THE WARRIOR QUEEN (The Guinevere Trilogy Book 1) Read Free

took my ladies on the back of their horses, and Sir Kay leapt up behind the knight on the remaining horse, and we turned away from Dover, and I turned my back on the sea, and my home beyond it, as though it were nothing at all to me. Nothing at all.
     
    The ride to Arthur’s new-made court, the city of Camelot, felt unbearably long, even though it took less than a day. I could feel my heart heavy within me, heavy and slow with the thought of my home receding farther and farther away behind me. The land we rode through was ravaged and bare. In the villages we passed though, the people cowered from the knights, lowering their grubby faces and retreating into the shadows of their doorways, as the huge men with shining armour on themselves and on their horses thundered by. This is not how it had been in Carhais. I had walked barefoot through the woodlands to the villages nearby and no one had known who I was. I had listened in on the conversations of my father’s subjects, smelled their food cooking, seen them crying. Perhaps if Arthur had walked among his people he would not be such a warlike king; perhaps he would be gentle and prudent instead, like my own father, who would rather have sent his daughter to a stranger, and a brute, and a conqueror, with no more protection than an enchanted table, than risk his people’s lives.
    I was glad to be ahead of the rest of the party – my horse was strong and fast, and bearing less of a load than the others was happy to prance ahead. I could see the landscape opening before me, softer and less wild than my own country, but full of deep, lush-looking woodlands and wide, proud hilltops. Perhaps I could be happy here in my time alone, as long as I was far from the war-hollowed villages or Arthur’s brutish court. If I could ride through the land, smelling the earth and the warm, homely scent of the horse beneath me. He was a handsome horse, the one I was riding, a bay with a glossy mane and velvety nostrils. I had left my own dear horse at home. I tried to put these thoughts from my mind. If I were to have any chance of happiness I had to be resolved to my new life, and try to forget about the past. My childhood stubbornness still lingered with me, determined to go home, but another part of me – I supposed what I had inherited from my father – knew I needed to be practical. That I might never go home.
    The smell of spring was strong in the air, and the gentle breeze that lifted my hair lightly off my forehead was soothing. It was when the sky began to redden at the edges, when the first edge of the sun dipped below the horizon and threw its fire onto the underside of the clouds above it, that I first saw Camelot. Black and sharp against the horizon, high on a broad hill, I could count eight round turreted towers reaching up high into the sky, and around them the castle walls. Silk banners whose colours I could not see fluttered in silhouette in the breeze above it. It was everything I had refused to believe it would be. The boy king’s city was a thing of beauty with its delicate towers fluttering with flags and banners, but also a siege weapon – oh, I could see that, too, from where I was already. Word of Camelot had come to Carhais years ago when it had been the mighty fortress of the warlord Uther Pendragon, the man they said was Arthur’s father, and people had associated its name with a shiver of the spine. I had imagined iron, and steel. The smell of blood. It looked a different place from that, now. Welcoming, though I only saw it black against the red sky, and far-off, with its fluttering banners. It was a place of celebration. Of course it was. Arthur had the victory. It was as though all the joy in the world had poured out of Carhais, and into this place. Of course it had. Joy followed victory. The sight of that city, my future home, black against the setting sun, filled me with a tentative, fluttering hope, but it also filled me with dread.

Chapter Two
    By the time