“I was named for Gwenllian ferch Gruffydd,” she said, as though he were to understand this as anything other than a string of breathy mumbling. He continued looking at her blankly, until she spoke again, a faint smile chasing across her generous mouth. “She was married to one of our Welsh princes of the south long ago, in the time of King Stephen. She raised an army during the great revolt.”

He raised his brows. “She won?”

“No, she was beheaded. Her army was routed. The Normans won, the first of many such victories.”

“What was meant, then, in naming you for a woman who lost? A reminder to your Welsh kin of Norman might?”

She shook her head at him, and gave him a memorable look. It was as though she wished to say much but was afraid, and all the while under that tension was her amusement. How strange, that there should be so much suppressed feeling around the question of her name. Stranger still, to see the ghost of a smile still on her lips.

“Did you not hear her name three years ago, my lord, when you fought in the middle March? The men of Wales shout Revenge for Gwenllian when they take up arms. It is their battle cry.”

“I was not there,” he answered, so quickly that it no doubt sounded suspect. But it was the truth, and he was anxious that she know it. The fiercest fighting to quell the Welsh rebels had been in the middle March. He had heard tales of the bloodiest butchery done by men who swore themselves more Christian than the savage Welsh. Many times when he’d heard the men of her party speaking among themselves in Welsh, he had thought of what he’d heard about the fighting back then, and was glad Edward had sent him to the south. He was only too ready to distance himself from a brutality that her people would not soon forget, or likely ever forgive. “I was at Carmarthen only. There were no battle cries there.”

She nodded once, firmly, accepting what he said with so little hesitation that he thought she must have already known where he was during the rebellion. “The Gwenllian of old is a legend. A hero and a battle cry. They say she was also beautiful, but there was little of that in me even as a babe.”

“And because you were named for her, you were allowed to take a sword?” That seemed far too simple-minded. To teach her, to hide it from the priests and other men who would call it a perversion and a sin, to orchestrate her upbringing so that she could become a leader of men and as good with a sword as he himself – this was not some passing whimsy, indulged merely because of her name.