I looked over the spoons, considering which one was best.  There were limited options since I was in the Great Hall, but I liked the bigger spoon that I suspected was for serving food.  Maybe that would be the one for today.

I heard footsteps hesitantly approaching me, but didn’t turn around.  “Merlynn?  Can we talk?”

I turned around to look at Arthur, raising one eyebrow.  “Talk?”  I asked.  “Or just tell me what you know that I clearly don’t?  Or argue with me because clearly you, a king, know more than a teenage girl about her own mother?  Or do you plan to kidnap me again – oh, I apologize – to rescue the damsel in distress?”

He cringed a bit.  “Okay, fair.  But I do want to talk.  Or, rather, listen.”

“Really listen?”  I countered.  “Because it seems to me that you don’t really want to listen to what I have to say.  Whether it’s because I’m a girl or a teenage girl, I don’t know, but I have yet to see the fair and noble king that Genevieve seems to think you are.  As far as I can tell, you don’t listen to people if they are teenage girls.”

“For what it’s worth, it was more about your age than you being a girl.”  He still looked uncomfortable.

Of course I knew he had told Genevieve he was willing to listen, but while I would give him credit for being willing to admit he was wrong, I wanted to find out just how far that went.  Would his demeanor change if Genevieve wasn’t around?  Was he really willing to admit to me he was wrong?  He did seem genuine, though, but I was still going to push this a bit.  He did deserve it, after all, for kidnapping me in the first place.

I raised an eyebrow.  “Really?  Then all those comments about it being in appropriate for a girl to be alone – you would have left me alone had I been a boy?  Even if I was alone?”

His brows furrowed in confusion.  “I – I – probably, yes.  Men are usually trained to have some basic training in defense, even the peasants, in case of things like geists or, well, wolves or whatever.”

“And women don’t because they’re expected to stay at home and raise babies and couldn’t possibly defend themselves, could they?”  I said it sweetly, too sweetly.

He frowned.  “I can’t deny that it’s unfair to women to have that expectation placed on them, or that women shouldn’t learn how to deal with wolves and geists and whatever else, too.  Unfortunately, that’s often not how people are raised.”

“You sure?”  When he seemed puzzled, I rolled my eyes.  “You know the life of a noble, Sire.  You don’t know the life of peasants.  Peasants all know how to deal with wild boars or wolves approaching – they have to.  Maybe for women some of it is more borne out of necessity than any sort of formal training, just grabbing a weapon and defending their land, and learning over time what is best, but you’ll find most peasant woman are more prepared to grab any sort of thing to defend themselves than most noblewomen.  Noblewomen have guards to do that for them.  Peasant women don’t expect someone else to do what they can do themselves.  Why should I wait for a man to defend me?  I’m perfectly capable of doing so myself.”

Arthur opened his mouth, then closed it, scrunching his face for a bit as he tried to figure out how to respond.  “Your point is valid,” he said at last.  “I may have more internal bias towards what I expect women to do, traditionally, than I realized.  For what it’s worth, it’s not what I intend.  I do think women are capable of as much as we are.  My knights prove that on a regular basis.  And Genevieve, too.”

I eyed him, but he had proven he was genuine and didn’t get angry at me for prodding him, so I decided to accept his response.  “Very well, we can talk.  But I’m assuming you would rather not talk here?  Too many potential ears.  But still somewhere public, so we don’t have to drag a chaperone along.”

“Ah, yeah.  Maybe the gardens?”  Arthur started to motion towards the door, but before he could say anything more, an angry steward marched up to us, visibly fuming, interrupting any further talk.

“You!”  Johfrit nearly seethed at me.  “Give me that!”  He snatched the spoon out of my hand, much to my disappointment.  Sure, the only reason I used the spoons was to annoy him, but I happened to like that one.

“Sire!”  He barely remembered to bow a bit to Arthur.  “This – this heathen!  The spoons!  For dirt, mind you!  And the cats!  A badger!  Not to mention the door!  And – and more spoons!”  He shook the spoon in my face.  “The insanity!”

Arthur was totally confused.  “Um…?”

Johfrit was so upset that he couldn’t be bothered to slow down and actually explain anything.  “Stop.  With.  The.  Spoons!”  He nearly shouted at me.  “And the door is unacceptable!”

Unable to control his fury and apparently unwilling to spend another moment in my present, he marched out, leaving a bewildered Arthur and me, who was trying to contain my laughter.

“Johfrit disapproves of my choices in room decorations,” I explained with a smirk, tucking some of my hair behind my ear.  “Don’t worry about it, it’s fine.”

Arthur automatically followed me when I started out of the room, towards the gardens, where we could have some privacy while still being public.

“He seems quite emotional about it.  I’ve actually never seen him that worked up about anything.”

I chuckled to myself.  “Yes, the spoons set him off.  It’s quite funny, really.”

Arthur was clearly baffled, but apparently decided this wasn’t something he wanted to pursue enough to deal with right now.  Instead, he fell silent as we wandered through the hallways and then into the gardens.

Arthur took a deep breath as we got far enough away to ensure no one would overhear us.  “Genevieve believes I owe you an apology.  And I trust her judgment?”

I looked up at him, studying his expression.  He winced a bit under my gaze, like he didn’t expect me to study him so thoroughly.  “That’s it?  Genevieve says so, so you do it?  If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were whipped.  Look, it says good things about you that you’re willing to listen to her.  But it also doesn’t say enough.  You haven’t changed your mind yourself yet, have you?  Or do you really believe you were right in the end?”

He took a bit to form his words before responding.  “I’m not sure exactly what to think,” he said at last.  “Genevieve and her lady-in-waiting both seemed convinced you are capable on your own and that you would be correct, therefore, that your mother left you because she knew that.  And I’ve heard that you gave Lucan a lecture, and I personally experienced a bit of the same just now – and you even pointed out my unintentional unfairness in how I would view a teenage boy in the same situation.  I can’t deny that there are problems with my decision to bring you here.”

“But you don’t fully buy it,” I finished for him.  “All right.”  I sat down on a bench and pointedly waited until he sat down on the opposite one.  “Fine, let’s go over it.  You come to see my mother, invite her here.  She’s not there, but I am, and I tell you she’s not coming back, that she’s confident I’m fine on my own so she left, and you can leave because I don’t need your help.  Instead, you drag me along.  And you don’t want to believe my mother would have left me alone.”

I spotted one of the castle cats wandering around in the garden and automatically held my hand out for it to come over and get pettings, which it agreed to, while I continued to talk to the king.

“You’ve acknowledged that there was some bias towards not thinking a girl would be safe alone, while you might have thought a boy would be.  That still doesn’t answer why me.  Had you spotted a peasant girl, who lived alone in a village, I suspect you wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”

He stirred a bit.  “Hopefully the other villagers would help there, and you don’t have anyone else.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “Okay, but still, what gives you the right to interfere?  Because you’re king?  And why is one girl more in need of help than others?  You’re assuming the villagers would step in, but you don’t know that.  Ask Olwen if you want – her sister had to marry at my age when she lost her parents, all because there wasn’t anyone else to step in.  That was her only way to survive.  And do you really mean if you had come across another cabin in the woods, with a teenage girl living alone and you didn’t know her, that you would have brought her, too?  You would have taken any girl you found like that?”  He seemed to be struggling to answer, so I pointed out the obvious.  “Or is this all about my mother?”

There was silence in the garden, apart from the cat purring while I petted it.

Arthur spoke at last, his expression troubled.  “I suppose it probably sounds bad to tell you that I obviously had some complicated feelings about your mother.  She was there when I was grieving, alone, and honestly thought I would die in the woods alone.  I won’t say she was a second mother to me, but at the same time, she was a kindly, mothering figure when I needed it the most.  I won’t deny that it affected me and I felt a bond with her because of what happened.  Not anything inappropriate, I just admired her greatly, and thought of her as someone to whom I could confide things, and have good feedback.  She gave me some blunt advice, actually, and I knew I could tell her anything and she’d give me a neutral point of view.  Not one from my father, or his supporters, or even those who supported my mother.  Someone who knew nothing of the individual politics of Camelot court.”

I barely managed to hold back an eyeroll.  “No one’s point of view is truly neutral.  Even my mother had an agenda, even if it wasn’t obvious or something that would hurt you.”  When he seemed taken aback by this, I did roll my eyes this time.  “Come on, Arthur, you can’t be a king without recognizing that.  Everyone has an agenda.  They can say they’re neutral all they want, but they do want something.  The neutral ruler who doesn’t want to be brought into a fight between you and another kingdom?  Well, he wants peace.  He wants to not be harmed or have his trade routes disrupted.  He still wants something, even as he’s mediating between you two.  It’s not necessarily harmful, but there is something he wants.  Some people are better at being neutral, especially in certain contexts.

“For instance, if I were asked to mediate a dispute between two young soldiers over who gets which bed in a room they’re sharing, I honestly wouldn’t care.  But does that mean I want nothing?  No.  I want the dispute to be over quickly so I’m no longer involved.  I may even think it’s a stupid dispute and they’re behaving ridiculously.  I have an opinion, I have something I want.  Does that mean I’m going to be bad at mediating?  Probably not, because I don’t have a bias towards one soldier or another – unless one starts appearing more reasonable, and then I’m likely to try to help them, just to get this thing over with.  You understand?  It might not be a huge bias, but even if someone doesn’t have an opinion on a specific dispute, they still don’t come into the situation truly neutral.  No one is truly neutral.”

Arthur blinked several times.  “That’s true.  I never thought about what opinions Tilde might have had that would affect her advice to me.”

“Mama never would have told you something she didn’t believe in, but she might have been vague about it if she didn’t feel like she could comfortably speak on a subject.  You know, ask you a question instead, about how you feel about something, instead of really telling you what she thought.”  I shrugged.  “But she had opinions.  She just might have toned them down.”

Arthur nodded slowly, considering this.  “Anyway, yes, she gave me some advice, I suppose not so neutral, but it was good advice.  Things on how to deal with my father when I was particularly frustrated with some of his policies.  Of course, how to deal with my mother’s death.  Things like that.  It was good advice.”

Well, my mother had been prepared to rule, too, so she knew things that would be helpful.  That made sense.