Chapter Eighteen
“ W hat do you mean his majesty has not returned yet?” Lancelot snapped at the man he was talking to. The alpha had seemingly forgotten me completely as he jumped from his horse, leaving Gawain to help me down from the massive stallion.
I looked shabby, I knew it, and everyone gathered in the stone courtyard knew it. Several people were whispering behind their hands, staring at my disheveled appearance.
“ That is our queen?” I heard someone murmuring to my left but when I glanced over every person standing around us was studiously avoiding my gaze.
“No, he sent word a few days ago that he would be behind schedule but we have not heard anything since,” the man he was talking to said with a shrug as he scratched his deep red facial hair. He looked to be the jolly type—the kind of man who laughed easy and deep at the slightest provocation. “I just assumed that he had found himself in trouble on his way back to Camelot.”
Lancelot just put his face in his hands. “Sir Kay, did you not even think of sending a pigeon in return?”
The man shrugged. “You know how Arthur is almost as well as I, Lancelot, do you think the king would have taken kindly to being minded by his brother?”
Lancelot just made a face before turning back to his horse. “I will go out in the direction they were meant to come in and see if I can assist.”
Bedivere reached out to stop him. “We have just returned to the castle, Sir Lancelot, your horse needs to be fed and rested before you go gallivanting off into the sunset again.”
Lancelot looked as if he wanted to argue with the older alpha, his fist tightening on Sarion’s reins before unclenching as he finally nodded his agreement. “Fine, but if they have not returned by first light tomorrow I expect you to go with me to find them.”
Bedivere’s frown was deep but still he nodded. “As you wish.”
Lancelot then turned on his heel and stomped off into the stone entrance of the castle, not sparing at glance over his shoulder for anyone still standing in the courtyard.
Or more importantly, not sparing a glance for me.
He probably blames me for his king going missing or some chivalrous bullshit like that, I thought to myself as the burly man turned his attention to me with a wide grin. “I always thought when my brother chose to bring home his wife she would look a great deal less… bedraggled.”
I had been racking my brain ever since Lancelot said the man’s name trying to remember where I had heard it before, and as the man swooped me up into a great, spine cracking hug, it finally came to me. His scent was light, fruity and most definitely that of a beta’s.
Sir Kay was the son of Arthur’s foster father, Sir Ector, and had been raised beside Arthur from a young age—the stories that mentioned things about him were all about how fierce of a warrior he had been and the sharpness of his tongue, but it was incredibly clear that those were way off about who I was likening to a giant teddy bear in my mind.
“And I never thought Arthur’s brother would be so… burly,” I said with a gasp as I gave the man a pat in hopes he would release me.
“Kay, I do not think his majesty would take too kindly to you rubbing your scent all over his omega.” Bedivere’s dry voice came from behind me and I was dropped back to the ground just as suddenly as I had been picked up.
“ Ach .” Kay waved a hand through the air as if he was waving off my scent. “Arthur will not care that his beta brother is touching his woman. He is more wise than that. Besides, it is not my brother that I have to worry about—”
“Kay!” a shrill voice cut through the crowd and the gigantic man winced before turning to look over his shoulder with a sheepish smile.
“Andrivete, my beloved!” he crowed, holding his arms open as a thin, willowy woman pushed her way through the crowd and came to a stop in front of him. “I was wondering when you would come down to greet the queen.”
Andrivete was a plain woman with dark features and high cheekbones. But there was one trait that was absolutely striking which were her eyes. As she squinted up at her husband and frowned, I saw that they were such a light color of brown that they almost appeared golden in the late afternoon light. “I was instructing the kitchen on the welcome feast which you neglected to do once we saw their party on the horizon and it seems that I came not a moment too soon, Husband, seeing as you were throwing our new queen about as if she was a sack of potatoes.”
“You very much so came not a moment too soon, my love, for I was just about to see how high I could toss her next.” Despite the woman’s clear disapproval, Kay remained jovial as he leaned down to press a sound kiss to the woman’s broad forehead.
Andrivete’s lips briefly turned up into an exasperated smile as she rolled her eyes at the man before turning to me in a flourishing curtsey. “Your majesty, it is an honor to make your acquaintance. I am Lady Andrivete, wife to this oaf here. I will be your head lady-in-waiting and both my husband and I serve as stewards for Castle Camelot.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, trying to mimic her curtsey and failing miserably.
Andrivete eyed the movement but said nothing as she turned to Gawain. “Gawain it is nice to see you have returned in one piece, go on and get the horses to the stable before taking a bath, I am sure you smell of horse and the wilds. Mistress Morris will have a warm meal for you after that.”
Gawain glanced between me and the woman, clearly unsure of who to listen to.
“Go on,” I told him softly, though my inner omega seemed to cry out in protest as the alpha disappeared into the crowd with all three horses in tow.
Andrivete’s steady gaze seemed to catch every miniscule moment of our interaction, her gaze flickering to the crowd and back to me again before she turned to Bedivere who had been standing as a silent sentinel behind me for the entirety of the interaction.
“And who is this, Sir Bedivere?” she asked, nodding to Henry who was peeking out from behind the man’s legs.
“This is a boy we found in the village that had been burned by the Saxons. His name is Henry.” Bedivere gave the boy a small shove forward and I watched as Andrivete’s entire demeanor changed and softened in an instant.
She crouched down in front of him, pulling her skirts up so that they would not be dragged through the damp dirt underfoot and offered him a smile. “Hello, lad, so your name is Henry?”
Henry’s head bobbed up and down as he looked up at me for help.
“He doesn’t talk much,” I told her, reaching out to smooth the little boy’s unruly curls on the top of his head.
“I see,” Andrivete murmured before turning to her husband.
An entire conversation seemed to be exchanged between the two with just one look and Kay just shook his head with exasperation once it was over.
“Wife, you are fortunate I adore you as much as I do,” he said with a wry grin as he held a hand out to Henry. “Come on then, lad. We will fill that belly of yours and scrub the rest of that dirt off of you before you meet your new siblings.”
My eyes widened as I looked between the couple. “Are you going to adopt him? Just like that?”
Andrivete smiled and it added a softness to her features that had not been there before as she pressed a hand to her stomach. “I have, unfortunately, never been blessed with children from my own womb—but we have seven children who came to us under similar circumstances—Henry will fit right in with the bunch.”
Henry’s expression brightened as he slid his smaller hand into Kay’s much larger paw and let the man lead him away, clearly already smitten with the jolly giant.
“Sir Bedivere, you should head in to rest. I will give her majesty a tour of the castle,” Andrivete said to me once the pair had disappeared completely as she stood up and straightened her skirts.
But Bedivere just shook his head. “I will remain with her majesty until she retires.”
Andrivete’s lips pulled down into a pensive smile. “I am fully capable of taking care of her majesty’s needs, Sir Bedivere, and she is safe while she is within the walls of Camelot. As such she does not need your escort.”
Bedivere just shook his head again, his expression still blank. “I will accompany her majesty until she retires this evening.”
Deep in my mind, I was completely tickled by the fact that the older alpha seemed protective over me. After our conversation by the creek the other day there had been no more mention of packs or fate, instead an awkward silence had hung between the four of us that I was too scared to point out.
In most of the romance books I had read as a guilty pleasure, fated mates were supposed to just know they were meant to be. In all of the books it was like some kind of switch was flipped and they just knew they were mates.
Meanwhile, me? I liked the way the other alphas smelled… but their personalities left much to be desired.
Lancelot was too broody and very obviously didn’t want anything to do with me, Bedivere was hard to read at the best of times, and Gawain? I had not been able to stop thinking about the almost kiss we’d shared at the creek.
And then there was his complete avoidance of me afterward. That had hurt my feelings almost as much as Lancelot forcing me to ride with him and then proceeding to ignore me almost entirely.
It was like they were playing a very fucked up game of emotional yo-yo —except I was the yo-yo .
Then there was Arthur. I had been able to feed my anger over being bonded by him on our wedding night for the first few days of travel, but by the end of the third day I just wanted to talk to him and ask him what he thought of this entire situation.
He had obviously trusted them enough to protect me, but what about everything else?
I also needed to figure out just when the final battle for Camelot was going to take place and try to fix it.
My mental laundry list of shit I needed to do was growing by the day and I didn’t even have my fancy planner that lived in my work bag to help me.
How the hell was a girl supposed to organize her life with a piece of parchment and a quill? Did they even use parchment and quills in the 6th century?
“Your majesty?” Andrivete’s voice cut through the constant stream of my panicked thoughts. At some point I must have mindlessly followed her into the castle because we were now standing in a sunny corridor in front of a pair of large wooden double doors.
“Sorry?” I said, my face warming. “Where are we again?”
“This is your quarters you will share with his majesty, I assumed you would like to change before we continued our tour of the castle.”
“With Arthur?” I repeated, sounding a bit stupid as I stared at the doors like they could grow fangs at a moment’s notice and swallow me whole. “Do husbands and wives usually share rooms?”
Andrivete’s dark brows drew together in confusion as if my words were foreign to her. “No, your majesty, they share chambers.”
I was already missing the room full of soft linens and sunlight back at Cameliard that had been all mine.
“All right,” I told her, my shoulders sinking as she pulled on the rings and opened the door…
Right into what looked like the most beautiful room I had ever seen.
Despite being built from the same foreboding stone as the rest of the castle it seemed to glow with multiple rainbows thanks to the stained glass filling the much larger than typical windows.
The bed sat up on a stone dais and was a large four poster with a rich, velvet looking cover across the top—it was a far cry from the nest my instincts wanted me to create, but even I had to admit it was the most opulent looking piece of furniture that I had ever seen. Each post had been meticulously carved with various animals and at a glance I could see foxes, owls, and even deer carved into the dark, gleaming wood.
“His majesty has never accepted an omega, so the bedding will need to be replaced, but does it suit your taste?”
I nodded wordlessly as I did a little spin, eyeballing the large blurry mirror and the great wood wardrobe that matched the bed.
Turning back to Andrivete, I pointed at the wardrobe. “There wouldn’t happen to be any clothes that would fit me in there, would there? All of my trunks are still with Arthur and his men.”
“The wardrobe is currently full of his majesty’s clothes, but you are of a size with Sir Agravaine’s wife. It will do until your clothing arrives,” Andrivete said, mostly to herself as she glanced at my shabby clothes. “I understand the men were keeping you safe, but it seems like they also decided to roll you in the mud before presenting you to your new people. I will have a talk with them.”
“Oh, you don’t need to! You know how camping is—dirtier than dirty with a side of dirt—just dunk me in a bath and I will be as good as new,” I said with a shrug, offering her what I hoped was a friendly smile as I glanced around the room for a tub. There had been one in my chambers in Carmeliad, but now as I looked around I found none. “Where is the bathtub? I don’t see it here?”
Andrivete’s expression was odd—probably thanks to my strange way of speaking—but she just shook her head. “Our bathing rooms are, ah, unique in Camelot, your majesty, come with me.”
Confused, I glanced over my shoulder at the beautiful space one more time before following the woman out of the room.
“This is amazing ,” I groaned as I sank down into the piping hot water and let it sting until my skin acclimated to the temperature.
After her mysterious words earlier, Andrivete had led me through the winding hallways of the castle and into what looked like a cavern carved directly into the mountain. It was there that she revealed a hot spring and I practically melted at the sight.
Back in Cameliard the maids had to heat up the water for baths bucket by bucket and by the time the wooden tub in my chambers was filled the water had long since cooled.
I hadn’t complained because they worked so hard so that I could bathe—something that I realized I could do from a place of privilege because when I asked Brenna about her bathing habits she told me she usually washed from a bucket with a cloth.
But now as I sank up to my chin in hot water, I realized that, out of everything from the future that I missed, soaking in blazing water was the thing I missed the most.
“It is Camelot’s best kept secret,” Andrivete told me as she sank down into the water next to me, clearly unafraid of being naked in front of a near-stranger like me.
There were several other women soaking in the spring several feet away, chatting as they helped each other wash their hair and in the distance I could hear the rough rumble of men’s voices.
Andrivete had explained that when the hot spring had been discovered by Merlin over ten years ago that Arthur had gone to work excavating the cave and they had carved out two spaces for both men and women to bathe.
Everyone in Castle Camelot used the spring to bathe—sometimes multiple times a day—which made complete sense as to why every person who passed us by in the corridors seemed cleaner than anyone I had ever met since coming to the past.
“Turn and I will wash your hair,” Andrivete directed as she poured a clear solution of something into her palm.
I did as directed, remembering Brenna explaining when she had washed my hair that they used something called soapwort to cleanse hair.
“How does the water stay so clean?” I asked, lifting a palmful of the steaming liquid up to look at it.
As I stared, it started to ripple and move as if I had blown on it and I dropped my hand into the bath before Andrivete could see.
“It is a very slow moving stream that leads back into the mountain,” Andrivete explained as she dug her nails into my scalp and I nearly moaned from how good it felt.
It had been so long since I had felt truly clean that all of my earlier morose thoughts about my current predicament faded away and I just leaned against the side of the pool and enjoyed myself.
“Dip your head under the water,” Andrivete instructed after a while and I complied, swishing my fingers through my much lighter feeling curls.
When I came back up, sputtering but feeling better than before, I turned to squint at Andrivete in the dim candlelight.
“Do you want me to wash yours?” I asked, gesturing to Andrivete’s straight brown hair that was slicked back out of her face.
But Andrivete just shook her head. “You are my queen. As such, I can wash your hair, your majesty, but you may not wash mine.”
I wanted to point out how silly that sounded when we were literally sitting in a communal bath naked together, but instead I just kept my thoughts to myself.
After a while of soaking and listening to Andrivete quietly wash herself, I couldn’t help but ask, “Camelot doesn’t work like everywhere else, does it?”
Andrivete’s expression remained neutral—I was pretty sure she could rival Bedivere in that department if she tried hard enough—before she shrugged her thin shoulders. “At Camelot’s conception it was entirely unique, your majesty. When I came here as a young girl I was even surprised by how blurred the lines between the rulers and the people were. It is not uncommon for his majesty or my husband to venture out into the fields to help with the harvest or put up the framing for new cottages.”
“But I still can’t wash your hair?”
Gold eyes sparkled with a mirth that didn’t match the frown pulling down on her lips. “At the end of the day, your majesty, you are still my queen and the queen of Arthur who is said to be the king of kings. That holds considerable weight.”
“Even if I wanted you to treat me like you do everyone else? Or call me by my given name?” I asked, pushing.
Andrivete nodded solemnly. “That is the way of things, your majesty, though I am surprised by your desire for such things. Much of what I have heard about Cameliard tells me that you should value all of the pomp that comes with being royalty. You are indeed a strange woman.”
Well, that comes with being a regular-ass woman from the 21st century and not really a medieval princess, I said silently to myself while telling Andrivete out loud: “My father always valued such unique thoughts from me as I was his only child.”
Andrivete looked as if she didn’t believe a word coming out of my mouth, but seemed to choose not to push it as she stood up in the water. “Come, let us get you dried off and dressed so that your people may see you looking like the queen you are rather than a bedraggled urchin.”
“You are a very blunt woman,” I told her, frowning at her as she handed me what looked like a linen sheet to dry myself off with. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
This time Andrivete’s smile was genuine as she wrapped herself in a similar cloth. “My lord husband tells me every morning.”
“And what do you say back to him?”
There was a pause as Andrivete’s expression grew downright feral. “That he was the one who chose to marry me despite my father calling me ‘defective’ and I fully intend to hold him to his marriage vows.”
Andrivete must have seen my shocked look because she burst out into a hearty laughter that bounced off of the low ceilings of the bathing cavern. “Do not worry, your majesty, Kay loves it when I speak to him in such a manner. Never have I met a man who enjoys a woman telling him what to do more than my lord husband.”
I had only known the couple for maybe an hour, but I was very quickly learning that their dynamic was not typical for this time. It was clear that, if there were pants in this relationship, Andrivete wore them while Kay gleefully accepted his wife’s domination.
They would have loved the future, I had a feeling they would have fit right into the BDSM community.
“Should you be telling me this?” I asked as I wrung the excess water out of my hair. “Won’t Sir Kay be upset?”
Andrivete snorted. “No, he will not be upset. The man has no qualms with telling every listening ear about how much he allows me to boss him around. Not a soul would dare try to tease him for fear of meeting the sharp end of his sword.”
Huh , I thought as I let her help me into the pale pink dress that she had borrowed from one of the other ladies in the castle, maybe the stories weren’t so far off about Sir Kay.
“Mother! Mother!” a young girl burst into the bathing rooms, her twin plaits flying behind her head as she nearly slipped on the wet floor in her haste to get to us.
“Lyorre, you must know better than to run like a stray filly in the bathing rooms, what have I told you a thousand times?” Andrivete scolded the girl as she finished dressing herself. “Not to mention that you are behaving incredibly rudely in front of her majesty.”
Lyorre’s green eyes widened as she glanced over at me as if she hadn’t realized I was sitting on one of the low stools that lined the craggy wall.
I gave her a little wave which sent the girl into yet another frenzy as she quickly curtseyed and nearly slipped again in the process. “I Lyorre, daughter of Sir Kay, greet her majesty the queen.”
There was that ceremony that I hated again, but I knew if I asked her to call me by my name that Andrivete would throw a fit, so instead I just smiled. “It is very nice to meet you, Lyorre, now what has brought you running in here in such a state?”
My words seemed to remind Lyorre of her purpose and she shot straight up from her curtsey and whirled around to her mother again. “Mother! Father sent me to find you and tell you that the king and his men have been spotted on the hill! They are back!”
I was up before she could finish and hurrying for the door.
“Your majesty, you are not wearing shoes and your hair is still wet!” Andrivete called after me but I ignored her, skidding into the hallway.
Somehow, Lyorre’s words had made me realize that I could in fact feel Arthur’s presence down the previously silent bond again.
And not only that, I could also feel that he had been hurt.