‘My Princess,’ she trembles as she speaks, ‘have I not been a true and loyal servant to you all these years? Does it count for naught that I have tended to you, comforted you, been your helpmate and your friend through so many travails? Have I not kept your secrets safe and done everything I could for your happiness? Can you not find it in your heart to help me now? Will you not speak for me?’

The princess does not answer, only turns her head away.

Nesta cries out. ‘What manner of woman are you? Have you no pity?’

‘Enough!’ Rhodri seeks to silence her, bidding the guards replace her gag, but Nesta wriggles from their grasp long enough to say more.

‘You!’ She directs her rage at me now. ‘If you had only thought of someone other than yourself Hywel would still be alive. This need never have come to pass! None of it! It is your selfishness, Seren Arianaidd, that has been the cause of this!’

‘Be silent, woman!’ Brynach tells her. ‘Let the execution proceed.’

Nesta snarls, her face contorting. The sky darkens as a flock of rooks rise up from the woods and fly so thick and so many that they block out the sun’s rays. She raises her voice, fueled by hatred and her own fear. ‘A curse upon you! A curse upon all your children, and their children! May they never know peace. May they none of them live to see their own young grown! May they die in terror and screaming, each and every one of them!’

It is a terrible curse. Such a legacy of dread and sorrow! All around people gasp and cry out, some of the children weeping. And all of them look at me, for had she not seconds before named me as the reason for all that we stand witness to?

‘Silence her!’ Brynach shouts.

But I know the truth of it. I saw where she directed her nightmare curse, I saw whose eye she hooked with her wild stare, whose future she blighted. And the words were not meant for me, but for Wenna and her brother, and his son.