Charmed Destinies Read online

  “I mind me what happened to Anghus’s last wife,” Robin continued with a shiver and a sharp glance with her bright, birdlike black eyes to see that their escort wasn’t eavesdropping.

  Gwynn just nodded; there wasn’t much she could add to that. The Baron’s last wife had been in the ground a bare three months and already he was sniffing around again, sending gifts of game and a herald to inquire of her health. When the King had proposed the match to Duke Bretagne, and her father had grasped at it with the desperation of a man with a pack of wolves on his doorstep, Gwynn had seen the marriage as a way to escape the danger of Anghus and to make her father safe again at one stroke.

  It was only after she had agreed, the King had given the match his blessing and the contracts were signed that she realized she might be leaping from the kettle into the fire, as rumors reached her and her father of what her affianced was like….

  Rumor claimed mistresses he had in plenty, both high-and low-born, and scores of bastards. Sure it was, that although he had given his solemn oath to support his monarch, the King felt he could not be certain of Bretagne’s loyalty without binding him with a rich prize.

  The King needed Bretagne’s support to keep the Border Lords from revolt. Gwynn’s father needed the King’s support to keep Anghus from their own door. And Gwynn was the bridge between the two needs.

  And she needed—well, what she needed was not to be thought of, for it was the stuff of minstrelsy, not of reality. There was no Gareth to her Lionors, and never would be. It would be enough if her husband would care for her and she learn to care for him.

  She was going into this willingly and with open eyes. She and her father had discussed other options and, to her mind, there were none. “Plague,” he’d said vaguely, grasping at straws. “You can feign plague, can’t you? Or pox. Surely Anghus wouldn’t want a pock-marked wife—”

  But she had shaken her head. “Anghus would take me were I as old as Methuselah, squint-eyed and lame, without a tooth in my head,” she had reminded him gently. “And you know what they say—that he has the blackest of black magic to help him.”

  Her father had shuddered, but he knew that she was right.

  Robin frowned. “What are you thinking?”

  “That at least, no matter what his repute, we’ve never heard that Bretagne is a black wizard,” she replied very softly. Robin had been her friend as well as her servant since the child turned ten, for Robin was no ordinary servant. No, Robin was her half sibling, the result of her father’s loneliness after Gwynn’s mother was a year in the grave—and Gwynn certainly had not begrudged her father the solace of female company. She knew, none better, that he had not ceased to mourn her mother. Baseborn Robin was a trusted member of the household in Gwynn’s service; by now, she was privy to all of Gwynn’s secrets.

  Robin shivered at the reminder of Anghus’s other—powers. “No, there is that. And with you away and gone, Anghus’s quiver will be empty. He can’t harm your father while milord stays on his own land. And by the time he learns you are gone, you’ll be out of his reach. Right?”

  “Out of his reach—yes, so far as I know. Fortunately, Anghus has nothing of mine to use to set his spells upon me when he learns I have escaped him.” Of that, she was sure; she left nothing to chance in that regard, and never had. “And if he tries to find me and bring me back by force, he will soon discover that if the King’s arm is weak along the Border, it is strong enough in the Marches. I have never heard that Bretagne ever let go of something that was his, and the King will have something to say about the kidnap of his liegeman’s bride. One misstep and Anghus will find all the King’s soldiers and all the King’s men on his doorstep and all the King’s priests, too. Let him try his black arts then.” Her lips stretched in a tight smile. “The King’s priests are well acquainted with the ways of wizards, and I doubt not they have long wished for an excuse to deal with Anghus.”

  “But milord…” Robin said doubtfully, her thick, black brows knitted into a solid bar across her horsey face. “There is still milord to face that evil magic, and all alone, too—”

  “My mother ensured Father’s safety with her own life,” Gwynn breathed so quietly only someone with very acute hearing could have heard her. That made Robin drop her eyes for a moment. “So long as he is on his own land, the land itself will shield him.”

  “They say you’re very like her, you know, milady,” Robin replied after a long silence broken only by the crackling of leaves and the soft sound of hoofbeats on turf. “That she was as beautiful as one of the Fair Folk and as kind as an angel. Mum told me she had green eyes, green as grass, like yours, milady, and golden hair, long enough she could stand on it when she let it down, like yours, also.”

  Gwynn smiled, sadly, and felt her eyes sting. “She was beautiful, and kind. I wish you could have seen her, Robin, you’d have been in love with her, just like everyone was. I will never be that lovely, or that good.” She laughed a little. “And I have too much of a temper to ever be that kind.”

  Robin looked askance at her, as if thinking about disputing those statements, but held her peace.

  “But I am my mother’s daughter in this,” Gwynn continued firmly. “Whatever it takes to keep my father safe, I will do. All that I am, I owe to him, and ‘tis a small sacrifice, this. Surely nothing worse than women have borne since Mother Eve. And belike, the rumors are mere air—”

  “But if they are not?” Robin asked, even as her father had asked anxiously that last day together, holding both her hands in his and looking into her eyes. “I don’t mean, what if he is cold, but what if he is cruel? What if he harms you?” She dropped her voice to a breath of a whisper. “What if he wishes to deal with you as Anghus would?”

  “Then you and I will do what is both lawful and needful,” she said firmly. Robin looked her square in the eyes and nodded slowly.

  “Besides, if he were that bad, how could he keep drawing women to his bed?” she asked logically. “A man who makes a habit of murdering his light-o’-loves soon finds he sleeps alone. No, I doubt we need fear that, and all else—I will hazard.”

  And when it came down to it, this was a battle, quite as desperate as any battle of arms and men. Gwynn and her father were fighting for their land, for the folk who looked to them for protection and for, perhaps, their own lives. If the battlefield was the altar and the marriage bed, then at least it was a fight in which Gwynn could take part rather than stand on the ramparts, watching helplessly. She was not yet a match for Anghus’s black powers; she might never be. And she could not afford to wait until she was. So she would be wife to Duke Bretagne and either make the best of it or—

  —well, that would play out as the fates allowed.

  At least, she reminded herself, he had not killed any wives.

  At least, not yet….

  It was certainly too late to turn back now. She was glove-wedded to Duke Bretagne of Clawcrag, a wedding as binding and as legal by every law she knew as if the man himself had stood beside her at the altar.

  She had not needed the omen of the crow to feel plenty of misgivings. Her new husband had sent word with the glove and the men-at-arms sent to bring her north that she was not to bring her own guards, nor any more than a single tiring-maid with her. We are simple border men, here, and there will be no need for a train of ladies, he had written. And her
father had not dared to object. For one thing, he could not spare any men, so Robin would have to be his eyes and ears for news of his daughter’s well-being. For another—

  Well, she had left her father as he had been for the past four years, with one side of his face slack and unmoving, one hand near useless, one foot dragging. He could not fend off Baron Anghus, because he could not have fought against a child and won. She was his protection as well as his heir now.

  The eight grim-faced men had not spoken more than a dozen words in a day to her since this journey began. She didn’t much like their look when they’d arrived, and her liking hadn’t increased since. She’d seen how they had eyed Robin before they’d gotten a good look at her; like cruel dogs preparing to quarrel over a bone. They seemed, to her, to be the sort of men who would have been brigands had they not come under the hand of a man stronger and more ruthless than they. She was grateful that Robin was anything but a beauty, stick-thin and stick-straight, with a long, homely face that reminded anyone who looked at her of a plowhorse.

  Yet so far they had been strictly polite with her. Other than the initial rapacious looks, they hadn’t offered any insult to Robin, either. And despite the omen of the crow, she had hope.

  There was one weapon she could bring to bear in this battle that might change all, and that was her willingness to make something of this situation. Willingness? Nay, that was too mild a word—she was determined to turn this marriage of convenience and state into something more. If she could soften this man, if she could turn his heart to her, if she could win him—

  Well, she would try. Her own mother had gone to her father as a stranger. She had not known what she would find, there on the Marches. And her father had been, if the tales were true, something of a hard man himself, but he had been won, by beauty, a soft word, a heart willing to create love, if she had not found it ready to her hand….

  A chill wind suddenly whipped up the leaves around her in a swirl and sent an icy tendril down the back of her hood. She shivered and pulled her cloak closer about her.

  “Captain,” she called to the man riding just ahead of her. “You said last night that Clawcrag was near, but you did not say how near it was. Do we reach there today?”

  The man looked back over his shoulder; she could not even see his face, only the glitter of his eyes in the slits of his round helmet. “Before sundown, Lady,” he replied curtly, then turned his attention back to the road ahead.

  Before sundown! She didn’t know whether to be glad or dismayed.

  “Then…will we stop before then?” she called again, determined to get something more than that bare word from him. “I should like to prepare myself to honor my lord.”

  “No, Lady,” came the cold reply, and this time the man did not even turn to deliver it. “I’ve my orders. No stopping between dawn and dusk for unnecessary nonsense. If primp ye must, do it in the saddle.”

  She swallowed hard. It wasn’t the first time that she had asked to stop while they traveled, and always the request had been refused, with no explanation of why those orders had been issued. This would be no exception.

  So she would not be allowed to remedy her travel-stained state, and this was how her new husband would first see her. Not at her best, to say the least.

  Not the way to captivate her new lord, showing up, looking as if she did not care how she looked to him, as if she could not trouble to make herself attractive for him and his people. He would wonder, at the least, just what sort of bad bargain he had made, for a slovenly, slatternly bride….

  But on the other hand, tonight she would at least sleep in a bed—

  Yes, but not alone.

  She suppressed a feeling of panic. Not that she didn’t know what went on with a man and a woman—but…well, that was for other people. It was the first time she had ever been faced with what it meant for her. And she had assiduously avoided the thought for this entire journey.

  And she would continue to do so now.

  “I reckoned something like this would befall,” Robin said with a kind of grim satisfaction. “And I took some precautions last night. I’ve a cloth to clean your face, lotion for your skin, some of your flower scent, a jewel or two, and your handsome wedding cloak, all behind my saddle.”

  “Oh, Robin—” she gasped in gratitude. “You should be a commander of armies!”

  “Mayhap, someday I will be,” Robin said with a wink. “In the meantime, I’ll command what I can. You, Captain!” she called ahead in her rough, imperious voice. “Have the courtesy to tell us when we’re within a league or two of Clawcrag, sirrah, or if my lady’s looks are not to her new lord’s liking, I’ll make certain to tell him why and who it was would not let her prepare herself to give him all honor.”

  “Robin!” Gwynn gasped at her temerity.

  But when the captain turned around to stare, his mouth below the eye-guard of the helmet twisted into a ferocious frown, there was also a grudging admiration in his voice. “Well, enough, wench, and I will, provided ye plague me not with further chatter. Yon crows have voices more pleasing than yours.”

  Gwynn bit her lip, willing Robin not to provoke him further. But Robin had never been a fool, and did not prove so now. She only traded him disdainful look for look until he turned back to the road, then humphed. But not very loudly. Robin might be bold, but she knew when not to press an advantage.

  “You should have taken the upper hand with them when this journey began, milady,” she said quietly. “These are dogs that obey nothing but the whip and must see that your hand holds it.”

  “If I had, would we have been let to pause in our travels?” Gwynn retorted.

  “Well—no,” Robin admitted. “’Twas your lord’s own orders—no stopping on the way, except when night fell. So they told me, as you will recall, when I badgered. Though they would not tell me why, and I should think ‘twould be safe enough to stop on my lord’s own lands…but perhaps, it isn’t as safe as I’d have thought.”

  “And would they have been more civil with us had I lashed them with my tongue?” Gwynn continued. “No, I think not. And I would not have them report to Baron Bretagne that his new bride was a scold and a harridan, hounding them with complaints and demands! Better they think me weak, soft and altogether womanish, and tell him so.”

  “Humph.” Robin raised an eyebrow and one corner of her mouth quirked up. “Meseems I see your thought. Well, I have been the scold and harridan, and I will continue to be so. Such a path suits me.”

  Gwynn nodded; she did not have to say anything more, not to Robin. Gwynn would be the milk-soft maiden and Lord Bretagne would underestimate her and her intelligence. If anything hard needed a heavy hand, it would be Robin who cracked the whip or demanded what was required as the rightful due of her lady. Gwynn would be sweet. Robin, sour. Both would play their parts to perfection. Gwynn’s rank would protect her, Robin’s sharp tongue would act with her looks to keep her safe.

  And if certain actions proved to be required, no one would hinder Gwynn in the doing of them, for no one would suspect she had the intelligence, the courage or the deviousness—no, they would not suspect she had anything afoot at all. Those actions would require privacy, but if she seemed weak and tender enough, no one
would in the least be surprised if she closed herself into her room to weep in private for hours at a time….

  But that would be as the future ordered and only if all other recourses failed. If she needed to spend that arrow, truly, her quiver would be empty.

  She shivered, and not from the cold wind that whipped her cloak flat to her body.

  Those actions were lawful but only just lawful, and only if she herself was in deadly danger. So if she was forced to take that course—she would have found herself in a position that was as bad as if she had been in Anghus’s clutches.

  She would pray it would not come to that.

  2

  The wedding cloak was a gorgeously impractical piece of clothing of heavy knotwork-embroidered satin in a wonderful blue lined with woad-dyed linen her grandmother had woven herself. Gwynn had worn it with the gown she had been glove-wedded in. A gown of lambs’ wool dyed to match, with embroidered bands of the same satin at the hems of skirt and sleeve and forming a placket at the neck. The cloak had come down to her from her grandmother, and her mother had worn it for her wedding; so had the bands of embroidery, which each successive bride had applied to her own new gown. Unfortunately, the cloak could not be spread over the top of her traveling cloak without looking ridiculous. So if she had been cold before, she was freezing now.

  But she and Robin had done everything they could to make her look her best under the circumstances. Her face was clean, with lotion applied to her wind-chapped cheeks, an amber-and-silver necklet adorned her throat, a matching ring slipped over the glove on her hand. She had bitten her lips and pinched her cheeks to make them red, and she smelled of roses as well as wood smoke and horse.