THE WARRIOR QUEEN (The Guinevere Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  I was glad to be ahead of the rest of the party – my horse was strong and fast, and bearing less of a load than the others was happy to prance ahead. I could see the landscape opening before me, softer and less wild than my own country, but full of deep, lush-looking woodlands and wide, proud hilltops. Perhaps I could be happy here in my time alone, as long as I was far from the war-hollowed villages or Arthur’s brutish court. If I could ride through the land, smelling the earth and the warm, homely scent of the horse beneath me. He was a handsome horse, the one I was riding, a bay with a glossy mane and velvety nostrils. I had left my own dear horse at home. I tried to put these thoughts from my mind. If I were to have any chance of happiness I had to be resolved to my new life, and try to forget about the past. My childhood stubbornness still lingered with me, determined to go home, but another part of me – I supposed what I had inherited from my father – knew I needed to be practical. That I might never go home.

  The smell of spring was strong in the air, and the gentle breeze that lifted my hair lightly off my forehead was soothing. It was when the sky began to redden at the edges, when the first edge of the sun dipped below the horizon and threw its fire onto the underside of the clouds above it, that I first saw Camelot. Black and sharp against the horizon, high on a broad hill, I could count eight round turreted towers reaching up high into the sky, and around them the castle walls. Silk banners whose colours I could not see fluttered in silhouette in the breeze above it. It was everything I had refused to believe it would be. The boy king’s city was a thing of beauty with its delicate towers fluttering with flags and banners, but also a siege weapon – oh, I could see that, too, from where I was already. Word of Camelot had come to Carhais years ago when it had been the mighty fortress of the warlord Uther Pendragon, the man they said was Arthur’s father, and people had associated its name with a shiver of the spine. I had imagined iron, and steel. The smell of blood. It looked a different place from that, now. Welcoming, though I only saw it black against the red sky, and far-off, with its fluttering banners. It was a place of celebration. Of course it was. Arthur had the victory. It was as though all the joy in the world had poured out of Carhais, and into this place. Of course it had. Joy followed victory. The sight of that city, my future home, black against the setting sun, filled me with a tentative, fluttering hope, but it also filled me with dread.

  Chapter Two

  By the time our party rode through Camelot’s gates and arrived in its great courtyard, night was almost fallen, and at the edges of the sky I could see the little white stars peeping out, and the ghost of the moon in a sky that was still indigo with night. This is the last moon I will see as a free woman, I thought. I slid down off my horse and handed Sir Kay the reins. Our hands brushed as I passed them and our eyes met, but this time I saw that I had been mistaken in what I had seen in him before. The look he gave me was not one of lust – as I had thought before – but something more complex, softer. A look of kind interest, but also of strange affinity, as though he knew me already, and as he brushed past me to take the horse by the nose and lead it away I felt a power that I recognised, and I understood that Kay was one of the Otherworld, and he had seen it in me too. My father had told me that I would meet others like us at Arthur’s court, and this giant of a man – for Kay stood head and shoulders above me, and I was tall for a woman – left some strange vibration in the air that was at once unexpected and deeply familiar to me. I felt I would be pleased to have him around.

  The other knights had not introduced themselves. Lot’s son had jumped down from his horse, leaving Margery stranded on the back of the charger, clinging on to the saddle, unable to get down, terrified and unable to ride or jump down safely from a horse so large. I made to walk to her and help her down, and Kay put a gentle hand on my arm to hold me back. I felt it then for sure, the warmth of knowing, of the same Otherworld blood in our veins. I wished harder that it was he, not Arthur, that I would wed. One of my own. What would a man with no magic in his blood do with my father’s Round Table?

  “Gawain, help her down,” Kay scolded patiently. Now I had a name for Lot’s son, and it was the one whose reputation on the battlefield had already reached me. The second of them, I thought. I wondered if the other sons, too, were at Arthur’s court. He strode back over and plucked Margery down from the saddle, his hands around her waist, and placed her lightly on the floor. He didn’t look at her or say anything, and he disappeared down a stone hallway into the night.

  “Don’t mind Gawain,” Kay said, his gaze following where Gawain had gone, his tone distracted for a moment, before he turned to me. “He is not usually so uncourteous. His mother blames him for bringing his brothers to Arthur’s court. She thinks he should have stayed in Lothian. She’s worried that all his brothers will follow him here. They probably will.” Kay turned back with a smile, less serious, and I was glad. “He usually wouldn’t pass up a chance to put his hands on a fair lady, such as your Margery.”

  Kay gave Margery a gentle little nod of a bow, and she seemed to relax. He had an easy charm about him; another gift from the Otherworld, I supposed.

  The knight Kay had shared his horse with trotted over. He was a large man, muscle-bound like an ox. I could see it in the way he moved, with an easy, muscular grace. He had a tanned, handsome face and a ready smile, and his golden hair was scruffy from the ride. He looked like an overgrown boy, flushed with excitement, and eager to get off to some game or other. I wondered if he were Kay’s squire. He jumped down from the horse and handed the reins to Kay.

  “Sir Kay, I hope you don’t mind taking the horses.” He turned to me and inclined his head. “My lady, Princess Guinevere.”

  I inclined my head in return, and the knight strode away. Marie and Christine had been helped from their mounts and were looking anxiously to me, uneasy about what we should do. I did not know either. It was not my country. They were not even speaking my native language. My head hurt already from the effort of speaking it, of understanding, and I just wanted to go to sleep. I had no idea what I was meant to do, did not know the customs of the court. No one had offered to show us to any rooms or offered us any refreshment. The man who had demanded me as his bride had not even come to greet me. The wedding was due to take place the next day, but what would be done with us until then was unclear. And I was prepared to protect myself. Beneath my silk dress I had concealed a small but highly effective dagger, in case the need might call for it. I was not so young and naive that I had not thought that some trick at my expense might be played. I had to submit to a lawful marriage, but not to anything else.

  “Sir Ector, my father, will take you to your chambers, my ladies,” Kay said, leading the horses away, all together. And they were calm for him, of course, and quieted their whinnying when he put his hand gently on their flank. Otherworld. How could I have not seen it at once?

  A knight, older than the others, the one who had shared his horse with Christine, came over. He had a kind face, and I could see instantly the family resemblance to Kay. This must be his father. He led us up to a set of rooms perfumed with spices and oils I had never smelled before, and decked in silks. Our Breton court in Carhais was more of a gathering of warriors, and I had silks only because they were gifts from courtiers coming to pledge their faith to my father. We did not value such things. Our rooms smelled of leather and straw. Our riches were in the arts of medicine, of poetry. We valued our ancient blood; we did not gather such things. I had never seen riches like this. How could this warrior king have also such a rich and decadent court already? I suppose it was the plenty of victory. The beds were heaped with rich coverlets and more candles than I could count at a glance filled the room with a soft, enticing light. The value of the luxuries in my room could have bought my father’s court. And now Arthur had bought me. Perhaps he had sent my father silks from the east, and gold and candles. But my father would have no use for them; these were not our ways.

  Sir Ector bowed goodnight as he made to leav
e.

  “My lord King Arthur sends his greetings to the beautiful Princess Guinevere and wishes you to have as a gift for your wedding tomorrow the dress and the jewels laid out upon the bed for you. He asks that you forgive his absence.”

  And he shut the door.

  The dress on the bed – he obviously had thought me too much of a savage to have fine clothes of my own – was nonetheless beautiful. Marie gasped as she lifted its soft fabric in her tiny bird-like hands and gently laid it against her cheek. It was a deep emerald green. It would be a beautiful colour for me. I could see as I looked at it that Margery was only being kind when she told me the dress that she had chosen for my being brought here – the finest of my dresses – was as fine as the dresses women wore in Logrys. No. It was old, and plain, the silk thin but coarse. I brushed my fingers lightly against the fabric of the dress that had been left for me. It was like a whisper, like a kiss. I sighed. Arthur sends gifts, but will not see me himself. I am truly something he has bought, a token of a distant kingdom. Otherwise he would care if his wife-to-be were beautiful or clever. He could have bought a cripple or a simpleton; he didn’t seem to care. I suppose it was not really me that he wanted; it was Brittany, and the table, and the last knights of Carhais who would gather for him now in Camelot, now that he had me.

  The jewels sparkled with gold in the candlelight, a gold net set with emeralds for my hair, and thick gold bangles, and a necklace set with an emerald the size of Marie’s little fist and hundreds of tiny diamonds. I supposed that, compared to these, what I had brought with me could hardly have been called jewels. I had gold – my gold circlet, the circlet of my ancient people, and a bangle of beaten gold that had been my mother’s, made to be worn high on the arm, no good for cold Britain, but nothing set with jewels like this. I would be covered in gems when I went to my marriage tomorrow. No one would see me. They would see a thousand dazzling gems and I would be a display of the riches and grandeur of the great King Arthur’s court. Or perhaps he was worried I would be plain. I knew I was not plain, at least. I had seen many of the women of Logrys and found them plainer, smaller, quieter than our own Breton women, many of whom like me were touched with fire, red in the hair and the soul, passionate and quick with life. What would Arthur make of me? I knew what I made of him already.

  Chapter Three

  I did not sleep during the night. Instead I listened to my heart fluttering in my chest, trapped under my skin, under the useless hushing of my ribs. I didn’t know what I was afraid of, or even if I was afraid. I wasn’t afraid of what I knew would come after the wedding, like other girls I had known were, though I knew all about it. I had heard other women talking about it, and even seen it once as a child when I walked past a half-closed door and peeped in to see one of my brothers on top of a girl from the village. It had not looked so bad as it sounded when I’d heard it described. Besides, I was not going to let Arthur touch me. He was not going to think he was just going to demand me here and throw me down beneath him like a whore. No, I was not worried about that, because it was not going to happen. Perhaps if it had been a man like Kay, as I had wished when they had come to collect me, then I could have borne it, to have his hands on me, but not a man who hid from me, and who in turn tried to hide me beneath silks, and jewels.

  I was anxious, though, that I had not seen yet the man I was to marry. Only his knights. Of them all, only Gawain was what I had expected; rough and quiet, with the ungentle hands of a killer. Sir Kay had been kind, and Ector. But what would Arthur be like? He was not a man who had been born and raised to his throne, so he would not be a spoiled fop, but he was a man who had killed for it, who had slaughtered his rivals for it, including my father’s own men, and done so relentlessly to get it, so he would not be a gentle man, a civilized man. Not that there had been so many of those at my father’s court, but we were wild people in a different way. Woodland hunters, proud fighters, but not warmongers, not battle-generals. We didn’t ride around on armoured horses, terrorising the peasants as Arthur’s men seemed to do. My father had sent our people because my mother’s people had owed King Lot allegiance, not because he was interested in wars. And now the war was over, and he found himself on the losing side. The knights of Carhais who would now come to Arthur were the last of my father’s forces, and though Carhais would be safe, it would also be empty. The glory of Carhais was all gone from it, seeping out into the big, bloody sponge that was Arthur’s Logrys, and the bloody beating heart at the centre, Camelot.

  I must have slept, because Margery gently woke me with a hand on my shoulder. It was full light already, so late, but my head throbbed with an insistent weariness, that of a night of broken sleep. I think I had dreamed of home, and the dappled light of the forest, watching the leaves dance in the breeze, chasing a doe through the woodlands.

  Marie and Christine came in with a bath and began to fill it with steaming water, and then lavender and rose oils. So Arthur even knew how he wanted me to smell. I slid out of bed, and out of my nightdress and into the water. It was too hot, and my pale skin blushed deep red at the heat of it, but I didn’t care. It felt as though it was burning the journey away, my past life away, preparing me to be the queen I was now going to have to be. Margery brushed out my hair with soft strokes as I lay soaking, and when I got out, wet and pink like a newborn, plaited it into the style the women wore in Logrys – not loose how I had always had it, but plaited into two thick ropes that she wound together into a bun at the base of my neck and pinned in place with the jewelled pins and net of gold that had been left by the husband I would acquire today. She placed the delicate golden circlet I had brought from home, made to look like an ivy-strand twining around, on my thick, red curls. The dress Arthur had chosen fitted well, its sleeves long and close down to the wrist where they ended with a point that reached almost to the knuckle of my middle finger, its bodice tight and embroidered all over with little gold leaves of ivy. He must have known the traditions of my father’s people. I was pleased with that, and with the swish and flow of the silk skirt around my legs. It was a well-made dress, truly. But, it was the dress of a princess, who stood still and was looked at. If I had wanted to run in it, I could not have done. When I was dressed in the green silk dress, and the emerald jewellery, they brought me before the mirror. I had been told, always, that I was beautiful, but all the young marriageable daughters of lords were told this every day, and I was not interested in being beautiful, so I had shrugged at it, and turned away, bored. I had been expecting the fairness of my youth, and the brightness of my hair, but dressed as I was I looked like the queen I was about to become. It was a fierce beauty I saw looking back at me, grand and aloof. I looked proud and cold, and I was pleased with it. I did not want this boy king to think that he had a defeated princess in his grasp. I was still strong, and proud even if my father’s people were defeated and gone.

  Sir Ector came to fetch me to Arthur, when it was time that we were wed.

  “My Lady Guinevere.” He took my hand and kissed it lightly. His manner was fatherly, and I was glad to see him. “You have the beauty of a true queen.”

  “Thank you, Sir Ector.” I dipped in a slight curtsey.

  “And your ladies, they are lovely little stars beside your radiant sun.”

  The three ladies bobbed in thanks. It seemed to be all talk at Camelot. Perhaps I would get used to all of these little politenesses, or perhaps they would stop once people had got used to me. I could not say I liked them; they seemed artificial to me. My ladies were dressed in matching gowns of pale blue that I had had brought over with us, all embroidered in silver with little flowers. It best suited Christine, whose dark hair, ice-blue eyes and pale skin made her seem every bit the fairy-woman in her dress. There would be many eyes on her, too, this day, although she was the oldest of us.

  Sir Ector offered me his steady arm and I took it, and he guided me down the stairs of the tower, and out across the open courtyard of Camelot’s keep, to its small chapel. I ought t
o have had my own father there, but I knew why he did not come. He was too old to leave his home. Too old to suffer the final grief of watching me be handed away. Outside the chapel stood a man dressed in a plain black habit whom I would have mistaken for a monk, were his shaven head and face not patterned with the ugly bruise-blue of woad in beautiful swirls and whorls like the depths of the sea. He measured me with black, beady eyes. I suppressed a shiver down my spine and turned my gaze away.

  Inside, the chapel was decked with red roses, and white roses, and white wildflowers all through. But these paled beside the gilded decorations within, pictures of the god of the Christians emblazoned in gold all around; or rather, not their god, but the man who reminded me of our Hanged God, but who I knew was not, but who hung there all the same, made in gold and on a gold cross. I think, like the Hanged God, he too had come back from the dead. So I was to be wed in the sight of Arthur’s gods, not my own. I don’t know why I should have expected anything else. Arthur’s strange Hanged God would be my god now, too.

  Everything in that chapel was red and gold and white, shining and overwhelming, so bright and ornate that it took me a while to notice that the chapel was filled with the lords and ladies of Logrys, men and women in ceremonial dress for my wedding, and some knights too, in their armour. I noticed Gawain in his, sat beside a woman with the same russet hair, who had a beautiful, gentle face, and clever, darting blue eyes that caught me with a swift look of appraisal as our gazes met. And in all this, I could scarcely see the golden-haired boy king waiting for me at the altar. All I knew of him was his name, that he had conquered all of Britain and that he was a few years my junior. But I was old for a bride at nineteen; his war had made me so. As I walked down the aisle with my ladies I realised with a sting of betrayal that he had been among the knights that had come to meet me at Dover. He had wanted to look at me, to check I wasn’t ugly or old; he wanted to decide if he liked the look of me before he agreed we should wed. That was the action of a child, a selfish child who wanted only what was good for himself. I felt my cheeks burn with anger. If I had not the thought of my father and my country in the back of my mind, I would have slapped him in the face, right there.