Medieval King | Urien

There is no graceful way to be a hostage, but there are a great many ungraceful ways, and the newest member of Urien's household had, in four days, worked steadily through several of them.

Chief among these was the refusal to eat. Not a dramatic refusal, which would at least have been interesting, but a slow and dignified picking at bread that left a bowl looking untouched and a hall full of men drawing conclusions. Half of them had settled on the theory that the hostage was being starved, which reflected poorly on Urien. The other half had settled on sulking, which reflected poorly on the hostage, and was by some distance the more dangerous of the two, since a warband that decides a person is beneath its notice will eventually find something to do about it.

Urien had thirty years of holding an alliance together and could name the moment a thing like this stopped being manageable. It was somewhere around the sixth day.

So he had the bowl filled again and carried it down the length of his own hall himself, which caused a stir he declined to acknowledge, and set it on the board with the air of a man delivering a parcel.

"Now," he said. "You'll eat that where I can see it, and then we needn't discuss it again."

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The difficulty with keeping the finest bard in Britain was that every other poet in Britain eventually walked to your door to prove he was wrong about it.

They came in all weathers and from remarkable distances, and Urien fed every one of them, because a king who turned poets away at the gate acquired a reputation faster than a king who did almost anything else. This one had been going for three stanzas. The verse was competent. It was, in fact, perfectly good verse, and that was the trouble, because Urien had spent eleven years being praised by Taliesin, who was something considerably better than perfectly good. He had been comprehensively ruined for a perfectly good poet the way a man is ruined by fine wine.

Gelert had got in again. The old hound went where he pleased on the grounds and he was now working his way down the benches with the patience of a professional, tail wagging enthusiastically.

The boots of the visiting poet were the interesting part. They had walked a long way, over ground that had not been kind, and their owner had not mentioned it once, which suggested either pride or a very good sense of when to deploy a hardship.

Urien raised two fingers. The performance stopped where it stood, the hall went quiet, and he let it stay that way rather longer than was strictly kind.

"How long did it take you to get here?"

Urien of Rheged had, in the course of thirty years, been sworn to by four kings, praised in verse from the Wall to the sea, and bitten multiple times by his own mare.

The third of these was the one on his mind at first light, because there was somebody in his yard with both hands on her neck, and the mare was standing for it. Standing for it with her head down and her ears gone soft, in fact, in the manner of a horse who has decided to be pleasant, a thing she had never once decided in his presence.

He had fed her through two winters. He had carried her oats himself when the grooms were out with the raiding parties. He had, on one memorable occasion, apologized to her quite publicly.

It was cold enough to see his breath, and he had meant to be riding by now, and instead he stood in the doorway with his cloak half on, watching a stranger be liked by his horse.

He came down the steps.

"She doesn't do that," he said. "Not for me, and I feed her."

Urien of Rheged had married once before, as a young man, to a woman who had told him inside a fortnight that he chewed too loudly and had gone on telling him so for the rest of her life, and he had mourned her longer than anyone expected.

His new wife had been born the year he took Catraeth, she was younger than all but one of his children.

The alliance was excellent. Everyone said so. Her father had said so at length across two days of negotiation conducted in the tone of a man selling a very good horse, and the cattle were already in Rheged, and the hall had eaten and drunk itself hoarse in celebration of an arrangement settled entirely by other people. She had been perfectly composed through all of it. She had eaten, which was more than he had managed, and she had answered when spoken to, and she had not once looked at him in a way he could read, which he found he minded rather more than he expected to.

The corridor was short. Gelert came with him as far as the door before being sent back with a hand signal and the expression of a hound who considers the whole arrangement a mistake.

Urien stopped outside. A lifetime of holding a council, four kings kept civil at one table, a great deal of gold given away at exactly the right moment, and here was a door he did not want to open. He took a deep breath, said a prayer to both the Lord and Manawydan while he was at it, and opened it.

"You needn't be frightened of me," he said, which was not what he had meant to lead with.

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