Read Online Goddess by Josephine Angelini - Free Book Online Page A

opened the shutter over the window, and Helen immediately saw why this version of herself was so terrified. The Furies started weeping in the corner of the carriage as soon as Guinevere and the other Lucas made eye contact.
    He was sitting on the huge, black horse that was trotting alongside the coach. He was wearing dark leather, a thick, black woolen cloak, and belted at his waist was a long broadsword. He looked big and fierce and beautiful.
    “Do you need to relieve yourself?” he asked in a strange, lilting language that Helen understood although she’d never heard it before.
    “My mother taught me to speak perfect Latin, as you well know,” Guinevere snarled back at him in a different language that Helen also understood without ever having heard it before. She assumed it was Latin. “She wasn’t a filthy Roman like you, but she was from the east.”
    “I’m no Roman. Don’t call me that,” the other Lucas said with a dangerous glint in his eye. “Sir Lancelot will do just fine.”
    Their baleful gazes met and held. The Furies wailed, causing both Guinevere and Lancelot to cringe as they tried to control themselves. Helen knew that if the bars in the window did not separate them they would have attacked each other.
    Lancelot looked up and down the long line of warriors that accompanied them, as if reminding himself that there were witnesses who would keep him from doing anything stupid.
    “Why don’t you just kill me now?” Guinevere hissed at him quietly. Her low tone told Helen that Guinevere was also aware that there were other people watching—people who would not understand her irrational hatred for Lancelot or his hatred for her.
    “That pleasure I leave to Arthur, my cousin and king,” Lancelot replied stiffly, almost reluctantly, like something about that bothered him. “ After you marry him and ensure your clan’s allegiance, of course. Then I’m sure he’ll kill you with joy.”
    “And you call us barbarians,” Guinevere snapped at him.
    She slammed the window shut and threw herself back on the pile of furs. Helen knew—she remembered —that the furs were part of the large dowry from Guinevere’s father. He was the head of her clan, and he had sent along many gifts with his daughter in this wedding train. All of the rich goods were a peace offering to the undefeatable invaders from the east, and Guinevere was the ultimate spoil of war. The most beautiful girl on the island offered up as a gift to the big, golden-haired invader from a faraway land. And they desperately hoped he liked the gift—because if he didn’t, this King Arthur just might slaughter them all.
    Guinevere knew her father loved her in his gruff way. He couldn’t know that he was sending his favorite child to her death. He wasn’t like these men from the east or like her late mother had been. Clan leader or not, her father was just a normal mortal, and he believed he was honoring his daughter above all others by giving her to the new, young, and, by all accounts, handsome High King. Guinevere had no defensible reason to object. Her father had every right to marry her off to whomever he chose, and unless she was ready to reveal her secret, and her late mother’s secret, she had to go along with it.
    Tears of rage and frustration brimmed in Guinevere’s eyes. Helen remembered Guinevere’s feeling of desperation in this impossible situation distinctly, because once it had been her own.
    “You didn’t answer my question,” Lancelot yelled stubbornly at the closed window. “You’ve been shut up in there for over a day now. Do you need to relieve yourself, Princess?”
    Guinevere proudly dashed the tears from her eyes, smoothed her mussed hair, and pulled open the window. “No!” she howled, and slammed the window shut again.
    Lancelot barked once with surprised laughter. A few moments of tense indecision passed. His black charger pranced anxiously outside Guinevere’s barred window as if he were reluctant to