Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [183]
“The last thing I wish is to leave your side, madam, but Arthur is my friend and my cousin—”
“God forbid that I should ever come between you kinsman,” she said, and held out her small hand to him to kiss. “By this marriage you are my loyal kinsman too, and my cousin. Go to my lord the king and tell him—” She hesitated, startled at her own boldness; would it be seemly to say this? God help them all, within the hour she would be Arthur’s wife, what did it matter if it sounded overbold, when what she spoke were words of proper concern for her own lord? “Tell him I gladly return to him his most loyal captain, and that I await him with love and obedience, sir.”
Lancelet smiled. It seemed that smile stretched a string somewhere deep inside her, that she felt her own mouth moving with it. How could she feel so much a part of him? Her whole life seemed to have filtered down into the touch of his lips on her fingers. She swallowed, and suddenly she knew what it was she felt. In spite of her dutiful messages of love and obedience to Arthur, it seemed that she would sell her soul if time would only turn back and she could tell her father that she would marry no man but Lancelet. That was something as real as the sun around her and the grass under her feet, as real—she swallowed again—as real as Arthur, now being readied for the wedding, for which she must go to Holy Mass to prepare herself.
Is it one of God’s cruel jokes that I did not know this was what I felt until it was too late? Or is this some wicked trick of the fiend, to seduce me from my duty to my father and to my husband? She did not hear what Lancelet said; she was only conscious that his hand had released hers and that he had turned his back and was walking away. She hardly heard the polite words of those two foster-brothers, Balin and Balan—which of them was the son of the priestess of the Lake, then? Balan; Lancelet’s brother, but no more like him than a raven is like a great eagle.
She became aware that Igraine was speaking to her.
“I leave you to the Companions, my dear. I wish to speak with the Merlin before the mass.”
Belatedly, it occurred to Gwenhwyfar that Igraine was awaiting her permission to go. Already her rank as High Queen was a reality. She hardly heard her own words to Igraine as the older woman withdrew.
Igraine crossed the courtyard, murmuring excuses to the people she jostled, trying to reach Taliesin through the crowd. Everyone was clad in bright festival clothing, but he wore his usual somber grey robes.
“Father—”
“Igraine, child.” Taliesin looked down at her, and Igraine found it obscurely comforting that the old Druid spoke to her as he would have spoken to her when she was fourteen. “I had thought you would be in attendance upon our bride. How beautiful she is! Arthur has found himself a treasure. I have heard that she is clever, too, and learned, and also that she is pious, which will please the bishop.”
“Father,” Igraine appealed, lowering her voice so that no one in the crowd would hear, “I must ask you this—is there any honorable way for Arthur to avoid this marriage?”
Taliesin blinked in consternation. “No, I do not think so. Not when all is readied to join them together after the mass. God help us, have we all been deceived, is she barren, or unchaste, or—” The Merlin shook his head in dismay. “Unless she were secretly a leper, or actually with child by another man, there could be no way at all to stop it; and even then, no way without scandal or offense, or making an enemy of Leodegranz. Why do you ask, Igraine?”
“I believe her virtuous. But I have seen the way she looks at Lancelet and he at her. Can anything come of it but misery, when the bride is besotted with another, and that other the