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the queen paces up and down the length of the solar, her pace slowing the closer she gets to the hearth, lingering near the heat, and only breaking away by the urgings of the restlessness she feels.
she is not used to being confined indoors for long stretches of time.
except for the coldest days of the southern winter, the girl and her sister always found a way of leaving their chambers and their mother's solar. they got their glimpse of the world waiting out there, taking in nature, observing the daily routine of adults from mother and father to the kitchen maids, and lazily reading in the courtyard under the sun.
but she is no longer a girl of tintagel, and the queen of orkney does not snoop around in the kitchens of the castle.
what she does, instead, is to wait.
it is inconvenient and makes her all the more restless that her heart doesn't know what it waits for and her mind knows there is nothing for which to wait.
she's been married for seven months past, arriving as a may bride from the south to the northern isle of orkney.
she has waited for the novelty of being a wife (wedded to a king!, a younger morgause would have exclaimed had she read of it in a book), of being a queen, regal and respectable, to wear off.
she has learned the cost of not having to ask your lady mother for permission comes with other ties that bind and compulsions that burden unlike daughterly obedience.
she has learned that having for husband a man who marries you to please your lord father the king (morgan spat in her face for using that word for him) is so unlike having a knight who'd lay his life at your feet like the garlands he has won for your favor as a lover.
then, she has waited for the yearning she feels for her home in the summer days that only lead to moonless, pale summer nights to wear off.
when this mood took her, she reminisced, gazing from the paned window of the solar as she finds herself doing now, about the times she was out in the open, looking from the ramparts over the verdant cliffs where warm foamy blue meets mellow green, ushered inside before the sun set. about a time she had companions of her equal, not ladies-in-waiting or maids, but sisters of her own blood, with whom tales of romance and adventure, no one would be surprised to know which sister favored romance, were traded, days spent in a patchwork of activities of their own liking.
each time these memories clouded her mind, she thought of the sister not faring much better, and her mother down south, so deeply plunged into a night unending, and her youngest sister even southward.
lucky, morgan, crossed her mind as each day lingered on, resuming anew at the moment of closure, and she wordlessly berated herself each time. she knew the youngest sister of hers was far from lucky, and no amount of benighted skies full of stars could change that.
then, the realization that she is not biding time, her father and his men will never come to save her, besides one cannot be saved from one's husband, settled into the crevices of her mind.
as the hope for the thawing of ice between her and her husband gave way to an acknowledgment of the relative freedom lot's disinterest in her save the barest of conjugal necessities and formalities gave her, she became convinced there was nothing to wait for, save the dismissable changes of everyday life.
now in the last month of the year, the reprieve the queen has got from the relentless days of summer has transformed itself into the monotony of days that begin and end in a flash, the night taking its revenge on the sun for the never-ending summer days as the latter now dreads to rise and hastens to set.
it is the young queen's first christmas season away from home, and more than missing the christmases of past, she is disappointed by the lack of change the season brings to her life.
her husband, a christian only as far as it gets him into the graces of the high-king, and the locals, worshippers of local gods of nature, morgause knows whatever miracle she witnesses will be of her own making.
yet, as a queen, she can only give orders of silk, damask, and game meat for christmas day and keep at her month-long pace between her chambers and the small chapel, built indoors in an act of limited thoughtfulness of king lot to preserve his southern wife, fragile like the orchids of arabia, never realizing she is more likely to wilt of boredom than of biting winds.
and those duties she fulfills, in the role of a good queen, wife, and believer.
she also reads. psalms of a virtuous queen and fanciful romances of a young girl wishing to escape into a world of imagination are read at different times of the day.
if her ladies notice the contrast inherent in the range of their reading material, none let it show. and morgause, dutifully continuing everything she has to do from embroidery to housekeeping to staying alive, yearns for magic and prays for something she has no right wanting.
because deep down, what she hopes for is a gallant knight in her husband's service stealing glances at her with hungry eyes, or a visiting young prince with kind eyes that see her as who she is, unwilling to follow the footsteps of the father that brought him to the kingdom of her husband.
what she wants is an understanding gaze that pierces through the dull pain of endurance she keeps ignoring, what she wants is a hand that caresses her copper curls like she is worth something.
she has grown level-headed not to think any of this in her reach, but still a girl of sixteen, she allows herself some luxury of dreaming.
and she thinks, nay, believes, god and all his angels above would not mind such a weak sin, withering in its inception, unable to take root, or mar her soul.
so she waits, constantly restless. if asked, for her husband to return from mureif, the realm of the brother-in-law she's never met.
and not so much kept as a secret, just unasked, she waits for anyone from the tales read to her by a sister, in a life seven moons and many miles away, to come through the mists and the winds of the isle into her halls.