Word of their arrival spread, and the yard began filling with manor folk. A few recognized her, and the shouted welcomes increased in number and enthusiasm and drew yet more people from the buildings. Their calls got louder and louder, and rolled over the manor and across the wall and into the forest, turning into a joyous chant of her name.

The demonstration moved her. Throat thick and eyes brimming, she paced her mount through the crowd, picking out faces she knew and waving her acknowledgment. Dozens of hands rose to touch her body and garments, slowing her progress.

Marcus took it in placidly, as if this outpouring did not concern him. That surprised her. Surely the implications must be obvious to him. This would not be like Anglesmore. Any one of these people would do her bidding.

“Will you lock me in chains now?” she asked.

“If I had intended to, the chains at Anglesmore are stronger. This changes nothing. It is your home. It is not surprising that they are glad to see you again.”

Her home. Her people. She surveyed the little sea of smiling, hopeful faces. Happiness welled up inside her, colored by profound emotions of pride.

He was wrong. It changed everything.

A woman lifted a child toward her, and shouted a petition for her blessing. Thus had mothers presented their babes to her father. Although she felt very awkward doing it, she placed her hand on the little head and mouthed the words. The warm softness of the skin and downy hair beneath her palm, the helplessness of the child, touched her so deeply that she could not move for a moment.

She suddenly understood Marcus’s impassive reaction. Aye, it changed everything, in ways that contradicted and confused each other.

Coming home reminded her as nothing else could what she owed to the man who had last been lord here, and to his dream, and to Wales.

But if war came, the first ones to suffer would be the Welsh in this manor and that forest and the nearby hills.

Simple people. Poor people.

Her people.

“Thank the saints you are here.”

Hubert uttered the statement after pouring more ale into Marcus’s cup. They stood alone beside a table near the hall’s hearth. After the castellan’s welcome, Addis had returned to the army outside the walls to see to the placement of camps.

Hubert downed another cup, his third. He was a fair-haired young man, the third son of a powerful baron in Sussex, and had been given his position as a favor to his father. Evidence in the manor indicated that he had no talent for managing an estate, or for anything other than battle. From the worry masking his features, Marcus suspected that even when he wielded his sword, Hubert liked to know he was favored to win.