Perhaps she knew he watched her closely, and so was careful of her movements, circumspect in everything she did. Perhaps she truly was this absorbed in the workings of the kitchens and the chandlery and the napery. But he could not forget her face when she had been handed the keys to Morency, and thought it more likely she was afraid of a misstep.

Never in all the days that he had observed her every move, did she ever return his close regard. As much as he could not look away from her, she seemed to take little notice of him until they were alone in the night, when she became eager and hot.

He stood now on the wall-walk, where he could see miles in every direction. There was privacy here, and more: the open vista, clear to the sea. It unburdened him. Too often, Ranulf spent his days pacing within the curtain wall as though it were a cage, vague apprehension lodged just beneath his breastbone until night fell. Then she came to him, or he went to her, and the knot inside his chest unraveled. In the dark, with her, there were no ghosts to whisper to him from the empty corners of the room. There was only the sound of her even breath as he fell into the deepest sleep.

But the nights did not last, and the days were a familiar torture. And so he told himself that he must come up here, to observe the progress in the fields as far as he could see. To inspect the wall-walk itself, as though they were in danger of attack. Any reason he could find to climb up here, where he did not feel so suffocated, would suffice.

Today the marshal stood next to him and enumerated the virtues of various garrison men, as Ranulf tried not stare too obviously at his wife.

“There be many men of the garrison ready to prove themselves for knighthood, my lord.”

Ranulf had asked the marshal to give this exact opinion only moments ago, before his mind had wandered. Yet still, the man looked embarrassed to speak so bold.

They were still nervous around him, every inhabitant of the castle save Gwenllian and that ever-present little dog – but they were beginning to look at him as almost human. With some of them, he thought he might even have been demoted from fully satanic to merely half-demon.

“Tell me which among them you think worthy. And mind you speak to me of the worth I cannot discover by watching them spar.” He looked down to see her hang a bundle of some plant to dry under the eaves of the herb-house, and remembered her hand holding out a dagger to him in the forest. “There is more to knighthood than skill with a sword.”