For soon it would be over. This was the beginning of the end, and all ended in cold flesh. Be it scattered on the ground after battle, or leering down from a spike high above London, or shivering beneath the cloak of a hopeless Welshwoman, it all ended in cold, cold flesh.

Over the next months, the losses came regularly. First came word that Dinwen, the stronghold that in her childhood she had called home, had fallen to the English. Her brother, who had once eaten so many apples that he had been sick all over her best shoes – that impetuous boy had become a man who had ruled the place and died in the assault. His son and heir was taken to Edward, where he would swear fealty and beg the king’s pardon. He was a small enough fish that mercy was like to be given, in exchange for all his lands and wealth. Thus would end centuries of her family’s rule in Wales, though their bards could sing a history of twenty-two generations in power. The lands they had held when Romans claimed this island as their own – all of it would now be called England.

She sat in her solar and wondered how long until they were forgotten. Her family would be dead history, covered over by time, nothing but a vague and faceless group labelled “savage Welsh” to be dismissed by the English who usurped their place. Long ago she had tried to close her heart to it. By giving her in marriage to a Norman lord, her family made her more Norman than Welsh. It was tradition that a wife take on her husband’s nationality.

And so she told herself as she sat, decades after the wedding that had made her a Norman lady, in the room where she had birthed Norman children to a Norman lord. It was there that word came to her from an abbess, telling her of the burning of the church at St. Anian and the murder of the monks there. Among those slaughtered was Adda, who had served as her father’s personal cleric and had fed her wild strawberries and who told her, when her mother died, about the glories of Heaven. The news of it sent a pain through her heart, and she knelt for hours in the chapel to pray for his sweet soul. She prayed too for the many other innocents who were murdered by looting soldiers, only because Edward’s forces knew there would be no reprisal. The king would claim the scorched land as his own, build a new castle over the bones of the dead, and call it good.

“Prince Dafydd is captured, my lady,” said a voice that came to her sometime in the summer, as she sat in her solar in the keep of Ruardean.