‘You were always a bad liar, Derfel. That’s why you were never a courtier. To be a good courtier you must lie with a smile.’ She stared into the fire. She was silent a long time, and when she spoke again the gentle mockery was gone from her voice. Maybe it was the nearness of battle that drove her to a layer of truth I had never heard from her before. ‘I was a fool,’ she said quietly, so quietly I had to lean forward to hear her over the crackling of the fire and the melody of my men’s songs. ‘I tell myself now that it was a kind of madness,’ she went on, ‘but I don’t think it was. It was nothing but ambition.’ She went quiet again, watching the small flickering flames. ‘I wanted to be a Caesar’s wife.’

‘You were,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Arthur’s no Caesar. He’s not a tyrant, but I think I wanted him to be a tyrant, someone like Gorfyddyd.’ Gorfyddyd had been Ceinwyn and Cuneglas’s father, a brutal King of Powys, Arthur’s enemy, and, if rumour was true, Guinevere’s lover. She must have been thinking about that rumour, for she suddenly challenged me with a direct gaze. ‘Did I ever tell you he tried to rape me?’

‘Yes, Lady,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t true.’ She spoke bleakly. ‘He didn’t just try, he did rape me. Or I told myself it was rape.’ Her words were coming in short spasms, as if the truth was a very hard thing to admit. ‘But maybe it wasn’t rape. I wanted gold, honour, position.’ She was fiddling with the hem of her jerkin, stripping small lengths of linen from the frayed weave. I was embarrassed, but I did not interrupt, because I knew she wanted to talk. ‘But I didn’t get them from him. He knew exactly what I wanted, but knew better what he wanted for himself, and he never intended to pay my price. Instead he betrothed me to Valerin. Do you know what I was going to do with Valerin?’ Her eyes challenged me again, and this time the gloss on them was not just fire, but a sheen of tears.

‘No, Lady.’

‘I was going to make him King of Powys,’ she said vengefully. ‘I was going to use Valerin to revenge myself on Gorfyddyd. I could have done it, too, but then I met Arthur.’

‘At Lugg Vale,’ I said carefully, ‘I killed Valerin.’

‘I know you did.’

‘And there was a ring on his finger, Lady,’ I went on, ‘with your badge on it.’

She stared at me. She knew what ring I meant. ‘And it had a lover’s cross?’ she asked quietly.

‘Yes, Lady,’ I said, and touched my own lover’s ring, the twin of Ceinwyn’s ring. Many folk wore lovers’ rings incised with a cross, but not many had rings with crosses made from gold taken from the Cauldron of Clyddno Eiddyn as Ceinwyn and I did.