Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [147]
As she restlessly shifted, finding a comfortable position in the hollow she had scooped dry in the rotted wood, the inescapable thought came to her. What if I never went back?
She immediately scolded herself for being impractical, if nothing else. She was well enough equipped to stay healthy and fed in the spring and summer, but winter would surely kill her. She did not have enough in the way of protection or hunting gear to survive even a mild winter.
But what if—what if she could find a way to live out here? Never go back to Arthur? And for just one heady moment, she entertained a daydream of complete freedom. Perhaps she could find an old hermit’s hut—she wouldn’t need much. If she were settled, she could spend her time hunting and tanning the hides of what she caught. She pictured herself making serviceable garments from rabbit hide, then, making a crude bow, bringing down deer . . . living out a life with no obligations to anyone but herself.
She sighed, the fantasy dissolving almost as quickly as she had conceived of it. I’d go mad. Although she liked her own company well enough, she knew she was not the sort for a hermit’s life.
And aside from all that . . . Gwenhwyfach was masquerading as her, and that could have no good ending, not for Arthur and not for anyone else, either. She had to get back and expose the treacherous bitch. Medraut had had a very long time to plan whatever it was he was going to do, and he probably would not have kidnapped her if his plans weren’t close to fruition. She owed Arthur that.
The weight of duty and responsibility descended on her again, as if someone had piled heavy stones on her heart. And she cried, just a little, as she settled in for sleep.
After two days of almost direct westward movement, Gwen relaxed a little, and began to look for signs of human beings. While it was true that Medraut’s control extended this far, practically speaking, she didn’t think he was all that interested in anything that went past the immediate boundaries of his villa. Medraut was, at heart, disinclined to trust anyone but himself. Governing land required a great deal of work—work he couldn’t perform if he wasn’t physically present. She had the feeling that the reason he had, as time passed, left her alone for so long, was that was still cultivating his place as one of the King’s Companions. The work her father did day to day meant he was always dealing with his chiefs and nobles, sometimes over details as small as the harvest from an individual farm. Medraut couldn’t possibly oversee extensive property himself, yet it was work he would never trust to anyone else.
So the villa was probably just a remote hideaway, and one with no village, no farms, nothing outside its walls. And while Medraut could probably force or bully cooperation from those living near the place, it was unlikely he even bothered to try to rule anyone living more than a day’s ride away.
She began listening carefully for the distant sounds that would tell her there was human habitation—the crow of a rooster, the sound of a dog barking, the echo of an ax on wood.
But the faint sounds she heard first were nothing so peaceful. They were the metal-on-metal clash of swords, faint, far, but not all that far away . . .
And she didn’t even think, she reacted. She ran toward the sounds, aided by the fact that the game trail she was on went in the same direction. Whoever was fighting, the odds were good that one side or the other would be friendly to her. The brief pang of regret that her strange idyll of freedom was over was lost in the fierce wash of glee that at last, at long last, she was going to be able to strike back at someone.
But as she stopped just before the clearing where four men were being held off by a single, incredibly skillful fighter, she froze in shock for a moment. She knew that fighter.
It was Lancelin, with his back up against the trunk of an enormous tree so that they