Page 60 of The Faerie Morgana
“To watch her.”
“Exactly.”
“I loathe seeing you used in this way.”
Braithe shrugged and crossed to the bed to fold back the coverlet. She held out her hand for the dressing gown, then folded it neatly at the foot as Morgana slid beneath the blanket. When Morgana was in bed, and Braithe had adjusted her pillow, she stood back, her hands linked before her.
Morgana barely recognized the look on her handmaid’s soft features. There was no sign of her dimples. “It doesn’t matter, Priestess,” she said, her voice as hard as her expression. “I have made promises, both to you and to the king.”
But when she looked up, meeting Morgana’s gaze, the pain in her eyes made Morgana’s breath catch in her throat. Braithe’s sacrifice was real. Morgana wondered if she could forgive Arthur for demanding it.
25
Gwenvere, as if she knew instinctively what would rankle the most, summoned Braithe to prepare her for her wedding night. The banquet had lasted long into the evening, and a full moon hung high in the sky above the keep when one of the new queen’s maids came in search of Braithe.
Braithe had gone to bed, but she rose without demur, drew on her customary brown robe, and tied on her sandals. Around her fair curls she wrapped a scarf, and she pulled a shawl over her shoulders against the night chill. She had to go down two flights of stairs to the queen’s apartment, where she found two slightly tipsy guards outside and a dozen candles burning within. Gwenvere’s three maids hovered uncertainly in the outer room, and Arthur stood beside the window, his hands linked behind his back, his face lifted up into the white moonlight. When Braithe came in, he didn’t move.
She gave a single firm knock on the inner door of the bedchamber and went in without waiting for a response.
“Braithe!” Gwenvere exclaimed. “I thought you were never coming.”
“I am here, my lady.”
“Good.” Gwenvere was still in her wedding gown, her plaits dangling over her shoulders. “The maids brought up the bathwater, but I need help taking down my hair and getting out of this dress. Then washing.”
Washing? Braithe had no idea what that meant, but she soon learned, to her horror. When her gown had been unwound and untied and laid aside, and her hair tied up out of the way, Gwenvere intended that Braithe should wash her body in readiness for her marriage bed. Soap was laid ready, and towels. Gwenvere stripped off her shift and her woven stockings, and stood expectantly before Braithe.
Her body was as beautiful naked as it had been surrounded by floating draperies. Her skin was flawless, and her arms and legs slender and well-formed, her breasts high and firm. The rest of her, Braithe could only assume, was also perfect, but she would never know. When she washed those parts, she closed her eyes, and pictured herself back on her mother’s farm, washing the parts of a newly lambed ewe.
Soon enough, it was done. The queen was dried and dressed in a heavily embroidered nightdress of a fabric so thin it was virtually transparent. Braithe pulled back the coverlet on the bed and smoothed the sheets. Gwenvere arranged herself artfully, two pillows behind her head, her hair let down once again to shine in the candlelight.
Her smile to Braithe was slyly direct, not the slanted, coquettish expression she used elsewhere. “Wish me luck,” she said.
Braithe responded, with a blunt sincerity born of her ownexperience, “You will not need it, my lady,” and made her escape.
The moonlit keep was deserted when Braithe climbed the stairs to the narrow door that opened to the top of the courtine. She walked along the wall, away from the tower, not looking back to where she knew the queen’s windows opened above the keep. She did not allow herself to think of Gwenvere at this moment, or of Arthur, or even of herself in her loneliness. She paced slowly along the top of the wall, letting her fingers trail along the thigh-high parapet. She tipped her face up to the moon as it traced its arc against the black sky, drowning the stars with its brilliance. She breathed in the fragrance of tree and shrub and flower from the woods surrounding the castle, and a stanza rose in her mind:
What blooms will die.
What dies is born again.
What comes between matters not.
Why write such a stanza? Was it meant to comfort, or to condemn?
She decided it was neither. It was simply a statement, devoid of emotion, neither a benediction nor a curse. She put it, and everything else, out of her mind. Throughout the waning night, until the moon set and dawn silvered the sky, Braithe paced, and breathed, and thought of nothing.
Arthur sent for Morgana first thing the next morning. She found him in a large, airy room on the level of the tower just above the great hall. She had been in that room before, but something about it had changed since her stepfather’s day. She paused in the doorway to discern what it was.
“The table,” she said.
Her half brother was seated at one side of the room beside a wide desk laden with scrolls and inkwells and pots of blotting sand. He was poring over a set of messages, but he laid them aside, smiling. He came to embrace her, and she felt his pride and happiness resonating through the touch of his cheek. “Good morning, sister,” he said. He gestured to the furnishing that had attracted her attention. “Do you like it?”
She gave him an oblique glance as she strolled toward the object in question. It was an unostentatious thing, lacking embellishment or decoration, but elegant in the simple pure circle of its form. Arthur walked beside her, watching for her reaction.
She stood for a moment, her hands on her hips, regarding it. Finally she said, “Yes, my lord. I like it very much. It’s a brilliant idea.”
“I have always disliked sitting at the head of a table, with all those around it being judged by their relative position. Competing to be above the salt or below.”
