SHE DID NOT sue for divorce, but her increasing malaise began to infest Cymaron. All day the solar was a silent, humid, dreary cage; at night she regularly refused her husband’s summons to his room. Determined for an heir, he began coming to her bed, and for the first time in a decade found himself lying with a wholly unreceptive woman, which only reaffirmed for him how much he liked his wantons. Had he not so despised and distrusted the cousin who was next in line to the throne, he would almost have preferred not bothering with issue. His wife understood him well enough now to know how to play against him: She acted bored by his attention, unimpressed when he tried to arouse her. That was not a game his pride would indulge, and one night he spent half an hour coaxing a physical response from her—but even then she was so doggedly still and silent that he would hardly have known she’d climaxed if he hadn’t been inside her. “An interesting skill,” he mused sarcastically, hovering over her. “Not especially useful, but interesting.” She blinked away humiliated tears and would not look at him.
Adèle, desperate to see her mistress’s spirit restored, begged a private audience with the king to offer a solution. The Cistercian abbey of Cwm-hir was less than three hours’ ride to the west; Cadwallon had founded the retreat in the serenest, most beautiful valley in the kingdom and the holy brothers were in the process of building an enormous church there. Noble regularly gave them money in his father’s honor, but he was their official patron and he’d been remiss in patronizing them. The queen, Adèle proposed, might go in his stead. The church would be under construction for years—as royal overseer of the project, it would keep her occupied for a very long time, doing something genuinely useful. Adèle suggested the idea because it was a religious house and therefore civilized; Noble approved it because it was Cistercian and therefore not English. He was impressed that the increasingly truculent old woman had presented a constructive idea. A lay brother was summoned from the abbey early one morning to show the queen simple hand signals should she need to communicate with the silent monks. Then the royal couple, Adèle, and a small van of bodyguards followed him back to the holy valley so that the king could officially introduce the abbey to its new patroness. He ruefully suspected she would not receive a warm reception.
But he hardly recognized the woman he rode out beside. Despite the dull white sky, Isabel’s mood obviously lifted once the riding party was out of sight of the castle. She cooed over the gentle open countryside as if she had never encountered such beauty. Noble hid his surprise, watching her smile with a warmth he’d never seen, at the smallest things, bumbling lambs and mewling calves, children playing with their grandfather on the edge of a village, even a cavorting couple they surprised in the sea of green bracken. He shot a glance at Adèle and read from her giddy expression that she had anticipated this—which meant, amazingly, that there must be some precedent for it.
They arrived at Cwm-hir in time for dinner, and the queen disarmed the wary, white-robed congregation of the complex—none of whom had ever seen a woman so elegantly dressed—by insisting upon leaving her husband’s party to join them in their simple, silent meal. They were all flummoxed but cautiously accepted, afraid to insult either royalty or Normans. Noble felt Adèle scrutinizing him, and granted her the satisfaction of looking pleasantly impressed. He took no meal at all: Intrigued by the alteration in his wife, he watched her from behind as she broke bread with the monks. She refused a better portion or preferential treatment, communicating entirely with the sign language she’d practiced with the lay brother as they rode.
After dinner the royal couple met with the abbot, who showed them plans for the church. Isabel examined them quickly then made several astute suggestions; Noble’s wonderment increased and he was afraid Adèle might explode from too much gloating when a tour of the construction revealed that the queen knew more about church architecture than the abbot did himself.
They stayed for nones at Isabel’s insistence, and she left a gift from her own coffers in honor of Maelienydd’s patron, St. Cynllo, whose feast day it was—something the native-born King of Maelienydd himself had not thought to do. By the time they headed home in the late afternoon, Noble was almost speechless with admiration and determined to keep Isabel in this spirit indefinitely. Adèle was all pleasure and relief to see her mistress once again behaving like herself. This was the girl she knew; this was the pluck with which to win over Cymaron. This was a strength that neither Gwirion nor the king could sap.
THE king returned from the abbey in an unusually genial mood, and Gwirion found himself entertaining informally in the hall for hours after supper had been cleared away. Nearly everyone played an instrument, but nobody played as well as Gwirion and he was always in demand. There had been many nights like this before the queen arrived and he was happy for a return to normal—and even she, returned from Cwm-hir, was behaving like a pleasant human being tonight. Noble stretched out with her on what would later be bedding for the unmarried servants, drinking wine; farther away from the fire, Gwilym, Hafaidd, Efan, Marged, and (remoter yet) a few of the kitchen workers were settled on the floor with beer. The servants whose bedding Noble had commandeered were gathered in the lower end of the hall, quietly gossiping or playing dice, while couples and families sought slumber behind curtains in the side sections of the great room. Gwirion performed the simple, often bawdy songs that were forbidden at board or when court was even marginally in session, those that no bard had in his repertoire. Those, in other words, that most people privately preferred to hear.
As he was loosening a string to go into his favorite key—“the drunkard’s tuning”—he unexpectedly addressed the queen; it was a civil gesture to acknowledge (grudgingly) her civil mood, although he was suspicious of the royal couple’s sudden easy amity together. “And so, Your Majesty, what do you think of our little Abbey Cwm-hir?”
“Little?” she said, almost stammering in her surprise that he’d addressed her without sarcasm. “That church is going to be the size of a cathedral. You have excellent stonemasons.” Feeling generous, she added the highest compliment she could think of: “It will be quite as grand as any church on the continent.”
“With all respect to Your Majesty’s weakness for Frenchiness,” Gwirion commented, keeping his attention focused on the harp peg, “nobody here has been to the continent, so we can’t appreciate how profoundly you must be flattering us.”
“My husband has been there,” she corrected him complacently.
“I have?” her husband said, taken aback.
She frowned up at him. “You went on Crusade.”
He was even more astonished. “I what?”
She faltered. “Years ago. I thought—”
“Where did you hear that?” He looked amused, as if it were a preposterous suggestion. She felt foolish and wished she hadn’t started the conversation in front of others. But surely Noble wouldn’t brush her off or bruise her dignity, not now that he had seen how desirable a companion she could be for him when she was treated fairly.
“In a book,” she muttered, trying to sound offhand.
“In a book?” Gwirion echoed, and looked at Noble. The king straightened, staring down at his wife. “What book?” Gwirion asked. “What else did it say about him?”
“It was just the one reference,” she replied quickly in the same quiet voice, feeling the heat rising to her cheeks.
“And…?” Noble prompted when she said nothing else.
“It was only a private manuscript one of the Benedictine brothers wrote. Uncle Roger loaned it to me before I came here. It mentioned all the Welsh princes, and naturally I read about the man I was about to—”
Gwirion could not contain himself. “This is brilliant!” He affected grave fascination. “Tell me, then, Your Majesty, is this typical of French scholarship in general?”
“Who wrote it?” Noble demanded. “What did they say about me?” He did not share Gwirion’s amusement.
She should never have mentioned it. She glanced at Adèle, a ubiquitous shadow near the kitchen screens, and knew the old woman was thinking the same thing. Her recent stiff self-consciousness came crashing down upon her, erasing the ease of the day. “Archbishop Baldwin made a tour through Wales,” she began awkwardly. “To enlist men for the Crusade, and he brought a Welsh brother named de Barri who—”
Noble almost choked on his relieved, dismissive laughter, and relaxed back onto the blanket. “Gerald? It’s my cousin’s cousin, for the love of God. Gerald de Barri—a spy for Canterbury, eh? Who would have thought it?”
“I remember that visit!” Gwirion announced, his face lighting up. “We all drank like fish! Don’t you remember it, Noble?” he asked the king, forgetting to use an honorific in front of members of the court. “Gerald kissing Baldwin’s buttocks all night? That man is a predicant phenomenon,” he told the queen. “His head is bigger than Noble’s and his mouth is bigger than mine.”
“Good God,” she said without thinking, sounding horrified, but Gwirion only laughed and asked, now with genuine interest, “What did he write, then?”
“He kept a journal of the trip, and published it. Noble met them at some fort—”
“It was Eryr, Crug Eryr,” Gwirion said, grinning at the recollection. “Noble nearly had to drug me to get me to go with him. What did our little Gerald write?”
She hesitated. “He wrote that Noble took the cross. That he swore to go on Crusade—”
“Yes!” Gwirion crowed, remembering the detail, and erupted again into laughter, turning to the king. “Your mother was furious. Cadwallon left you with an abbey full of Welsh Cistercians to support and there you were offering your soul to the Archbishop of Canterbury. She didn’t want to let us back in when we came home. Now that queen,” he said with a nostalgic chuckle, “was a queen to worship.”
Noble finally recalled it too. “Oh, yes,” he said dismissively, amused. “That was just political farce—nobody intended to go to Jerusalem.”
“That’s shameful,” Isabel chastised.
“No, it’s not,” her husband said, sobering a little. “The Crusade was a front. Baldwin wanted to remind us that Canterbury controlled the Welsh church.”
“I’m surprised you agreed with him,” she said, trying not to sound sarcastic, trying to reclaim some sense of their earlier rapport.
He shook his head. “Like everything else, love, it’s tit for tat. Once you take the cross, you’re a soldier of God and woe to any man who wrongs you. We sold our souls to Canterbury so that Canterbury would forbid the English barons to attack our lands. The barons attacked anyway, and more than once. And your esteemed archbishop did nothing. When the shepherd stands idly by as the wolf wounds his flock, the flock does not feel much indebted to the shepherd.”
“But the wolf does,” Gwirion said dryly, plucking out a dissonant chord.
“Anyhow, they were boors,” Noble went on, lightening the mood again. “Even without the politics, we’d have agreed just to shut them up and make them go away. And we’re all clever fellows, we’d have each found plausible reasons not to follow through.”
“Rhys said his wife wouldn’t let him go,” Gwirion chortled. “The Lord Prince Justice of all South Wales, henpecked out of going on Crusade! And Gerald, that sanctimonious woman hater—Gerald fell for it!” He and Noble starting laughing convulsively, remembering.
As they quieted, Noble affected nostalgia. “Ah, Cousin Gerald.”
“Ah, good Queen Efa,” Gwirion said in exactly the same tone. With all apparent friendliness he told the queen, “I do wish you could have met her, Majesty. She might have helped you find your feet more easily.”
She was completely taken aback by the tone—and so was everyone else. There was riveted silence as she asked, tentatively, “How?”
Never losing the guileless, helpful look, Gwirion explained, “She didn’t want Noble learning about women from the teulu, so when he was thirteen she sent her attendant to his room for a nocturnal education. A very practical lady, that one. She could have set you straight about the monogamy problem right away and it would have saved us all a hell of a lot of grief—we might have had so many lovely evenings like this one.”
“Gwirion,” Noble chastised wearily, his smile vanishing. “That was uncalled for.”
“It was also accurate,” Gwirion said pleasantly, and began to play “Rhiannon’s Tears.” Isabel was already standing, and without addressing any of them she began walking toward the stairs to her room. Gwirion watched her go, looking disappointed. “She might have stayed and fought a little,” he sighed. “The Saxoness has no play in her at all.” He heard a rustle in the shadows and looked over to see Adèle glaring at him as she headed after her mistress.
THERE was another courtyard feast in early August. It marked the start of harvest, and caused Adèle apoplexy because it did not even try to hide its heathen roots: It was proclaimed even by the chaplain as a day of homage to the pagan god Llew, and the populace celebrated it like all the other feast days. Isabel ignored Gwirion’s jubilant afternoon rhetoric in the sweltering courtyard, claiming that Llew, as god of both the sun and harvest, offered manifest proof that even an oat stalk was animated by a divine spark. Except for the sac-rilegiousness of it, it seemed utterly out of character for Gwirion to turn his attention to anything divine, but he was as casual about it as if he were explaining why the rain falls. His audience—villagers, castle workers, and some landed gentry arrived early for the feast—listened to him with the same placid interest with which they had earlier listened to his tales of the last dragon in Wales, asleep in Radnor Forest. It was off-putting to Isabel, but fascinating, how matter-of-fact these people were about even their most fanciful and superstitious beliefs. Sorcery was not a sin to them, but simply a power that could be used for good or ill; dead kings seemed closer to a second coming than even Christ himself. Especially when the bards got hold of them.
For the feast itself that evening, Gwirion was not asked to entertain, but by the end of the evening Isabel almost wished he had been, for she found it excruciating to sit through the alternative. The aging bard Hywel donned his long blue ceremonial robe and spent the entire evening reciting elegies to fallen heroes. They were exceptionally wordy and filled with linguistic tricks; this in itself she would have found merely tiresome, although she enjoyed watching how intensely emotional everyone—landowners, villeins, teulu, castle servants, and even her own husband—became over the stories. But the finale, which took up almost half the evening, was an epic poem about the valor of the kings of Maelienydd through the years, and the theme became tedious. For years the princes and their retainers lived out of saddlebags, battling to win control of Maelienydd back from the evil Mortimers. Finally, after more than a decade of battle and intrigues that followed the assassination (by the evil Mortimers) of good King Madoc, his surviving son Cadwallon reclaimed Castell Cymaron (from the evil Mortimers). For more than three decades, there was glorious stability, and every attempted invasion (led, usually, by some evil Mortimer) was valiantly rebuffed. The fair-haired Prince Maelgwyn was born to the incomparably beautiful and righteous Queen Efa and all was well in the kingdom of Cadwallon, who was referred to as “the holiest flame of all humanity” and a few other things Isabel considered just a bit excessive…and then, moaned the bard, came the day that changed everything. In late September of ’79, Cadwallon was summoned to Gloucester to meet with Henry of England. It was a large party that rode to the high king and a large party that began the return…but only the young prince and his companion made it back alive. At this point the evil assassin’s name was so obvious it did not have to be mentioned, but of course it was anyhow, at least five times. Gwirion was absent for the recitation and she wished she had been too.
“I assume you are aware of how humiliating that was,” she said later in the king’s solar, in a cadence intended to be calm but instead sounding standoffish.
“It could only be humiliating if you think yourself a Mortimer,” Noble retorted. “Call yourself the Lady of Maelienydd and I think you’ll feel quite different.”
IT was very warm the next day, despite the silver barricade of clouds that blocked the sun from view, and at Noble’s request, he and Goronwy held court outside. The queen was not welcome to participate, but he did not begrudge her watching, although the cases were almost always very dull. They were not, however, as dull as sewing. Her presence at the abbey, although welcomed, was not useful more than once a week, and she was desperate for distractions from the distaff life. She knew Noble was finding other women again, and she resented it, but not enough to estrange herself from the entire castle by being peevish—that was Adèle’s pastime. So she made it a habit to insert herself, however silently, into court life as often as she could. This was not the manner of Welsh queens, not even the incomparably beautiful and righteous Queen Efa, but the king’s benign neglect of her behavior afforded nobody the chance to challenge it.
When Hafaidd brought her chair out for her to sit behind Noble, the first case of the morning had already begun, and this one showed signs of intrigue. A young woman, hardly more than a girl and dressed very demurely in a worn-looking long tunic with a high collar, was standing before Goronwy’s chair tearfully murmuring her version of whatever the argument was. Behind her, looking agitated and resentful, was a rough-looking man dressed all in leather, nearly old enough to be her father. They were not from the castle village; they must have come from several valleys away. The chubby, pink-faced judge, sitting on a lower level to Noble’s right, listened attentively and occasionally murmured asthmatically to his assistant, who took notes. When the girl was finished, she curtsied and backed away from the low dais.
The man glared at her and moved closer to Noble and Goronwy. “She’s lying if she says I touched her. She’s claiming she was virgin when I took her—well then, she’s virgin yet. I swear that on the holy book, and it’s all I have to say.”
King and judge exchanged meaningful glances, sharing some unspoken knowledge that seemed to burden the justice but tickled Noble’s sense of humor. “Where’s your heir?” Goronwy asked, which struck Isabel as a remarkable non sequitor.
Noble shook his head. “My beloved cousin is a day’s ride away and I don’t care to have him near me anyhow. I’ll appoint a worthy substitute.” Then he grinned, and Goronwy sighed with resignation.
“Sire, it’s a delicate matter, by the rule of law it ought to be your heir—”
“I can appoint someone else my heir for the next hour,” Noble said reasonably.
Without waiting for the king to say the name, the judge phlegmatically dispatched Hafaidd to find Gwirion, and Noble relaxed against the back of his tall wooden chair looking pleased with himself.
Gwirion was in the kitchen with his harp, in a silk brocade tunic that had once belonged to Noble, too old now for its color to be clearly discernable. He was entertaining Marged’s workers with improvised, outrageous divinations. Absolutely straight-faced, his right hand fluttering dramatically over the lower strings of the harp, he claimed that the bard Taliesin’s prophecies (which had never been wrong in over six hundred years) predicted that the world would end the following Thursday unless they all rose in revolt against the king and replaced him with whoever in the castle could drink the most cheap ale without passing out—so they should all start imbibing immediately, for the good of humanity. Hafaidd caught him in the midst of this exhortation, ignored the treasonous commentary that would have hanged anybody else, and briskly escorted him out to the yard.
Arms crossed, blinking his dark eyes in the harshly hazy daylight, Gwirion considered the two suppliants warily and then looked at the king. “Why am I here, then?” he asked.
Noble folded his hands together, made a steeple of his forefingers and tapped it against his lips, a lifelong habit Gwirion knew meant he was trying not to laugh. “This young woman,” he said matter-offactly, “claims this man forced her to yield him her virginity, and he denies it. To begin examining the case, therefore, according to the rule of law, we must first examine her to see if she’s intact.” He allowed himself the slightest indulgent smile. “That’s going to be your job.”
“What?” It came in stereo, from both the queen and Gwirion at once. “Noble, are you mad? Have a woman do it! Or at least the physician,” the queen insisted. Gwirion was too shocked to say anything else. Even the two suppliants were astonished; the girl looked outright alarmed.
“It’s not my place to change the law,” Noble said with mock humility. “I confess it sounds peculiar, but who am I to challenge Hywel the Good?” He smiled beatifically. “It has been the law in rape trials for centuries. The notary of maidenhead is supposed to be my heir, but he’s too far away, so I’m appointing Gwirion as substitute. Go on, Gwirion.”
“Not in public,” Isabel announced firmly, standing. “That’s barbarous.”
He shrugged agreeably. “Very well, in private, then, but you’d best go along as my representative to keep an eye on him.”
For one disorienting moment, the queen and Gwirion were united against him, as Gwirion made generic sounds of protest and the queen declared, “I’ll examine her, don’t subject her to a man.”
“You?” Noble crossed his arms and looked at her, his sarcastic smile twitching the corners of his mouth. “I didn’t realize you were experienced with women’s private parts.”
There was squelched laughter from onlookers and the queen shot back, “I didn’t realize Gwirion was either.” This earned a bigger reaction and for a moment she was pleased, until she realized that she had just cemented the situation, for now Gwirion would be goaded by them into proving her wrong.
Gwirion stood in the middle of a circle of teasing spectators who were all ignoring the usher’s stern requests for silence. For a moment he stared at Noble, his face unreadable. Then he turned to the nervous girl and said in a tone of resignation, “Let’s go in here,” gesturing to the ground-floor room of the nearest corner tower. He turned toward the queen without quite looking at her. “Are you coming, milady?”
Childishly, she wished that Adèle would miraculously appear from the solar and deal with the situation. With a heavy breath, which she hoped made her appear disdainful, she nodded and followed. “Remember, she’s there to keep you honest,” Noble reminded him cheerfully as they entered. “There’s a very hefty fine at stake here.”
This room, below the steward’s well-appointed chamber, housed several of the lower officers. Their beds were mats of brychan-shrouded heather and the room, ill ventilated, had a heavy, sweet aroma to it. The wiry Hafaidd escorted them in and crossed at once to swing open the shutter of the only window, letting in some light and air.
When the door was closed behind them, Gwirion turned at once to the girl, who looked traumatized. “Are you devout?” he asked. She glanced down shyly and nodded, and Gwirion held his hand out to the queen. “Your rosary, milady, if I may.”
Isabel hesitated. She didn’t trust him and the piece was precious to her—Adèle had fashioned the beads by hand from the pulp of crushed roses, and the crucifix held a lock of hair from the head of St. Milburga, at whose abbey she’d been baptized.
“I’ll be careful with it,” he promised impatiently, understanding her expression. She gave it to him, frowning, and he pressed it into the girl’s cold hand, bending over her. “Will you swear on Her Majesty’s cross to be truthful?” Her eyes flickered up to his, then down again. She pursed her lips together and nodded. “Are you still a maiden?” he asked quietly. Her face crumpled and she nodded again, close to sobbing, but his calm reaction reassured her and she kept herself in check. “Why are you doing this, then? Who put you up to it?” She shook her head, pursing her lips again, and he sighed. “You’d better tell me or you’re in a lot of trouble.” The girl shifted her eyes pleadingly to the queen, hoping for feminine sympathy.
She found none. The queen was waiting for her to speak; her expression was far less lenient than Gwirion’s, and framed by her wine-red wimple it looked especially severe. “My brother,” the girl finally said, whispering miserably, then blurted it all out at once. “That man killed our sister when she refused him years ago and he made it look like an accident, like a drowning; I saw it but I was only six then and they wouldn’t take my testimony in court, so he was acquitted but I saw him do it and he never paid the blood fine for it and we need money terribly so Iorweth thought to get it by accusing him of something else we could fine him for.”
Isabel wanted to be sympathetic but she couldn’t let this pass. Anticipating Gwirion’s thoughts, she warned, “Even if you play along with her and say she’s been deflowered, he can claim it was by someone else’s hand.”
“We don’t use hands for that here. You English are a weird lot, aren’t you?” Gwirion retorted, and was relieved to see the shadow of a grin on the girl’s face. He patted her shoulder. “What’s your reputation where you come from?”
She sobered instantly, looked guilty. “It never occurred to anybody in the village to question me when I said it, and anyway he’s known for taking anyone he pleases.”
Gwirion looked up at the queen with an expression of satisfaction. “I think it’s very obvious what to do here.”
“I can’t let you,” she said with sympathetic firmness.
“Oh, for the love of God, milady!”
“First of all, you don’t even know that a thing she says is true, and anyway, I won’t let you lie to the court, it makes a mockery of justice.”
“Letting a murderer go free isn’t making a mockery of justice?” he demanded and then, before she could reply, he gave her an ironic look of comprehension. “Ah! How could I forget, milady, you’re a Mortimer, your sort does that all the time.”
She wanted to hit him. “I believe in the rule of law,” she said through clenched jaws. “Perhaps you haven’t heard of that here.” She turned to the girl. “We can try to exonerate you from this scheme, but you’re taking justice into your own hands and I can’t condone that.” Seeing the look on Gwirion’s face she added, “I’m representing the king, Gwirion, you know I have to do this.”
He stared at her for a moment. “Allow me to treat you precisely as I would the king on this occasion, then,” he said, and walked to the exit, grabbed the latch, and threw the door open.
Twenty paces away sat Noble and Goronwy, on the far edge of a ring of waiting onlookers, most of them starting to perspire in the summer-morning haze. All eyes were immediately on Gwirion.
“And how was the anatomy lesson?” Noble called out.
Gwirion ignored him and crossed to the accused man, standing alone in the middle of the circle, idly picking at a scab on his elbow. Barely moving his lips, in a voice too low to carry beyond the two of them, Gwirion muttered ominously, “I know about the sister and I have the proof to hang you if you don’t confess to this instead.” The man’s alarmed reaction, although quickly buried, was cognizant enough to satisfy him. He turned to Noble and the judge. “This man is guilty,” he said loudly, with finality, and marched back to the tower.
The queen was at the threshold, on her way out, as Gwirion returned. To a collective gasp from the onlookers, he grabbed her arm and pushed her back inside, hesitating for a moment in the doorway until he heard the man start to confess the rape. Then he slammed the door closed.
“Let go of me!” Isabel ordered.
He released her but kept his hand leaning on the door. “Milady, if you call this girl’s bluff now, that whoreson will go free, unpunished—”
“For something he didn’t do!” she snapped.
“And also for something he did do!” he insisted. “And the family, who has been wronged, and by that man, never gets any reparation. I would never let Noble do that and I won’t let you do it either.”
“You think you’re above the law?”
“Oh, no, milady, very much below it,” he said comfortably.
“I’d say so,” she muttered. “Even your charity is underhanded.”
If it was meant to insult him, it failed. Looking pleased with himself, he collected the rosary from the shaken girl and held it out to the queen. She snatched it up from his open palm and headed at once toward the door.
“He just confessed to the lesser charge, milady. If you tell them all the truth now you’ll be doing nobody a favor, except perhaps God, but in that case I must say that God is a twisted bastard.”
She winced at his impiety. “The law is not for doing people favors, Gwirion, it’s for justice. Nobody’s being punished or rewarded according to their just desserts and that’s an affront to the rule of law itself—and to the king who executes it.”
He considered this briefly, then shrugged. “Well then, tell the king to sue me for it.” He walked past her to the door, exited the tower, and walked through the court, straight back to the kitchen, his harp, and his audience.
A mockery of justice?” Noble echoed her in disbelief that night. He was in bed, waiting—very patiently, he thought—for her to calm down and join him for her wifely duties.
Isabel was pacing his chamber in her shift and his bedrobe, which was far too big for her. With her long braids swaying and the robe dragging behind her she looked like a child playing at being an angry adult. “Gwirion mocked the law today—because you decided to entertain yourself by giving him authority you shouldn’t have given him.”
“I don’t exist to serve the rule of law, Isabel—the rule of law exists to serve me.”
“It exists to serve the kingdom!” she insisted hotly.
“I am the kingdom,” he said, quite cool.
She began pacing more excitedly. “That is the most hubristic, self-centered definition of kingship I have ever—”
“No, it’s not, Isabel,” he said with an exaggeratedly tired sigh. “In fact, it’s absolutely self-less, but it’s too late for political philosophy, as charming as it is to find that you are so inflamed by the subject. Come to bed now.”
“How does appointing Gwirion in that way serve the kingdom?” she demanded, her pacing bringing her no closer to the bed.
“You would rather I’d called Anarawd over from Elfael to molest her? Just because that would be the legal thing to do, you’d subject that poor child to him? Come to bed.”
“No, I wouldn’t want Anarawd either,” she said impatiently. “But if you were reassigning the job, you should not have given it to a rascal like Gwirion. If you’re going to manipulate the law, do it responsibly, do it with sense,” she insisted, slapping the back of one hand upon the other palm for emphasis. “Just because you’re the king doesn’t mean you can reorder the universe to suit your whim.”
He raised his head off the cushion and gave her a look of amazement, almost choking as he laughed at her. “My whim? I’ve never done anything in court to suit my whim! Short of picking the women I bed for pleasure I don’t think I’ve ever done anything to suit my whim.”
“Assigning Gwirion to that position was a whim.”
He shook his head. “I knew the girl was virgin, I could tell by the way she walked, let alone that she was a truly incompetent liar. Gwirion was the best choice to resolve the situation, never mind why. Come to bed, Isabel, that’s an order.”
“You treated it as if it were a whim,” she insisted.
“Of course I did,” he said in exasperation, relaxing his head on the cushion again. “Half Gwirion’s value is that nobody, including Gwirion, takes him seriously except for me. It’s part of that fool mystique I’m so charmed you introduced me to. If you don’t come here at once, I shall summon someone else to take your place, and I’ll be glad of the replacement.”
Her anger suddenly refocused, she spun around to glare at him. “It is possible for you to philander without insulting my station that blatantly,” she informed him.
“Yes, it is. But it is not possible for me to procreate without a willing partner. I have a genocidal Norman baron, an upstart Welsh prince, and a criminally-minded cousin to ward off with the fruit of my loins. Where would you prefer that fruit to ripen?”
Looking sickened, she forced herself to join him.
HA! I knew the monogamy experiment would never last,” Gwirion wrote gleefully to Corr, some two weeks later. “He’s returned to his natural ways with a vengeance. It’s refreshing. I myself think he should try to seduce that addle-pated Adèle, just on principle.
“Our Saxoness queen consort is showing a little more mettle now, which I actually admire although it’s not nearly as entertaining. But her entire life revolves around where he shoves his cock, and she’s being incredibly backward about it. After raising such a fuss about Enid, she could have divorced him over Gwen, but she didn’t—apparently in England that would make her ‘damaged wares,’ and I understand that’s even worse than having a virile husband. And now that she’s put up with him for more than three episodes, of course, she’s even lost her right to ask for reparations, so we are all doomed to listen to her rant and rave when any reasonable woman would have dealt with the thing by now.” This was a fiction of Gwirion’s; the queen’s reactions were as always icy, not volcanic. “At least I finally have something to make fun of. But he won’t let me use it.
“And Adèle is becoming a nuisance. Is it my fault that the queen is always within earshot when I’m practicing a new verse about the king’s latest conquests?”
An hour after handing this last letter to the increasingly fidgety messenger, Gwirion was in the kitchen showing Marged’s grandson Dafydd some sleight-of-hand tricks with a kerchief. The kitchen workers were taking a short break outside, soaking in a rare moment of genuinely bright, dry sunshine and blue sky. Marged, relaxing on a sack of oats that was only marginally wider than she was, nursed a mug of ale before starting in on supper, watching these two with a contented grin. She remembered when Gwirion was that age. She even remembered when Corr was that age.
The peace was shattered by Adèle storming into the kitchen from the hall, her face nearly purple, murder in her eyes. She rushed up to Gwirion and without warning or explanation slapped him across the face as hard as she could. Astonished, he stood up and glared down at her. “What in hell was that for?” he demanded, as the boy leapt away and Marged scrambled to her feet.
Adèle, almost too outraged to speak, shook a handful of documents in his face. It took him a moment to recognize that they were the letters, every letter, he had written to Corr. They had never left the castle. “That’s private correspondence,” he cried. “You had no right—”
“I have the right to do anything in defense of my mistress,” she shrieked. “You heartless bastard!”
“That’s just me sounding off to a friend who can’t even read!” Gwirion shot back. “I’m not planning anything against her, there’s no malfeasance—”
“You sent her to find the king with that whore in her room,” the woman shouted, shaking the packet under his nose.
“No I didn’t!” Gwirion shouted back. “She found them on her own! You silly, ranting—”
She slapped him again. “Get out of this castle,” she ordered. “Get out of my lady’s life. You’re good for nothing here, you’re nothing but a parasite.”
Gwirion laughed bitterly. “Do you think I don’t know that? You convince the king to get rid of me, and I will readily go wherever he sends me. But he’ll never do it.”
“Then go on your own,” Adèle said. “You’re obviously miserable here. Go someplace where they’ll let you unleash your vicious humor. Just walk out of here and go somewhere they’ll appreciate you. If there is such a place.”
Gwirion shrugged. “I can’t,” he said. As if that settled it, he resumed his seat and gestured for the boy to join him again with the kerchief. Adèle pushed between them and chucked the letters under the cauldron, into the flames of the gaping fireplace.
“What are you doing?” Gwirion yelled, trying to grab them back. He salvaged only half of one burned page, puckering his nose against the smell of burning parchment. “Those are mine! You have no right!”
“Sully her name one more time,” Adèle threatened, “and even if nobody reads it, I swear on all I hold sacred, I will make you suffer. And I’ll make the king suffer for keeping you.”
She looked alarmingly serious, but Gwirion calmed at once and gave her an appraising, almost approving look. “Very well, I’ll take that dare,” he said. “You’re far more satisfying to bait than she is—I wish you’d’ve let me know that sooner! As soon as I’ve taught my little friend this trick, I’ll get a fresh quill.”
ADÈLE decided she would have to get rid of him. It became her monomania; she made it her business to learn everything she could about his background, certain there would be grounds for an accusation of unchristian ways, but she was disappointed. Father Idnerth was helpful with the start of the story, which was disappointingly mundane. Gwirion had been a foundling; the holy man had wanted him christened and when nobody else expressed an interest in naming him, the priest himself had chosen Gwion, the birth name of the legendary bard Taliesin, who had also been a foundling of sorts. When Prince Maelgwyn as a toddler, stumbling over his expanding vocabulary, called him “gwirion”—not a name, just a word meaning both innocent and foolish—the entire court had humorously taken up the misnomer until the orphan thought it was his real name. Maelgwyn and Gwion, the chaplain pointed out with parental and slightly senile affection, had rechristened each other.
Marged—not yet the cook then, but the cook’s wife—was Gwirion’s wet-nurse, and he slept with Corr in the little closet off the kitchen, which was unorthodox since private sleeping quarters, even modest ones, were unheard of for anyone but royalty. Because he was of an age with the prince they were sometimes left together, and Marged noticed almost at once that Gwirion was the only one whose presence calmed the infant prince’s tantrums. This elevated his potential from domestic drudge to royal companion, and when the prince began his studies Gwirion was not officially tutored, but he was invited to learn on the periphery. So he learned to ride, but not to lance; to fight, but not with sword or arrow or spear, only with fists. He never studied politics, but he learned to read and write faster than the prince, and when he took an interest in and had an aptitude for Hywel’s harp, Cadwallon invested in training him to music.
There was one detail that challenged credulity: Older castle residents insisted that Gwirion, although never respectful of authority, had been the sweetest-tempered child until the murder of Cadwallon. Again and again she heard the chorus that Gwirion had saved young Maelgwyn’s life that day, although nobody seemed to know or care about the details. In fact, nobody seemed to care about much of anything about Gwirion’s past, including Gwirion himself. Adèle realized she would have to look to the present or worse, the future, to find a way to deal with him.
And then the queen presented her with an unexpected opportunity.
NOBLE was surprised that the tentative knock at the door that wet September evening was his wife’s. He had asked for one of the steward’s girls, but she must have seen her mistress on the way and wisely dropped back. Thanks to Gwirion, the queen’s tantrums were legendary, despite the fact that she had never thrown one.
“Milady,” he said, and stood up, straightening the tunic and drawers that he slept in, glad he hadn’t yet removed them. “I wasn’t expecting you tonight.”
“Do you want me to leave?” she asked quickly, hesitating to take off her cape, already soaked from the short walk across the bailey. She was in a strange mood, tense and yet distracted. Usually when she was upset about something she had the focus of a hawk. Now her attention was turned inward.
“No,” he said, placating her. “I…perhaps I just misread the moon, but I assumed—”
“You did misread,” Isabel said. “My flux should have been upon me nearly two weeks ago. Nothing has come.” She didn’t know where to look. This was why they had married, after all, it should have been an announcement of extraordinary joy, but she had sobbed in Adèle’s arms for most of the afternoon.
Noble took a breath and found his hand at his chest. He pushed the cape off her and had his arms tight around her, his lips pressing her brow. “This is wonderful!” he announced, almost trembling.
She managed to give him a weak smile. Her hands were cold.
SINCE he now understood exactly who his audience was, Gwirion obligingly tailored his wit. “To my revered correspondent,” he scribbled onto a pilfered piece of the king’s best paper, sitting by Marged’s hearth, and paused. He wanted to provide material worthy of Adèle’s awesome wrath. “The queen is suddenly no longer allowed to ride out to the abbey. No one is saying why, but I’m sure she’s with child. Why must they all be so precious about it? Why can’t someone just say, ‘Ah, he finally ploughed her deep enough,’ or words to that effect, and be done with it?
“My personal theory is that his other women enjoy him so much that they don’t want to lose his favor by becoming fat with pregnancy, and they take precautions, so he’s never sired a bastard. I’m glad they know to do that; she’ll be so swollen and crabby soon that he won’t want to touch her, but you know as well as I do that he can’t go more than a few days without activity. I suspect he’ll be riding the entire female population of the castle by Advent. Perhaps he’ll even make her watch, so that she might finally learn a little of what really pleases him.
“Or perhaps, once there’s an heir, he’ll dispose of his marriage altogether. I don’t think Mortimer is behaving himself anyhow, so she’s essentially useless. The gaggle of girls who do nothing all day but play with balls of yarn and giggle at each other’s stupid jokes have been displaced from her solar and are spending their time in a corner of the great hall, where they get in the way of the people who have real business to attend to. Only Adèle spends any time with the queen now. How could anyone possibly have a healthy pregnancy with such a humorless, mad old shrew hovering about? Half the time she won’t even let the king in to speak to his own wife! Well, she’s such a frail little thing, she’ll probably die in childbirth, and then we won’t have her to deal with anymore. Then he can find himself a nice Welsh wife and restore Cymaron’s dignity. We all pray for such a time—and if he has any sense, he prays so too.”
HE found Adèle by the hall fire. “Here you are,” he said angelically, handing her the letter. “Do let me know when you’re ready to begin the persecution.” He bowed extravagantly and went back into the kitchen. She pursued him with her eyes.
“I’m ready now,” she gloated.