He reached out to catch her elbow, and felt her go still beneath his touch. There was rejection in her, a stiffness that did not soften and melt as he expected. He waited, too happy to be touching her to break the contact, trying to judge her silence, desperately searching for the right thing to say. But she began to pull away.

He did not let go. He could not. He tugged at her arm to turn her to him and she spun, swift and sudden. She flung his hand off her in the same motion, a knife in her fist as she stepped within inches of him. It was the simple eating knife that hung from her belt, the only one she wore tonight – at least the only one that could be seen. She met his eyes, more threat in her look than he had ever seen directed at him.

The air froze in his lungs, but he did not flinch. “You would not.” There was no doubt in his voice. “I know you would not.”

Her look never wavered as she pressed the blade closer, the edge of it just under his ribs. Her words were cool, deliberate, spoken very clearly so that he would not mishear any one of them.

“I suffer the touch of no man without I ask it, be he prince or no.”

She turned and made her way toward the manor, leaving him with only the burning blue of her gaze, her perfect Welsh ringing in his ears.

Nan retreated to the tower roof again the next day. She should be attending her lady, or bent over an embroidery frame – something, anything. But she needed a kind of peace that could not be found anywhere except in this high corner of the manor, open to the wind and sky. A place where she could see the world but the world could not see her.

Word would come soon. The king held court barely a day’s ride from here, hunting at some manor she had never heard of. Close enough for a pigeon to have carried a return message already, and she did not know what it meant that there was none. Perhaps it was not safe, or perhaps there was no news yet. But if nothing else, Robin should come back tonight. It might be any minute. She stared at the horizon, trying not to watch for riders.

At Morency she would have lost herself in sparring with Davydd and Robin, or listening to the unrelenting flow of Suzanna’s chatter as they stitched an altar cloth. Or hours spent next to Gwenllian in the herb-house, her occasional murmur about this or that cure, the quiet companionship as they sorted and steeped and distilled.

Life had made sense there. She had made sense there, or felt she had.