Free Queen Hereafter by Susan Fraser King

tales—one for each day of the year, and more than that to fill rainy afternoons and winter evenings. Someday I might attain the mastery of a
filidh
, a poet-bard, though that needs twelve years of study. Or I could declare myself a harper and court singer, a status I have attained already.
    Bard-craft is my joy and calling, and I hunger to know more of that as well as of the greater world. My grandmother would like to keep me in Moray, close and safe, where I have a right as bard and princess to a seat on that council. But life has more for me somewhere. I feel it so.

    “ IN THE SOUTH , Malcolm struts and rules and calls me witch, and now he wants a favor!” Lady Gruadh paced the floor, clasping the folded page with the king’s latest missive. Her hand shook a little as she felt, and hid, her near panic. “He orders Eva to act as a harper in his court because he has guests. What do I care about that? She might never return from that place.”
    “If she went to court for a few weeks, her visit could be useful to us,” Ruari mac Fergus said quietly. “She could be the eyes and ears of Moray in the south.” He leaned his hip against a table, arms folded, watching as Gruadh walked the length of the hall and back again with a swirl of skirts.
    “I will not allow it,” she said bluntly. “Witch, I am told he calls me inprivate, though here he properly writes ‘Lady of Elgin’!” She brandished the page. “Most call me Lady of the North now.” Secretly she liked that term. “I will not stand for ‘witch’ from anyone, especially—”
    “You are no witch, Rue. Go easy,” he added.
    “Malcolm Ceann Mór, Big Head, wants our girl-bard for her talent and renown.”
    “The letter is polite. I think he fears you a little.” Ruari smiled.
    “So he should.” She handed the page to Ruari. “I do control Moray as regent mormaer for my grandson.” She felt calmer. Ruari, once a member of her father’s guard and later head of Macbeth’s guard, was not only her advisor but her lover now. His steady, imperturbable manner—and private tenderness—soothed her ire. “Malcolm cannot ignore the importance of this vast province with all its resources and seaports.”
    “And its thousands of warriors not keen on Malcolm,” Ruari added with a warrior’s spark in his hazel eyes. He had fostered the resistance that still survived in Moray. “The king never knows what we are thinking or doing up here in the north.”
    “May that uncertainty keep him awake at night.” Gruadh folded her arms.
    “Lately they say he has a new distraction—the fugitive Saxon royal family, the prince and his pretty sisters and others, who fled the Normans over the North Sea only to be shipwrecked on a beach in Fife. Malcolm gives them sanctuary, no doubt to suit his own ends.”
    “But what does he want? We have heard the reports of William’s attacks in northern England, the loss of Danish support, the hunt for the Saxon royals. And now Canmore goes into Northumbria to thrash the poor Saxons further, even with the Aethelings supping at his own table. Malcolm has always been a brute. Macbeth would never—”
    “We cannot know what he would have done to prevent the Normans from gaining Scotland,” Ruari pointed out. “Malcolm will protect his borders, yet he also hungers to expand his territory in Northumbria. He still means to reclaim his lands there.”
    “Why shelter the Saxon royalty in his court? That only invites Norman wrath.” Gruadh shook her head. “Malcolm soaks up Sassenach ways and diminishes the Celtic traditions that thrived eons before him, back to the ancestors he and I have in common. And now he harbors a Saxon prince to taunt a Norman king. This is too much risk for Scotland.”
    “If he lends the Saxon prince his military support against William, thinking to tip the balance and flush the Normans out of the north, it will never happen.”
    “Once again Malcolm backs the losing cause,” Gruadh murmured.