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“Bruises aplenty. Maybe a cracked rib. Those churls might have had horses somewhere about, though they attacked me afoot when I stopped to let Idris graze for a bit.” He tried to stand up and winced.

She got back to her feet. “Stay there. I’ll have a look about for them, but don’t hope too much. I don’t think Medraut lets too many of his men have anything as costly as a horse.”

A brief look didn’t turn up any horses, nor any sign of them. She wasn’t surprised. Even afoot, they’d had plenty of time to get ahead of her; they hadn’t needed to stop to fish and cook and try to make some makeshift equipment for themselves.

When she came back to him, he’d gotten his armor off, and he looked as if he’d been put in a barrel full of stones and rolled downhill in it. But he wasn’t cut anywhere significant—a shallow gash across the ribs, a couple across the backs of his hands, and another over one eye. And careful probing proved that he hadn’t actually cracked his ribs.

So now she asked the question that had been burning on her tongue. “Were you looking for me?”

He nodded. “When we came back from trouncing the Saxons with Arthur, the queen—the false one—didn’t seem . . . right. She looked like you, but . . . there were too many things that weren’t like you, at least, not to someone who’d fought beside you.” He grimaced. “This will sound rude—”

“So be rude,” she replied. “We’ve fought together, and more than once.”

“She was too womanly.” He glanced at her, apologetically. “I don’t mean that you are not womanly, but she—she was like the king’s second wife; she reveled in luxury. You were indifferent to it, at least it seemed that way to me. She spent hours in the bath, and when she wasn’t in the bath, she was fussing over gowns and hair, and when she wasn’t doing that, she was all over Arthur like a camp whore.”

He said that last without thinking, then flushed a deep crimson, glancing at her. But she just nodded, grimly. “She’s my sister,” she replied, around clenched teeth. “Schooled by Anna Morgause and Morgana, and Anna Morgause was . . . insatiable. Those weren’t just rumors you heard about her legion of lovers, they were facts. We called my sister Gwenhwyfach, ‘Little Gwen.’ She’s married to Medraut.”

He blinked at that, and blinked again. “But—”

She snorted. “Oh, Medraut is perfectly happy to have her where she is. He may think he’s nothing like Lot, but he has no trouble playing his wife’s pander. The only difference is that he does it for power, not pleasure. He has several plans afoot to be named Arthur’s successor, and he’s using Gwenhwyfach to open the door for him.”

Lancelin’s mouth made a shocked little “o,” then he cleared his throat self-consciously and continued. “I couldn’t get anywhere near her, of course. And Arthur . . . well, Arthur was . . . rather pleased . . .” He flushed again. “He said, now and then, that his wife must have missed him a—very great deal.”

“Arthur is a man,” she said dryly.

He coughed. “Yes, well . . . the thing is, Gildas turned up around Midwinter, and she acted as if she had never seen him before, and when he tried to converse with her, she just turned him away. Arthur wouldn’t hear that there was anything wrong, of course . . .” He coughed again. “So Gildas talked to a few of us who knew you. Asked us to try to find out what was going on—if maybe the queen had been possessed or enchanted or—well, then he had another idea. Gwenhwyfar, this sounded mad to me at the time: He asked if maybe it wasn’t you at all. He pointed out that the Merlin had enchanted Uther to appear as Ygraine’s husband, and that was how Arthur was conceived in the first place. He thought that maybe someone had enchanted another woman to look like you.”

She blinked at that, because it was so near the truth. Gildas was great deal more observant, and more clever, than she had thought. “And you thought—”

“I knew something was wrong. That queen wasn’t the warrior I knew. Her hands were smooth