She held the little sack as if it were stitched from cloth of gold and not rawhide. “Do you wear it to remind you of the starvation, or as a talisman against it happening again?”

The question astonished him. He busied himself with his belt. “As a youth, after I returned to Anglesmore, I grew accustomed to wearing it, that is all.”

He reached for the sack and took a piece of venison, to prove it was a convenience and nothing more. The small strip of meat was very old and tough, but he chewed with determination.

She finished her own dressing. As if both of them wanted to delay opening the lodge door, they were fastidious in folding the furs and banking the fire. Neither of them spoke as they obliterated the evidence of the night.

Finally all was prepared. They stood by the dead fire in a space still full of the night’s shadows but stabbed by dozens of arrows of bright sunlight.

Her hand sought his. “I should have asked about it. Last night I should have had you tell me more about your years in London, and your father’s death, and your sister’s sacrifice, and what you owe to Anglesmore and his memory and your own past.”

“I did not want to speak of such things.”

“Aye, but still I should have asked.”

He pulled her into his arms. The embrace was too much like one shared by people parting, and the warmth of her, the spring scent now mixed with sensual odors, moved him. Very deliberately he caressed her, branding his memory so that her feel would never be lost.

As they walked to the door, he thought of nothing but the night. She pulled it open, not him. Beyond the threshold spread a dazzling day, and a bright sun melting the last of the night’s snow.

As they walked to the horses, her last words repeated in his mind. He realized that if she had asked him about those things last night, he would have told her everything, just as he had told her about Joan buying his life. It would have been easy to speak of it, even though he never had before with anyone else.

The omission was not just hers. He should have asked about her own father, and more about her years in Scotland, and what she owed to Llygad’s memory and to Wales and to her own past.

He had not asked because he did not need to. He already knew most of it. Not the most dangerous parts, he was sure, but the reasons.

He knew because, during the hour before he had followed her and Genith and Dylan, he had read her letters.