He made it sound like she should be amazed. If she felt like talking, she might tell him how she and Oliver were treated like dogs when a Norman lord had held them. Worse than dogs. But she had told him that already, all of it. He had seen the scars. So she stayed silent and tried to care about some sneering in his youth.

“I could not tell you for fear of my life. If Rhodri knew I lived, or the king... I could tell no one.” She could hear the urgency beneath his calm coaxing, hear how much her silence unsettled him. “I verily believed I could live a simple Welshman, with none to remember my birth. I tell you, it is what I wanted.” The yearning was in his voice, the same way he sounded when he spoke of his home. “I wanted that, and you.”

She had imagined it. She had. No use in pretending otherwise. She had imagined a place in the green hills he had described, him flying falcons and Fuss hiding from the hawks. And now her imagination added a child – his child – in her arms, and she wanted it with a breathtaking ferocity. All of it: the place and the child and him.

It made her dizzy with longing, and then sick with hate. Hate for him because he made her want it. Hate for his murderous brother, hate for the king. Hate for all of them because they stole her Welshman and replaced him with a prince.

“It means naught to me, Nan,” he insisted. “It is but a name.”

A name, just a name. Gruffydd son of Iorwerth and grandson of Cynan the Red, that was what he was called. The leader of Aderinyth, who probably had a bard to sing the history of his family for ten generations.

She was Nan. Just Nan from nowhere, with a whore for a sister.

Though he stood close enough that she heard his every breath, all she could feel was the distance that had come with this word he said had no meaning. Even if a lesser prince, he was still a lord, like those she had served, those who felt free to grab and take as their right. Those who commanded serving girls to their beds, who had looked at her and seen a sweet morsel to get their hands on, who were the reason she had made herself strong and deadly: so that they could never hurt her again.

But one had found a way to hurt her in spite of it. Her heart seemed to bleed, a steady seeping as though from a skillful cut, no matter that he had not intended it. Any of it.

“Say something,” he entreated.

She could not. She could feel how much he wanted to touch her. Her eyes stayed fixed on the horizon. The riders would come soon.

“Know you what has become of the other Welsh princes?” he asked suddenly.