ISABEL WAS OLD for a bride, nearly twenty, and orphaned with little dowry beyond her bloodline. She was considered a great beauty in her own country—small and boyish in build, with an intelligent, squarish face and a high, graceful forehead—and supremely desirable for her education, skills, and absolute lack of feminine triviality. But she had always known she’d be married for politics. It never bothered her; until she’d heard Chrétien de Troyes’s romances of Lancelot and the Round Table, at the age of thirteen, it had never even occurred to her that there could be other reasons to bind herself to a man. She remembered Adèle chasing away the minstrel reciting them, then chastising Isabel for corrupting her own wits and sense. So she had never dwelt on the possibility of romantic love. But she’d assumed a match would at least be within her own race, and she had been taken aback when her uncle Roger had revealed her suitor’s identity: not only a Welsh prince, but the only prince still referred to by the English chroniclers as “Rex”—King. A small kingdom, and a poor one, but she would be a queen. And the king, when she’d met him, was so disarming and handsome and his accent so melodious that it had made her knees weak, although she was hardly the sort to get weak knees. When the date was set and the terms agreed upon, she had spent a fortnight smiling to herself.
But that smile waned on the journey to a land that was far too alien, considering it began almost at her childhood doorstep.
They had left the homey fields of England for windy Welsh hillsides, hillsides carpeted by dead bracken that looked like russet snow, and nothing else for miles at a stretch but grass and prickly gorse—not a tree, not a house, not even a rocky outcrop to vary the landscape. Nothing but herds of white sheep and black cattle being driven upland for what passed as summer. The songbirds had been cacophonous, magpies and curlews, red kites and buzzards perched on the skeletons of sheep that had not survived the winter. In England there had been farmers, already sowing, bowing respectfully as they passed; here they’d found undernourished peasants digging up peat under the damp grey sky and pointedly ignoring them. Isabel tried not to be disheartened by this; she hoped she could eventually make these people understand that not all Normans were butchers. Below them, the valleys and lower hillsides were impassable bogs shadowed by dense groves of scrub oak (considered by the natives sacred and haunted), so the ancient Roman roads had kept them high on the slopes, windblown, chilly and exposed. She had known it would be highland, and she’d thought that meant mountains, which would have at least been interesting. The first few hills had been promising, with lovely sweeping views of river valleys, but by the time they were well into the kingdom, the entire country was high, with decidedly undramatic undulations from valley to hilltop—there were no peaks to speak of anywhere. It looked, her brother Thomas had muttered, like the English moors flung over a gigantic bowl of lumpy porridge. Wigmore Castle was only a day’s ride off but in that day she had been transported farther away than her pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela had taken her.
GWIRION had been incensed when he’d learned the wedding was set for May Day, and the Spring Rites canceled because of it. (“Usurped,” he’d protested, “by a Mortimer, by a bitch of an English virgin.”) When the king warned him not to use this public gathering as a chance to make sport of anybody, Gwirion had rebutted that he would never condescend to dignify the occasion by immortalizing it with a prank of any sort. And so the entire castle population knew there would be trouble.
It was May Day at last. Boughs of birch twigs hung over windows and everyone wore brilliant colors—even the usually bedraggled dwarf Corr wore green hose under his linen tunic. The one exception was Gwirion, who had donned sackcloth to mourn the end of the king’s finest years as a bachelor. He insisted the day was too splendid to waste on a wedding, particularly one involving Mortimers, and would have avoided it altogether if Corr had not begged him otherwise.
“You know how ladies react when they see me for the first time,” he lamented, his colorless lashes blinking almost spastically in the sunlight. “If you’re beside me I can pretend to myself it’s partly your hideous mug.”
Gwirion grinned at this and then a thoughtful gleam warmed his eyes. It was a look Corr was all too familiar with.
“Whatever you are thinking of thinking,” he said, “don’t think it.”
“It seems to me,” Gwirion mused, ignoring the request, “that we’ve never fully exploited that particular aspect of your appearance.”
“I doubt she’ll give us much satisfaction that way. I’ve heard she has a sensible head on her shoulders.”
Gwirion considered this. “But what has she got on the rest of her?” he asked. Rhetorically.
Corr sighed in capitulation. “And how severe a whipping will this be bringing us?”
Gwirion lowered his voice even though they were yards above the crowd. “This wedding is an invasion. She’ll try to coerce us to join her Norman civilization.” A loaded pause, and then he grinned. “If we’re expected to become like her, why don’t we just become her?”
The two of them stood atop the king’s tower, watching people mill about in anticipatory disarray around the ashes of the Beltane bonfires in the courtyard below. They descended the wooden stairs that hugged the stone curtain wall, bickering over the details of their plot, and began to scout for the bride’s brother. He was a younger brother, named Thomas, and he was hardly in whiskers. Gwirion discovered him by the stables. He was standing near a cluster of dangerous-looking youths not much his senior—the infamously rowdy teulu, the king’s resident warband. Their massive leader, Efan the penteulu, was showing off his horse’s battle scars. Thomas, a doughy-faced boy with light brown hair, was looking very short and very young, and embarrassed about it. The teulu glanced toward Gwirion, realized who his target was, and returned to their boasting.
“Thomas Mortimer, isn’t it? Your presence is required above,” Gwirion whispered in his ear. The boy didn’t recognize the oddly dressed man, but he was so grateful to be taken seriously by somebody that he went along, unquestioning. He failed to notice the looks of the young men he walked away from.
Gwirion led him past the pipers trying quietly to tune, past the large stone well, and up the wooden stairway to the top of the curtain wall. The garderobe up here, intended for the king’s use, was not as foul as the one below—Gwirion was willing to incur only so much wrath for his prank. Thomas was too bewildered to understand what was happening; even after Gwirion had chained his makeshift gate fast across the open doorway, and the boy was penned into the toilet, he continued to ask innocently where his sister was.
“I’ll just get her for you,” Gwirion said cheerfully, and departed with no intention of returning for hours.
At least three hundred people were crowded around the large courtyard. Most were landowners of Maelienydd, handsome, sturdy Welshmen, many claiming distant kinship to the king. There were a few visiting dignitaries from England, but Roger Mortimer, Lord of Wigmore, baron of the March, was not among them. To pass the time until Corr was in place, Gwirion thought to seek the presence of Hywel, the old court bard who would bless the ceremony for real after the queen’s priest performed his doddering church ritual. But he was arrested by better entertainment: His Majesty the bridegroom was forcing himself to chat with a cousin they both detested. Anarawd, the man next in line to the throne, obviously did not like this match. Besides the fact that he would soon be supplanted as heir, his father, like the king’s, had been ambushed and killed by Roger Mortimer. He was a violent man himself—he’d blinded his own brothers and taken their inheritance—and he’d raged against this latest treaty with the Marcher baron, but today he was trying very hard to appear respectful and resigned because he knew the teulu would have been all too pleased to disembowel him. King Maelgwyn smiled politely as they spoke, visualizing just such sport.
He had no personal interest in his wedding or his bride. This union was only to seal an uneasy truce. Over the course of two decades he’d thrice thwarted Mortimer’s attempts to conquer Maelienydd, but earlier this year, when the king’s powerful comrade-in-arms Lord Rhys had died, Mortimer had redoubled the effort in a raid that had severely taxed both sides. With this wedding that would all be—theoretically—behind them now. There were several benefits to such a match: Although he could have made any son his heir, even a bastard, a child of this marriage would be half English—
Norman English, the ruling class—and would be safe no matter which side ultimately prevailed.
The king was dressed magnificently in green and gold and he truly looked heroic, if not especially Welsh. Fair-haired and tall with fierce blue eyes revealing a sliver of Viking ancestry, he was as ever poised and effortlessly charismatic, and Gwirion conceded silently that the king deserved in earnest the title he had once given him in affectionate mockery: Maelgwyn Urddol, Maelgwyn the Noble. In their adolescence, this private joke—inspired by a summer of sexual exploits of questionable virtue—had spread throughout the castle and out to the surrounding countryside, the irony replaced immediately by earnest images of an able and handsome young ruler, and for years now he’d been referred to admiringly among his people, and by Gwirion, mostly by this sobriquet.
Noble excused himself from Anarawd, only to be immediately overtaken by Lord Ralf, one of the queen’s maternal uncles, who was no improvement. “Your Majesty!” he trumpeted, a sharp-featured bearded man with hawkish eyes. He loudly began an inventory of his niece’s many qualities as if Noble and the populace at large still had to be convinced of the match. “I’m sure you know that she was her brother’s regent until this year—very unusual situation,” he announced, with a smugness that suggested it reflected well on him somehow. “Excellent administrator. Did you know she’s multilingual?”
“French, Latin, Welsh, and a little of the Saxon tongue,” Noble recited sardonically. He’d been told this near a dozen times.
“Yes! And an able horsewoman.”
“I intend to speak to her only in Welsh and I do not expect her to ride into battle with me,” Noble said, smiling dryly. “But I do appreciate the match’s value. And I assure you all my subjects do as well.” With one exception, he thought, watching Gwirion slip through the crowded courtyard.
Gwirion had finally spotted Corr, his white hair gleaming as he whispered to the quartet of young women huddled near the dovecote. These creatures had been brought in from around the kingdom to become the new queen’s officers and attendants, and Gwirion had already established that they were the silliest women he had ever met. They were bending over Corr now. Two of them looked confused, but the little redhead managed a smile and the tallest one even giggled. A grim, sharp-eyed old woman dressed incongruously in silk, who must have been Adèle, the queen’s English attendant, had been inside the chapel with the as-yet-unseen bride, and stuck her head out to examine the crowd at a most inopportune moment: She caught Corr whispering to the girls and marched toward him with a frown. Gwirion was afraid Corr would falter and tell her everything. He had to prevent them from speaking. He had to create a distraction.
“Friends!” he yelled with a piercing bray into the droning hubbub. He scrambled up onto a stack of upright mead barrels for nuptial celebrations, which made him high enough to command instant attention. The sight of the slight, wild-haired man who looked like Pan in sackcloth startled everyone and the yard fell quiet. He saw the king, just outside the chapel door, turn toward him and purse his lips. He had been listening to one of the bearded foreigners, but now he absently motioned the man to shush. “Friends!” Gwirion repeated. “Before we begin today’s solemnities, we must introduce the new faces you see here today. I trust you shall receive them graciously.” Adèle ignored him, continuing toward Corr. Gauging the distance to the ground, Gwirion leapt high off the cask, somersaulting in the air as people scrambled to get out of his way. He landed hard on his feet on the stone paving, as the crowd scattered from him, then he shook his head once to clear it and ran toward where Adèle was just about to accost Corr. Before the old woman could entirely register Gwirion’s presence, he had crawled between her legs and stood again, hoisting her brittle frame up on his shoulders and gathering her skirt behind his head. She let out a short, undignified squawk, which delighted the crowd.
“Behold Adèle,” he intoned, grabbing her ankles to keep her secured. “Lifelong companion to our new queen. This is the closest she’s ever come to having a man between her thighs, and we owe her a debt of gratitude for raising her ladyship to be the chaste and lovely creature that she is. Salute her!”
Most of the assembly burst into good-natured applause and cheers. Adèle looked livid. But she restrained herself to a dull scowl and once he had set her on her feet, she glared at him then slunk away, forgetting about the dwarf, just as Gwirion had intended. Corr nodded to him and slipped quietly behind the king, toward the chapel door.
Noble could barely maintain his composure when Gwirion hoisted the old woman. He wanted to let him go on, to test his shamelessness, but the bride’s uncle was standing gaping right beside him and he couldn’t risk it. “Gwirion!” he snapped. “Stop that nonsense at once or I’ll have your head.”
“But I have two heads, sire. Shall I give one to you and one to your fair bride? The inferior one would probably be of more interest to her, don’t you think?” He pointed broadly with both hands at his groin, an exquisitely grotesque grin on his face. “I’m quite sure it’s superior to anything you can offer her!”
The Norman uncles exchanged looks of shocked disgust across the yard, and the crowd in general hesitated, especially those who saw the ladies in the retinue blush purple. A disappointing response, Gwirion thought—the locals would have laughed. The king gestured sharply to Efan the penteulu to remove Gwirion from the yard. Tiring of the prank, he ignored the fact that Corr was in place and relying on him; he went with uncharacteristic cooperation, and waited patiently in the kitchen for people to get drunk enough to appreciate him.
THE queen apparent, hidden behind the chapel door until the moment the ceremony began just outside it, missed the entire episode. She’d been in here since dawn, when she had celebrated mass for the first time with her future husband, and despite the high-arched windows the room was starting to feel very claustrophobic. She was trying gamely to keep in good humor, but she hated the gown Adèle had insisted on lacing her into, an excessively tight kirtle with an equally suffocating surcoat over it, and under the elaborate gold circlet on her head, cascades of silk that distracted her like a swarm of flies. For the years Isabel had stewarded her brother’s estate, she’d worn only the loosest-fitting kirtles she could convince her seamstress to fashion for her. “I’ll be tied up tight enough when I’m married,” she had reasoned to Adèle. “Let me breathe a little until then.” Adèle’s rebuttal—which she now saw the truth of—was that when she was finally tied up tight it would be far more uncomfortable than if her body had developed into womanhood already constrained. This outfit, which any other female her age and build might have been comfortable in, took her to the point of fainting. This was the first time she was wearing a wimple, which made her feel like an aging abbess, and the thought that her glossy, rosewater-scented coil, the sole thing she was prideful of, the source of so many admiring stares, would now be forever hidden from the world depressed her. Her heart was beating faster than she wanted to admit; for the thousandth time she repeated to herself she would someday be at home here—more than that, she would enhance the well-being of those who now probably considered her kin to the devil himself.
She was aware of the crowd noises, but hardly noticed what they were. At one point she did hear the king’s raised baritone, and assumed he was gathering people to congregate just outside the door. That meant Thomas would be stepping into the chapel for a final embrace, then escorting her to the priest, who would give her to the king.
But the person who entered wasn’t Thomas.
It was an albino dwarf. Being startled by a stranger—and particularly this stranger—made her take a sharp breath in, and the dress was so tight that she nearly swooned before he even began his patter.
“Your brother is detained, milady,” he said by way of greeting, polite and expressionless.
“Detained?” On reflex she reached for her belt, for the rosary and precious crucifix holding the saint’s relic.
“A bad flux of the bowels. He can’t leave the garderobe just now. The priest asked me to escort you outside in his place.”
She stared at him, dumbfounded, the ringing in her ears getting worse. He held out his cocked arm for her to take. She tried to back away, straining to keep her composure. “Why are you doing this to me?” She spoke so softly that Corr felt ashamed. But Gwirion was relying on him; he had to see it through.
“Doing what, milady?” he said innocently, and reached for the furred hem of her sleeve. Instinctively she released her rosary to grab her eating knife, then remembered that the wedding outfit had none. Corr took her slender hand in his knubbly, callused one and—as Gwirion had instructed—sloppily licked her palm with an expression of deadpan reverence on his face. She made a strange, unpleasant sound, and fainted.
YOU’RE the one who fouled it up,” Corr snapped. “Where were you? You were supposed to come in through the side door!”
“I told you, he sent me to the kitchen. Apparently I overstepped my bounds.”
“And what did I do, then?” demanded the dwarf. “I only nearly gave the bride a concussion!”
Gwirion said nothing.
They sat glumly in the castle prison, a dank, clammy cage dug into the basement floor of the barbican. Despite Noble’s frequent threats, neither of them had actually been locked in here before and they were both unnerved. They were hungry and sober, which neither of them had expected to be by this hour of the king’s wedding day, and it did not help their mood.
“He’s coming,” Gwirion suddenly said into the tense blackness, and grabbed the bars. The cell was half a level lower than the rest of the basement. Gwirion could look out—or could have looked out, if there had been any light—but Corr was too short.
Moments later, a torch glimmered above them, and Corr heard feet on the stone floor. The king appeared in his long green-and-gold wedding tunic and his heaviest ceremonial crown, dazzlingly over-dressed for his surroundings. He had brought the unsociable-looking porter Einion and a guard, both holding torches, and three other men. No…two other men and Thomas. They all crowded into the tiny antechamber outside the cell and the visitors’ extremely annoyed faces peered down to inspect them. The strangers wore Norman beards, and clothes similar to Thomas’s in cut and color. Gwirion and Corr knew what this meant: They were not about to be released, they were about to be humiliated.
“Let me handle this,” Gwirion whispered.
The dwarf made a derisive sound.
Noble crossed his arms and glared down at Gwirion. Gwirion mimicked him. For a long moment they stood there glowering at each other, until finally the king let out a sigh of disgust. “I hope,” he said, “that you’re both ashamed of yourselves.”
“I certainly am,” Gwirion said. “I’ve never botched anything so thoroughly. I say I should be whipped for incompetence.”
“Yes, you should,” Corr muttered, as one of the strangers demanded, with an atrocious accent, “Are you saying you did not intend for that to happen?”
“Of course not,” said Gwirion. “I never should have got myself thrown out of the yard, that was thoughtless on my part, I lost interest in the whole affair, and that was irresponsible, because it left Corr to fend for himself, and it was a two-man affair. There’s really no way he could have managed it on his own.”
“What are you saying?” the stranger pressed him, not looking pleased.
“Well, when she fainted—we were nearly certain she would faint—I was planning to—”
“You intended for my niece to faint?” The man’s sharp face looked menacing, and Corr wished he could hide.
“Of course we did, that was the whole point to it. I was right, you see,” he added in a conversational aside to Corr. “About the kirtle.”
“What about the kirtle?” the uncle demanded.
“Wedding gowns are always tight—it’s the bride’s last chance to show off her wares, isn’t it? And she was probably nervous, probably not breathing right. They swoon very easily when they’re not breathing right. But we didn’t want her to hit the floor that way. I was supposed to be there to catch her. To keep the gown from getting dirty. Because the laundress has been ill and I couldn’t bear to give her any more work than she already has. But then—”
“Hang him,” said the stranger, straightening, and left with one of the torches.
After a startled pause, Gwirion asked, “And who was that?”
“He’s my uncle Ralf and he’s important,” said Thomas, trying in vain not to sound like a whining child. “His approval is worth more than a parasitic—”
“That’s enough,” Noble said brusquely. “When you’re wise enough to not follow strangers into strange dark rooms, you may insult him all you wish.”
Demoralized, Thomas shut his mouth.
“But don’t you want to hear how it was supposed to happen?” Gwirion said to Noble with a cherubic smile.
“No, I don’t. Idiot.” He turned to the other Norman, the tallest and gravest of the three, and said something in French beginning with “Walter.” Walter said nothing, merely stared in disgust at them. After a moment, he signaled to Thomas and the guard. They lit a wall sconce for the king and the porter, and exited.
For a long time, Noble stared at Gwirion, until the prankster, who had nearly convinced himself he had done nothing wrong, had to look away.
“Have you any idea how stupid that was?” Noble demanded in a quiet, dangerous voice. “This marriage is to secure their loyalty. The ceremony today was to show them how civilized and respectable we can be. The English mock us and belittle us. We finally had a chance to show them we’re to be taken seriously, and you ruined it.”
“I didn’t want to, sire, it was his idea,” Corr said miserably.
“Spineless,” Gwirion spat at him. “I didn’t have to hold a knife to your throat for it.” Beaming boyishly, he insisted, “It truly was clever, sire, subtle and sophisticated—we even worked the ‘Norman usurpation’ theme into it.”
“Stop it, Gwirion,” Noble said shortly. “Do you understand me?”
“You’re telling me I must behave myself until they leave,” Gwirion said, sighing. “And if I don’t, half of England will attack us.” He smiled with satisfaction. “I had no idea I was so dangerous.”
“I’m not of a mind to jest now, Gwirion,” the king continued evenly. “There’s only one way to make certain you’re not either. You’re staying down here until they’re gone.”
Gwirion was shocked. “Sire?”
“You heard me. Both of you. Until they’re gone.”
“Oh, sire, for the love of God—” Corr began.
“That’s final,” Noble said. “When I let you out, you’ll pretend you’ve been whipped within an inch of your lives. And you’ll be decent to my wife.”
Gwirion, as if stung, jerked away from the door. He curled up against the cell wall, and tried to sweep the meager straw into a pillow. Noble peered down at him for a moment, then turned to Einion. “Bring them blankets. And food. See if anything’s left from the feast, but don’t say it’s for them. And send your boy down here to watch the door—Gwirion can pick locks.”
The porter nodded gruffly, separated some burning rushes out of the wall sconce, and departed, leaving the king completely alone with the prisoners.
Noble turned back to the cell. “Well?” he said after a pause.
Gwirion said nothing. Finally Corr very hesitantly asked, “Well what, sire?”
“How was this subtle and sophisticated prank supposed to work?”
Corr glanced at his cell mate. There was a moment of stillness. Then Gwirion, without quite uncurling himself, looked over his shoulder at the king. “If she was completely out, I would take her veil and Corr would walk me out of the chapel and hand me to you in front of the priest. If she came to, I would carry her in my arms out the door, and then run past you and through the gate as if I were abducting her.”
Noble’s face betrayed the faintest tic of amusement. “Christ in heaven, I’m grateful you botched it, then.”
“You have a strange way of showing it,” Gwirion said, and turned his head away.
THE bridegroom was gentle with the bride that night, even gentler than he had assumed he would need to be, because of the afternoon’s misadventure. He disappointed the revelers by canceling the traditional bedding ritual, refusing to allow the carousing guests to come with them into the wedding chamber. When they were finally alone together for the first time he was surprised, but not displeased, by her absolute stubbornness: She would not let him touch her until he swore to send at least one of the offenders away. He relented, refusing to provide details, then caught both of her hands in one of his and reached for her wimple, and she looked down, blushing, and became at once obedient.
She was far from his ideal. He liked trollops, he liked wild dark hair and curvy flesh and the fluid peasant accents of his mother tongue. She offered nothing coy or feverish. Her hair was the color of hay, and hung heavily, with startling flatness, nearly to her knees. Her eyes were such pale brown they looked feline, entirely too calm for him. And naturally there was some part of him that saw her flesh only as a piece of Mortimer’s. Here it was, literally in his grasp, under his weight, crushable and trusting—a limb of the animal that had murdered his father and damaged his friend. It was his. The flesh that had wronged him was finally in his hands, spiritually obliged now to bend to his will, and he found this so thrilling that it almost made him dizzy.
But he did nothing untoward. His better side won no internal moral victory, nor did he remember that he had entered into this marriage in service to his people’s need for stability, not his own need for vengeance. Her safety was secured by something far more elemental: He loved the female form too much. He could not have forced his hands to touch her for any purpose but pleasure.
IT was neither as tremendous nor as terrible as she’d thought it would be, their first night together. From almost the moment he touched her, Isabel felt safe. But the part of her that knew it wouldn’t be terrible had expected it would actually be marvelous. That there was a mystical secret she was to be let in on. That they would be joined soul to soul afterward, and that did not happen.
Still there was great pleasure in it. Vague urges that her body had felt for years overwhelmed her, and he knew just where to touch and what to do. She assumed some older woman must have instructed him in these arts, and she was grateful for his education. He was patient with her bumbling shyness, and promised her that the physical union itself was all he required for satisfaction, a polite fiction he would rectify when she was ready for it. It did not hurt the second time, and without the pain, she shivered with the pleasure that he brought her. Adèle had never even hinted that the burden of womanhood could be so agreeable.
GWIRION picked the lock their first night of confinement when the porter’s boy fell asleep. Corr wouldn’t go with him, terrified that they should further anger anybody. So Gwirion went alone, slipping silently through the dark of the porthouse, out of the barbican and into the bailey.
The daily life at Cymaron took place around this bailey, a large walled courtyard with corner towers and several freestanding buildings within. Across a steep trench to the south was a smaller but much higher earthen motte, which housed the looming keep tower used for protection during sieges. The moon was only a few nights past full and shining defiantly through a cloud cover that had slunk in from the north, and Gwirion knew there was a watch on the roof of the keep, so he didn’t dare walk straight through the courtyard to his destination. To circle the yard to the left would take him past the great hall and then the kitchen, both full of lightly sleeping servants trained to wake at the slightest sound. Instead, he took the long way around, skirting silently along the curtain wall to the right, past the chapel, the dovecote, and the steward’s corner tower with its snoring court officials; along the western wall where the kitchen garden and council chamber stood; past another corner tower and then along the southern wall—past the kiln house where the unkempt chief huntsman slept, the kennels where an early litter whined for its absent mother, the stables housing Cadwgan the marshal and his grooms. The large D-shaped tower in that southeast corner held the king’s bedchamber; Gwirion had learned long ago to scale the wall, despite the sleek external whitewash that made the castle look carved from a single piece of stone.
He climbed up past the room of the sleeping judge and chamberlain—the fattest and thinnest men in the council, respectively—to the top floor, where he peeked into the room through a window whose shutter had been left open in the cool spring night. What he saw nearly made him laugh aloud.
The new queen’s most impressive addition to the castle, a source of fascinated and suspicious gossip, had been a wedding bed—a large canopied, curtained feather mattress far softer than any self-respecting Welshman should ever sleep on, Gwirion had scoffed. The bed curtain facing the open window was pulled aside. He had never laid eyes on the queen until now, when she was splayed naked under her husband. Not really interested in her, Gwirion noticed only that she was very slender and small, and therefore would be of no lasting interest to the king. What was of interest, and amusement, was how she moved beneath him: She looked excessively virginal. Over the course of years, Gwirion had seen the king with women of all sorts, and this was sending him back to the nursery. He must have been so bored, Gwirion thought sympathetically. And of course he wouldn’t tell her that, so he was in the unusual position of having to be bored and polite about it. That was what had made Gwirion want to laugh. When looked at from such a perspective, he decided, this marriage could be exactly what Maelienydd needed after all: The king might develop a working sense of diplomacy.
GWIRION and Corr were ecstatic to be out in the air again, especially after Noble made them sit through a sermon by the chaplain on their moral perdition. They danced about the fog-dampened courtyard drunk with rowdy laughter, and no one could quiet them for half an hour.
“So did you even meet her?” Enid asked when Gwirion finally stopped for breath by the herb garden to steal a sprig of mint. Enid was a pretty, dark-haired kitchen girl brought to the castle for the Spring Rites four years earlier, and had been the king’s favorite ever since.
He shook his head and grinned. “Caught a glimpse of her, though—certainly no threat to you.”
“What about a threat to you?” she teased.
HIS glee was shattered an hour later when the king announced he would—eventually—be sending Corr away. “It’s my fault—I even admitted it!” Gwirion protested angrily in Noble’s private receiving chamber, pounding his fist against the mantel stone. “And I think the valor required of me to admit that should cancel out all blame against both of us.” Noble, slouching in his leather chair, responded with a droll expression that showed he disagreed. “Then at least send me away!” Gwirion shouted.
Noble gave him one of those slow stares of his, the hypnotic gaze that Gwirion thought must explain his sway over the entire court. “You know you’re not going anywhere.”
“The mischief was my brainchild, I bullied him into it,” Gwirion insisted. Corr stood quietly by the door, cleaning his fingernails, fretting as he always did when he was made the center of attention.
“He was the one caught in the act,” Noble said, shrugging.
“I locked the boy in the garderobe!” Gwirion stamped his booted foot in exasperation. “Half the teulu saw me take him there!”
“The teulu will never testify against you, Gwirion, you know that. You’re the only entertainment they’ve had since I made them stop vandalizing the abbey.”
“Noble,” Gwirion said sharply, shedding the feigned adolescent tantrum. “You know I’m the one to be punished.”
Noble folded his arms and pretended to consider this. “You’re right,” he said at last. “You should be punished. Your punishment is to remain at Cymaron and learn to tolerate the Mortimer-born queen consort. Corr will be spared this dreadful fate by retiring to someplace far away, once I have found him a suitable guardian.”
“That’s not amusing!” Gwirion said through clenched jaws.
“I find it hilarious,” Noble said in a humorless voice that ended the discussion. “Let’s have a song. What key is your harp in?”
Gwirion scowled and with annoyance ran his hand through his unkempt black hair. “I invented a new tuning in honor of your wife,” he answered, with a mocking bow. “Every string is tuned to the same pitch. I call it ‘the Anglo-Norman Drone.’”