Angharad of Llyr is heir to a matriarchy: a line of enchantress-queens that has ruled her island for centuries. Her destiny from birth: to rule as sole authority and ensure that her powerful bloodline endures for another generation. Devoted to her p...
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"Your Majesty."
Quiet words, spoken like the gentle nudge of an elbow; they brought a long meditation to an abrupt end. Regat turned from the window she'd been gazing from and nodded to her Chief Steward. He laid an armful of documents before her upon the table. "As you requested."
"Thank you, Caradoc." She ran her elegant hand over the yellowed vellum. "Nothing was disturbed?"
"Nothing, milady. It was well-secreted, exactly where you said it would be. Even I had no idea. I thought it all destroyed." He looked curiously at the cryptic symbols scrawled across the page. "What prompted you to preserve your father's notes?"
"It was Mother's idea," Regat said dispassionately. "I wanted to burn them."
"What do you hope to find?"
"I hope for nothing," she sniffed, "only remembered, in my meditations, that he had been following a rumor. I daresay it was all nonsense. But these days, no stone should be left unturned." But she pushed the pile to the side, lost it in a heap of several other documents, as though it were unimportant as yet. "More urgently, I understand we have a guest."
"Indeed. One hopeful enchanter, a Lord Grimgower." Caradoc cleared his throat. "Do you suppose he named himself that?"
The queen made a sound that might have been called, in anyone else, a derisive snort. "No doubt he did. Ridiculous. What sort of prospect?"
Caradoc looked cautiously amused. "A bit older than one might hope, and...rather dour. He came with a small retinue, a sun-starved lot, I thought. They wear only black. I saw nothing likely to appeal to the princess, but perhaps he will surprise us."
"Perhaps," said Regat dryly. "Well, we can hope he is only the first of many choices. We have a few more weeks. See that he is made comfortable. I suppose there is nowhere to put him that will be entirely free of gossip about the current trouble. It will be alleviated shortly, I hope."
"Shall I arrange a meeting with the princess?"
"Good Llyr. Our hospitality is reward enough for his eagerness. No need to overdo it."
Caradoc swallowed a smile, and bowed as she waved him a silent dismissal. Regat waited until the door had shut behind him, and turned back to the table with a sigh. She stared at the documents laid upon it, angry at the contradictory urges she felt to throw them instantly onto the hearth, or to lay her head upon them and weep at the sight of her father's familiar hand, unseen for decades. The former was emotional outburst. The latter was sentiment.
Regat, daughter of Mererid, Queen of Llyr, was a woman given to neither.
Calm and collected dignity was a skill trained into all those of her line, of course. A queen could not afford instability or even the appearance of it in public — not when neighboring kingdoms, some distrustful, some hostile to matriarchy on principle, might take it as a sign of weakness. Moreover, the innate ability to set any flammable object in the near vicinity ablaze at a flick of the wrist was not one suited to a lack of self-control. Thus, the education of a Daughter of Llyr began early, with nursemaids who did not reward tears with kisses, with governesses who allowed no excuses of fatigue for work done carelessly or left unfinished, with mothers who plied the shoulders of their slender, steel-souled daughters with the burdens that had been passed down, with equal weight, by their own.
