“I vow it is more beautiful here than ever you could describe,” said Will that evening. They sat together in the chamber set aside for him, with its window that looked out onto the northern ridge, drinking and talking into the night. “Will we go hawking tomorrow? Nor can I stay long, so much has your betrothed delayed me, but there will be time to fly a falcon or two.”

“Aye, we will.”

Gryff almost thanked him again for escorting Lady Margaret but thought it better to speak of anything else, so much did the thought of her sour his mood. She was a rather timid and bland-looking lady, who dressed so plain and modest that he wondered what she could have filled her baggage with. There seemed little to her character at all, aside from an overabundance of piety. It was probably why Will disliked her overmuch. He had a particular aversion to religious fervor.

Gryff turned the talk instead to affairs in Will’s lands, and the prospect of Edward’s intended crusade. It was pleasant, a welcome thing to see Will so relaxed and unguarded. “Time away from court suits you well, Will,” he said.

“It does,” he replied. “It can be a poisonous place.”

A silence fell between them that went on long enough that Gryff knew it was not by chance. He braced himself to hear some bit of unwelcome news, some new thing the king wanted of him. But Will’s words, when they came, were a different kind of blow. He did not look at Gryff as he said them, but at the fire.

“She is not with child,” he said quietly, and took a long drink of his wine.

They had never spoken a word of it, but there was no doubt what he meant. Gryff stared at the embers. He wondered what exactly Will knew, and how he knew it. He wondered if he could be trusted, if his mother had confided anything about it, if anyone else at court knew.

He didn’t ask any of it. He just looked at the embers for a very long time in silence, and mourned a child that had never been more than a forbidden dream.

“Where is she?” he asked. He had tried to imagine her at Morency, with Fuss at her heels as she tracked down thieves or chased off poachers. Now he wondered if she was with Lady Eluned in the north of Wales, and felt a violent stab of jealousy at the thought that Will might have seen her recently.

“She journeys to Burgundy, and then on to Basel.” Will reached for the bottle and poured more wine into Gryff’s cup. He very kindly did not look Gryff in the face. “Some task she has undertaken for Lord Robert, to see some cargo safely through England and then to distant shores.”