The recruits had the next day off from training, and most of them elected to sleep in. Gwaine didn't have that luxury; he and Elyan had had patrol at six. It was a drizzly morning, and he was glad to get back to the shelter of the castle four hours later. He would even be in time for lunch!
"Merlin!" he said, stripping off his gloves as he strode quickly across the courtyard. Merlin grinned from a dry position under the colonnade. "Eeuch," he added expressively as he came alongside his friend and stripped off his soaked cape. "Days like this were not meant for early patrols."
"I think the recruits agree," Merlin said as they headed in the direction of Gwaine's quarters. "I've hardly seen any of them all morning."
"Have you seen Somer?"
"No—not since I left him with Gaius yesterday afternoon."
"Well," Gwaine grinned, "he's surely rested long enough! Let me get out of my wet things, and then let's go wake him up."
Merlin hadn't planned on examining Somer's room while Somer was in it, but at least he'd have a chance to see inside. So he followed Gwaine without argument.
He wasn't sure what he expected when Gwaine knocked at Somer's door ten minutes later, but he certainly wasn't prepared for what did happen. "One moment!" Somer called, and then the door was opened—by one of the housemaids.
Merlin and Gwaine both stared at the girl for a moment, unable to speak. "Come in!" Somer exclaimed cheerfully. He was running a comb quickly through his hair. "Thank you, Faleiry," he added, to which the maid curtsied, nodded to the two visitors, and retreated in the direction of the kitchen. Merlin and Gwaine stared after her, but were broken out of their stupefaction by a laugh.
"Think no evil, gentlemen," Somer said, grinning. "Gaius recommended that I ask Faleiry to help me out with—" He gestured to the sling on his left arm. "I can't do it by myself, and it's more convenient than running up to the surgery every morning."
"Ah," Gwaine said.
Merlin looked around the room, trying to be nonchalant. It was like all the other recruits' rooms: a bed, which Faleiry had apparently made (Merlin recognized the folds he and all the other Camelot servants had been taught), a chair, a table, currently littered with pieces of armor and writing materials, a screen near the fireplace with Somer's arming jacket draped over it, waiting for laundry day, a wardrobe, and a chest in the corner. Of course, if Somer really were a warlock, he certainly wouldn't leave anything suspicious around where Faleiry could see it.
"Well, it's early for lunch, but perhaps we could take a stroll around the castle?" Gwaine suggested. Somer agreed and Merlin was opening his mouth to excuse himself to attend to Arthur, when there was a knock at the open door. They all three looked up in surprise at Bors, who was standing there alternately blushing and blanching and looking very uncomfortable.
"Yes, Bors?" Somer said, not unkindly.
Bors shuffled more into the middle of the doorway and cleared his throat. "I just—" He dropped his gaze. "I just wanted to apologize for any part I played in my brother's bad behavior. I—I let him lead me into doing things I knew weren't right. But I swear," he added, looking up, "I had no idea he had brought a sharpened weapon into the mêlée. He talked about getting revenge on you and Sagramor, but I thought he only meant to best you in the mêlée. I didn't—I mean—"
Somer smiled faintly and walked over to him. "I understand. He was your older brother—you wanted to think the best of him."
Bors smiled shakily and nodded, gulping.
"We're heading out," Somer added, after an awkward pause. "Will we see you at lunch?"
Bors nodded again and said a quiet goodbye. The other three all looked at each other for a moment, all waiting for someone to comment on the scene that had just passed.
"Well, shall we?" Somer said at last.
000
Several of the knights and recruits stayed in the Great Hall after the midday meal, just chatting in small groups. Elyan was telling Percival about a recent tiff with his sweetheart, a local girl named Tirion.
"I knew she would enjoy having dinner with Lewys and his wife, so I said yes, we'd come. But when I mentioned it to Tirion, she threw a fit! I said, 'Don't you want to have dinner with Lewys and Tegwen?' and she said 'Yes, I just wanted you to ask me if I wanted to!'" Elyan threw up his hands in despair as the men shook their heads. Then he spotted Gwaine and Somer, listening nearby. "Somer! You've spent time in Gaul; you must know a lot about women. What is it they want?"
Somer smiled faintly. "Sovereignty."
The other men stared at him. "You mean Tirion wants to be able to order me around?" Elyan said, confused.
"No—not sovereignty over you, personal sovereignty. Sovereignty over her." They still looked confused, so Somer continued, "You wouldn't like it very much if you had somebody telling you what you had to do with your free time, whom you had to marry, how you were to dress. Apart from your uniform, of course." He smiled. "But women are told what to do their entire lives. First their fathers rule them, then their husbands. Most women only get to decide for themselves what to do with their lives if they're lucky enough to be widowed and still have some money! They're taught from childhood to be content with their place in life, but sometimes they can't stand it—any more than you would be able to.
"What Tirion objected to was that you didn't let her make the choice of what she wanted to do with her Sunday evening. She might like the idea of dining with friends, but she wanted to make the choice to do so for herself, and not have you making that decision for her. It seems like a small distinction to you, because you have personal sovereignty. But she doesn't—so it's not small to her."
Elyan nodded slowly, and the other men looked thoughtful. "But lack of person choice is the price women pay to be protected," one of the recruits said.
Gwaine saw Somer's eyes flash and saw him close his mouth on a retort, and he spoke up instead. "I've spent a lot of my time wandering in rescuing women who trusted men to protect them," he said gravely. "They are taught that they should rely on men rather than themselves. Then if they're young and beautiful too many men are ready to take advantage of them, and if they're old or ugly men will not help them, and they are forced to rely on themselves with no knowledge of how to do so or ability to stand up for themselves in a world that does not want to listen to women. We ask them why they do not let men speak for them, and then we ourselves refuse to do so when they ask." He realized the men were staring at him, and stopped, afraid he had gone too far in telling the truth.
"Apparently we don't need to be educated in Gaul to understand women," Lancelot said with a smile, breaking the tension. The men chuckled.
"Certainly not," Somer agreed. "Everything I know about the hearts of women I learned from my sister." He glanced at Gwaine for a moment and then away, coloring slightly. Someone changed the subject, but Gwaine was silent, thinking.
Somer's explanation of sovereignty shed some more light on Raynelle's reaction to him. He had assumed her anger was based on her indignation that Camelot was ignoring Somer's right to Inglewood. But now he realized that at least part of it was probably at Gwaine's whole manner.
He had never stopped to ask who was left in Sir Gromer's family, had never considered how a widow or daughters might react to his sudden appearance. If not for her brother, Raynelle would have been robbed of sovereignty twice: her father's lands would have been forcibly taken from her guardianship by the King and the laws of the land, and Gwaine's thoughtless behavior took from her the right to invite him to Inglewood or deny him—the right to do as she wished in what should have been her own house, in her own lands. Gwaine found himself suddenly very uncomfortable—not for his own behavior, but for how the law automatically passed lands from father to son or from knight to knight, ignoring daughters and widows who should have had equal rights to hold the land. He was a knight, not a legislator—but what kind of knight would he be if he ignored the claims of women? He had condemned men for not taking care of women, who had always been of special concern to him in his long years of wandering and knight-errantry. He wondered what action duty called him to now.
Somer noticed his uncharacteristic silence. When the group in the Hall broke up, he asked, "What is bothering you?"
Gwaine rubbed his forehead. "When I was young, all I wanted was to be a good knight. Like my father." Somer looked at him in surprise, but he didn't notice. "Now that I am a knight… I want to be more than that. I've seen men who were 'good knights'—men who followed orders, managed their land, cared for their servants…" He looked up at Somer. "But we could be more. We have influence, money. I don't want to be just a good knight. I want to be a good man." He realized how unusually serious he sounded and gave a slight chuckle. "But I don't know where to start. The problems are so big, and how much influence can one man have?"
Somer was watching him with a curious expression on his face. After a long moment, he said, "I've heard second-hand stories, even since I arrived, of your adventures before you came to Camelot. I'm sure many of them are apocryphal," he added quickly as Gwaine laughed, "especially the one about you taking on a three-headed giant! But if even half of the stories of you rescuing women from bandits and tavern-keepers from gangs of thugs are true, then I think you were already a good man before you were a knight. You just have more opportunities to be one now."
Gwaine unexpectedly found himself unable to speak. So he clapped Somer on the arm with a shaky smile, and they both headed in the direction of their quarters.
000
An hour later, Gwaine stood in his room, staring out the window at the rain and the occasional servant dashing across the courtyard. He had heard from Elyan that morning that a stablehand who worked for the King had died suddenly a few days before, leaving an old widowed mother. Elyan had mentioned that Arthur would likely pay her a pension, but Gwaine wondered how much it would cover. What about funeral expenses? And all the things her son had surely done around the house that she would now have to pay for on top of her daily expenses? And he had almost a year's worth of salary in the chest in the corner: living in Camelot, he had not needed to buy food or lodging, and had only spent money on some nice clothes for special occasions and a few items of comfort.
He went to the chest and counted out a good number of coins, wrapping them up in a bundle. He hesitated, then opened a drawer in the chifforobe and pulled out the ink, pen and parchment that a servant had placed there when he had first taken these rooms, and that he had rarely used. Sitting down at the table, he wrote a note of condolence then paused, sucking on the end of his quill. At last he added, "If I can ever be of any service to you, please do not hesitate to let me know. Sir Gwaine." With a smile he folded and sealed the note, then strode out into the corridor with the package, looking for a servant to carry it to the town.
TBC
AN: Faleiry—pronounced val AY ree. Welsh form of Valerie.