“Never did he harm me.” He wished for darkness, to hide from the bright light of day. “Not a hair of my head did he touch.” Aymer’s perversions and wrath were reserved for everyone else.

“And so it is right to kill a sleeping man, save that the man is unloved by his servants or the church?” She asked it carefully, and he could hear her Master Edmund in her philosophical tone. And then she answered herself. “But he was mourned, my lord. I mourned his loss.”

“You mourned the life you believe you would have lived.” He stopped walking, and she stopped with him. He looked at her significantly, a look that ran slowly up her mail, to her hip where her sword was buckled, coming to rest on her begrimed face. “Do you mourn it still?”

Her eyes turned to him in the stillness, large and gray and beautiful, full of the light that he remembered from his sickbed.

“Sometimes.”

This was so obviously the truth, accompanied by such a vulnerable and very female look crossing her face that it took his breath away. But it was gone with a blink of those heavy lashes and replaced by a blank wall. He felt it again, the familiarity of spirit, a glimmer of himself in her. He shook his head slightly. It was that they both knew life with a sword in hand, no more in common than that. He would allow no other thought than that, no memories of his fevered dreams.

“Then we shall drink to you, lady,” he said, pulling out the flask of ale he had pilfered along with the sword. It made him thirsty, to remember how it felt to be young and murderous. He found a convenient rock and sat, his back against a tree as he took a long draught. “But a brief pause in our march, to honor Gwenllian of Ruardean, the only mourner for Aymer of Morency.”

She only watched him, not objecting to his sudden stop for refreshment. Even sitting, he was not used to anyone towering over him the way she did. “Giants,” he mused. “Are there giants in Wales? And which one fathered you?”

Her face lost the neutral look. She had a distinct lack of humor when it came to her parentage. He saw her hand drop to her sword, an unthinking reflex. “It will not protect you from insult,” he said wearily. “If it did, I would hear no whispers when I pass by courtier and peasant alike. And priest, and prince, and maid dressed in mail.” He took another long drink and looked up at her, thinking of that he would rather speak of her strange youth than his own. “What kind of mother or teacher would allow you to become this? Come, tell me. Is madness, you must know it.”