She paused in her fast march, looking around her. There had not been much thought behind the direction she took, only the sure knowledge that a village lay this way. In all other directions, there was nothing for miles, from what she knew – and she believed he would not have quit the company lest he knew the area. She had done a quick inventory of what he must carry now, and it was little: the knife, his own small purse that contained a very few personal items and a ration of food, some rope.

Unless he were more skilled in surviving the wilds than she thought, he would find the town and seek shelter. But he was clever, not foolish enough to go to the one place he was sure to be followed. Night was coming on, and she must decide which direction to search. She followed instinct across the fields and into the woods just outside of the village as the sun dropped on the horizon. The rain at last – blessedly, mercifully – stopped, and Gwenllian instinctively murmured a prayer of thanksgiving that was likely lost among her less kind thoughts of Morency.

It was humid, and muddy, and she was tired from walking and cursing... which only made her curse him more for ever coming near Wales, for ever being so rich a political prize to Ruardean, and always, most of all, for ever touching her.

Then she made a mistake, because she was so tired, and the last rays of the sun drenched the trees in magical hues. She let herself remember it. The feel of him. The taste. She allowed herself to imagine all of it happening again, but without the shame, and when she let the memory in, she was seized with hunger.

The memory sent such a shock of heat through her limbs that she paused, staring amazed at her own feet. She should not want this – the heat of him, his lips again, his lust. She should not. But for years alone in her chamber at night, she had thought these thoughts, and touched those places, had closed her eyes and seen and smelled and tasted the flesh of comely men. The priests would call it sin, if she had ever told the priests, or ever cared for their opinion of her. But she had never thought it a sin, until now. It was only a secret weakness, a stolen pleasure that no one need ever know about.

Yet he knew. He tasted it in her. If he were an ordinary man, not the man who had killed her almost-husband, not the man whispered about and feared. If he did it out of hunger for her, instead of a revenge for his lost pride. If, she thought. If he were someone else.