I nodded. “It may even have been true, though not in the way you’d understand it, my lord. She vowed herself to the Church when I should have no more need of her. The Christians call that a betrothal.”

“So?” He considered for a moment. “Whatever it was, I sent no more messages. And when later on there was mention of a child, a bastard, it hardly crossed my mind that it could be mine. A fellow came here once, a travelling eye-doctor who had been through Wales, and I sent for him and questioned him, and he said yes, there was a bastard boy at the palace of such and such an age, red-haired, and the King’s own.”

“Dinias,” I said. “He probably never saw me. I was kept out of the way . . . And my grandfather did sometimes explain me away to strangers as his own. He had a few scattered around, here and there.”

“So I gathered. So the next rumour of a boy—possibly the King’s bastard, possibly his daughter’s—I hardly listened to. It was all long past, and there were pressing things to do, and always there was the same thought—if she had borne a child to me, would she not have let me know? If she had wanted me, would she not have sent word?”

He fell silent then, back in his own thoughts. Whether I understood it all then, as he talked, I do not now recollect. But later, when the pieces shook together to make the mosaic, it was clear enough. The same pride which had forbidden her to go with her lover had forbidden her, once she discovered her pregnancy, to call him back. And it helped her through the months that followed. More than that; if—by flight or any other means—she had betrayed who her lover was, nothing would have stopped her brothers from travelling to Budec’s court to kill him. There must—knowing my grandfather—have been angry oaths enough about what they would do to the man who had fathered her bastard. And then time moved on, and his coming grew remote, and then impossible, as if he were indeed a myth and a memory in the night. And then the other long love stepped in to supersede him, and the priests took over, and the winter tryst was forgotten. Except for the child, so like his father: but once her duty to him was done, she could go to the solitude and peace which—all those years ago—had sent her riding alone up the mountain valley, as later I was to ride out alone by the same path, and looking perhaps for the same things.

I jumped when he spoke again. “How hard a time of it did you have, as a no-man’s-child?”

“Hard enough.”

“You believe me when I say I didn’t know?”

“I believe anything you tell me, my lord.”