Chapter 4

For the most part I always felt extremely guilty about the indulgences that my position allowed for, and I rarely took advantage of the castle's willing and highly competent staff. I rarely had someone help me dress or clean my rooms. I usually did it myself. I sometimes had meals sent to my rooms for Raphael and I, if it was late, or if I was feeling sick, but I felt guilty enough about everything else. I felt guilty that Nimue was suffering and that people were dying. I felt guilty that there wasn't more that I could do. I felt guilty that Rowan was out there fighting . . . but right then he was back with me, so as we walked across the courtyard and in through the great doors, I looked to the Chancellor and the Head Steward, “Have a hot bath brought up to our rooms immediately, and dinner. Nothing fancy. Bread, cheese, dried fruit, hard boiled eggs, stew, and I know I don't need to say this but, no meat. Make sure no one bothers us until tomorrow midday unless it's an emergency, and I want breakfast brought up, but not too early.”

I think that it was the most I'd said all in one go, to Wilhelm, the head steward, since my arrival and he blinked at me and said, “Certainly My Lady. Right away.” And then hurried away to make sure it was done.

I briefly hugged Liam and told him that I would see him the next day and told him to say the same to Lief if he saw him, and then I took Rowan's hand and we left the busy courtyard for the quiet peace of a candlelit room and closed doors. You can feel guilty tomorrow, I told myself.

Rowan didn't say much to me as I undid the buckles on his armour and tossed it in a pile for the attendants, who were filling the bath, to take away with them when they left. It was hard in a way. Rowan and I had known each other for about three and a half months by then, but we'd been apart more than we'd been together. There were things that had happened during that time apart. Battles, losing Nessa, Malik and Cole, my fights with the council. I wanted to shelter Rowan. Let him be away from all of that, but I wasn't sure what to say to him. I was pregnant with his baby, but I didn't know what to say? It wasn't an uneasy silence though, so I decided to let it be. Rowan threw his filthy clothes onto the pile and then sank into the tubful of hot water. I watched him fill his hands with water and pour it over his face, rubbing with his hands as if to clean it of more than just dirt. I turned to the wardrobe and swapped the red dress for a comfortable night gown then lay down on the foot of the bed curled on my side with my head propped on my hand. Rowan sank deeper into the water and then sank right under rubbing his face and head still. He emerged dripping and looked at me. Nothing more. He just rested there and looked at me for a long time then he smiled, “Pass me the soap and the razor, would you? Now that I'm all the way warm and my mind finally believes that my body is sleeping next to yours tonight, all I want is to be clean, shaved, and dry.”

I smiled and got up and passed him the tray with all of the toiletries on it. I pushed up my sleeves up and told him, “Here, lean forward and I'll scrub your back.”

There were scars, new scars, on his back, and while I let my fingers linger over them briefly, wishing that I could erase them, I didn't ask how he had gotten them because I knew now that it wasn't that he didn't want to share with me, it was that when he was with me, the ugliness of war was something that he wanted to leave behind him and forget. So I wouldn't remind him. Not just then.

The tubful of dirty water was removed and food was brought up by Wilhelm himself. I took the tray from him and thanked him which was, I knew, not what the kings and queens before me would have done. They would have sat by and watched as he placed it on a table and set everything out, but I wasn't like that. I'm still not.

“Pwyll is in the hall. If you should need anything else just send for me,” Wilhelm said in his efficient tone.

“Thank you, I will,” I said as I pushed the door closed with my foot, then turned and brought the tray over to the bed so that we could eat and lounge.

“You know exactly what I need and want, don't you?” Rowan said looking at me appreciatively.

“For everyone to go away and let us be?” I smiled.

“Yes.” He smiled back at me so that everything felt right in my heart.

“Are we going to have to pay for this with the council tomorrow? Are they waiting with baited breath for a report so that they can argue over how best to proceed?” he asked, and I'm sure that he asked so that he would know whether or not he would have to be mentally prepared for it.

“No. We met today shortly before you returned, and I did schedule a short meeting tomorrow before dinner just to keep them happy, but we've had steady communication through Nuriel and Mikail, and anything else can be discussed once you and the rest of the army have had a chance to sleep, eat, and see their families if they can. I had to push the issue home pretty hard but the fact is, that at this juncture, the weather is our friend, and we can afford a night to let everyone catch their breath.” I didn't tell him that I'd had to yell and scream at some of the more obstinate, conservative, council members that my sister-in-law and a close friend had just been blown up, and that if they wanted sanity from me that I needed a break and that since we couldn't see more than four metres out from the castle anyway, that this seemed the night for it.

Rowan nodded, understanding that we could drop any talk of the council or duty or obligation and instead looked around the room, “It looks much better in here. What did you do?”

Ever since arriving at the castle I'd felt overwhelmed and overstimulated and after a few short weeks I realized that the castle was so heavily over-decorated that it felt cluttered and it was actually making me more anxious. The sheer volume of daybeds, settees, portraits, occasional chairs, tapestries, bureaus and every other imaginable type of furniture or decoration was quite beyond comprehending. Everything was heavily carved, excessively ornate, and, gloomily reminiscent of the Gothic revival and Jacobethan styles. It would have been kind of fun in a romanticized medieval sort of way if it weren't so very over the top.

I looked around the room. The castle would never have the airy golden feel of Rowan's family home, but at least now you could actually see some of the truly beautiful woodwork and tapestries with all the excess removed.

“I got rid of half the furniture,” I told Rowan. “In fact I had nearly a full third of the furniture in the entire castle removed and given to less fortunate families in the city. It was a good thing too because the temperature was dropping and with all the men and many of the single women gone, those left behind have been pushed to the point of burning their own furniture for warmth. Their houses aren't built to handle this cold and there were children and old people with no beds to sleep in and not enough blankets.”

Rowan was quiet for a moment. “The furniture is better off where it will get used. If old Queen Freya were alive to see it she would have some kind of internal rupture. What did my grandmother say?” he asked me with a smile as if he were expecting to be entertained by my answer.

“Caitlin backed me all the way on that one, and she's been laughing for the last three days. Ever since the furniture was moved out. She keeps making jokes about the most convoluted use of tax dollars she's ever seen, and every time I ask her to explain she laughs so hard that I can't get a coherent answer out of her.”

Rowan laughed. “Freya was often criticized for, how shall we say it,” he paused finding the right words, “Confusing her own comforts and desires with the needs of the people. She's the one responsible for the over-furnished castle. Of course it all came from taxes, so the fact that you've given all of the excess furniture to the poor, so that they can use their old furniture for fire wood, is a very convoluted use of tax dollars. My grandmother never did like Freya.”

“Freya was my Grandmother wasn't she?”

“You're nothing like her, trust me,” Rowan said, then, “More bread?”

“Mmm,” I nodded. “More stew too,” I said, grateful to finally be relaxed enough to eat a little more than usual without having my poor stomach twist into knots of anxiety and send me scurrying. It was normal for me to have a nervous stomach, but being pregnant was putting it over the top. We ate and talked, sticking to superficial topics, but when the food was gone and we had fed the fire, turned out the lamps, and lit a candle or two on the bedside table, it wasn't as easy. Not that it should have been. Awful things were happening.

The window in its pane shuddered as the gale force winds battered the castle walls. Rowan had just lifted the blankets to climb into bed next to me, but put them back down and walked over to the window and opened it then wedged a towel in between the window and the outer shutters so that the rattling stopped. He came back to the bed and lay down and I moved so that I could rest my head on his shoulder. He circled his arms around me and I buried my face against him and breathed. I'd never felt so much relief in my life as I did that night at having Rowan back, but I hadn't realized until he ran his hand down my abdomen so that it came to rest on the hard little curve between my hip bones that he had still been worrying. He let out a long breath, “Oh Rhiannon. You don't know how much I've hated leaving you here. When you came to me outside of the gates you were like a vision in that red dress with the snow and your hair swirling around you. More beautiful than any angel to me. But when you were in my arms and you cried I thought . . . I thought that perhaps you'd lost the baby and I've been afraid to ask you how you are for fear of upsetting you. But you're alright . . . You're alright.”

I started to cry again for no good reason, but told him, “I'm fine, I'm fine. There's nothing wrong with me. Morgana says I'm perfectly healthy and that being sick as much as I am is a sign of a healthy baby. I just missed you so much.”

“It's foolish of me I know, but every time I sent Nuriel or Mikail back to the castle I asked them to bring me word of you, and every time they came back they told me the same. That you were fine. There was a part of me that feared they only told me that you were fine so I wouldn't worry and let it distract me.”

He held me tightly for a moment and then moved his hand back to my belly.

“I'm fine Rowan, I really am. Morgana told me that in a few more weeks I should be able to feel the baby moving. If . . . If you have to go away again, I'll write to you. I'm messy and stilted when I write in your script, but I'll write to you every day and tell you everything. I promise.”

He nodded and looked at me in the candlelight. Gently brushed a few stray tears off of my cheeks and then sighed, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” I said and nestled in closer, liking the way relaxed muscles were so warm and comfortable to curl up against, and the fact that Rowan wasn't lacking in muscles. But since we were moving into painful territory I asked him, “How are you?”

“Now that I'm here,” Rowan sighed, “I'm . . . fine. Better anyway. I . . . wish this were over.”

I wasn't going to push him to tell me more than that, but I needed to know, “How is Lief?”

“Not well,” Rowan said bluntly. “Not that I've pushed him, and I won't what with the words that have passed between us on the subject of love over the last year, but he won't speak to me beyond essentials. As far as I could find out he isn't speaking to anyone. Lief is very stubborn. He'll deal with Nessa's death in his own way, even if it kills him.”

It was another hard thing. It left a lump in my throat and renewed the ache in my chest that had been there ever since news of the explosion had been brought to us. Nessa's death wasn't an easy one, because if Lief had made his relationship with her official she would probably have been at home and about as pregnant as I was by then, not fighting. But Lief didn't love her enough to want that with her anymore, not enough to be sure he wanted to tie himself to her. Or was it that he truly felt it would be unfair to her to commit to her when he had every likelihood of riding away and then being killed in battle? But Nessa was stubborn too, and had been an exceptional spy. What she had done in finding the enemy weapons cache and then helping Malik into the compound with the bomb may well have been the tipping point in allowing us to win the war. I couldn't regret what she and Malik had done, I could only regret that they were dead, and I knew that Rowan felt the same way that I did. I couldn't imagine how Lief was feeling.

It made me think though. It made me imagine what would have been, how life would have turned out, if I had been too afraid of being hurt to have accepted Rowan's proposal that autumn evening. Too afraid of falling completely and then losing him, to have said yes. But I couldn't deny that I had already fallen completely by then. If I had said no, and he had died, I would have been left with nothing but regret. Even then, I knew that I would have spent the rest of my life wondering what it would have been like to be his, and have him be mine. I tightened my grip on him. “Let's not talk anymore,” I said.

Rowan, in reply, kissed me. I wasn't so pregnant that we couldn't make love, so we did. And then we slept.