Page 1 of Warrior Queen
Chapter One
Silvered with ageand long use, the ancient round table occupied the central space in the lofty Council Hall of Viroconium. The ornately carved, high-backed wooden seats assigned to each of the many kings of Britain encircled it, all but one of them occupied. The largest and most splendid. Being round, the table possessed no head, but this chair, a throne, occupied what might have been that place.
Pressed back against the plaster-covered walls of the hall’s ground floor, and jammed in shoulder-to-shoulder, each king’s followers crowded close, eager to observe the momentous proceedings.
Dressed in a vivid, dark red gown, and with my chestnut hair flowing loose to my waist, I stood with Merlin alongside our men of Dumnonia. A few paces in front of us, my husband, Arthur, had not long ago taken his place at the table. He now sat motionless in one of the chairs, beside his older cousin, Caninus. Only the back of his dark head, with the slender gold circlet of rank resting in his curls, was visible from where I stood.
In the galleries that overhung the hall, the locals jostled for position. The lucky few who’d managed to fight their way inside strained against the not-very-robust-looking rails put there to prevent them from toppling onto the flagstone floor below. The babble of voices rose to the rafters, and an unwelcome stink of hot, unwashed bodies permeated the stuffy air.
Caninus, King of Gwent, and son of the man who’d once held the title of High King himself, had called this Council the moment he’d heard Arthur had succeeded in drawing the sword from the stone. The stone that had stood for nearly three years in the forum at Viroconium, where any man who dared, young or old, rich or poor, had been able to try his hand at taking it. Many had tried, but until Arthur came, all had failed.
“The words written on the stone might say that you’re High King because you’ve been able to draw the sword,” Caninus had said to Arthur, when we’d arrived at his capital of Caer Went bearing the sword. “But it will take a meeting of the Council to ratify this. And they’ll want to see you do it for themselves.”
Wise words.
We stayed with Caninus while he sent out urgent messengers in every direction to all the kings of Britain, bidding them to come as quickly as they could to an extraordinary meeting of the Council. And now here we were, standing in the Council Hall, where Caninus had dropped the bombshell of what had happened on his fellows.
I glanced at Merlin. His thin face still bore the marks of the beating and torture he’d received at the hands of Morgana’s henchmen, the bruises yellowing now, and the cut above his right eye scabbed over. I didn’t need my woman’s intuition to know his internal scars must remain raw and unhealed.
The cause of all this stood on the far side of the hall, at the front of her brother Cadwy’s faction, beside Cadwy’s dowdy wife, Angharad. The Princess Morgana, sister to Arthur, Cadwy, Morgawse and Cei, beautiful as ever in a long cream gown, her slender waist girdled with the chain of delicate gold links as was her habit. She wouldn’t be able to wear that for much longer, now she had a child growing in her belly. The child she’d stolen from Merlin with her guile. Maybe even her magic.
I fixed her with my best hard stare. If there was anyone I’d like to see brought down, it was her. When necessity called, I could be as bitchy as the next woman. And as the next woman was Morgana, that was saying something.
She didn’t look my way, but kept her eyes fixed on her oldest brother’s broad back. Even from here, I could see Cadwy’s face looked ten times worse than Merlin’s. Both his eyes remained puffy and swollen, and probably bloodshot. His lower lip bore a huge dark scab, and shades of yellow and purple blotched his cheeks from where Arthur had gained the upper hand in their fight just two short weeks ago.
Cadwy had certainly borne the worst of it. But then, Arthur had been fighting not only for the return of Merlin, but also for the sword in the stone itself. Cadwy had lusted for it, still lusted for it probably, and the power it could bring him, just as he’d lusted for me and the power he thought I held. He’d schemed to gain it by any means, but he’d failed, and lost. At the last, Arthur had drawn the sword for himself, to replace his own, broken in the fight.
On the far side of Merlin stood the burly, red-headed Cei, Arthur’s other half-brother, both his seneschal and trusted friend. He met my eyes, and his for-once serious face softened into a smile of encouragement, his blue eyes twinkling. It went a small way to calming my twisting stomach.
The legs of Caninus’s heavy seat grated as he shunted it back across the flagstones and rose slowly to his feet. Gazing around the hall, lips pressed together in a stern line, he held one hand above his head, commanding silence.
A spare, ascetic man, he nevertheless possessed a quality of leadership and a deep voice that commanded attention: the voice of an orator.
Silence fell in the hall, as every man’s eye, and every woman’s, too, turned toward Caninus. As the son of Ambrosius, and great grandson of Constantine III, the last Roman Emperor recognized by Britain, he affected the old-fashioned, classical Roman style. Over his rich, dark-purple tunic, he’d draped an off-white gown that could have been described as a toga about his body, and he wore sandals on his feet.
When not a sound could be heard in the hall, and he’d gathered in the attention of every person present, he spoke. “Fellow kings.” His voice rang out as his gaze ran around the table, lingering a moment on each man’s face– on the old and the young, the bearded and the clean-shaven, the curious, the hostile, the openly expectant. “We are gathered here today for one reason only. Some of you will already know why. Rumor travels at speed even to the far-flung corners of our island, and others of you have been encamped here long enough to have heard the story.”
Even though I knew exactly what had happened, I found myself hanging on his words. In another time, he could have been a theatrical actor.
“A little over two weeks ago, something momentous happened here in Viroconium.” He paused, his gaze taking in the crowded masses in the galleries before dropping to the men of rank, and the few women, pressed back against the walls. Did I imagine it, or did his eyes linger on Morgana, standing defiantly beautiful at the head of Cadwy’s faction?
Moving on, Caninus swiveled on his heel so as not to leave out the audience behind him, which included Merlin, Cei and me. “The Sword of Destiny has been drawn from the stone.”
A hushed gasp whispered around the hall, of a thousand voices inhaling in wonder, even though most of them already knew this, and many of the townspeople had seen it happen for themselves. Caninus had a flair for the dramatic.
On the far side of the table, Cadwy glowered as much as his damaged face would allow, lowering his head like a bull about to charge. His bushy black brows met in a heavy scowl, thick lower lip jutting from within the nest of his tangled, graying beard. Although he must only have been in his mid-thirties, ten years older than Arthur, he had the look about him of an older man. Life in the Dark Ages wasn’t kind to warriors. Or women, for that matter.
He’d wanted that sword badly. Enough to aid Morgana when she’d seduced Merlin and lured him into her power. Enough to have Morgana and her cronies fruitlessly torture Merlin in an effort to make him release the sword from the stone. Enough to agree to fight Arthur in hand-to-hand combat for Merlin and the sword.
He must have been convinced he’d win, and both Merlin and the sword would have been his. He hadn’t. With his own sword broken in the fight, and Cadwy lying beaten to a bloody pulp, Arthur had stepped up to the stone where it stood in the forum– the stone they’d been fighting around. The time had at last been right, and in front of not just his own men, but those of Cadwy, and the watching population of Viroconium, the sword had slid out of the stone at his touch.
I had to shoulder the blame for the sword even being in the stone to start with. Merlin had set it up in the forum because of something I said. I’d once made the mistake of telling him he would be the one to make Arthur High King, and how it would happen.
In legend.
Thanks to me, that legend had now become reality, and had left me with a morbid fear of doing the same again. My biggest worry here in the Dark Ages was that my knowledge, gained from an upbringing by my Arthurian scholar father, was unreliable, and that I daily risked changing the past, and with it, the future.
Caninus, from his place beside Arthur, laid a hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “And this is the man who drew the sword.”
