Queen of the Summer Stars

Queen of the Summer Stars Read Free

Book: Queen of the Summer Stars Read Free
Author: Persia Woolley
Tags: Historical Romance
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greet her son’s bride and shape my future as surely as Merlin shaped Arthur’s. I was—and sometimes still am—too outspoken to please most nobles, and my life at the High Court could have been a misery if the Queen Mother hadn’t taken me under her wing. During the months after the wedding, when Arthur was off at war, she smoothed my tomboy ways into some semblance of grace, and taught me to look beneath the surface of the people around me. It was then we had become close, and she’d told me any number of stories of her early life. She did not, however, talk about Arthur’s origins, or how she herself came to be High Queen, and I lacked the courage—or rudeness—to ask about it.
    The common folk claimed Arthur’s birth was the result of magic—that Merlin created him to fulfill the prophesy that a great king would rise out of Cornwall and lead the Britons to victory against the Saxon invaders. There were stories of dragons and comets, and mighty spells cast over the fortress at Tintagel. I was sure there was more to the story than legend allowed, and hoped I might understand Arthur better if I could figure out the riddle of his parents.
    Igraine was regal and dignified, and always thought of the needs of others, while Uther—by all accounts—had been harsh and abrasive, and was as much feared as Igraine was loved. Indeed, the very fact that they’d become a couple at all seemed a puzzle to many, including me.
    Born of the royal line of Cunedda in southern Wales, Igraine would have known a life of ease and luxury but for the shadow of Vortigern, the Wolf; even the established families of the Empire walked cautiously in the days of the tyrant.
    Like most British children, I’d listened to the elders tell the stories of Vortigern, who rose to power following the Time of Troubles, after the Legions were taken back to the Continent to support Constantine’s bid to become emperor. Seeing Britain left defenseless, our barbaric neighbors—Pict and Irish, Angles and Saxons—rushed to plunder the rich Roman province. But though we begged Rome for help, the reply was an admonition to look to our own defenses because the whole of the Empire was crumbling and there were no legions to spare.
    In the chaos that followed, Vortigern had clawed and schemed and murdered his way to supremacy over the other warlords who were carving out kingdoms for themselves. Once in power, he offered to make the Saxons Federates, giving them both land and money if they’d help us fight off the rest of our enemies.
    “Invited the sea wolves right into the sheep-fold, he did,” my childhood nurse used to say. “Anyone could see they’d revolt against him sooner or later. By then he’d fallen in love with the Saxon chief’s daughter, Rowena…stupid old man put aside his British wife to marry the pretty lass with the flaxen hair, and gave her father the kingdom of Kent to seal the bargain! One wonders how he slept at night, knowing the people cursed him for the turncoat lie was!”
    Indeed, both Vortigern’s waking and sleeping were troubled, for there were rumors that Ambrosius Aurelius and Uther Pendragon, the sons of the rightful ruler, were building an army in Brittany, and would one day return to claim their throne. So Vortigern sent his spies everywhere, until fear begot constant suspicion, and tyranny replaced leadership.
    “I was eleven when the tyrant’s men swept through my father’s villa, murdering them all,” Igraine had once told me. “If my parents hadn’t sent me away with their old friend the Duke of Cornwall the night before, I would have been killed as well, for the tyrant’s men spared no one. But instead I grew up in Gorlois’s stronghold at Tintagel, as the Duke’s ward.”
    Igraine was very happy there, playing in the meadows at the top of the cliffs while the surf crashed and pounded on all three sides of the headland, and rainbows hung in splendor over the ocean.
    I could easily imagine her—a shy,

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