Goddess (Starcrossed 3)

The other Helen who sat across from her was not the Spartan one from before. This one was wearing a gown made out of some kind of rough, homespun material. There were blue-dyed strings woven into her long, blonde hair and she sat on a pile of tanned skins and furs. The backs of her hands were painted with more blue dye in intricate curlicues that Helen vaguely recognized as Irish. The word Celtic bubbled up in her mind and she knew that description, while maybe not completely accurate, was closer to the true one.

At the other Helen’s waist was a dagger. Her hand clutched it desperately at every sound she heard from outside the shuttered and barred window of her prison-like carriage. This other Helen looked like a savage and was being treated like a caged animal. Helen wondered if this “other her” was dangerous.

“My lady Guinevere!” shouted a familiar voice outside the window.

Lucas’s voice.

Guinevere opened the shutter over the window, and Helen immediately saw why this version of herself was so terrified. The Furies started weeping in the corner of the carriage as soon as Guinevere and the other Lucas made eye contact.

He was sitting on the huge, black horse that was trotting alongside the coach. He was wearing dark leather, a thick, black woolen cloak, and belted at his waist was a long broadsword. He looked big and fierce and beautiful.

“Do you need to relieve yourself?” he asked in a strange, lilting language that Helen understood although she’d never heard it before.

“My mother taught me to speak perfect Latin, as you well know,” Guinevere snarled back at him in a different language that Helen also understood without ever having heard it before. She assumed it was Latin. “She wasn’t a filthy Roman like you, but she was from the east.”

“I’m no Roman. Don’t call me that,” the other Lucas said with a dangerous glint in his eye. “Sir Lancelot will do just fine.”

Their baleful gazes met and held. The Furies wailed, causing both Guinevere and Lancelot to cringe as they tried to control themselves. Helen knew that if the bars in the window did not separate them they would have attacked each other.

Lancelot looked up and down the long line of warriors that accompanied them, as if reminding himself that there were witnesses who would keep him from doing anything stupid.

“Why don’t you just kill me now?” Guinevere hissed at him quietly. Her low tone told Helen that Guinevere was also aware that there were other people watching—people who would not understand her irrational hatred for Lancelot or his hatred for her.

“That pleasure I leave to Arthur, my cousin and king,” Lancelot replied stiffly, almost reluctantly, like something about that bothered him. “After you marry him and ensure your clan’s allegiance, of course. Then I’m sure he’ll kill you with joy.”

“And you call us barbarians,” Guinevere snapped at him.

She slammed the window shut and threw herself back on the pile of furs. Helen knew—she remembered—that the furs were part of the large dowry from Guinevere’s father. He was the head of her clan, and he had sent along many gifts with his daughter in this wedding train. All of the rich goods were a peace offering to the undefeatable invaders from the east, and Guinevere was the ultimate spoil of war. The most beautiful girl on the island offered up as a gift to the big, golden-haired invader from a faraway land. And they desperately hoped he liked the gift—because if he didn’t, this King Arthur just might slaughter them all.

Guinevere knew her father loved her in his gruff way. He couldn’t know that he was sending his favorite child to her death. He wasn’t like these men from the east or like her late mother had been. Clan leader or not, her father was just a normal mortal, and he believed he was honoring his daughter above all others by giving her to the new, young, and, by all accounts, handsome High King. Guinevere had no defensible reason to object. Her father had every right to marry her off to whomever he chose, and unless she was ready to reveal her secret, and her late mother’s secret, she had to go along with it.

Tears of rage and frustration brimmed in Guinevere’s eyes. Helen remembered Guinevere’s feeling of desperation in this impossible situation distinctly, because once it had been her own.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Lancelot yelled stubbornly at the closed window. “You’ve been shut up in there for over a day now. Do you need to relieve yourself, Princess?”

Guinevere proudly dashed the tears from her eyes, smoothed her mussed hair, and pulled open the window. “No!” she howled, and slammed the window shut again.

Lancelot barked once with surprised laughter. A few moments of tense indecision passed. His black charger pranced anxiously outside Guinevere’s barred window as if he were reluctant to leave her. Finally, he clucked his tongue at his Goliath of a mount and thundered away.

Guinevere dropped her head onto her folded arms and tried not to think of how much she needed to relieve herself.

Moments later, she lifted her head in alarm. Shouts were coming from the back of the wedding train—shouts and strange yelps. Someone screamed in agony. Guinevere leapt to her feet and pulled out her dagger, snarling like the heathen she was.

Her carriage lurched to a stop, and Helen could hear men shouting all around. Something jolted the side of the halted carriage, sending Guinevere sprawling against the wall of her cage. She steadied herself on her knees as another great shove knocked the carriage over onto its side—the window side facing down. The inside of the carriage went completely dark as the only escape was pushed into the earth.

“To the princess!” commanded Lancelot’s voice from a distance. “Surround the carriage!”

There was a great rustling of leaves, and the sound of many men moving into position around her. Guinevere listened to the clanging of metal on metal, and the pounding of feet running over her carriage. There were men grunting, shouting, screaming, and dying in every direction. The dull thud of bodies hitting the carriage and the ground was coupled with the last rattling breaths of dying men.

Guinevere repeatedly slammed her shoulder into the side of the carriage, trying to tip it over and expose the window, but she did little more than rock the massive iron-and-oak enclosure back and forth. She let out a moan of frustration.

“Lady Guinevere! Are you injured?” Lancelot said in a strident voice from outside the wall of her knocked-over prison.

“No,” Guinevere said back firmly. “Let me out so I can fight.”

Lancelot made a frustrated sound. “They’ve taken to the trees.”

“Picts?” Guinevere guessed. There was no sound from Lancelot, probably because he didn’t know who their attackers were and couldn’t answer her. “They’ll be back with more warriors after dusk,” she promised him. “Please believe me—you may have pushed them back for now, but they are not gone.”