The Hollow Hills - Mary Stewart [28]
"Prince Merlin. Welcome." Marcia curtsied to the air somewhere between me and the Queen, and withdrew. I went forward to kneel and kiss the Queen's hand.
"Madam."
She raised me kindly. "It was good of you to come so quickly for such a strange summons. I hope the journey was easy?"
"Very easy. We are well lodged with Maeve and Caw, and so far no one has recognized me, or even Ralf. Your secret is safe."
"I must thank you for taking so much care of it. I promise you I'd not have known you until you spoke."
I fingered my chin, smiling. "As you see, I've been preparing for some time."
"No magic this time?"
"As much as there was before," I said.
She looked at me straightly then, the beautiful dark-blue eyes meeting mine in the way I remembered, and I saw that this was still the old Ygraine, direct as a man, and with the same high pride. The heavy stillness was just an overlay, the milky calm that seems to come on women in pregnancy. Beneath the stillness, the placidity, was the old fire. She spread her hands out. "Looking at me now, do you still tell me that when you spoke to me that night in London, and promised me the King's love, there was no magic there?"
"Not in the ruse that brought the King to you, madam. In what happened after, perhaps."
" 'Perhaps'?" There was a quick lift to her voice that warned me. Ygraine might be a Queen, with mettle as high as a man's, but she was a woman nearing her seventh month. My fears were my own, and must stay my own. I hesitated, searching for words, but she went on quickly, burningly, as if to convince herself across my silence: "When you first spoke with me and told me you could bring the King to me, there was magic there, I know there was. I felt it, and I saw it in your face. You told me that your power came from God, and that in obeying you I was God's creature, even as you were. You said that because of the magic that would bring Uther to me, the kingdom should have peace. You spoke of crowns and altars...And now, see, I am Queen, with God's blessing, and I am heavy with the King's child. Dare you tell me now that you deceived me?"
"I did not deceive you, madam. That was a time full of visions, and a passion of dreams and desires. We are quit of those now, and we are sober, and it is daylight. But magic is here, growing in you, and this time it is fact, not vision. He will be born at Christmas, they tell me."
" 'He'? You sound very sure."
"I am sure."
I saw her press her lips together as if at a sudden spasm of pain, then she looked away from me, down at her hands which lay folded across her belly. When she spoke, she spoke calmly, straight to her hands, or to what they covered. "Marcia told me of the messages she sent to you in the summer. But you must have known, without her telling you, the way my lord the King thinks of this matter."
I waited, but she seemed to expect an answer. "He told me himself," I said. "If he's still of the same mind now as he was then, he won't acknowledge the child as his heir."
"He is still of the same mind." Her eyes came swiftly up to mine again. "Don't misunderstand me, he has not the faintest doubt of me, nor ever had. He knows that I was his from the first moment I saw him, and that from that moment, on one excuse or another, I never lay with the Duke. No, he does not doubt me; he knows the child is his. And for all his high speech" -- there was the glimmer of a smile, and suddenly her voice was indulgent, the voice of a woman speaking of her child or of a loved husband -- "and for all his rough denials, he knows your power and fears it. You told him a child would come out of that night, and he would trust your word, even if he could not trust mine. But none of this alters the way he feels about it. He blames himself -- and you, and even the child -- for the Duke's death."
"I know."
"If he had waited, he says, Gorlois would still have died that night, and I would have been Queen,