He relaxed against the tree, shifting his weight and looking up into the branches. “Your speed would not have saved you and you are not half so clever as you think, do you believe it would. Know you of the wife who came before you? Alice. Her name was Alice and she bore him a son who did not live past infancy.” He could not stop himself from telling her. “She was eight months gone with his second child when she died. No more than a month later he signed the papers that bound you to him.”

She did not look at him. Her eyes were fixed on her own leather boots. “He killed her?”

She made him remember it. He could see Alice’s face still, swollen and ravaged. He could feel her hands on the sides of his own face, her lips on his hair, as she stood on her toes and gave him a motherly kiss. He had been seventeen, tall and strong and already good with a sword.

“She killed herself,” he said to the branches, to the sky. “Made a rope of the sheets from her marriage bed to hang herself.” He raised the flask to his lips and drank the last swallow. “Is a good thing you married by proxy, my lady Gwenllian,” he observed, “Else your wedding might provide your winding sheet, too.”

He waited, watching her. She made no move even to look at him, her eyes trained on the ground through long minutes of silence. He listened to the birdsong and wondered what he would eat tonight, what they would trap in these woods for dinner. It was pleasant here, with the world so far away. He envied her, that she had nothing but the wilds of Wales and the company of her men for all these long years.

“He wrote to me,” she said suddenly. “He wrote to me only days before you murdered him.”

“Oh? And what did he write of?” he asked. He braced himself for her answer, a slow breath drawn deep into his lungs. He opened his eyes and looked into hers, the infinite gray of them, the unblinking mirror that bore his self back on him.

“He wrote of his great love for you,” she answered, the accusation in her voice so faint that he could almost convince himself it was not there at all.

He carefully lifted his mouth in a faint smile, still looking her in the eye even as he fought down the familiar and frantic fear rising in his throat. Love. The priests may say what they will of murder as a mortal sin, but it was not the killing that weighed heavily on his heart.

“Aye. He loved me well, even better than his own son. I always knew it. Even as I slipped the blade in, I knew it.”