Finally he realized that she would not move from where she stood. He would be the one to leave, not her. Oh, the things she said without words.

He never knew how he mounted, or whose horse it was. The only clear memories were Fuss, and Lady Eluned. Fuss looked up at him, barking anxiously, confused as to why Nan did not command him to follow Gryff.

Then as he looked away from the dog, afraid he would weep at the sight of its sweet and eager face, Lady Eluned appeared at his knee. She bade him a formal farewell and murmured in Welsh, “If there is a child, it will not be yours. Do you understand?”

He closed his eyes against the sharp stab of pain. He understood. Of course he did.

The feel of it as it leaves your hand, Nan had said to him. You will know if you’ve done right by how it feels.

But he felt only a cold sickness as he rode away from her. He felt nothing but her silence like a cloak of condemnation, her words lodged like a splinter in his heart.

Chapter Twenty-Four

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He had thought it might be the falconers who would resist his authority most strongly, but it was the bards with whom he clashed immediately and most frequently. It was not their counsel he objected to, nor even their politics. It was their poetry.

“Better to lament my brothers were sacrificed so young than to praise the battles they fought,” he had said – mildly, he thought, which was no easy thing when he was so disgusted.

When he had first arrived, the chief bard seemed intent on performing poem after poem about the noble defense of Aderinyth, how its fallen prince had fought most valiantly against foreign rule. Gryff said they must stop singing of senseless death as a glorious thing, and was told that he had no right to dictate how the bards composed their record of history. His rule was temporary, after all, while their work lived on for generations.

“There will be no praise for Edward the Norman king, save this one verse where he does recognize your authority,” the chief bard had declared one day. “That he returned you to us is his only worthy deed, my lord prince.”

After the first month, Gryff had given up on trying to stop them from calling him prince. So long as the title was not given to his sons, the king did not care. Edward almost seemed to prefer it, so that he could boast of how princes knelt before him.

“Nor do I wish your poems to praise Edward,” Gryff had said to the old bard, his patience worn thin after weeks of this same argument. “I ask only that you not stand in my hall and sing how righteous was my father’s cause, and how good that so many died for it.”