Shine Cycle Character Profile: Blanchefleur
This is the next in the series of profiles of characters who will appear in the Shine Cycle, my fantasy-series-in-preparation.
Blanchefleur – Lady in waiting to Rhiannon. When the King was court bard to Arthur as Taliesin he fell in love with her and she with him, but Merlin warned them that unless they postponed their love tragedy would ensue. Much later, she appeared in the Empire at the same time as the rest of the Chosen.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that the initial conception of this character was sparked in part by the character of the same names in the Arthurian poetry of Charles Williams. But my character grew rather differently.)
Blanchefleur is a tall, slender woman with long black hair. She wears the customary garb whenever and wherever she finds herself; in the court of Arthur this was modest but brightly colored gowns, while in the Empire this is formal robes, which she has had richly embroidered with intricate designs along the borders and on her shoulders.
Most people she meets think of Blanchefleur as complaisant, a pleasant and agreeable woman, willing to give selflessly of herself at need. But only a few know that she holds her strongest emotions carefully veiled around all but her closest friends, and is fiercely passionate about the causes and people she holds most dear.
She does not have any strong ability in the Power, but has just enough that she can begin to understand and contribute to discussions, and can give useful service to the powerful mage she serves. She occasionally uses a minor working to save her significant amounts of time—to remove all dust from her mistress’ chambers when she has other time-consuming duties that will fill the rest of the day, for example—but more often conserves the power available to her by not using it at all.
Blanchefleur was the daughter of an impoverished knight in Arthur’s Britain. When she was “a girl not yet grown,” her father died while on a quest, leaving her family with no hope but for King Arthur’s mercy. Her younger siblings were fostered by nobles of the court, her mother eventually remarried, and Queen Guinevere took accepted Blanchefleur as a maid and took over her education.
As she approached the age when she could reasonably marry or seek lifetime employment, but several years before she would be expected to do so, she saw Taliesin arrive at Camelot, and she was immediately taken with him. After he accepted a place in the court, Guinevere gave her leave to pursue an at-first-informal courtship with him, beginning a period of a few blissfully happy months.
Those months came to an abrupt end, however, when Merlin spoke to both Blanchefleur and Taliesin, separately, to warn them of the doom that would more quickly befall Camelot if they continued to pursue an attachment leading to matrimony. Each of them reluctantly agreed that the necessary separation, though painful, would be better than Camelot and all it stood for being overturned in fire.
Taliesin’s duties as Arthur’s court bard kept him constantly before the court, so Blanchefleur, who had become an active participant herself in the court’s public life, withdrew to Guinevere’s side, planning to remain in the queen’s service only until a suitable replacement would come and she could train her. She endured a period of two more years in the exquisite misery of seeing Taliesin’s veiled melancholy, hiding her own sorrow to set an example for the younger ladies.
A week before Taliesin was abruptly called home, Merlin spoke to her privately to give her advance warning, and also gave her leave to farewell her beloved as she would when the time came. On the day in question, she kissed him, gave him permission to love again should the chance come in his home country, and bade him farewell. After another mournful month, of a different quality of bitterness seeing Camelot without him, she entered a convent. And she was taken from the world after a decade there, finding herself in the Shine and Wild Empire at the same time and place as (almost all) the rest of the Chosen, and like most of them returned to the bloom of her youth.
Amid the tumultuous confusion, she felt more comfortable among the strange new circumstances than did many of the others (since there were obvious similarities to the world of Arthur’s court but far fewer to twentieth-century America) and found a “genteel service” position far from the capital. (She chose that location because seeing more than hints of “Taliesin” in the King’s face was disconcerting and saddening, for all that she found herself surprisingly as heartened as she had promised him she would to see him happy in love with his Queen.)
She served contentedly in that position for a decade, until her patron died, when she found another such position in a different region. When that employer died, she found another, and so on for many years.
Not long after Rhiannon—whom she had of course known as Guinevere—arrived in the Empire, Blanchefleur was again at loose ends and between positions, and happened to meet Rhiannon in a city market. Despite several decades of time (and more on Rhiannon’s part), a new world, and new identities having changed things, they recognized each other immediately and took the time to reacquaint themselves.
After an afternoon’s conversation, in which she learned how Blanchefleur had made her life in the Empire so far and her current status, Rhiannon offered her friend a place in her own small court that was developing around her, and Blanchefleur gladly accepted.
