She wanted to ask him how long it would be until the pain was bearable. Or how he knew the lady had truly loved him, if she had given him up. Or if he had felt a terrible anger, as she did, to be left behind. But she only looked at him and kept the words locked up inside of her, where they would burn for the rest of her days.

“It was my idea to send you to Morency, you know.” She blinked at him, startled. “I told you once, that I did think my lady wife wished you to be a true friend, and not her servant. I knew if you did not leave her side and make your own way, you might never let yourself be her equal. And because she thought it best for you, she put aside her sorrow and bade you go.”

Nan knew she could never bring herself to call Lady Eluned her friend, though she was that and more. Friend and mother and savior, her protector and her confidante. “Never could I be equal to so great a lady,” she said.

He smiled fondly at her. “Already are you her equal. You have only to believe it, and you will be as great as she.”

Perhaps it was true. But it could not make her a lady.

Soon after, she had left to meet the baggage train, ignoring Robin’s request to accompany him first to Morency and then go on to Lincoln from there. She was too eager to be among people who had not known the Welshman, to have a purpose to her days again, to spend her time on the alert with a knife in hand, ready for something. Anything. So she had passed the summer guarding carts of wine barrels from one town to another. It felt strange to use the main roads, after so many months of disregarding them, but she grew accustomed.

They must pass some days in Lincoln, so she went to Wragby to see how Aunt Mary fared. She spent a day in cleaning again, and cooking, and refusing to take the mule back with her. “I have no use for him, Aunt Mary,” she insisted. She endured the questions about her fine Welshman – where was he, and was it true he beat a man at the market? Nan said only that he had gone home, and then ignored the questions about her sister.

She made sure to avoid the southern road, and Bargate. Even to think of the woman who had once been her sister hurt, but she found she was accustomed to hurt. In Lincoln she tried to avoid the falconer’s home entirely. But she must be sure little Cecilia was well. She braced herself when she went to the door, but the falconer and his wife were not at home. The girl was thriving, so happy and smiling that she seemed a different person entirely.