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As the door closed behind her, leaving her holding a candle in the dark passageway, she closed her eyes and leaned close to the flickering light. She whispered her name directly into the flame.
And then she blew it out.
The spider dies on the windowsill.
The centipede withers, legs twitching in agony, at the space between door and stone floor.
A dozen other things that creep and crawl and skitter try and fail to visit Arthur that night. None intends harm, so the magical bonds are not broken and no one is alerted to the dark queen’s attempt. But those same magical bonds mean that the queen cannot see.
Not seeing, however, is just as telling as seeing.
The usurper king has a new wizard. Merlin is gone, but still has his claws in the kingdom. She calls back her legions that have not yet perished. There will be other times to see. Other ways to spy. She has hands and eyes in Camelot yet. Let the king and this wizard sleep.
She is the earth, the rocks, the forest. She is patient.
She plucks the life from a hundred spiders in a twitch of anger.
Perhaps not too patient.
The problem with being a lady was that a lady had a lady’s maid, and a lady’s maid never left.
Brangien had been sleeping on a cot in the corner when Guinevere crept from the passageway into her own bedroom. If Brangien was startled to wake up in the morning and find Guinevere, she did not show it. She bustled about, drawing curtains and tidying. There were windows along only one side of the room. The back wall was against the secret passage, which itself was against the rock of the mountain. The way the castle clung to the cliff was unnerving to Guinevere. There was so little between her and falling. And the lake lurked, waiting beneath to swallow her whole.
No wonder Merlin had never described Camelot to her. He had filled her instead with stories of Arthur. His goodness, his bravery, his goals. If she had been aware of the particular geography of the place, she might not have agreed to come.
Come to think of it, she had never explicitly agreed to come, because he had not asked. He had told her the threat was imminent and whisked her to the convent. That was his way, though. For all she knew, ten years in the future he would sit down and explain the whole thing to her, including what the threat was, how she was to fight it, and why it had to be she, and she alone.
After she had already done it.
She tried to have compassion for him. It was like he lived every moment of his life all at once, his mind slipping through time. Which meant that he knew things were coming before they happened, but it also meant that he had a hard time landing on what needed to be said or done at any given time.
And it made her own life very frustrating. Nothing to be done for it, though, but to get to work.
She stood and stretched. The bed, at least, was comfortable. It seemed new compared to Arthur’s. The coverlets were dyed deepest blue. The ropes across the bed frame tight enough that they did not so much as creak when she moved. And the mattress was softer than yellow-green tufts of new spring grass. The bed at the convent had been a straw mattress, itchy and lumpy. And her bed at home had been…She could only picture it, not remember sleeping in it. It felt like a lifetime ago. She had only the memory of dreams, which was fitting for a home shared with a wizard.
Cloth draped over the four posters of the bed could be drawn closed like curtains at a window, sealing her in to sleep. She had not done that the night before. She did not like the idea of being confined in her dreams.
In addition to the bed, there were several chests in the room, sent ahead by the convent. They were the real Guinevere’s. She wondered what was inside them. It felt wrong to open them, but she had already claimed Guinevere’s name. How much guiltier would claiming belongings make her?
She tore her eyes away from the chests, which had begun to feel like caskets. There was a table with a single chair, and Brangien’s neat cot in the corner. A door led out to the hallway, and another door to a side chamber.
Two tapestries brightened the wall without windows; one of them hid the secret door. The tapestries were both old, like the one in Arthur’s room. The pastoral scenes could have been hanging in any great man’s home.
“Why does he have no tapestries of his life?” Guinevere asked as Brangien bustled around.
“Beg pardon, my queen?”
“Arthur. The king. All the tapestries I have seen are meaningless. Does he have none of the miracle of the sword? Of his victory over Uther Pendragon? The defeat of the
fairy queen and the forest of blood?”
Brangien paused where she was laying out fresh underclothes. “I had not thought of it before. But he has never commissioned them. And there are no tapestries of Uther Pendragon, either. I think he had them destroyed.”
“Is he— Am I supposed to eat breakfast with him?” Guinevere did not know the rules yet. Could she go over to his room to bid him good morning? Should she?
“I believe there is a trial this morning. A woman caught practicing magic.” Brangien said it as perfunctorily as her movements making Guinevere’s bed were. It was a routine matter. Guinevere forced a neutral hmm in response.
After Brangien was satisfied with the items she had chosen, she bowed and left. Guinevere hurried to the windows, repeating for herself the same work that she had done last night for Arthur. She would need to redo it all at least once every three nights. And there were bigger, stronger magics to work. But those would take time as well as supplies.
