Guinevere's Gamble, Page 5

  Her anxiety transmitted itself to Zephyr, who began to fidget and paw the ground. Guinevere patted the filly’s neck to calm her. There was no point in envisioning disasters. She must concentrate on finding her way to the White Foot, or on getting off the mountain and back to the stronghold. It was foolish, frustrating, and an utter waste of time to be lost in a wood.

  Zephyr’s ears shot forward as a long cry pierced the air. A rhythmic, breaking wail came through the trees ahead. Guinevere touched the horse with her heels and chose a path.

  Pine needles covered the forest floor and silenced their approach, so that they came unawares upon the wounded creature whose wail of despair had drawn them. A girl lay prostrate on the mossy ground in the center of an open space beside a mountain stream. A tangle of black hair hid her face. Nearby, an old standing stone, gray-green with lichen, cast its blurred shadow across her shaking body.

  Guinevere slid off the filly and went toward her. She moved almost silently, but the girl heard her and whipped around, fast as a snake, to crouch beside the standing stone. A small, bright-pointed knife slipped into her hand. Her breath came in rasping gulps, tears slid down her muddy face, and her dark eyes glinted with malice. She crouched there, a half-feral creature, torn between fear and aggression, at the edge of desperation.

  Guinevere stopped and opened her hands, palms outward, to show she carried no weapon. The effect of this on the other girl surprised her. The dark eyes widened into an incredulous stare. The knife slid to the ground. The girl straightened. Even at her full height, the top of her head came only to Guinevere’s chin. Her small face, stretched for a moment in awe, now twisted in fury. She pointed a finger at Guinevere and cried out, her voice rising and falling in a rough but deliberate cadence. The words were unintelligible, but Guinevere did not doubt their meaning. She was being roundly cursed in the ancient tongue of the Old Ones.

  She shivered. She had been raised in the pagan kingdom of Northgallis for the first eight years of her life, and the subsequent five years of Christian training in Gwynedd had not assuaged the ancient dread of curses. She struggled to ignore the sound and raised a hand in greeting.

  “I mean you no harm,” she said in Mountain Welsh. “I come in peace.”

  At last she had found one of the Old Ones. The girl was dressed in ill-cut animal skins, primitive ornaments, and soft leather slippers, very like Llyr’s, that left no tracks on the forest floor. Llyr knew Mountain Welsh, a polyglot language—a mixture of Old Welsh and the tongue of Earth’s Beloved. If this girl was an Old One, she might speak it, too.

  The girl stopped her chanting and stared at Guinevere with unconcealed malevolence.

  Guinevere tried again. “My name is—”

  “I—know—your—name.” The girl spat out the words. “She—With—Hair—of—Light.”

  Guinevere sighed. It was what the Old Ones called her, for reasons of their own, but it was not her name. “Gwenhwyfar,” she said carefully, using Llyr’s pronunciation. “My name is Gwenhwyfar. I come in peace.”

  The girl glared at her, defiant and unconvinced. “Where you go,” she said in perfectly fluent Mountain Welsh, “there is no peace.”

  Guinevere stiffened. She had given the stranger the gift of her name and received only hostility in return, an insult by anyone’s standards. “If that is true, it is not of my willing. I mean you no harm. I’m lost and in need of your help.”

  She knew from Llyr that the Old Ones were a hospitable people who, despite their aloofness from her own race of men, would not deny a direct plea for help. But this fierce girl might be the exception. She did not look at all sympathetic. Guinevere waited, keeping her expression neutral and her hands open at her sides.

  “You are on Snow Mountain without permission.”

  “I beg forgiveness. I came to find a friend.”

  There was a long pause. “What friend?”

  Guinevere found herself almost unwilling to tell her. “Llyr, son of Bran, leader of the White Foot of Snow Mountain.”

  The small face paled under its overlay of mud and tears. The girl said in a frozen voice, “You will not find him.”

  Guinevere shrugged. “I know. I lost my way, and now it’s too late.”

  “The Goddess barred your path.”

  “Very likely.” Guinevere drew a deep breath. “Could you take Llyr a message from me?”

  The girl seemed to struggle against speech. Her face flushed pink. After a long and strained silence, she thrust her knife into the knotted cord around her waist and strode away.

  “Wait! Oh, please wait!” Guinevere cried, but the girl ignored her. At the edge of the stream, she knelt and began to splash water over her face and hands.

  Guinevere leaned against Zephyr for support. She trembled for fear the girl might vanish into the woods. This strange person, who appeared to despise her, was her only link to the White Foot. She must do nothing to anger her or frighten her into running away. Not that the girl would run away from fear—she was as fierce as a wildcat and every bit as wary.

  Her ablutions finished, the girl rose and returned to the standing stone. She had a pretty, heart-shaped face and large, dark eyes brimming with suspicion. She touched the stone and raised her chin in an attitude of defiance. “What is the message?”

  Guinevere exhaled in relief. She was going to help. Yet it was clear she did not want to. Despite the ingrained hospitality of her people, malice flowed from her like a blast of cold wind. Her posture was stiff, her speech clipped, and her furious eyes almost impossible to meet.

  “Please tell Llyr that I am sorry I tried to follow him up the mountain. It was wrong of me to think I might be welcome. Tell him that King Pellinore’s party will be leaving soon. It is time to come down. And if he … doesn’t want to see me, I will wait for him at Deva.”

  There was no response from the girl. Guinevere stepped away from the filly and said, in a neutral voice, “Do you know Llyr? Are you a member of the White Foot clan yourself?”

  It was as good as asking outright for her name. Again, the girl refused to answer. She looked as if she had reached the limit of what she could endure. But why should she need to endure anything? What had Guinevere done to make her so angry?

  Between one heartbeat and the next, she knew. It was She With Hair of Light who had made the girl angry, not Guinevere of Northgallis. After that first fleeting moment of incredulity, She With Hair of Light had been taken for an enemy. Why should that be, when all the other Old Ones Guinevere had ever met respected, even revered, this personage they had invented? Guinevere could think of only one reason: She With Hair of Light had been indirectly responsible for Llyr’s being cast out from the Long Eyes clan and, as a consequence, from all of Earth’s Beloved. Because She With Hair of Light needed guarding—a need evident only to Earth’s Beloved—a wisewoman among the Long Eyes had solved both problems at one stroke by appointing Llyr as her guardian. It had never before occurred to Guinevere that someone who loved Llyr might resent that. Such a person might hold She With Hair of Light responsible for cutting Llyr off from his family and friends, for stealing him away from his intended path of life. If this hot-tempered girl had been part of that intended path, her animosity was easy to understand.

  Guinevere came farther into the clearing and stopped beside the standing stone. “Please don’t believe what they say about me. I am not really She With Hair of Light. Not inside, anyway. I am an ordinary person. There is no need to be afraid.”

  The girl bristled instantly. “I am not afraid of you.”

  “Good. Then I will try not to be afraid of you.”

  The dark eyes narrowed. “You are jesting.”

  Guinevere swallowed. “I am not.”

  “What could you fear?”

  The words came out in a whisper: “The future.”

  “You? But you know your future! It was prophesied for you.”

  Guinevere gazed at her helplessly. She could not deny it. On the night of her birth, a hill wi
tch had told her father, King Leodegrance, that his laboring wife would bear a daughter destined to become the highest lady in the land. She would wed a great king and come to glory with him. Her name would be remembered beyond a thousand years. “I would give anything to avoid it,” she said.

  The girl’s mouth fell open, and she shut it with a snap. “Then you are a coward and a fool.”

  “Why? Is it a fate you envy? I would change places with you in a heartbeat, if I could.”

  The girl made a sign with her fingers as she thrust her hand behind her back. Guinevere’s heart sank. She knew that sign. In Northgallis, villagers had used it to ward off monsters, to defend against the unnatural, the grotesque.

  The girl said in a shaking voice, “That cannot be true.”

  “Why not? Do you think I like having everyone expect wonders of me? How can I do what is impossible?”

  “You are She—”

  “Stop saying that! I am not that person. I have no magic arts. I live in Gwynedd on the sufferance of my aunt, Queen Alyse. I have no claim to land or power, nor any influence over those who have. I have no wealth, no prospects, no ambition—I have nothing to recommend me to this great king of yours. I have not the slightest chance of even attracting the notice of such a man. And yet—and yet”—her voice quavered—“that is what everyone who has ever heard that wretched prophecy expects of me.”

  “You—you don’t believe the prophecy?” the girl whispered, paling.

  Guinevere shuddered. “No. How could I? No single mortal could fulfill all those expectations. I’ve always believed the hill witch who made that prophecy came down to my father’s castle to cadge a place by the fire. She told him exactly what he wished to hear.”

  The girl looked scandalized. “But the prophecy is true! It must be true! We have been taught—we have been taught since we were children that it is the marriage of She With Hair of Light to the great king of her destiny that will save Earth’s Beloved from annihilation by the Others.”

  She chanted the words as if she had known them by heart for years. Guinevere stared, frozen in horror at the enormity of such an expectation.

  “Keeping you safe,” the girl finished breathlessly, “is our only chance for survival.”

  Guinevere fought back panic. Here it was again, the nightmare terror she lived with: the hope of rescue, salvation, invincibility, and now survival for an entire race of people had been unfairly placed by some malignant power upon her own narrow shoulders. She seemed to be the only one who knew she was incapable of carrying such a burden.

  She realized she was shaking and that she could not control it. “How can any one person do that? I can’t. You must see that I can’t.”

  “But you must!”

  “How?” Guinevere cried, flinging out her arms in desperation. “How?”

  The girl backed a pace, frightened now at the new and terrible possibility that had arisen. “I—I don’t know.”

  “Well, I don’t know, either.”

  There was a long silence as each girl looked at the other. Even the birds were still. Finally, the Old One spoke.

  “It is necessary to try.”

  With a shaking hand, Guinevere wiped her eyes. “I know. I know. Even though I don’t believe the prophecy, I am bound by it. I am bound by everyone else’s expectation. That is my fate. Do you envy it now?”

  “… No.”

  Guinevere turned to take up Zephyr’s reins, but stopped at the touch on her arm.

  “Stay,” the girl said slowly. “Perhaps I have misjudged you.” She gazed into Guinevere’s face. “You are no coward. You accept sacrifice.”

  Guinevere tried to smile. “I understand why you dislike me. It’s Llyr, isn’t it? In your place, I would feel the same.”

  The girl did not smile back. “You couldn’t. You don’t love him.”

  Guinevere drew breath sharply. She reined in her first impulse to deny the accusation. It was true. She loved Llyr as she loved Elaine, as a friend and companion, but she remained a stranger to the kind of painful passion that burned behind the girl’s dark eyes.

  “Not as you do, perhaps,” she admitted. “We are friends.”

  “Thank you,” the girl said, and at last her expression softened, almost to a smile. She raised her hand in greeting. “This ill-mannered person is Alia, daughter of Enna of the White Foot. I beg forgiveness for my anger…. For so long I have wanted to hate you—have been determined to hate you. And you do not allow it.”

  Guinevere flushed. “I’m sure I can’t prevent you. But I am glad to meet you, Alia. Thank you for sharing your name.”

  “I beg forgiveness for my rudeness. I should have given it to you before. But I did not want to trust you.” Alia smiled bitterly. “It is still difficult.”

  “I mean you no harm.”

  Alia shrugged. “Even so, harm is done.”

  Guinevere frowned, not sure she understood. She made a guess. “Llyr will not be my guardian forever. One day he will return to the White Foot.”

  Alia laughed, a bitter sound. “It’s too late for that.”

  “It can’t be. The White Foot are his people. Snow Mountain is the only home he has.”

  “His place among us belongs to his brother now.”

  This news startled Guinevere, and she was loath to believe it, but it did explain Llyr’s reluctance to visit his family and his refusal—by evasion—to take her with him. He had not been sure of his reception.

  “Do you mean he would not be welcomed back?”

  “To visit, yes, but not to stay. Our home is not his home any longer. And even if he could stay, he wouldn’t want to.”

  Guinevere gaped at her. “Whyever not?”

  Alia regarded her critically. “You must know. And if you do not, it is time you opened your eyes.”

  Guinevere paused. Alia sensed a danger to Llyr that she did not, and try as she might, she could not imagine what it was. “Does he have a rival among the White Foot? Someone who would become an enemy if he stayed?”

  There was a long pause. “How old are you, Gwenhwyfar?”

  “Thirteen. Why?”

  “Thirteen.” Alia sighed. “Forgive me, I thought you were older. My ignorance of the Others leads me into many mistakes.”

  “Why does my age matter?”

  “I thought you were being devious or playing with me. I see now that Llyr has behaved himself and that you have not been trying to deceive me.”

  Guinevere looked at her in utter astonishment, and Alia, with a wide smile free of condescension, reached out and took her hand.

  “You are the reason Llyr will never return to the White Foot,” she said simply. “It is best to acknowledge it. For both of us. You have his heart.”

  Color rose from Guinevere’s throat to engulf her face. Alia squeezed her fingers. “Part of you knew already, no?”

  Guinevere shook her head. “No.”

  “I can understand now what happened to him. I could not before. So I am glad that I met you.”

  “I don’t see … What happened to him?”

  Alia gazed at her until Guinevere lowered her eyes. “He met you and his world changed. The Long Eyes saw it and cast him out. The One Who Hears saw it and put it to use. All this time I have thought him ill-treated by the Long Eyes, but now I see that no one, not even Llyr, had any choice. It was the prophecy at work.”

  At that, Guinevere’s chin lifted. “I don’t believe in the prophecy.”

  Alia shrugged. “Nevertheless.”

  “We are friends, Alia,” Guinevere repeated, but her voice sounded hollow even to her own ears, like a reed when the wind blows through it.

  “Yes,” Alia agreed. “And you are bound by the prophecy to someone else. Even so, Llyr will not come back.” She squeezed Guinevere’s hand again and let it go. “So someday I will have to become a wanderer myself.”

  Tears filled Guinevere’s eyes. “And leave your people? That is a sacrifice indeed.”

  Alia’s lips
trembled. “The gods love sacrifice, my mother says. And besides, one day you, too, will have to leave home for a foreign land.” She stepped back and pointed down the path by which Guinevere had come. “Go left at the crossroads until you reach the pine tree by the stream. Take the downhill path to the mines. There’s a road from there to the meadows behind the town.” She paused. “Llyr is with his family now, but I will take him your message.”

  “Thank you, Alia.”

  Alia raised her hand in the gesture of farewell. “Light with thee walk, my sister.”

  Guinevere returned the gesture and gave the response she had learned from Llyr. “My sister, dark from thee flee.”

  Alia turned, stepped back into the shadow of the standing stone, and faded silently into the forest.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Matter of Perspective

  Llyr hurried downhill after Bran, his heart racing and his thoughts spinning wildly. She With Hair of Light on the mountain! She had succeeded in escaping the stronghold and following his traces. The knowledge pleased him as much as it annoyed him. She had remembered the skills he had taught her and, like any teacher, he was proud of her success. On the other hand, she should have known from the distance he had kept between them on the journey that he was not yet ready for his people to meet her.

  His father must have sensed this reluctance, for he had made the excited kinsmen stay behind when the lookout brought the news. Everyone had wanted to see her, but Bran had refused to let them follow. Thankful as he was for his father’s discretion, Llyr prayed silently that Guinevere might be gone by the time they reached the shrine.

  He wondered what had drawn her to that particular place. It was far from the path she should have taken. He had only been to the crossroads once himself, for his manhood rites. The clearing, the stream, and the shrine were sacred to the Good Goddess, Mother of men, whose gifts were fertility, fecundity, birth, and life. The clan’s women tended the shrine until they were past the age of bearing. Virgins who had reached the age of bearing, Llyr knew from Alia, went there often to pray for the attentions of the young men they admired.