“Do you come here to torment me with your silence?”

He asked it to the candle, his eyes following the dripping wax. He almost asked why she did not leave him alone, but stopped himself in time. She would take it as a command from a prince, damn her, and he would be left without even her wordlessness to keep him company.

Her step came closer, a soft footfall on the rushes behind him, but he did not turn from his place on the bed. There was a gathering glow, and he understood she must be holding a lamp. The light of it joined the light of his candle as she came closer behind him.

“Nay, not that.” she said. “Far from that.”

He held his breath through the rush of relief that flooded him. Her voice. It left him lightheaded, staring at his shadow on the wall while he prayed he would not say the wrong thing.

“Then why?"

Her slow steps carried her around the corner of the bed, just at the edge of his vision. He felt it again – that thin ribbon of her deepest self escaping its careful containment, flowing out toward him. He knew she was waiting for him to look at her. He thought he should fear whatever she had come to say. But he did not care, as long as he could look at her. As long as she spoke to him.

He turned his head to where she stood in the glow of her lamp. She was back in her coarse brown dress, her weapons glinting in the dim light. All her beauty was still there, and all her lethal strength, no matter the outer trappings.

“Robin has not come.”

“Nay,” he answered. “Haps he will never come, and I will bide here forever, waiting.” The sight of the little lamp in her hand pierced his heart. It had burned beside them in their nights together, those nights he had dared to believe would never end. “Would you bide with me, Nan, through days and nights without number?”

There were signs of sleeplessness around her eyes. “What will happen?” she whispered. “What will the king do to you?”

“I cannot know.” It seemed not to matter at all right now. Nothing mattered but her. “Would you bide with me?” he asked again.

She blinked, casting her eyes down to the floor. “You are a prince,” she said, as though that were an answer. “You say the word means naught. You think it’s naught to do with who you truly are.” She looked up at him again. “But I see it in you, all the things that make you a prince. It’s in your blood that you curse, and in your bones, and in everything that makes you. You were born to be Gruffydd ab Iorwerth, not a common Welshman. Just as I was born to be plain Nan and cannot be worthy of a lord, except as servant.”