Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [29]
On the way there she passed the turnspit guarding the door to the guard-closet. There were muffled sobs coming from inside. But they didn’t sound repentant, or frightened, or sorrowful.
They sounded angry.
Chapter Five
Winter did not stop the training. Even when conditions were too foul to ride, it was the responsibility of the warriors-in-training to take the horses out to the paddock, turn them loose, clean the stalls, then give their feet a thorough cleaning and put them up again. Normally the grooms did this, but when the horses were confined to the stable, rather than running loose, the stalls fouled that much faster. A horse standing in a fouled stall was in danger of thrush. And a horse with thrush was in danger of having to be put down. As the horsemaster told them all sternly the first time they were set to this task, “Every horse in this stable’s worth three of the likes of you, an’ ne’er ye forget it.”
It was true, too. So foul weather only meant another sort of work with the horses.
As for warrior training . . . well, foul weather meant that some of their “training” involved ax work . . . against the firewood. The trainers had very clever ways of making sure that every stroke accomplished some wood-splitting. Gwen built quite a set of muscles over the winter. And once they could be safely trusted with bows and arrows, they became part of the army of hunters that provided meat for the king’s table. And a miss there, against rapidly moving targets, had more serious consequences than a miss at a wand. Gwen learned to appreciate every bite of rabbit pie and to look on goose, duck, venison, and boar with an appreciation she’d never felt before.
After a month of punishment, Little Gwen finally broke down and repented . . . or at least made the motions of repentance. Gwen was expecting some other form of retaliation, but at least where she was concerned, nothing happened. In fact, Little Gwen left her alone for the first time in memory. Perhaps it was nothing more than the fact that from Gwenhwyfach’s perspective, Gwen’s training regimen was worse than any sort of revenge. It hardly mattered, really; the only time she ever saw her little sister was at meals and bedtime and often not even then. Gwen ate early, rose early and went to bed early, so tired from the physical work that she was dead asleep from the moment she got under the blankets.
But once back in the king’s good graces, Little Gwen seemed to be putting most of her effort into becoming his favorite—and to making herself as unlike Gwen as possible. She began walking and talking as daintily as any girl trying to catch the eye of a boy, kept herself fastidiously neat, and for the first time volunteered to do things, as long as they were womanly. The king found this very amusing; as for Eleri, she was too preoccupied with her own matters to pay much attention. And Gwen was just relieved that Little Gwen had finally found something to keep her from plaguing her older sisters.
The winter was not as harsh as everyone had feared, and most took that as a sign that the High King’s marriage had had the desired result on the land. Certainly at the Year Turning and Fire Kindling, the Midwinter Solstice, word crept across the kingdoms that the new queen was properly increasing, and that was a good omen indeed.
Someone else was increasing as well, although the queen had kept it to herself until almost February, revealing it only when her women threatened to tell the king themselves. But again, this had little impact on Gwen’s life; now one of the warriors-in-training, she was effectively out of Eleri’s household.
Strangely enough, now that she spent less time within the household, she came to know more of her older sisters. In many ways, she saw them now through the eyes of the older boys, hearing things from them she would never have guessed. That made her watch them, pay attention