ISABEL SPENT a panicked week believing both that Noble knew about them, and that he didn’t care. Or if he did care, he needed her too much now. He had made her the darling of Cymaron, which made Cymaron that much dearer to the kingdom at large. With Mortimer to one side and Llewelyn to the other, it was largely force of personality that was keeping Maelgwyn ap Cadwallon on his throne, and she was part of that mystique now, amplifying it. She played her role beautifully for her husband through the grey, end-of-winter doldrums that had settled on the castle. She rode uncomplainingly for hours with him through hellish weather for brief “social” sojourns to remind Maelienydd’s aristocracy in person how fortunate they were to have such a powerful and charismatic first couple attending to their interests. They made many of these visits to the south, near to Anarawd’s estates and friends. She would return from these trips—two days out and back at most—exhausted and yet strangely sleepless, and only the harp could soothe her nerves. Her women, growing accustomed to the noise, came to sleep so soundly through it that there were nights when they would have sworn the harpist, although summoned, did not play at all.
Mortimer was still stalling on providing the promised resources for the earth defenses, complaining that no work could be done in winter anyway, and the barons whom Noble had assigned to be his watchdogs, all of them fearful of Mortimer’s wrath, were too halfhearted to demand results. And Llewelyn’s rising popularity to the north, outside Maelienydd’s borders, seemed unstoppable—to Noble’s great annoyance, for he understood the source of it: Lord Rhys of Deheubarth had been a boon to all of Wales, lending support to almost any skirmish against the Normans. But Rhys was dead now, his kingdom in shambles; men wanted a new font of manpower and Llewelyn seemed to have it. Noble himself had shown his own army that by taking Llewelyn with him to the front. Owain reported duly that the king’s northwest barons, learning Mortimer was not abiding by the terms of treaty, could not understand why Noble would not pledge himself to Llewelyn. The prince of Gwynedd was not a conqueror, he was a unifier, and asked only appropriate respect from those whose lands he would protect. In their minds, Maelgwyn ap Cadwallon’s demotion from sovereign to petty prince would be a small price to pay.
As relief from these and other plagues, Noble craved distraction, but Gwirion had not been up to form and he was beginning to resent it.
But perhaps something was afoot now. The king was pleased when he saw his friend revert to old familiar habits of scuttling around dark corners of the castle, speaking hurriedly in whispers to people who later denied seeing him, and disappearing for hours at a time into dank basements. Surely he was staging an event of some sort, and he was staging it for Noble. This was all that mattered to the king. The less he could afford time for such distractions, the more he needed them.
THE morning of the March new moon, the castle awoke under a damp snowfall that melted underfoot, leaving the courtyard a mess of slush made slushier by the predawn brigade of Gwirion’s bribed assistants. When the muffle of fog and darkness eased enough for light to enter the courtyard, the guards on the keep tower briefly started: There were strangers in the bailey, standing in formation as if awaiting orders. Their stillness in the face of the guard’s warning calls suggested an intimidating martial discipline, and Gwirion appeared at the watch’s elbows just as they realized the things weren’t alive. He crossed the soldiers’ palms with what was needed for them to respond as he wished and at once the trumpet sounded the five-note siege alarm. The castle population assembled, half-dressed, groggy, and shivering in the hall, already suspecting this had to do with Gwirion, because no one would be insane enough to attack in this weather. The queen had been summoned to her husband’s bed in the middle of the night, and came with him now straight from his room to the hall, one of his shorter robes wrapped over her shift for warmth, without stopping to collect her jewelry, her rosary, or even her wimple from her own room. People stared at the thick tumble of her hair in the lamplight, unused to it.
The grey daylight grew, and features on the figures became discernable. That created the first buzz: All of them were dressed as women. They were effigies, enormous poppets, life-size and sometimes bigger, held upright by stakes shoved into muddy cracks between the courtyard paving stones. The mock siege alarm was called off and everybody in Cymaron, following the king and queen in their bedrobes, grabbed wraps and wandered outside into the wet, grey morning to see what strange immobile army had invaded them.
The creatures themselves were simply made, limbs of rags wrapped around branches and heads made of leather with facial features drawn or glued onto them, but all of them wore actual clothing stolen from women in the castle. In fact—
“This is Marged!” Noble cried out with a delighted chuckle, reaching an especially short, round one near the kitchen. He took a closer look. “That’s her nose!” He glanced around at the rest of the figures. “Did he make everyone?”
The sewing bevy had just discovered their unflattering statuary: three beings identically dressed and decorated with feathers. “Yes, sire,” Generys said in a clipped voice, her nose running in the cold. “At least the women.”
“Let me see my wife,” Noble called out to the courtyard as a whole. “If someone finds the queen—”
“Here she is,” Gwilym announced, his lips squirming as he tried to squelch a smile. He gestured to a small figure with an enormous metal crown hanging cockeyed over a long wimple that was one of the queen’s own. There was a black-and-white belt around its waist and from it hung a remarkably good imitation of her rosary, complete with the cross housing the relic of St. Milburga. The royal couple admired it from across the courtyard, laughing.
For nearly half an hour, all activity was suspended as the entire population wandered about marveling and chortling over the likenesses. The more Noble smiled, the easier Isabel felt. For several nights now, Gwirion had not come to her, explaining only that he was at work on an enormous secret project designed to please the king. She regretted that their trysting had to be eclipsed for this to manifest, but it was necessary insurance. Her husband was still affectionate to her in court and amorous in bed, but she had become more anxious than Gwirion about his possible suspicions, and anything to alleviate them met with her instant approval. If Noble knew and felt trapped into looking away, she was grateful that Gwirion at least gave him something else to look at.
Gwirion watched them all from the highest point of the wall walk, hidden from view in the tower that housed the bridge to the keep, wearing his entire wardrobe for warmth: four tunics, two britches, and two pair of hose, all of it too large. For the first time in his life, inventing mischief had felt like labor to him, harder not only to dream up but to find the energy to realize. He had rallied himself to do it as a patriotic duty: His king required it of him.
When he sensed the hubbub dying down, he crossed along the wall walk and descended the stairs closest to the king’s tower. “Attention, people!” he cried out from the last step, affecting a dreadful French accent. He was bulky in all his layers and he’d slicked his dark hair back on his head with water and spit, although a curl from the cowlick lay obstinately askew. “My dear students! And faithful assistants! I am glad to see you here at the convocation of my school!”
Noble grinned. He was impressed with the effigies, but he’d have been disappointed if that was as far as the effort went. “What school?” he prompted.
“My dear king! You do not know about this great school I have created? Just for your men? Just for the men of this castle? You have so many beautiful virgins and so many beautiful prudes and it is so frustrating for your men. So I have invented the school of proximal fornication! Behold!” He grabbed the skirt of the nearest figure—the butler’s wife—and flung it up over her head. The actual wife, standing near it, shrieked when she saw it exposed, and everyone else in immediate view had such an enormous reaction that the rest of the yard squelched through the slush to see: The effigy was crudely anatomical. The butler himself thought it was amusing, and after a moment his wife started laughing even as she blushed.
“Here we are!” Gwirion cried out happily. “In full working order—every one! I have tested each myself, only this morning, so you may have to clean up a little.” The beaming teulu at once dispersed to hoist the skirts of all the figures, and found with hilarity that every one was similarly outfitted. Noble leaned against the wooden staircase to his room in the cold morning air, clouds of laughter bursting from him, and the women present were wrestling with different levels of amusement, shock, embarrassment, and fury; amusement generally won out. It was an egalitarian offense, at least, with every servant and every lady equally obscene.
The one effigy whose skirt was not upended was the little wimpled one.
“Is my wife not worthy of your lechery?” Noble called out to Efan and his band. He embraced Isabel from behind and rested his chin on her still unwimpled mane.
Efan looked extremely clumsy for a moment. “Nobody would presume to gape at the queen’s private parts, sire.”
“Don’t be absurd—Gwirion made the queen’s private parts.” Noble laughed. Gwirion suddenly felt the need to focus all of his attention on adjusting the sewing bevy’s veils, and Isabel willed herself not to tense in her husband’s arms. “Go on, then, have at her.”
The teulu exchanged glances, but all hesitated to take the first step.
“You silly children,” Gwirion said with forced casualness, in his own voice, and ran to the queen’s figure to flip up the skirt. “It’s just another cunny, lads.” He instantly busied himself again in the sewing bevy’s veils.
Noble kissed Isabel’s head quickly and went to study her double. She knew going with him would seem most natural and lighthearted, but she could not bring herself to do it. Everybody chuckled with anticipation as Noble knelt down to view the artificial copy of his wife’s loins. Screwing up his face with exaggerated scrutiny, the king poked and pried, examining the artifact with such vulgar fascination that even Isabel herself, blushing, had to laugh. Gwirion was apparently having a devil of a time getting the veils to sit right on the sewing bevy, and missed the king’s performance. Noble finally stood again, shaking his head. “You didn’t quite capture it, Gwirion. You must study your subject in more depth next time.”
The queen’s blush vanished and she looked ill, but nobody noticed her reaction because Gwirion shrugged theatrically and answered, “I made them all alike, sire. Just like women really are.” This brought roils of indignant amusement from both sexes and gave him an excuse to resume his French persona and push on with the prank. “Come along, students, we will be getting started for the first lesson now. Let us begin! I need a volunteer boy and a volunteer girl. If there is no volunteer girl, I will substitute myself. I choose…” He looked around the courtyard. Madrun, the queen’s youngest woman, was standing clutched and giggling beside the hall serving girl whose breasts Gwirion, with his new wonderment about the female form, often found himself staring at.
“And I will choose the fair Madrun over here…” As she squealed, he stomped through the slush to her and dragged her over to her effigy. Her face was pink from both the cold and the thrilled embarrassment. “And for the man I find…” Nobody said it but everyone knew whom he was looking for. Madrun and the marshal’s son Ednyfed had been besotted with each other for months, but Ednyfed’s mother Elen would not allow him to court a woman from the south; she considered that stock infected with the blood of Flemish settlers and therefore beneath him. “Aha, here is the young man I am searching…” He found the boy, blushing but hearty, and dragged him briskly toward the effigy as well. “Now this is the game we play, yes? He wants to relieve his burning desire with her. But he cannot relieve his burning desire with her. So—he has use of the proximal fornication. Pull your drawers down, lad, and make yourself at home.” Gwirion flipped the skirt up and casually threw it over the effigy’s face. The assembly laughed. He knew that nobody would actually strip in such weather—although he wondered briefly if there would be any takers had he tried this in summertime. “And you, fair Madrun, you will be providing the sounds! You will stand behind and mo-o-o-o-an and gro-o-o-an for all of us to hear, to make it seem more real, yes?” She covered her face with one hand, laughing and blushing, and tried to swat him away with the other hand. “No, no such gestures, only sounds. Very well. Are we ready to begin?”
For the next several hours, Gwirion teased and goaded random couples to bond over the figures. Almost everybody, including all of Noble’s teulu, who came over from the keep or up from the village, took the dare at some point, although no man went so far as to drop his drawers. At one point Noble pretended he was about to engage with the effigy of Marged the cook, with Gwirion offering to provide the sound and even giving a spirited demonstration. For over two hours, nobody touched each other, removed any article of clothing, or even made much eye contact, but Gwirion had roused as much flirtatious mirth as was usually reserved for the Spring Rites of May Day. It was an antidote to the weather, the winter, and the threat of war. Give us this every day and I can endure anything, Noble thought gratefully.
The hilarity might well have lasted into the afternoon if Noble had not decided to try coaxing his wife into participating with him. There was no problem with her enthusiasm—she agreed to it, and the crowd cheered and applauded her as she crossed, blushing slightly, over to her small effigy. The moment she was beside it, however, her face changed from pink to purple and she was instantly enraged. She grabbed at the fake rosary hanging from the figure’s belt and snatched it away so hard the belt broke.
It wasn’t fake.
“Gwirion!” she nearly screamed. “This is my rosary!”
Gwirion, who had almost succeeded in getting the buxom hall servant to have a go with the falconer, glanced over his shoulder and called back pleasantly, “Of course it is, that’s why I put it on you.”
“You had no right to take this!” she shouted. People in the path between them stepped away—this was not hysteria or whining, it was righteous wrath. She held up the chain and shook it in her fist. “You know what this means to me. And this.” She held up the cross, her hands shaking, and spoke very slowly and clearly. “This is the relic of a saint. You know that.”
The courtyard was instantly silent and all eyes turned to Gwirion. With a quick nod he excused himself from the black-haired girl and walked to the royal couple. Even Noble looked slightly cowed by her announcement.
Her eyes blazing, she pushed the cross out toward Gwirion, daring him to further insult it. He took the rosary from her politely and examined the crucifix. “But you see, it’s just an English saint,” he declared dismissively, and handed it back to her.
Nobody laughed. People stood silent, ruddy cheeked, suddenly noticing that their boots were leaking in the slush. Gwirion looked to Noble for support; the king shook his head slightly. “What does this mean, then?” Gwirion said, raising his voice to address the crowd. “I’m allowed to mock the men who persecute us, but not the church that justifies their doing it? What hypocrisy!” There was an uneasy shifting of legs and exchange of glances, but still nobody spoke. “Oh, for the love of ale!” Gwirion said, laughing. “It’s a strand of hair! It was probably cut off some leprosed peasant who died on the side of the road near the shrine. If half the relics out there are real, the saints were all eight feet tall with sixteen legs and triple rows of teeth.” The silence grew even more absolute. He had never in his life so utterly misjudged his audience. He tried to think of some way to bow out gracefully and decided that it had to be at her expense. “Surely you can afford to buy another one, if that one’s been desanctified,” he suggested sarcastically, and addressed the crowd again: “You do understand that’s why she has it, don’t you? It was a purse that earned her that little tidbit, not merit. Just a purse, and probably Mortimer’s at that. But go ahead, please, be incensed on Uncle Roger’s account.”
It didn’t get the response he’d hoped for, but there were finally mutterings that sounded more questioning than damning. She looked like she truly would have killed him if she could. “You stole something of mine,” she said, quickly shifting the emphasis away from her family.
“No, I stole several somethings,” Gwirion corrected with forced cheeriness, and lifting up the makeshift crown, he pulled the wimple off the effigy. “Here, you can have this back too. Would you like me to strip her for you? Or shall we ask the king to do it, he has much more experience than I do. In fact maybe he should strip them all!” Finally there was a very slight ripple of chuckling around the yard.
She was unappeased, and all the angrier for not being able to chastise him with the bluntness this deserved. “Adèle made that rosary for me. It’s the most cherished object I possess.”
“I didn’t damage it, milady,” Gwirion said, trying to avoid being cornered into defensiveness or worse yet, apology. “I didn’t even disrespect it. I had it hanging from your belt like it ought to be—believe me, there’s a dozen other more creative places I could have set it! Shall I list them for you?” She stared at him, saying nothing, and nervousness began to dictate his behavior. “And there’s a dozen other things I could have done with it,” he babbled. “For example, I could demonstrate its essential Englishness and my essential Welshness by flogging myself with it, like this!” And he reached out to take it from her grasp. She snatched her hand away but not before his finger had caught a loop of the chain, and the length of the rosary was stretched taut between them. He didn’t want to be accused of stealing it again and she did not want the chain to break under tension; they both released it at the same moment and the rosary plummeted. The clear glass crystal that encased the relic in the center of the cross struck the stone paving of the courtyard first, and struck it hard.
Isabel said nothing, which was the harshest possible condemnation. She knelt at once without looking at him and picked up the crucifix, wiping the slush and dirt away on the yellow woolen robe, almost too horrified to speak. Reflexively, Gwirion got to his knees to help her, but she pushed him away, so abruptly and angrily he toppled into the slush. “Leave me alone,” she said in an icy voice. “Go away. You’ve done enough damage.” She clasped the rosary and crucifix against her chest and stood, then walked out of the courtyard without another word or glance at anyone. Everyone watched her go in silence.
The king found her in her solar, fuming, the rosary and crucifix drying near the hearth. The crystal hadn’t shattered, but it was scratched. “Do not even try to defend him,” she blurted out in lieu of greeting. “Even without the relic, even if there was only the fact that Adèle made it for me and he knows that—”
“I agree,” Noble said quietly. “I’m making no excuses.” She shut her mouth, disarmed. “I came up here to see how you were faring, nothing more.” He gave her an affectionate look. In the warm light of the fire, his broad face looked paternal. “We all forgot breakfast entirely this morning, but dinner will be ready soon.”
“I don’t want to see him,” she said.
Noble pursed his lips. “I assume you are not asking to eat in your chamber.”
Instead of answering she peered through a rip in the sealed parchment covering the window, tried to make out the different hilltops an inch at a time. “Very well,” Noble said. “I’ll tell him to take dinner in the kitchen.”
“And supper,” she added at once, her eyes still on the abbreviated landscape.
“This will not be a return to the hostilities of last year,” he announced firmly. “I don’t have time to relive such nonsense now. I require the two of you to be civil to each other.”
“Tell him that,” she snapped, forcing herself to be fascinated by the little she could see out of the window.
She did not call for Gwirion that night and relished, for the first time, the power she had in their affair: He could not come to her unbidden.
GWIRION tried the next morning, after mass, to apologize. She requested him to do so formally, in front of the king and court as they broke fast, and he agreed even to this humiliation, even knowing that for the first time, perhaps ever, he was not the congregation’s secret darling. He stood before the high table where the royal couple sat, feeling rows of diners’ eyes on the back of his head, self-consciously penitent in stance. “What exactly are you apologizing for?” she asked sharply, when his two-word declaration—“I apologize”—was over.
“Whatever you want me to regret,” he said after a moment. It was an honest response; he had no other answer.
“What do you regret?” she demanded severely from her chair. He reviewed the whole event mentally as king and queen waited, watching him expectantly, and finally he answered, “I regret that I released the rosary. Then it wouldn’t have fallen and gotten scratched. That’s the only real harm that was done—and we’re equally responsible for it,” he pointed out reasonably, adding in an exaggeratedly indulgent tone, “but if you’ll apologize for your part in the mishap, I’ll certainly apologize for mine.” This got no reaction from the hall. But Noble was making a steeple with his fingers before his lips, his signature of suppressed laughter, and Gwirion knew he was amusing the only one who mattered. He relaxed a little, reassured. There was no harm done, then—in fact, a public falling out like this, suggesting things were somehow as they’d always been between them, was strategically savvy, although he was glad it was over now and things could go back to normal. After only one night apart, he missed the feel of her hair between his fingers.
She gave him a disgusted look. “I accept your apology,” she said coldly. “And when you figure out what you should really be apologizing for, I’ll accept that as well. Until then, please refrain from placing yourself unduly in my presence.”
FOR three days she ignored him. He did not dare approach her, even given a chance to. But he ached with missing the smooth warmth of her skin, would have been content even catching a hint of her scent at the hearthside. And yet the young hall maid seemed more attractive every hour. He found his own fickleness oddly reassuring, proof that it was only flesh he missed, and flesh could come from other sources. Hall maids, for example.
Isabel was glad he’d reminded her of just how callow he was, for she’d been teetering on the edge of real attachment, and this had helped her to collect herself. She was grateful for the affair, it had brought her pleasure and a sense of power, but Noble seemed wholeheartedly devoted to promoting her adoration and contentment now, and deserved the whole of her in kind. Gwirion would be her lover only on the physical level, and as physical levels went, what Noble offered was easily superior in both form and technique. So there was no profit to an intimate reconciliation. It was not guilt or even loyalty that prompted her decision; it was simply pragmatism. Let Gwirion find himself a woman better suited to him, she thought, and when each was confident that the other was independently content, perhaps a treasonless friendship could mature between them. It would be a graceful and sensible resolution to an otherwise impossible scenario.
WHEN his wife had first become seized by insomnia and insisted on retiring to her own bed each night, he realized he missed feeling a feminine body asleep beside him. He had seldom kept a woman in his bed after lovemaking prior to his marriage, and was surprised to find that he had developed an attachment to it; he was not surprised to find, however, that he had no attachment whatsoever to the feminine body actually belonging to his wife.
There was a young woman who had caught his eye weeks earlier. She was black-haired, with the curves and generally wild look that he liked so much, but a sweet, almost childlike face. He asked Gwirion about her and learned that she was new to Cymaron, that she was orphaned but well past the age of consent, with a younger sister who like her worked in the hall. One night shortly after Gwirion’s wan apology to Isabel, Noble saw the girl standing with a group of others, mostly Marged’s assistants, listening to Gwirion play. When he had finished the tune, the king called him over. The rest of the clique broke up to return to their chores, but the black-haired girl, curious, followed Gwirion’s path of travel with her eyes. Servant and queen both watched the two men in whispered conversation. Noble’s gesture, and Gwirion’s eyes following after, left no doubt who the subject of the conversation was. The girl, her face wide-eyed but unreadable, darted out of sight into the kitchen. Isabel felt a stab of jealous anger in her gut as she realized Noble was openly setting up a tryst; it mocked her assumption that they were working toward at least the appearance of adoring monogamy. Perhaps I misunderstood, she decided with a dismissive mental shrug. Perhaps the girl is simply meant for Gwirion.
Suddenly she couldn’t breathe.
AFTER supper Isabel excused herself to the chapel and sat for a long time in the light of a single votive, the rosary on her lap and her eyes fixed above the altar, staggered by the unwelcome enlightenment about the state of her own heart.
Back in the hall, she found Gwirion in his usual loitering spot by the kitchen screens, cleaning his teeth with a hazel twig. He made to walk away at her approach, but she signaled him to stay. Being close to him again made her palms clammy. It took her a moment to corral her thoughts into words.
“That Christian spirit you find so contemptible is coming to your aid,” she finally whispered. “The moon is far from full tonight, so people will be sleeping soundly. Except perhaps for me.”
He was surprised. “You don’t think I’m beyond redemption?”
“Oh, you might be,” she answered, still whispering. “But that’s not for me to judge.” She crossed her arms awkwardly. It made her look, as certain gestures did, like a little girl playing at adulthood. “I know you felt you had to do that, and I forgive you, Gwirion, but you must understand something. I don’t think you realize just what an insult you committed that morning.” He decided it would be best not to comment on this. “What you mocked was the very part of me that is choosing to forgive the mockery. You may find devotion absurd, but if I were not devout, I would not be speaking to you now—or ever.”
“I don’t believe that,” Gwirion said quickly. “I’m not devout but I’d forgive you nearly anything.” And then he was quiet, looking almost embarrassed.
“Then you’re a better Christian than you realize.” A pause, as he graciously refrained from mocking her for saying this. “I know that nothing is safe from your derision, least of all me. I don’t care, give him what he wants. But I do ask that you hesitate, at least, before you mock my piety again.”
He grimaced for a moment, chewing on the hazel twig. “I’ll do that for you, not for your piety. Good evening, sire,” he went on brightly in a louder voice, his eyes widening, and she jumped as Noble’s hands squeezed her shoulders from above. She whirled around to find him grinning at her.
“I see there’s some progress being made here. Excellent. Life is much easier for the entire castle, frankly, when the two of you are not at odds. Is the battle over?” Both nodded, slightly sheepishly. “Who took the honors?”
They exchanged glances. “She did,” Gwirion conceded.
“That’s fine,” her husband hummed. “As long as you don’t rub off on him.” The king nudged her toward the door. “I’ll be up in a few moments, go and warm the bed for us.”
She nodded, said good night to Gwirion politely, and left the hall. Noble turned his hypnotic gaze on his friend. “Thank you,” he whispered, squeezed Gwirion’s shoulder, and exited after his wife.
AN hour later, as the castle was settling in to sleep, Gwirion received two summonses at once—to play the harp for the queen, and to play the pander for the king. Grudgingly he took up his old vocation of royal procurer, a job he had once approached with a certain amusement and, if nothing else, vicarious pleasure. Now it felt seedy, even shameful—and annoying at the same time, for it was the young woman he had very nearly asked the king to give him as a mistress. He found her lying on a pile of rushes and meadowsweet not far from the hall fire. When asked, she said her name was Nest, and she seemed not only prepared to follow him upstairs, but, in fact, quite pleased about it. As they traveled through the night-fogged courtyard, he was close enough to her to catch her scent, the kind of sweet muskiness that would have excited any man; Noble’s taste was impeccable. He led her up the outside stairs to the king’s chamber, pausing at the door with a nod to the bored and smirking Gethin. “Here we are,” Gwirion said, and she laughed with nervous pleasure. He gently nudged her through the door and closed it behind her.
In his bedchamber, Noble lounged propped up on one elbow near the fire, throwing a few sticks into the hearth to keep the new flames hot. He heard brief, excited laughter outside, and smiled. Then the door opened and he saw the girl enter. Somebody pulled the door shut and after a moment, realizing she’d been left here, she turned and faced the king. Her eyes went very round as she saw who her companion was. She looked confused for a moment, then nervously dropped into a curtsy.
“You don’t need to do that in here,” Noble said expansively. “Come sit by me.”
Her jaw went slack and she gave him a stupid, stunned look. “Your…Your Majesty has called me?”
“That surprises you? You came willingly along, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sire. I didn’t realize this was your room, sire, I’ve never been upstairs before.”
“Whose room did you think it was, then?”
She swallowed uncomfortably, radiating embarrassment. “I thought the room was unoccupied, sire.”
For a moment he was confused by this answer, then understanding, he lay back on the floor and shook with laughter. “That’s brilliant!” he crowed. “You, my dear, are a godsend.”
HER women were asleep by the time Gwirion arrived and he did not even bother with the pretense of playing the harp. They were impatient to touch after days of separation; he had just undressed and they were running their hands along each other’s bodies with breathless awe as if it were for the first time. A moment later and he might have been too absorbed in her warmth, but he was still alert enough to realize that it was the king who was whistling “Rhiannon’s Tears” as he descended from the wall walk. In barely a second Gwirion had blown out the candle, scrambled out of her bed and into the shadows near his harp. She barely had time to register what he was doing before he leapt back, pulled the bed curtains closer together and disappeared again into the shadow to frantically pull his tunic on.
“Noble!” Isabel managed to sound normal as her husband abruptly flung open the door and entered.
“I have extraordinary news,” the king announced cheerfully, throwing open the bed curtains and placing his candle lantern on the side chest. His cheeks were flushed from the cold and he slid his chilly hands under the covers, pressed them against her warm abdomen.
She shrank away from his hands and gestured at the tapestry that shielded the sewing bevy. “Be quiet, you’ll wake them,” she shushed.
“I don’t mind if they overhear,” he said as Gwirion emerged, miraculously dressed. “I thought you’d both enjoy hearing that my evening’s assignation failed utterly.”
“What a pity,” the queen said sardonically, although at this moment she hardly cared. “Why?”
“Because the girl thinks she’s in love with Gwirion.” Noble laughed.
Gwirion was astounded. “But she seemed eager to go to your room—”
“She didn’t know it was my room. She thought it was some special bower you were taking her to for your own devious purposes. She was so adorably earnest that I decided to reward her for it. So she’s waiting in your room downstairs—I promised her you’d be right down.”
The two of them started violently in the darkness, and Gwirion felt a weight lift from his chest. This was the perfect solution for him, the perfect out, and he knew she knew that because when he risked a glance at her, he saw on her face exactly the look he had wanted never to see there: fear. Anything else he could have managed—derision, amusement, sulking, even jealousy or anger. But the vulnerable look that begged him not to wasn’t something he was equal to. The alternative he wanted—the safe, relatively moral, and very delectable alternative to the worst kind of adultery—was dangling within reach and the only thing keeping him from grabbing it was that look on her face. As if reading his mind, she caught herself and turned her head away, forcing her expression into a neutral mask.
“Thank you, sire,” Gwirion finally managed to stammer. “Did you mean…now?”
“Of course now,” Noble said, laughing at him. “Now and later too. I think it’s an excellent long-term proposition. Go on, then. She’s practically edible.”
“Thank you, sire,” Gwirion said again stupidly, but his legs were unwilling to move. Inexplicably he felt compelled to take her emotions into account—an alien, confusing impulse. He resented her for it but the resentment did nothing to dull his disorienting sense of duty to her.
She read his mind and forced the hardest sentence of her life out of her mouth. “Go on, then, Gwirion,” she said, managing to sound like a teasing older sister. “The night’s not getting any younger.”
Noble chortled. He nudged her, grinning, incredibly pleased with himself. “He’s stunned by his good luck.” He turned back to Gwirion. “Go on.” He wafted his hand in a grand wave of mock imperiousness. “You are dismissed,” he intoned, sitting on the edge of Isabel’s bed and loosening the tongue of his drawers belt. “My wife and I will celebrate your good fortune on our own.”
With a terse good night to both of them, Gwirion collected the harp and left the room awkwardly. He was angry, and mostly he was angry with her. What she’d said to cover herself didn’t count. He’d seen her expression, her one unguarded moment. Earlier in the evening she had been with the king, and he was being sent away so that they could be together again and she’d dared to give him that look?
He left the harp in the hall, and paused outside the opening to his own little room. There was a slight rustle within and his heart almost stopped. “Sir?” Nest’s voice whispered from beyond the opening, and suddenly he remembered how good she’d smelled. He closed his eyes in the darkened kitchen, and rested his head against the stone wall a moment. Finally, with a heavy sigh, he knelt down and crawled into the space.
“Good evening, Nest,” he said quietly, and reached for her hand.
THE next morning in chapel, Isabel prayed in vain to be released from the torment that had kept her awake, a fever of emotions she knew she was not the least entitled to. He was being paired off with a mistress who would be free to show him tender affection every day, in ways both casual and intimate. In front of other people. That would be seductive. Over time, Nest would win him away from her by offering him what the queen was not allowed to. Her envy of Enid paled by comparison.
At board, her angst was only worsened by a sharp slap of guilt when she saw her husband’s face, as he was brooding over messengered dispatches he’d asked to read before breakfast. While she was nearly falling apart over the petty luxury of personal emotions, he was struggling to keep the state intact. Absurdly, she envied him the burden. He gave her a weak smile when she sat beside him and gestured to the scrolls he’d been perusing. “As usual. Llewelyn is doing things he said he wouldn’t and Mortimer is not doing things he said he would,” he said, sounding tired. “While Anarawd is querying his neighbors on the royal bed’s fecundity.” Then his eyes flickered to something behind her and his face brightened a little. “And speaking of fecundity, here is Cymaron’s newest stud!” Gwirion had approached the table, and without a word or look of greeting, settled quietly upon his stool. Noble gave him a lecherous wink. “Entertain us with tales of your nocturnal exploits, then, you little satyr. I’m taking my wife back to bed immediately after breakfast, so you may be quite explicit.”
Gwirion’s face went very red and he looked into his lap. “I…don’t think that would be gentlemanly of me, sire.”
“When have you ever been gentlemanly?” Noble snorted, and his eyes were once against drawn to something behind his wife’s head. Nest had just entered the hall, as unreadable as Gwirion, skimming the sides of the room cleaning up after the servants and guards who had slept here. “Never mind,” Noble announced smugly. “I’ll go straight to the source.” He rose and ambled over to the girl. Isabel and Gwirion avoided looking at each other. While the chaplain intoned his usual Latinate thanksgiving, she watched the king approach Nest and speak to her for a moment. He patted the girl’s arm with a parental joviality.
But after he’d left her and returned to the table, he paused and looked appraisingly at Gwirion. Gwirion tried to ignore the gaze and then realized it was going to continue indefinitely if he didn’t acknowledge it, so he finally looked up. Their eyes locked and they maintained the silence for another moment.
“You really are a fool,” Noble said. He was annoyed. Gwirion simply shrugged. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Isabel relax and close her eyes in gratitude for a moment. She who willingly spread her knees to another man every evening was tormented by the thought of his being with another lover even once. He almost wished he had taken the girl after all, just to give Her Royal Majesty a taste of what he went through each evening.
THAT night when she called him, Gwirion almost sent back the message that he was busy with his stud duties by order of the king. But he couldn’t bring himself to refuse her. He retrieved his harp from its chest in the hall, his gaze lingering briefly on Nest’s sleeping form curled near the hearth.
He stopped. Even if Noble did not suspect them, even if he never came to suspect them, what had happened last night would be only the first of interminable irritations.
He turned to Llwyd and whispered, “Please apologize to Her Majesty, but I’m unable to attend to her, I’ve other commitments.”
Her doorkeeper was confused by the obvious lie, but nodded and headed back for the stairs as Gwirion, trying to breathe calmly, watched him. There. That simply, it was over. He started back to his stone warren, imagining her as she imagined him taking Nest. For one dazzling moment this gave him extraordinary, vengeful satisfaction and then he was disgusted with himself.
And he had not, after all, actually fantasized about taking Nest this time—only about Isabel fearing it. He cursed softly to himself, understanding what the difference meant.
Clutching his harp under his arm, he turned back toward the stairs. Nest, as he passed her, slept peacefully. He intercepted Llwyd just before he reached the balcony and mumbled an excuse to go in.
He sat himself near her bed and began to play without greeting her, and played for nearly half an hour in the sad Irish tuning that he knew she liked. Then he silenced the strings and rested the harp on the dried meadowsweet that fragranced and padded the floor.
He waited for her to tug the bed drapes apart and gesture for him, as she always did, but there was no movement from within. After a long moment, he tentatively opened the curtains himself, unused to taking the initiative.
She was sitting up on the far side of the bed in her shift. She made no movement toward him as he crawled in; he left the curtain open behind him for the candlelight to come in. She looked anxious.
“Why didn’t you?” she whispered.
“Isn’t it enough that I didn’t?” he whispered back.
She shook her head. “If I didn’t care why you didn’t, I probably wouldn’t care if you did it at all. I want to know…” She hesitated. “I need to know how I figured into your decision.” She shrugged self-deprecatingly. “If I figured into your decision.”
He looked at her unspeaking for a long moment in the obstructed candlelight. “You are my decision,” he finally said.
Her breath caught. She had so hoped for that answer and so doubted it would come. She held her palm out toward him and he met it with his own. His large eyes in the muted candlelight made him look almost childlike.
“I thought it was a trap,” he said, sheepish.
“So did I.”
“But then I realized it couldn’t be.”
“How can you say that? Wasn’t it strange, when he came in here last night? As if he was being deliberately naive.”
Gwirion shook his head. “He knew you were sleepless, so he expected that I’d be up here, there’s nothing odd in that. And you covered beautifully when you told me to go downstairs.”
“The whole thing just felt…too pat, somehow. Like a well-planned game.”
He shook his head again, this time sympathetically. “Noble’s always playing games, it’s second nature to him. You’d drive yourself to distraction trying to track every one he plays.”
“What if he suspects, and he’s setting us up to get caught?”
“He could have caught us last night. If I hadn’t heard him whistling—”
“Exactly!” she hissed, hating that they had to whisper. “He was whistling!”
“Which he would not have been doing if he was trying to catch us at something,” Gwirion said reassuringly, interlacing his fingers with hers. “I’m far more attuned to him than you are, why are you so nervous?”
She sighed. “He says things sometimes, gives me funny looks, that make me think he knows.”
“He would have done something already.”
“No, he wouldn’t, he needs me now.”
“Noble doesn’t need anyone,” Gwirion said, almost dismissively. “If he wants something, he always finds alternatives. He would never subject himself to wearing horns because you’d somehow become indispensable to him—nobody is ever indispensable to him.”
“We have to be more careful,” she said with vague stubbornness.
He grimaced. “Should I come to you less often?”
“No!” She crawled over to him and leaned against him. This was the longest conversation they’d had by far since their first tryst in this room, and its timbre bothered her. She cuddled into his arms, pressed against the body that she feared she now knew better than the person. “It isn’t fair,” she sighed. “It’s so simple for him to tryst.”
He hesitated. “This is much more dangerous than his liaisons. You know that.”
“But I’m damaged,” she said bitterly. “Even if he suspects my fidelity, he knows I can’t conceive a bastard.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” Gwirion said. After a self-conscious pause he added, “I meant he doesn’t fall in love.”
That night they lay together for hours, holding each other.