window.

She was almost beginning to look forward to this. It made for a change in the endless sameness of her days. She had thought she was bored as Arthur’s queen; here she had nothing whatsoever to do except exercise, comb her fingers through her hair, and braid what came out.

At least she was still fit. She did every exercise she could remember, practiced fighting moves even if she didn’t have a weapon, stretched and flexed until she was more limber than she had ever been in her life except as a small child. She had learned how to run and tumble in these wretched gowns, even if she couldn’t run very far in the tiny cell.

She even practiced that meditation that the Ladies did, though she wasn’t very good at it. She prayed a great deal. She recited what she could remember of bardic ballads and epics.

She did that now, waiting for the potion to take effect, staring upward, because when she couldn’t move, she really didn’t want to be frozen in a position where she had to look at Medraut.

The room began to spin, even though she was lying down. Beneath the furs, she tried, experimentally, to move her arm, and couldn’t. So . . . he should be entering at any moment.

This was when she heard the bar on the outside of the door slide aside, and the door scraped open. Footsteps on the stone followed as Medraut entered the room, followed by a servant with a comfortable chair; who placed the chair and washed out the basin with a bucket of water. She could just see Medraut out of the corner of her eye; he made a face, and waved a hand in front of his nose.

“Time for another bath and a new gown, my love,” he said. “You’ll like that, won’t you?”

She felt a little sick inside. Yes, she liked being clean. No, she did not like the fact that it happened while she was unconscious. Not one bit. She would wake up with her hair washed and braided, completely scrubbed, and in a new clean gown. She had no idea who or what was doing this, nor what, if anything, happened besides the washing. What was the most disturbing, perhaps, was the level of detail; her fingers and toes were neatly manicured, the nails trimmed, and even buffed to a soft polish. There were none of