“Her mind is quick enough and bold, to find the words that will save her.”

“And if she does not wish to save herself?”

“She does,” he said to the empty fireplace. “In every move she makes does she leave room to doubt it is her hand behind it all. She is ever careful to have likely reasons to meet with these men, that have nothing to do with rebellion, and so keeps the stench of it far enough from her. Nor has she written even a word that would betray that she is anything but a timid and powerless lady, mindful of her station. She well knows how to use the advantages of being a woman, though she taught little of such art to you.”

He did not say it as a rebuke, which made it all the more painful. She turned her face down to her half-covered legs, saw the muscles of her thighs clearly defined beneath the gooseflesh, and thought of the child inside her. Of all the ways it would change her body, how it would make her fully and irrevocably a woman.

“All the way from Ruardean, the Welsh talk of you.” His eyes touched on her exposed length of thigh, then the shirt of mail she wore. “Or so says Davydd.”

At last he looked at her directly as she had wanted, and she found she must look away. Awkwardly, feeling his eyes on her all the while, she covered her nakedness fully. She should stand and face him, but she could not find the strength to rise from the floor.

“What do they say?”

“Oh, I think you know well enough.” He leaned his shoulders against the mantel, an easy posture that went well with his mocking tone. “Like Gwenllian of old. She’ll beat back the Normans this time, I hear. Nor could I understand a word they said, yet did I hear my wife’s name come from the mouth of every man, woman, and child along our journey through this godforsaken land.”

“I told you I was named for her,” she said to her knees.

“You did not tell me you were to become her. Tell me, Gwenllian the Great, did you conceive the idea and so took up the sword in pursuit of it? Or was it that you first discovered your talent for battle, and then decide to fashion yourself into a legend?”

There was laughter in his voice, and more. She looked up and saw the sardonic curl of his lip, the polite but seething distance that hid so much behind scornful eyes. He was again the arrogant lord she had dragged to Edward, and not the man she had come to know. It should harden her against him, but it only made her feel wretched.