He stopped there and rode with her until she thought he’d said all he’d intended. At last he continued, “When I was a boy, we had a kitchen maid, the daughter of one of the stablemen, whom everyone was in love with. I was thirteen and thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. It was more than her face and form—though those were remarkable—it was . . . joy, I suppose is the right word, though happiness would work as well.” Tosten gently dissuaded his gelding from snatching a bite of grass. “I don’t think that she and Ward were lovers until the night my father tried to rape her.”

“Ward stopped him?” she asked.

“I used to think it was Stala,” he replied. “But I’ve thought about it since, and I think Ward sent Stala there. The maid was carrying trays from my mother’s rooms when my father walked by her. I was hiding from him—under a piece of furniture in the hall—and when he stopped I thought he’d found me, at least until she screamed.

“She fought him hard—and he let her. If he’d wanted to, he could have stopped her struggles easily. He was almost as big as Ward is.” Tosten stopped speaking again.

They ate lunch in the saddle and Tisala made no move to push him. When Tosten resumed his story, he did it as if there had been no break in their conversation.

“My aunt Stala came in running.” Tosten closed his eyes. “I think she heard the screams. No one else in the keep would have gone to rescue a woman trapped by my father. Stala knocked him away from the maid, then slapped her, I think, because the screams stopped. I couldn’t tell, since my view was limited by the hall table I was hidden under.

“Stala helped the maid up and sent her to my brother’s rooms.” Tosten let out a huff of air that might have been a laugh. “I think now, that night was the first she spent in my brother’s bed. But at the time I felt truly betrayed: by my own inability to face my father down and rescue the maiden, and by my brother’s relationship to the woman I, a thirteen-year-old, thought I was in love with. I couldn’t deal with my own shortcomings, so I blamed them all on Ward. I listened to Stala and my father fight—both verbally and physically and then have sex in the hall—and I thought about the maid and my brother doing the same thing and I hated them all.”