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

Britain, but nothing set with jewels like this. I would be covered in gems when I went to my marriage tomorrow. No one would see me. They would see a thousand dazzling gems and I would be a display of the riches and grandeur of the great King Arthur’s court. Or perhaps he was worried I would be plain. I knew I was not plain, at least. I had seen many of the women of Logrys and found them plainer, smaller, quieter than our own Breton women, many of whom like me were touched with fire, red in the hair and the soul, passionate and quick with life. What would Arthur make of me? I knew what I made of him already.

Chapter Three
    I did not sleep during the night. Instead I listened to my heart fluttering in my chest, trapped under my skin, under the useless hushing of my ribs. I didn’t know what I was afraid of, or even if I was afraid. I wasn’t afraid of what I knew would come after the wedding, like other girls I had known were, though I knew all about it. I had heard other women talking about it, and even seen it once as a child when I walked past a half-closed door and peeped in to see one of my brothers on top of a girl from the village. It had not looked so bad as it sounded when I’d heard it described. Besides, I was not going to let Arthur touch me. He was not going to think he was just going to demand me here and throw me down beneath him like a whore. No, I was not worried about that , because it was not going to happen. Perhaps if it had been a man like Kay, as I had wished when they had come to collect me, then I could have borne it, to have his hands on me, but not a man who hid from me, and who in turn tried to hide me beneath silks, and jewels.
    I was anxious, though, that I had not seen yet the man I was to marry. Only his knights. Of them all, only Gawain was what I had expected; rough and quiet, with the ungentle hands of a killer. Sir Kay had been kind, and Ector. But what would Arthur be like? He was not a man who had been born and raised to his throne, so he would not be a spoiled fop, but he was a man who had killed for it, who had slaughtered his rivals for it, including my father’s own men, and done so relentlessly to get it, so he would not be a gentle man, a civilized man. Not that there had been so many of those at my father’s court, but we were wild people in a different way. Woodland hunters, proud fighters, but not warmongers, not battle-generals. We didn’t ride around on armoured horses, terrorising the peasants as Arthur’s men seemed to do. My father had sent our people because my mother’s people had owed King Lot allegiance, not because he was interested in wars. And now the war was over, and he found himself on the losing side. The knights of Carhais who would now come to Arthur were the last of my father’s forces, and though Carhais would be safe, it would also be empty. The glory of Carhais was all gone from it, seeping out into the big, bloody sponge that was Arthur’s Logrys, and the bloody beating heart at the centre, Camelot.
     
    I must have slept, because Margery gently woke me with a hand on my shoulder. It was full light already, so late, but my head throbbed with an insistent weariness, that of a night of broken sleep. I think I had dreamed of home, and the dappled light of the forest, watching the leaves dance in the breeze, chasing a doe through the woodlands.
    Marie and Christine came in with a bath and began to fill it with steaming water, and then lavender and rose oils. So Arthur even knew how he wanted me to smell . I slid out of bed, and out of my nightdress and into the water. It was too hot, and my pale skin blushed deep red at the heat of it, but I didn’t care. It felt as though it was burning the journey away, my past life away, preparing me to be the queen I was now going to have to be. Margery brushed out my hair with soft strokes as I lay soaking, and when I got out, wet and pink like a newborn, plaited it into the style the women wore in Logrys –