Beautiful words. Nesta’s words. Spoken at the betrothal with the earnest honesty of someone seeing the depths of her own soul. Stunning words, that he already knew would be the last ones that his mind would hear at the moment of his death.

Forgotten words. An admission of the heart, but not the head. After the vigil in his bedchamber, David had warned that the potion made one as if drunk beyond awareness. It removed a person’s normal restraints.

Marcus wondered what words he had spoken while he tested the potion on himself. The ear that forgets what it hears had not said, but considering David’s last words, Marcus could imagine.

The castle had fallen quiet and the moon had risen high in the sky. Marcus left the wall’s vast embrace of the night, and sought the more intimate one in the garden.

As he descended he passed the level where Nesta slept, and the urge to go to her almost overwhelmed him. It was not only lust that spurred the impulse. His passion for her was bigger than that. So much bigger that it frightened him.

The image that he had examined on the parchment this evening floated behind his inner eye. A knight and a lady, separated by a river.

The farmers looked at her differently. Spoke to her differently. They still greeted her in the mornings with smiles and gossip, but she could tell the betrothal had changed things.

They were no longer sure of her. Marcus had confused them with that public ceremony, and her willing compliance had been well reported. She could not slice through the lie even though she denied its legitimacy to them over and over again.

She tried to buy back their faith. She slipped a few pence to children, and gave one of her veils to a girl who was marrying. She made a small design for a woman whose husband was very ill. It showed a cross and two angels, and the woman gratefully took it home to tack up on the wall beside her ailing man’s bed.

The morning after she handed it over, the woman pulled her aside in the yard.

“They took it from me. The image. When I left, outside the gate, Sir Paul was waiting and he took the parchment.”

Nesta had seen Paul in the yard yesterday morning, but had not realized he had been watching her. “Did he give it back?”

The woman nodded. “Had me wait while he brought it inside, but he was back with it quickly. My husband was grateful for it, my lady, and for the prayers that you said you would say for him.”