What was inside her. She thought of Oliver dead on a dirty floor. She thought of her mother telling her to care for her brother and sister. She thought of her aunt marveling over simple embroidery, of Bea with a blade pinning her sleeve, of Robin whispering in the dark. She thought of princes and cages and far green hills.

“Say something,” he whispered.

But she did not, and he left her alone under the open sky.

Chapter Twenty-Two

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The flame guttered, the wax dripped, the empty hours passed. His was a life spent in waiting. Waiting to learn when he would stop being a hostage, waiting until it was safe to come out of hiding, waiting for Baudry or one of his men to kill him. Waiting to go home.

Another day had passed. Three full days, when the journey to Edward and back should not be more than two. No message had come, no word of reassurance. Nothing.

It could only bode ill. Lord Robert was insistently optimistic, citing any number of harmless reasons for the delay – poor roads, an injured horse, the court moving to somewhere a little farther away for better hunting. He was sure it was nothing more than that. But Lady Eluned’s face was carefully neutral, and her noncommittal responses filled him with foreboding. She knew Will as he did, and they both knew Will would send word if the news was good.

He would also send warning if it was bad – if he could. If it was safe to do so.

Gryff stared at the candle by his bedside. Those first years in Lancaster’s household, when he was too young yet to fill the hours with welcoming women, he had spent his nights in this same way. He would watch the candle flame for hours, trying to burn the memory of home out of his eyes. Then at the abbey, he had spent every night for five years in the dark, wishing he could remember more.

Somewhere in the night he became aware of her. Outside the glow of candlelight, just inside the door of this fine bedchamber with its thick tapestries and carved oak furniture, she had slipped silently in. She brought her own peaceful variety of silence with her, somehow smoothing the jagged edges of the quiet that surrounded him.

He did not look toward her. All day he had paced the grounds of the manor, sure that at any moment a message would arrive. By late afternoon he had given into the sinking sense of doom. He could not eat, but could not resist going to the hall to look at her from afar, sure now that it was the last he would ever see of her. Blue silk, blue eyes, golden hair, and a mouth made for sin. No flame would ever burn the memory of it out of him, but he had let his eyes drink their fill.