For the first time in weeks, she missed her sword. She would have liked to run him through.

“Well do you know the danger she courts.”

“Aye, and well do I know her capable of it,” she countered. “You give her no more credit than a simpleton.”

For a moment, he only looked confused. Then, slowly, a suspicion came into his face.

“So did you give her little credit, until now.”

His eyes dropped to the letter she held. She felt the heat rising from her skin, outrage and affront – for her mother or herself, she hardly knew. She closed her fist on the letter, pressing it neatly into a ball that she thrust at him.

“Take it to Davydd, do you not believe me, and bid him read it to you. You’ll find no more than I’ve told you. “

“And even that little may be enough to condemn her as traitor.”

His voice had risen to meet hers, and now she felt herself more wild with anger than she had been since she was a child.

“Shall you tell your king, then? Why wait for her to act when you can give him this to warn of her intent, and be done with it?”

Edward’s butcher, they had called him. Little do you know of my sins, he had said. Oh, but now she knew.

“Go on, then. Well do you know how to buy a king’s favor with a life.”

In the hollow silence that followed, she watched as the face turn to cold stone. A piece of her wanted to take the words back, to turn her face down in shame of saying it. But a coldness had grown up inside her. She was not a delicate, golden-haired ornament. She knew what she was. She had always known, but had forgotten. He was Edward’s creature, and she was her mother’s. And so she did not look away from him, even as the silence and the tension grew, even though she feared what might come next. She stood tall and unflinching, ready for the fight.

But there was no fight. There was only this man who was her husband, and his look that burned her.

Finally, he opened his hand and let the crumpled letter fall to the floor. Without a word, he walked out of the room.

She was left in the resounding silence, alone with the cold clarity that had come in the room with the letter that lay on the floor.

An hour later she found Edric the messenger in the stables, where he waited patiently, brushing his horse until it gleamed.

“A place will be made for you in the knights’ quarters, however long it may please you to bide at Morency. Does my cousin expect your early return?”

His glance flicked to the boy who was sweeping dirty straw into a neat pile.