He kissed me formally when he greeted me, and held my hands in his own.
“My child.” I welcomed him. “You have changed a great deal since I sent you off.”
“Godmother,” he answered warmly, “but you are exactly the same, and all as beautiful as I remember.”
Since I had seen him I had borne two more children, five in all, not counting those not carried to term. My husband, King Lot of the Orcades, flung words like hag and crone in my face when he wanted to hurt me. Yet I had never known Medraut to say a doing he did not believe to be true.
He sat by me as we feasted him on his first night back in the home of his childhood. He shared a plate with me. His left hand rested quiet and still upon his thigh, while he broke his bread and handled his meat only with the right. He did it deftly, and without making a show of it; I only noticed because I was fascinated by the curious beauty of his long, dark hands. My own hands had grown thin and wiry over the years of birthing and cutting and healing and killing; they were now lean and taut as a man’s. Medraut’s hands were like replicas of my own, but larger, stronger.
“Have you hurt your hand?” I asked, and touched his left very lightly. “You do not use it.”
“It is only habit. It is very rude to eat with your left hand in Aksum.”
I clasped his fine fingers beneath mine. He tolerated this patiently, but did not return the endearment. His first ten years had taught him to beware my attention.
“How long were you ambassador there?” I asked.
His look turned suspect a moment. It was exactly the expression he had worn at seven, apprehensive that he was about to endure another humiliating catechism: Why do I have you beaten in place of my husband’s sons, Medraut? Why do I place the fault at your feet when you did no wrong? Why is it meet that the high king’s bastard should wait on King Lot’s children?
Now I laughed at his look, very gently. He joined me, laughing at himself, suddenly at ease; or attempting to be. His hand lay still beneath mine.
“I was in Aksum a little longer than three years,” he said. “Which of these young men are my cousins?”
He called them cousins, not brothers or half-brothers, for it is a secret that I am his mother. He had been taken from me when he was born and then, after an occult series of maskings to hide the truth of his birth, given back to me a little later to “foster” for his father the high king. It would have been profanity to allow the people to know that the high king’s only child was born of incest. Medraut had never heard the truth from me.
“I think I can guess Gareth and Agravain,” Medraut continued, “but I don’t recognize Gwalchmei at all. Agravain’s hair is so like yours.”
“And Gareth’s like yours,” I said.
He shot me a swift, startled frown. So: He knew what I meant. How could he not, with my eyes and my hands and my cool, collected glance? But Artos must have told him.
“Gwalchmei has more of his father’s look than mine,” I added calmly, as though nothing had passed between us in that moment of subtle testing and recognition. “There he is, at the opposite end of the other long table. And Gaheris is on his right. Gaheris is devoted to him.”
“Artos wants to offer them all places in his court,” Medraut said.
Perhaps he meant it only as a polite and honorable invitation. It was sheerly threatening. Well, I thought, so he declares his loyalty.
“And you,” I said gently. “Have you a place there?”
“Always,” he said warmly, reverent and unguarded.
I felt the same surge of jealousy and hatred that I had known when he was a child. It made me want to strike him, as it always had. What a spirit he had had then, how he had endured my dominion over him in silent stoicism, how he had clung pridefully, quietly, to the knowledge of who his father was, and to the hope that Artos would rescue him from the northern hell that was his childhood. And here he was back within my grasp, his loyalty confirmed, himself no longer a child.
“Neither Gaheris nor Gareth was born when I left,” said Medraut lightly. “I have been away longer than it seems.”
I had striven so to create him, this living weapon against my brother. I remembered the seduction and the labor, the intrigue and the exile, and felt myself haggard with age and strain. I thought I had lost him.
“Medraut,” I said, “stay with me a while before you return to your father in Camlan.”
His idle hand turned suddenly over. The long, beautiful fingers folded around mine in apology. He could have crushed my hand.
“I can’t stay here.”
The seven-year-old I had fought with and beaten and solaced regarded me through the poised and guarded gaze of the young man. He looked down at our thin hands entwined and smiled ruefully. “I only came because I did not think I would have another chance to see you. But I am bound for Camlan. I have been doing too much. There’s nothing for me here. I need to act. I need to learn.”
He had been important in Aksum. He had been feared and loved and admired as an administrator, and for his skill as a warrior and a hunter. He had taken great cats of strange and wild strains on the African plains, and brought me gifts of lion and leopard skin.
“You could learn much from me,” I said.
He looked up. It was like staring at my own gray eyes in a glass to look into his calm and shuttered gaze. “How much do you mean that, I wonder,” he said. He had never been anyone’s fool. “You have always kept your knowledge jealously concealed.”
“I have only ever wanted one apprentice,” I said. “I have been waiting.”
“Waiting for me?” He laughed. “You never told me so. Do you mean to say that in thirty years you have taught no one else any of your physician’s skill?”
“And lose my reputation as a sorceress?” I said playfully. “I am revered for it.”
“And abhorred, some would say.”
“You are as bold with me as you ever were.”
He was silent a moment. “I did not mean to be rude. But I feel as though I am being tempted not for my good will, but to your own purpose, Odysseus ensnared by Circe.”
I laughed lightly. “The traveler and the witch.”
“You suckled me on Greek legend,” he made excuse. “And the old stories have been much on my mind in my journeys, seeing the famous places for myself.”
“I did not suckle you,” I corrected gently. “But I am glad you remember the stories. You do not really fear me, do you?”
“Of course not,” he answered swiftly
“Then stay here,” I said. “Prove to me your courage. I have much to teach you.”
I felt like one who wants to trap and cage a little bird, and after years of waiting and luring and baiting finds that she must do no more than hold out her hand, and the finch lands on her finger and does not fly. You scarcely dare to move. It rests on your hand whole and free, foolishly trusting and infinitely courageous. It will never be more beautiful.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
My pig of a husband had long since ceased to share a bed with me. I think by now he must have guessed that the only thing that stopped me lacing his ale with aconite was my brother’s threat to have me executed for regicide if he heard rumor that Lot had died unnaturally and in my presence. “Well, you’ve a new toy now,” Lot said to me at the end of the evening. “Perhaps this season you won’t find it necessary to drug all the townsfolk at the Lammas festival.”
“You are idle as I am.”
“Take a lover,” my husband said.
“None of your fawning retainers is to my taste. Let you rut like a wild boar, without choosing, the nearest thing on heat. I can better satisfy myself.”
“Then do so,” Lot said cruelly. “Wait much longer to choose a man and none will have you. Go to bed, old woman.”