Chapter Fourteen

Winter 502

Arthur was alone when I found him upon my return to Camelot. I needed to see him, but I was not yet ready to face Morgan. He was sitting in the circular meeting room overlooking the city and staring out the window. He appeared so deep in thought he did not hear me enter.

“Arthur.”

It took him a moment to respond, and when he did, he was like one waking from a dream. Slowly, he turned, and a smile like dawn broke on his face. He stood, hurrying to embrace me.

This was the reception I had expected and so badly needed when I first returned to him in Cadbury. I let myself melt into his arms, remembering how safe and secure I had felt there before everything changed. I would not think of Morgan, only of him. Repair my relationship with my husband first, then worry about her.

“Guinevere.” He breathed my name the way he had on our wedding night. “It is so good to have you back.”

He held me at arm’s length, looking me over as though searching for any outward signs I had changed, for anything that might still betoken the crazed woman who had entered his court six moons earlier. My bruises, cuts, and broken bones had healed of course, but if he could have seen within my heart, he would have beheld the interweaving scars and stitches threatening to burst at the slightest tug. Arthur gestured for me to sit with him, which I did, unsure of how to speak with him now.

“Lancelot has told me everything. You need not ever speak of it. If that bastard who hurt you wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him myself.” He clenched his fist in frustration that he could not avenge me. Then he asked, “How are you?” His sapphire eyes were full of concern.

I dropped my eyes to my lap. “I am better. Thank you. It is . . . strange . . . being back here again with everything so different.” I looked at him, wondering if he would acknowledge the living ghost who would forever haunt our love.

“Guinevere,” he whispered, shaking his head. “I owe you so much, an explanation words cannot begin to express.” He looked down, unable to meet my gaze.

“Why, Arthur? Can we start there?”

When he finally met my gaze, his eyes were shining with unshed tears. “I thought you were dead. No one could find you. We searched everywhere—every fortress, every cave, every seaport—and there was not even a trace. I had my suspicions your disappearance was somehow linked to Malegant—”

I flinched at his name.

“But we couldn’t find him, much less connect him to a crime we couldn’t prove had been committed. There were whispers you could have abandoned me for another man, gone back to Avalon, or worse, taken your own life.”

I gaped at the foolishness of those ideas, and Arthur put a hand on mine.

“You must believe I paid no heed to any of this. But I will not lie to you. As time went on, my hope dimmed. Then those in my council began to speak of remarriage. I didn’t think it right, but even the priests said that given the circumstances, God would understand if I wed another.”

I was silent for a moment, wondering when Arthur, a devotee of Mithras, had started listening to Christian priests. “What now then? Surely you will not stay married to both of us?” I laced my hands together in my lap to conceal their shaking.

Arthur would not meet my eyes. “Many others have already asked me the same, and Morgan has requested I divorce you. But I will not do it. You are queen. That is an honor that cannot be conferred onto more than one woman at a time, and you have done nothing to cause me to revoke it. The people would be outraged if I put you away.”

“Oh, I’m glad to know the people would be upset because you certainly don’t look as though you would be.”

Arthur shot me a contemptuous look.

I couldn’t fight my frustration any longer. “Why can you not divorce her? Why must it be me? After all, as you pointed out, I was married to you first, and I am queen.” I sounded like a petulant child, but I didn’t care. He had to understand how ridiculous this whole situation was.

“Morgan has brought me a son, a child I never expected. I cannot ignore that.”

Pain twisted my heart. Yet again I was being condemned because my children had died and I could bear no more despite my best efforts to encourage life within my womb. Would I ever escape that horrid curse? I swallowed hard, summoning the courage to ask a question I had to voice yet dreaded hearing the answer. “Forget everyone else. What does your heart tell you?”

Arthur’s gaze pierced my very soul. “I love you both. I know it isn’t what you want to hear, but it is the truth. When I met Morgan in Avalon, she was the Goddess, and I never thought to see her again. I had almost forgotten her when she appeared in camp and told me she had given up everything to be with me. From that moment on, I was hers.”

Arthur stood and made a slow circuit of the room as he spoke. “If Uther hadn’t died, if I had remained simply Lord Ector’s son, we would have wed—and quite happily. No one looks into the lineage of a soldier’s wife. But then I found out I was no mere solider but the son of the high king, and everything changed. From being free to marry her, I was now forbidden—all because she couldn’t tell me the names of her kin.” He shook his head. “It tore my heart in two to know we would never be together.”

He stopped in front of me and bent so we were at eye level. “Now, as things have changed and I am free to be with the one I love, I understand what I did to you when I asked you to marry me, that I put you in much the same tragic circumstance, and for that I am sorry. I would not wish such agony on a Saxon.”

I smiled at him because it was the right thing, the polite thing, to do, but I was certain it didn’t reach my eyes.

“I couldn’t leave Morgan to the wiles of fate, so when Uriens expressed interest in her, I realized his would be a safe household for her to be in, one where I could be sure she would not be ill-treated.”

“And one that afforded her frequent visits to court.”

“Yes, that too.” Arthur sounded guilty.

“So where does that leave us?”

Arthur did not answer. Whether he had none or simply chose not to respond, his silence unnerved me more than if he had yelled. The familiar panic I had felt since leaving Malegant’s tower was returning, coiling around my heart. If it squeezed tight, I would lose my composure again.

I stood, seeking air at one of the windows. My eyes fell on the statues surrounding us. In my absence, the stone images depicting Arthur and me as high king and high queen had been installed. “Will she have her own statue too? What a great legacy for future generations. ‘Look at King Arthur and his brood of wives,’ they’ll say. ‘He really must have been someone grand.’”

Arthur stood too. “Guinevere, please don’t be this way.”

“What way is that? Hurt? Outraged? Indignant? How would you have me react?” I ran a fluttering hand through my hair. “Think about how you would have felt if the situation were reversed. What if you had been captured in war with the Saxons, brutally abused, then managed to escape only to return home to find me married to Aggrivane?”

Arthur’s jaw tensed, but he said nothing.

“That is how I felt seeing you with Morgan. What’s worse is she has given you the one thing I never will—a son. And she can continue providing you heirs. So as much as you may contend that I am and always will be queen, I know she means more to you for that alone.”

Arthur seized my shoulders hard. “You are my wife, and I still love you. But Morgan is my wife too, and I love her as well. This is how things are. Unless you wish to divorce me and forfeit your power as queen, you will both have to find a way to accept it.” There was no malice in his words, just the starkness of truth.

So this was my new world. Little more than a year ago, we had been celebrating Arthur’s latest victory over the Saxons. We had been happy. Now I had to share my life—though it was not of my own choosing, I had fought so hard to build and sustain this life—with the one person I hated more than all others. When would the Goddess stop testing me?

Living with Morgan meant more than simply vying for Arthur’s attention. The servants, especially the newer ones, had grown used to answering to Morgan while I was away, and they were uncertain which one of us now held sway. Some made their loyalty clear. Octavia and Sobian, who was still acting the role of my maid, would never take orders from Morgan again, while another small cadre of women were devoted to Morgan. Though their words showed they understood I was queen, their actions proclaimed Morgan their mistress. When we appealed to Arthur, each wishing to have him side with us, he held up his hands and told us to work it out without him, locking us in his study until we came to an agreement.

Glaring at one another across the table, we tried to find a compromise.

Morgan was quick to try to preserve her newfound power. “I have been running this household for more than a year, Guinevere. Why can you not simply let things be?”

I snorted, pacing the length of the small room. “Would you have allowed me to walk into your home with Uriens and take over without a fight? I think not. You have little experience in running a house this large. I have been doing so for five years.”

“Four. You were away for the last year, remember?” She arched an eyebrow and took on an imperious tone. “Your time is mostly spent in matters of judgment and diplomacy. The best you can hope for is to employ talented stewards and maids to oversee things for you. You should leave the household matters to me. I have the time to personally oversee such things.”

I settled myself on the corner of the table and looked down my nose at her. “What then do you propose would be my duties?”

“Besides being a thorn in my side?”

“I could say the same about you.”

“You would oversee your own personal maids, of course,” Morgan drawled as though she were doing me a favor. She was quiet for a moment, then she sat up as though she had an idea. “You could handle the guests and their servants as well.”

Though I was not happy with that being my only area of power among our hundreds of servants, Morgan was trying, and she had a point about the time I spent with Arthur in my role as queen. “Fine, let’s start there.”

By spring, however, it became apparent that while Morgan was excellent at getting the servants to do as she pleased and ensuring the quality of their work, she was ill-equipped for the record-keeping and handling of finances that came with being in charge of so many people, especially on a feasting schedule as unpredictable as Camelot’s. So we found ourselves back in that same small room negotiating our duties once again.

“Camelot will be broke before the end of summer with you running things.” I glanced over a list of supplies and costs for the previous month the head kitchen maid had provided to me. “Though I daresay the merchants will miss you. Who pays this much for oysters? We live on a bay. They should be nearly free, especially to the king. And where are you importing our wine from—Rome? This bill is unacceptable. Gaul gives us a much better rate, and the product is fresh, unlike the bottle of vinegar we served to the Breton ambassador last week.”

“You wish to be in charge of the finances? Take them.” Morgan spat the words but was unable to completely mask the relief in her voice. “But then let me oversee provisions for our guests. At the moment, their poor maids know not who to listen to for you tell them one thing while I have trained our staff for another, so they get mixed messages. Lady Ettarre has written Arthur to express how shocked she was at the incompetence of our maids.” She leveled me with an icy stare. “It’s almost as though you are trying to make me look bad.”

I rubbed my tired eyes then glared at her. “Yes, Morgan, you’ve found me out. Are you happy?” I snapped, voice heavily laced with sarcasm. “Do what you like. I have much bigger problems than whether or not Lord Pelles’s wife is happy with the way her servants behave while they are here. The Saxons are threatening Bernicia and the Midlands again. Arthur is preparing for battles on both fronts. When will this war be over?” I sighed.

Our domestic squabbles at an end, at least for now—I had no doubt Morgan would continue to push the boundaries of her power as royal wife—I fell into bed, much in need of the surety I could find only in Arthur’s arms. He held me for a while, but when he thought I was asleep, he carefully untangled himself from my arms and rose.

He was headed for Morgan’s room—that was certain. I didn’t bother to try to stop him. He had been playing this game for months now, sometimes even returning to our bed before dawn in the hopes I would think he’d never left. Did the fool really believe I couldn’t feel the bed shift when relieved of his weight or hear the creak of the door when he returned?

When I’d first returned, Arthur patiently waited as I found my way back into his arms after Malegant’s brutality. For a while, I’d believed I might serve as his wife in every way again. Once we were sharing a bed, it was as though nothing had changed. During those blessed weeks, under the cover of darkness, I was able to convince myself Morgan didn’t exist. But then I woke in the middle of the night to find Arthur gone. That was when my ears became attuned to the signs of his departure.

Arthur still spent some nights with me, though they were decreasing steadily in number. I wondered if there was any logic to his choice of companion for the night or if he simply decided on a whim.

One night, I worked up the courage to question him about it. “Tell me, husband, how do you decide between me and Morgan each evening? It must be nice having your choice of women.” Admittedly, that wasn’t the kindest way of asking, but I wanted him to know I felt slighted by his actions.

Arthur paused in the middle of removing his tunic. For a long moment, he looked at me as though I was daft. “How can you ask me such a thing? It is my duty to act as husband to both of you.” He stood and headed for the door. A few paces from it, he looked back over his shoulder. “You are fortunate I respect you, Guinevere. Most men would have beaten you for even inquiring.”

So there it was. Our marriage had deteriorated to the point where my husband wanted to hit me for questioning his motives. That was a far cry from the affection and honesty of our early years together. I had gained nothing by my curiosity. In fact, I had practically driven him into Morgan’s arms. Now I would never know his reasons. Maybe Morgan didn’t ask such questions. Maybe she didn’t challenge him at all. Whatever the truth, it was clear she had found a way to satisfy him that I would never match.