Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [57]
Little Gwen had been surprisingly good, although she looked as disappointed as Bronwyn when the queen changed the subject away from the Orkney clan. Gwen was relieved. Perhaps all the attention she had gotten from the Merlin had done her good. She certainly had been on excellent behavior this evening, fetching the queen anything she asked for and not even trying her coy little tricks on the bard. It was rather too bad in a way that Eleri had changed the subject; the bard was not very good, and Gwen found her interest straying away from the war song that was less song and more toneless chanting, mostly in praise of a nebulous leader who, she supposed, was intended to resemble her father. That was often the way with these bards; trying to flatter their hosts in hopes of a rich present, rather than earning the rich present by honestly performing to the best of their ability. Sadly, her father didn’t seem to see the ploy for what it was; he nodded to the monotonous strumming and looked as if he were going to interject an approving grunt on the chorus, when suddenly Eleri clutched her swollen belly and screamed out in pain.
It was not just a “cry”—this was a sound that Gwen had never heard from her mother, and from the look of it, neither had any of the other women, not even Bronwyn, who had been with her through all of the births of her children. The look of startled alarm on Bronwyn’s face, made a stab of fear go right through Gwen. Swiftly, Eleri’s women surrounded her and half-carried her into the royal chamber, as the king tried to make light of the situation.
“You see, Bard, your song has roused my son, and now he wants to come forth and do battle!” He stripped off a bracelet—only bronze, to the bard’s swiftly covered disappointment—and tossed it to the man, looking distractedly at the entrance to the chambers, now covered by the curtain. “Let us drink to him and to the safe delivery of the queen! And let us take our drinking outside, so that we do not disturb the women at their work!”
The rest of the men were nothing loath to do so, taking up their cups and moving with unseemly haste to the fire outside. And Gwen had to go with them, in her capacity as a page.
And of course, even though they were all outside and the cries were muffled, when the screaming began, everyone knew that something was going horribly wrong. It was bad enough that this was far too early for the baby to be coming. Two weeks more, better still, a month—not now. But the awful sounds that Eleri was making—she didn’t sound human anymore, she sounded like an animal in pain. The men all raised their voices and gabbled about nothing at all to try to cover it, but the king was pale and sweating, and Gwen wanted nothing more than to run away, far away, and curl up in a ball with her hands over her ears.
It was worse when the terrible screaming stopped, and a cold silence took its place.
They came to get her, two of Eleri’s women, sobbing. Gwen didn’t want to go with them, but they took her hands and pulled her along into the room that smelled of stale sweat, and blood, and something else, something sweetly sickening. Poison, she would have said, if they had asked, but no one actually asked her anything. Gynath was already there, sobbing as she wrapped something small in long bands of white cloth. They made her go to the side of the bed, but the thing in the bed with the twisted, agonized face was not her mother, could not have been her mother. Eleri had never looked like that.
But, like Gynath, she cried as she did what she was told to do. Eleri’s women did most of the work, washing, dressing, and laying out the body, trying to smooth that tortured face, carrying her and the wrapped infant that had never breathed to the