He did not move, did not seem even to breathe as they stood in the echo of her words. She would rather cross swords with him and a thousand other men, than to suffer this. She became acutely aware of her missing shoe, how laughable she must look as she stood before him and spoke of kisses and weakness and fear.

“In heaven or on earth, Gwenllian, I swear to you, there is no man who could make you weak.”

She gathered her courage to look at him, and found him watching her as though in a trance. The stark and flawless beauty of him, eyes blue as the sky when night is first born – all of it fixed on her unlovely face and awkward body. Her hands ran idly over the cold rings of her mail shirt, but it did not make her feel any less exposed. What a raw and tender thing, in the end, this heart of hers. Not even with a hundred swords could she protect it.

“There was a demon at my throat,” he said now, as naturally as he spoke of the weather. “Ever did it whisper to me that my sins were not forgiven, no matter what the priests say. Ever did it thirst for my death, so that my soul would return to its rightful place in Hell. Yet it fled into the night when it met you.”

She remembered him, raving in his fever about devils and hellfire. “You asked for mercy.”

“I thought you sent from God to deliver me. An angel with a fiery sword.” A corner of his mouth curled up briefly, the ghost of a smile that was gone even as it began. “I was right.”

So bleak and melancholy was he that a prickle of alarm moved along her nape. After weeks of studiously avoiding all thoughts of what he might have felt when he discovered she had left him, her mind raced to take in his true meaning, to understand the magnitude of it. He thought she had come as God’s judgement upon him. When she chose against him, she had left him open to Edward’s wrath... and this, he plainly thought, was a just reckoning for his sins.

She stepped forward to him, surefooted at last. She raised her hands, cupping his face, commanding his attention.

“Believe you that I can see through to the heart of you, Ranulf?”

“I do,” he answered.

“And that I can speak no falsehoods of what I see there?”

She felt his breath against her fingers, the tensing of his jaw, before he nodded once, a small but definite answer.