“Hiraeth,” he answered her. After many years of swearing he would never do so again, he found himself almost eager to speak his native tongue whenever she asked. Isabel had a seemingly insatiable appetite for stories about Wales, and since she was equally insatiable in ways profoundly more pleasing to Gryff, he did not hesitate to indulge her.

“Hiraeth,” she repeated in perfect imitation. “It means to miss your family? But I feel this too, so it cannot be true when you say there is no word in my language.”

He didn’t know her language. She came from Aragon and would return there soon, so her father could marry her to a new husband – one who might live longer than the Norman one had. She seemed determined to make the most of her freedom as a widow before that happened.

“Hiraeth is more than just missing family,” he explained. “It is the land and the people, the smell and the sounds, and more. Like a flavor on your tongue from a fruit that no longer grows. You ache to taste it again, but you cannot, and so you are never satisfied. Hiraeth means to long for a place that is lost to you, or impossible to reach. To know a great part of your soul dwells in a place you cannot be – that is hiraeth.”

Her lips had begun to kiss his throat before he was finished, her hands moving under his tunic. “Mm, do not stop,” she sighed. “I love the sound of it.”

Belatedly he realized he had said all of it in Welsh. It had felt entirely natural, because all the words he knew to describe hiraeth had been learned from Welsh bards. He wanted to confess to her what he had discovered through all her questioning about his homeland, what he could barely admit to himself: he missed it. All of it. His brothers, his mother, and even his father. The hills and the sea, the rain and the mists, the bards and the falconers. He did not want to miss it, but he did. He did.

He could not tell her in this mood. She was urging him down on her, and he was more than happy to oblige her. Later he would tell her all his heart, he thought. Finally there would be someone who would understand him.

The only thing that happened later was that he learned what she really thought of him.

He and Hal were strolling in the ornamental garden, in the last stages of manning a new hawk. Gryff had spent four days patiently waiting in the dark mews with the bird, until finally it took food from his hand. Now it must be carefully introduced to the wider world so that it was not shy among people, and the almost empty garden was a perfect place.