“I don’t know,” Alinor said. “I thought it was the quatrain fever but I have no signs; I expect it will pass. Perhaps it was something that I ate.”

“It’s been weeks,” Alys pointed out. “Surely it’d be over by now if it was rancid cream or spoiled meat.”

“Don’t,” Alinor said, the back of her hand to her mouth. “Don’t even speak of them.”

Ned laughed shortly. “She was always sickish,” he said unsympathetically. “You should’ve seen her when she was breeding you.” He bent his head and cracked one of the claws. “Here, Rob,” he said. “Try this.”

The young man and his uncle picked at the meat. “It’s good,” Rob said. “The claw’s always the best.”

“D’you get lobster at the Priory?”

“No,” said Rob.

“Folk look down their noses at it, as poor man’s meat, but I like it better than beef,” Ned said, his speech muffled by a mouthful.

Alinor heard them as if they were far away. Her brother’s careless words echoed again and again in her head. She heard a noise in her head like the rush of the waters in the millrace as she looked up and saw Alys’s dark blue eyes on her, and heard a distant voice say: “Ma?” as she went down into the darkness.

She woke on the bed in the cottage, Alys at her side. She raised herself on her elbow and Alys held a glass of small ale to her lips. “Where’s Rob?”

“Uncle Ned’s walking back to the Priory with him. I said that you’d be fine. I said that you’d send to tell him tomorrow. I said it was women’s troubles.” Alys scrutinized her mother’s face. “It is, isn’t it?”

Dumbly, Alinor nodded.

“The worst kind? You’re with child?”

Alinor swallowed. “I think so.”

“You think so?” Alys was pale and furious in a moment. “You must know if you laid with a man or no. Or are you going to tell me you were forced by a faerie lord? God save us, have you been dancing with the faerie lords again?”

A deep shamed flush rose from Alinor’s belly to her hot cheeks. “Of course I know. What I don’t know is if I’m with child. I hadn’t thought of it till Ned said . . . what he said.”

“And you tell me to beware of the gallows!”

“I’ve done very wrong,” Alinor confessed to this new, authoritative daughter. “Very wrong.”

Alys rose from the bedside and stepped towards the door, flinging it open as if she would summon the icy sea breeze to blow the words from the little cottage. “You must be mad,” she said bitterly. “After all you’ve said to me!”

Alinor bowed her head in shame.

“How could you?”

“I know, Alys. Don’t scold me.”

“And you dare to let my uncle tell me that I must wait for months to be married? When you’ve not even waited a year since our da left?”