Donagan was helping me get ready for bed. This was part of the regular duties of a body servant. Since I was an adult man and perfectly capable of taking off my clothes and putting on a nightshirt unassisted, we were doing what we usually did at this hour: sitting in my bedchamber sharing a jug of mead and talking. Or rather, I had been talking and my companion had been listening, until now.

‘But she won’t even see me,’ I said. I understood his argument; I had already made allowances for Flidais’s distress, her exhaustion, perhaps a sudden attack of homesickness. ‘She’s been shut up in her quarters since she first got here. Two whole days. I should be helping her recover, comforting her, reassuring her. We’re to be married, after all. She’s barely spoken to me.’

‘After what happened to her maidservant, you should be glad she did not say she wanted to go straight back home.’ Donagan was looking at Flidais’s portrait; her image gazed back at him, eyes full of love and sweetness. I had been startled, when I’d first seen her in the flesh, how like she was to that picture. It had all been there: the perfect heart shape of the face, the deep blue of the eyes, the delicate mouth and neat straight nose. It had all been there but the look of love. Instead, her face had worn a wary expression, as if she were trying to take my measure. Perhaps I did not live up to her expectations. Perhaps she thought me ugly or weak-looking, too tall, too short, too soft, too . . .

This was foolish. What had I been hoping for? I could not say, save that after our letters, I had not anticipated that she would be so . . . cool. Even allowing for the unfortunate circumstances, I had thought she might summon a smile, not the conventional smile of a formal greeting, but a special smile just for me. I had thought, when later I gave her the poem I had written for her arrival, that she would read it straight away, not pass it to one of her waiting women with scarcely a glance. I had not expected that she would shut herself away from me as if she were thinking better of her choice.

‘She’ll be fine by the betrothal ceremony,’ Donagan said. ‘I’m sure of it. Women have these ups and downs, Oran. They’re creatures of a hundred moods.’