You would not think a place like this could exist somewhere like the High Palace, with its confection of white towers and sugar-dusting frosts on the leaves, its parades of airy corridors and roaring fires in the halls. It shouldn't have a place like this. A room, not a suite, lurking under one of the staircases at the back of Lawrin's Keep. You could easily walk past the door if you weren't looking for it; there is no decoration, no sigil, nothing to indicate that it is anything other than one of those odd little rooms castles sometimes have, that had some purpose once but which have been long forgotten. Inside there is a desk half-hidden under piles of paper and a sprawling abacus, at an awkward angle to allow it to actually fit in in the first place. A banner of a tree, empty of leaves but thick with branches, hangs from one of the beams, attempting to divide the room in two but succeeding only in drawing attention to how small it is. Light slices in through an arrow-slit. The bed seems to have been added as an after-thought. The tower steward, currently one Garef Delles of House Harwood, lives in a smart suite at the keep's entrance, with pages attending to many of his needs even though he is not even a gentleman born. But his son lives here, breathing in the dust, probably dreaming of his old room back at Harwood Ridge. It was no bigger, but at least it had a good view.
Nobody is there to show her in so she does so herself. A young man is bent over the desk and flipping impatiently at the abacus. His cuffs bear old ink stains. Absorbed in his work, he does not hear her enter; she watches and listens to the scritch of the quill as it darts elegantly across the page, the click click click of the beads on the abacus, the soft sigh when yet again something doesn't add up. She waits until he shifts the paper aside and reaches for another one, but suddenly she wants to see his face before she speaks, so instead of a greeting she smooths a hand down her skirts, creating a rustle of cloth. It gets his attention. He half turns, sees who it is, beams and turns fully, with one arm dangling down the back of his chair. In her head, Lady Pallina sniffs. Is that any way to greet a lady? In her head she assures her again: oh, Gweon knows his place. There is nobody more humble.
His expression lights, and her reservations fade. She can speak. Things have changed - but nothing has changed.
"Gweon."
"Branwen."
"Are you well?"
His face gives the answer. "Thank you," he says. "For speaking to the queen."
She flushes, awkward, caught in the knowledge that he will have heard this from somebody else, likely in passing. It is not news to learn by accident, that you will be spared the muddy fields and the snow and the screaming, bloodthirsty enemy. "I wanted to tell you myself. But the queen needed me, and my father came to fetch you... I meant to come earlier, I promise. Am I forgiven?"
"Let's see." He likes lists. "I don't have to march hundreds of miles with men I don't know telling me how lucky I am to be joining them. I don't have to deal with useless commanders who hardly know the difference between north and south. I don't have to spend sleepless nights worrying about borrowed weapons and armour that may as well be paper. I don't have to sleep in a tent. And I don't have to fight slavering, snow-drinking, bear-fur clad northmen." A smile, tentative but genuine. "Right now I think I could forgive you anything."
"Hide your jewels, then!"
He looks around the room; the ink is probably the most valuable thing in it, excepting his good self. "If you see any in sight, let me know."
It is a relief to see him without the tension of the last months, to see him smile. He will not admit it, not even to her, but he has been afraid. It has coloured his manners and his bearing and his expressions, made him fractious, an effort to communicate with. The blots under his eyes have not faded yet, but already he looks better and has his humour back. She grins. She can take any amount of Lady Eliyne's teasing, if this is the result.
"I did mean to see you earlier."
"Doesn't matter. I was busy, anyway." He flaps a paper at her, to emphasise it. "Father's lost staff, gone off north to try and earn a knighthood by the turn of the year. He says trying to fill the gaps gives him toothache, so here I am, stuck with a list of men and a list of tasks that just won't add up."
She is happy, lighthearted, so she offers, "I'll do some."
"I don't think so," he says quietly. "Lady Clare doesn't scrub floors, does she?"
So she doesn't. "I wouldn't know how, anyway." Then, brighter: "Draft in palace people? None of them are going anywhere, and half of them sit around sighing over courtiers anyway. Cerys is always complaining that she's tripping over them. I could speak to her?" She will anyway, whatever he says, and he knows that.
"Perhaps don't plead my case too soon," he suggests, and they laugh.
When the laughter fades they stay in a comfortable silence. She sits on the end of the bed and takes a book from one of the piles. It is lying open; he has been reading it, clearly, and because she is interested in this sort of thing she takes it up and studies it. It appears to be a new edition of some sort of old story-book; knights on white chargers, highborn maidens in towers, beasts of the realm, when courtiers were the very models of chivalry and heroic deeds were a matter of daily accord. Here is a piece of Gweon the child, using a stick as a lance and telling her that even lowborn men may make a knight, if their deeds suit. Now she supposes he reads these with irony, noticing the lack of blood and refuse and endless hours of boredom and the saddle-sores. She takes it up and reads. Sir Erris, for whom it was said the kingdom was named, slays the vicious merman Sharkstooth. Gweon looks like the last person to charge a merman. He would probably ask to count its scales, price them up every one, give him a total. His head has fallen back over his figures; after a moment, he starts click-clicking again.
A false woman turns into a serpent. Gweon groans, asks her help; she sets the book aside and provides it as best she can, though if he can't make sense of it she doesn't see how she can either. Suddenly he stops and gasps, smacks a hand into his forehead.
“By the way. When I said about the commanders, I wasn't talking about your brother."
"A fact I will carelessly forget to mention when I write to him, I'm sure."
He pales. "Branwen, you wouldn't!" Dewi used to call him Sniffy, for the set of his nose; he has always been careful not to offend him. Gweon slender and inky, Dewi built like a Harwood wall, not pretty, but strong and sturdy. It would be like sending him to fight a bear with a brooch, pitting the two together, but he has momentarily forgotten that. Until he sees the look on her face, and colour floods back into his cheeks. "Oh! You're cruel."
"Go fetch the heralds, we should proclaim that in the streets. 'Lady Clare teases people, someone tell the lord!'"
"I imagine the lord knows," he says. "Too bold?"
He has always been bold, in his own way. She does not remember the day she first saw Gweon - that is the way of small households, where no face is ever truly new - but she remembers the day she first spoke to him. A little girl sitting on the bailey hill, wiping away tears with her knuckles. She was too young to be trusted to wear nice dresses unless it was a special occasion, so she was wearing a patchy old shift with a skirt buttoned over it and a jerkin tied under her arms. If you didn't know her, you could have taken her for a cook's girl, perhaps, but that is just how things were done at Harwood Ridge.
A shadow fell over her, that little girl, and a voice she knew and didn't know asked:
"Why are you crying?"
"My father's gone away," she sniffed.
He stared at her; a boy with tight dark curls, in scruffy clothes that hung down over his knuckles. "My father goes away loads, you don't see me crying about it."
"Your father's not anybody."
"He is to me."
That upset her, she never really knew why. "You can't talk to me like that!"
"And you're not supposed to talk to me at all, so there."
"You'll get me in trouble."
"My father says you're always in trouble anyway."
Even as a child she understood there was some kind of insult there, and decided to take pride in it instead. "Are you sitting down, then?" she asked, and he sat, and she told him about her father going off to meet the Clares and how they were the most powerful lords in all the lushlands, and he had said that he'd heard Rooksrest had a whole keep just for the records of the family going back to the time of the songs, and they had decided to be friends and shaken hands on it, with the simplicity and innocence of childhood.
She smiles, remembering it now. They were children, then; two children in a castle full of grown-ups, or children who wanted to be grown-ups, and nobody else who would think it fun to play hide-and-seek or mystery knights or to climb trees and imagine being birds. Dewi was a squire already and most of the time was off serving one of the household's few knights on some errand, so she had tried to make Gweon her brother instead, even though he was her age. Unwisely, she had confessed this to Moll, the girl whose job it was to dress the ladies of the household, and before she had even finished her breakfast she had been summoned to her mother's rooms. What she remembers most from this is a pair of faded felt slippers from which she never lifted her eyes, the smell of lavender flowers, her mother's voice. She wasn't usually so stern. We all miss Dewi, but this is just folly, Branwen. Gweon your brother! It simply isn't possible. If I hear any more of this, it'll be bed without supper for you, do you understand? She had almost slammed the door behind her on her way out, and tearful and angry, didn't leave her rooms for the whole day.
Now she thinks: she didn't understand. She thought that I thought it was real.
"How are those men adding up?" she asks, and they dip back into the papers and beads and books, until she can lose track of time and almost forget that she is in the palace at all. It is not too hard, in this room. There is hardly space for the two of them. But the comfort of a room depends on the company, and this one is lacking in Eliyne's jests, Alice's temper, Lady Pallina's stiff tone. Gweon at his work, quiet, focused, is still a better companion than the rest of them together. She knew him before she knew Cerys, before her mother became so exasperated with her that she begged the King Who Was to take her into his court, before Lord Clare, the elder one, her legal father, agreed that a woman of the princess' company was more than suitable for his son.
"They were planning it," she says suddenly. Gweon looks up: hmm? "When Father went away to Rooksrest. Mother, she was already thinking she could get me into the palace, and then maybe I could marry Ranulph."
He looks at her. Laughs. "You only just worked that out?"
The girl is young and hesitant and looks around the room, turning up her nose at the piles and the dust. Gweon jumps to his feet as if he has been there all along. She has been sitting on the bed reading again; she puts the book aside and waits for the servant to talk. She is simply but expensively dressed, in red and brown and orange, hemmed with gold. A runner from the queen. Branwen studies her face, searching for any sign of distress or anger to tell her what kind of mood Cerys is in. In public she is immutable, unchangeable, but behind closed doors she may weep and cling and need sympathy, or go off to her own rooms and refuse any help. It is hard not to feel for her, in these moods. It is hard not to show it on your face. But the girl only looks disapproving, mildly frustrated. It rankles with her. Who are you, girl, to look down on Gweon? Just lucky, that's all.
"I've been looking all over for you," she says. "I had to wait for Lady Eliyne to tell me where to go."
"And you've found me. Where am I going?"
At the sound of her voice, the girl's attitude fades; perhaps she has remembered she is talking to Lady Branwen Clare, sister of the First Commander, wife to the inestimable Ranulph Clare. "My lady. The queen wants you. Um. She says if you're not busy..." Probably Cerys did say this, but only as a courtesy, and likely with a different intonation to the one this girl uses. "She's in her chambers. I'm to escort you."
In the queen's chambers: "You were with Gweon."
The queen's tone is curious, her expression mild, but she still hears a faint accusation in it and bows an apology. "I said I would see him."
"You did? Oh. Yes." Cerys puts aside her book and stands, smiling. It is like watching the sun come out. She takes her hands and squeezes. "I am so glad to see you, Branwen, you have no idea. Today...I cannot wait for today to be over. And it is not even midday, yet!"
Today is Monday. The queen is dressed to accept the company of her intimates, nobody else. It seems that the master-of and her uncle, the Lord Treasurer's father, have been to see her this morning, with their dossiers and list of names. It is past time you married, they said. (Cerys does a passable impression of her uncle; at least, you can tell who it is meant to be. She has his habit of puffing out his cheeks when he speaks perfectly. The master-of, with no real notable mannerisms or features for her to pick out, is not honoured, so one can believe that the entire conversation was between niece and uncle, with nobody else involved.) You are not a girl anymore, and girls marry every day. You may frown, you may baulk, but the fact is that the crown must have a child, two or three for preference, and for that you must have a husband. Here is a list, they are all good men of good families... Breaking character, Cerys runs over the names for them to discuss. One lame. One older than sixty. One a buffoon. One, Nicolas Wrainby, is an interesting prospect - but no, the queen decides, he is too staid and bookish. She wants a king who hunts, to take him away from the palace for days at a time.
"He is subtle, though. Nicolas. And he has kind eyes, and pretty lips."
"What use are pretty lips?" Cerys grumbles, then flushes delicately, bringing her into conflict with the topaz stones glittering all around her neck. "Well. I suppose you would know, wouldn't you? Being a wife. Lady Eliyne would know, and she isn't."
"Safest that you don't, though. In case your future consort gets suspicious."
"What consort? I don't remember deciding on one."
"You can't avoid it." It is easy to imagine Cerys married; with some women, like Eliyne, it is impossible, and with others, like Lady Pallina, it is hard, but somehow the queen has some quality that lends itself to wifehood. A maturity to her manners, perhaps, or a knowing glint in her eye that speaks of experience which she, in fact, does not have. Young men have written her verse - it would be remiss if they did not - and have offered her all devotions, claimed to lie sleepless and tormented every night for her, but these are only the usual attentions expected of court gentlemen, even those with wives of their own. Not one has ever been close enough to even kiss her cheek. She has never known a lover's hand in anything but the most chaste of ways. Compare her to Eliyne; one graceful and elegant and willowy and perfectly pure and innocent, the other plump and cheery and glittering with presents given for her own sort of favours, and yet experience clearly means nothing. One cannot imagine Eliyne proceeding down the throne room on a husband's arm, smiling serenely. With Cerys it is as if the image has been there for years. Only the man's face is difficult to make out.
"I intend to avoid it," she says. "Your boldness has inspired me, my dear Lady Clare. I told them I would choose a husband when the war is done. It is not right, I told them, to engage in celebration at such a painful time. How could we eat swan while our men taste steel and snow?" She is fond of this idea, of this excuse, and to show it she mimics her uncle's face, his puffed cheeks, his frown. "I will choose when they return, and we will celebrate double: a marriage and a victory."
"As it will be."
"As it will be, of course." A smile. She wants to be told she has done well, so Branwen says it. Cerys, when she is in the sort of mood that has her dancing about the room, deserves all validation she can receive. "Shall we have music?" she asks, whirling. "Nicolas Wrainby has sent me a harpist, and he is not an utter disaster if someone tunes the instrument for him, which I can. We can sing ourselves, if you would like. Or send for Alice. She has a sweet voice, we shall have to start calling her our little nightingale." Her eyes flash with mischief. "And what of Gweon? Does he sing too?"
"Alice," she says firmly. "We'll have Alice."