Thranduil, riding at Guenievre's side the last day of her life, saw more of what she did for her daughter than did even her daughter - the interest she took in her affairs, the way she had stepped around bidding him watch after the girl when she was gone, the request she had wanted to make of Solas and had known would raise too many questions, questions Thranduil in his own fondness would not ask.
(She had thought the separation to be temporary, when she asked it. They all had.)
Gwenaëlle remembers, sometimes, the immovable patience of Guenievre in Skyhold, holding a brush and waiting for her to relent and sit down and let her hair be plaited for bed when she could more than do it herself--
"He'd have tired of her if I wasn't," she says, bleakly. "She'd never have been sent to Skyhold at all." She might have lived. Any other day, she might say: and for what? but today, today. The world might yet be put to rights, and Guenievre Baudin will still be dead. She will still be gone. It will still have been an awful waste of a woman Gwenaëlle barely knew, whose love for her lived in silences and stillness she didn't know how to read.
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(She had thought the separation to be temporary, when she asked it. They all had.)
Gwenaëlle remembers, sometimes, the immovable patience of Guenievre in Skyhold, holding a brush and waiting for her to relent and sit down and let her hair be plaited for bed when she could more than do it herself--
"He'd have tired of her if I wasn't," she says, bleakly. "She'd never have been sent to Skyhold at all." She might have lived. Any other day, she might say: and for what? but today, today. The world might yet be put to rights, and Guenievre Baudin will still be dead. She will still be gone. It will still have been an awful waste of a woman Gwenaëlle barely knew, whose love for her lived in silences and stillness she didn't know how to read.