When he came to her, he stood close and gathered a fold of her dress in his fist. He had done that when he was a child, when he felt especially protective of her, or very lonely or scared for himself. It had been years. Now the fold he gathered was nearer to her hip than her knee, because he had grown so tall.

“Do you remember,” she asked him, “the mice when we slept in the kitchen at Dinwen?”

He leaned against her a little, warm pressure at her shoulder. “And Hawys snoring, and the smell of dried fish when the wind blew southerly.”

The boy at the hearth had banked the fire, leaving the embers faintly glowing. He nodded to them and stepped out of his wooden clogs as he left the kitchen, walking with bare feet toward the hall. Now he would go to his own bed, wherever it was, prepared to wake early to start the day’s long labor. Stoke the fire, turn the spit, grind the spice. All of it was as familiar to her as breathing.

A prince. Not a falconer. Not even just a lord. A prince.

“Will you sleep with me by the fire?” she asked Robin.

“Nan –”

“Say you will.” She was the one who used to say it wasn’t right for him to sleep by her side in the kitchen, for all that he was a page at the time. “I want to be just Nan, with her Robin at her side. Just for a little while.”

They made a place in the corner by the hearth, his cloak spread below them and hers over them. He grumbled a little about the hard floor and she teased him for growing soft. When they laid down, he did not curl his back against hers as he used to. Or maybe he did, and it felt different. Everything was changed. Everything.

Fuss settled at her feet and they all lay in the dark for hours, not sleeping. She thought of the steward at Morency, and how she had once considered becoming his wife because he was a good man and wanted her. She had let go of the idea easily, because she could not fathom marrying so high above her.

A prince. The last living prince of Aderinyth.

Deep in the night, she turned onto her back. Robin turned too, like he’d been waiting for it. He took her hand in his, and they stared up at the blackness above them a long time before he whispered to her.

“Do you love him, Nan?”

She tried to remember words. She seemed to have lost them. There were sounds that meant something, that would say what was trapped inside her. Breath and tongue and teeth and lips. Simple sounds. They would make it real.

“How can I love a prince?”