Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [39]
Little Gwen had an uncanny instinct for when Gwen wanted to think. During the day, of course, Little Gwen didn’t come anywhere near her. But during the day, Gwen was too busy to stop to think. That moment when the queen had come to speak to her had been the only pause in the entire day, and Gwen was pretty certain she would not have had that much if it had not been the queen who had taken her aside. Gwen’s day, like that of her fellows, always began before anyone else but the servants were up, and it was filled with chores, exercises, practices, lessons, and duties. It only ended when the steward, who was the one in charge of Gwen and her fellow squires and pages, said that the day was over.
But she loved it. Not every moment of it, of course—but even in the most tedious parts, the knowledge that after this, I’ll have archery practice or we’ll be learning to wheel in formation kept her willing to work through the tedious, or the difficult, or the downright onerous. Or she would be thinking hard about something she was supposed to master, which made the time pass so much faster when she was mucking out, or grooming, or cleaning weapons and armor. And of course, when she served at table, she had to stay on her toes. The Great Hall was a lot more crowded when you were counted among the servitors. Not that all the squires served every night, far from it. Most meals were very informal. But they all took it in turn to serve at the High Table to keep in practice. Gwen was never allowed to serve the king—the steward told her from the beginning that a squire was never, ever allowed to serve someone he was closely related to. But at some point or other, she did serve each of the other men at the king’s side of the table—his three captains, the steward himself, and any important guests he might have.
That, too, put her out of Little Gwen’s reach. And usually she was so tired by the time the Steward dismissed them all that she went straight to bed and was asleep by the time Little Gwen—who was always trying to put off her bedtime—came back to the room. But on those rare occasions when Gwen wasn’t exhausted and did want to lie awake thinking for a while, Little Gwen seemed to sense, somehow, that she was feigning sleep and would poke and prod her, “accidentally,” or pretend to be tossing and turning, interrupting her thoughts.
So tonight she took a sheared sheepskin rug and a blanket out to that little sheltered corner where she used to pick over the feathers. She nodded at the sentry standing guard at the door. “Too hot to sleep inside,” she told him, and he grinned and nodded. Of course he wouldn’t have grinned and nodded if she had been old enough for boys to be interested, as they were in Cataruna. He would have asked quite sternly if the king knew she intended to sleep out, and if she was sleeping alone, and then he would have made certain that the king did know and knew who she was with. Not all her willing him not to see would have stopped him from spotting her if she had been Cataruna’s age. Although things were changing elsewhere, it was still the expected thing here that boys and girls, even when the girl was the king’s daughter, would make their first fumblings together without there being any formal promises binding them. A swelling belly generally meant a wedding, of course, but Gwen knew vaguely that there were ways of preventing such a thing. If there hadn’t been, there would have been a great many more princesses than just four. In the village, at least, the girl that went to her marriage a virgin was a rarity.
Nevertheless, for the king’s daughters . . . there were some things expected. You might keep the identity of the boy you were with from your parents if you were an ordinary girl, but the king’s daughter—well, there were always going to be complications. That had been carefully explained to them once they were old enough to notice that