Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [2]
There were those that said the queen was Fae-touched. Certainly, despite having given birth to Gwen and all her sisters, she often seemed as young as any of the maids at her hearth. There were those that said the two youngest of the brood, Gwen and her younger sister, took after her. But those that said it did so with a touch of pride, not fear; if they were Fae-touched, then, that would be a good thing.
Gwen’s sisters sat beside her, watching and listening just as raptly. Gynath who was almost twelve summers, Cataruna who was fourteen, and Gwenhwyfach a mere eight, the sister enough like her to have been Gwen’s twin, all listened and remained very, very quiet, lest they be remembered and sent off to bed. All the sisters had much the same look about them; they got their looks from their mother, who was slim and very fair—a rarity among dark people—and not the king, who was burly and, even rarer, had a head of hair like copper wire. They had a visitor this night, who would stay through Samhain to give their rites especial power. Eleri was concerned that the old men and women were right, that this would be a hard winter, and she would do whatever it took to keep her people safe through it.
But it was not talk of the winter to come and the Samhain rites that occupied them now. It was talk of Arthur, the High King, and his court at Celliwig.
“. . . and so the High King takes a bride, and the Merlin is making sure the land-rites are performed,” the lady visitor was saying; she was very important, a priestess and a sorceress, from the great school at the Well of the Cauldron.
“And not afore time, too,” muttered old Bronwyn. “Asking for trouble it was, leaving it for so long! It’ll be a hard winter, thanks to all this dallying. As the king goes, so goes the land, and that’s a fact.” She made a sour face as the rest of the women nodded. “If the king be wifeless and childless, how can the land be anything but cold and hard? All very well to say the Merlin could make up for it, but he’s only a man, one man, and—”
“Hush,” Eleri interrupted, chiding her woman, and the visitor nodded with approval.
“What’s done is done; the land hasn’t suffered. The land has a long memory and longer patience. One hard winter will not ruin the land, and the Merlin has brought him round to the bride and the rites.” The woman sighed. “And now I am here to ask you, has the High King’s half-sister been among you?”
“Morgana?” Eleri shook her head. “You surely do not mean Anna Morgause . . . I have not seen her in a year or more. The Orkney clan does not favor us with their attention, much. Why?”
The visitor shrugged, but looked troubled. “It is Anna Morgause I mean. Morgana is hardly more than a child, for all her power, and she heeds the Merlin and the Council of the Wise. But Morgause . . . Anna is a woman grown, with four sons she would fain see raised high. She has the power and the willfulness, and she is wedded to Lot, who speaks the High King fair but watches through his fingers. And Morgause speaks the Council fair, but . . .”
But Eleri shook her head. “Rhianu, be careful of what you say. Have you anything other than gossip and your own suspicions? Has the Cauldron shown a vision of the future?”
The visitor looked away a moment. “No and no,” she admitted. Eleri smiled slightly. “Have done, then, and tell us of the bride. If gossip there will be, let it be of bright things and not dark, truth and not suspicion. Anna of the Orkneys will do as she does, and if the Cauldron gives you no visions, then that is the will of the Goddess.”
Gwenhwyfar pondered the visitor. She did not seem like someone who would gossip to make trouble, and normally Eleri would have deferred to her judgment, since she was older and a very powerful Wise Woman indeed, one of the Nine who served the Cauldron of the Goddess. But her mother must know something that made her say what she had. Perhaps there was bad blood between Rhianu and Queen Morgause, and