She had already decided, almost as soon as she had lifted her sword from his throat and seen the hurt to his shoulder, to spare him the indignity of that. It would be more difficult to do this work alone, but prudent. Fine enough for her mother to heap insults upon him from the safety of her bower. It was something else when he traveled with them, when he could upset the delicate balance she had created within her guard. It was not her mother’s realm at all, this world that Gwenllian ruled in the wilds. There were no stone walls or high towers to put between her and the lord of Morency.

When her men had gone, she approached him. He stayed silent and wary, as though she were some foul and magical beast come to bedevil him and cheat him of his soul, or worse. Here in close quarters, as it had been when he lay ill, he did not look like the monster that rumor had made of him. He was only a man lit by firelight. Still she found her hand was damp and cold, wrapped around the leather strap, and she stared. It was her veil, simple and white, abandoned and draped across a nearby branch, that drew her eye and called her back to her senses.

“Tis dislocate, the bone,” she told him as she moved to wind the veil again around her head. It was best to do physician’s work in a veil, though why she had always believed so defied her own powers of explanation. “Is best to set it to right when the blood is still hot, else your flesh cool and it be frozen out of joint.”

She had slid bones back into place only twice before, and she would count herself lucky if he did not bellow to wake the dead when it came to it, even did she manage it perfectly. The trembling in her hands steadied as she finished arranging her headpiece and looked at him. Perhaps it was only superstition, as Master Edmund chided her, but she felt more capable now the veil was in place, and safer, and more ready. The same as she felt with steel in her hand. Capable and sure, until she looked at him.

Gone was the contempt of but a moment before. His eyes were roaming across her face and her veil, softening almost to humanity in the moment that she stood motionless before him. It frightened her, that look. No man had ever gazed at her so. In defeating every worthy fighting man of Ruardean, she was always met with sullenness or else a forced cheer. No man ever looked her in the face when she had beaten him, not for days. But he watched her as though she were a mystery to be solved. As though she held some secret that fascinated him. As though she were more than just the weapon that had defeated him.