Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [58]
That only made her burst into tears again, and he awkwardly patted her head. “You must,” he said, then, after a moment, his own voice choked. “But you never do.”
After that, Peder kept her with him except when she was fetched by one of the women. He gave her hard things to do, things that forced her to concentrate, like splitting a wand with an arrow, or braiding a horsehair halter in an intricate pattern for a foal. Then he would give her things that exhausted her body, like carrying water and chopping wood. For the most part, though, she seemed to exist in a haze of disbelief, interrupted by the same anguish that caused Gynath and Bronwyn and some of the other women to kneel beside the bier and howl.
That was not for her, though. She couldn’t let herself do that.
But it made her feel torn into a thousand pieces to see her father sitting there beside the bier, eyes dull, hands dangling, face almost gray.
It seemed a hundred years. It seemed no time at all. It seemed as if she had thrown herself down, exhausted with weeping and work and woke to find herself at the side of a barrow. The king’s barrow, of course. She knew it; she visited it dutifully and left offerings of fruit and flowers and thought no more about it. Now there was a hole in the earth beside it, and at the bottom of the hole was Eleri. She had been draped with a linen cloth so fine that her features could be seen through it, and in her arms was the son she had died trying to give the king.
Gwen stared down at her, numb. There was no Lady here now, and they could not wait for one, so Bronwyn said the words for the women, and the bard, who had stayed, shaken, but there was some bravery in him to have stayed, said the words for the men.
Gwen wanted to run away as they all began, handful by handful, to throw dirt and flowers into the grave. She wanted to scream, to throw herself down there and beg her mother to return, to do anything but what she was doing—tossing in the meadowsweet and angelica she had picked, watching Gynath crumple to the ground, seeing her father look as if he were going to collapse at any moment.
All her anguish centered, at last, on that tiny bundle in Eleri’s arms. The cause of all this grief. The brother she had intended to serve.
She didn’t hate him. How could she? She had loved him for months. It wasn’t his fault this had happened.
But with a stab of grief so deep it felt as if her heart had been ripped from her body, she swore a silent vow to Epona.
I will never, never, never have a baby just to please a man.
Even when they were putting Eleri in the ground, Gwen couldn’t believe she was dead. And now that the wake was long past, and there were even little pinpricks of green poking through the brown earth mounded over the queen’s grave, Gwen still couldn’t make herself believe it.
She felt numb, and her thoughts were muffled by a thick fog of grief and disbelief. She kept thinking that it was all some sort of nightmare, and she would wake up, and everything would be normal again. But she didn’t, and it wasn’t. Nothing would ever be normal and right again.
The rest of the family was no help. Gynath was utterly inconsolable; she and Bronwyn spent most of their time collapsed in each others’ arms.
The king looked . . . shrunken. And old. He’d aged a dozen years in a night, it seemed. He still went through his day, doing all the things that a king had to do, but there was neither life nor light in what he did. He was a king, and he acted as a king, because it was his duty to be a king, although the man in the king wanted only to mourn.
Little Gwen was as mute as a stone; her face had a closed look about it, and she hadn’t shed a single tear. She just went about, doing what people told her to do without saying three words in the entire day, like a little