“I shall write to you at Morency when you have gone,” Suzanna was saying as they paused outside the solar where the other court ladies sat. “By Mary, I should like a friend who can converse so well of dragons.”

Her sincerity startled Gwenllian. It must have shown on her face, for the girl looked down, played with the hem of her sleeve, and whispered, “So alone will I be in Italy, when I am wed.”

She had never had a female friend before. Even when she was a child, it was her male cousins whom she played with and confided in.

“Is a poor friend I may make,” she warned Suzanna. “I do not concern me much with gossip or fashion, as the ladies here.”

A sunny smile spread across the girl’s face. “Verily, I would not wish a friend who would write of such. I will be in sore need of wise counsel, chiefly in household matters, may it please my lady to so advise me.”

So hopeful was the look on the girl’s face that Gwenllian found it impossible to deny her. Thus did she make a friend in her few days at the court of the king.

CHAPTER 11

––––––––

Long ago, in another life, she had memorized all the lands and homes that were part of the Morency inheritance. She had all but forgotten them in the interceding years, just as she had forgotten how to anticipate being a man’s wife. All her life, until Aymer had been killed, she was to be nothing more or less than the lady of some great estate. Marriage had been her fate, until it wasn’t. She could dimly remember hoping as a child that she might wed one of the Welsh princes. But in the end her father had chosen Morency for her, and her vision of her future easily adapted to that fate.

Even more easily had she adapted to her unlikely freedom from that future. With her father gone on crusade, her mother had never spoken again of marriage for her daughter. There will be time for that if God wills it, she had said, and then set about indulging her daughter’s various whims. Thoughts of marriage receded as she happily immersed herself in the study of physicking, and swordplay with her cousins. Once she had begun to wear armor, the very idea of becoming any man’s wife was as distant as the moon. Her mother had conceived of a new fate for her, one that had nothing to do with wifely duties.