Page 10

Not fear of her. Not really. It was only a warning, clearly communicated without words, as she communicated everything.

It was not fury and the promise of retribution, as it had been the only time he’d escaped the thieves.

A day of running, sure of his freedom, relaxed and finally believing it was over when Baudry appeared from behind a tree and held a dagger to his throat.

This was not that. But it felt like it.

He looked down at the knife, blinking. A shape was carved into the grip, and he seemed only able to consider the question of what it was – a circle, a snake, the letter G?

– instead of what might happen if she pressed the blade forward.

He knew he must say something. Once, long ago, courtly words had come so easily to him, smooth and polished, the accepted ways a man would beg pardon of a lady.

But now his mind was a desert. If only she would take the blade away.

When she finally did, concern ceased her features.

She looked at him with her brows drawn together, obviously wondering what ailed him.

All the warning in her had dissolved into uncertainty, and she seemed to become smaller.

It was a trick of his mind – she had always been this small, coming only barely to his shoulder and so slight of frame that it would take no great strength to overpower her.

She stepped back from him and returned the knife to its place at the back of her belt, never fumbling for the hidden sheath.

He waited to feel relief, but it did not come.

Her eyes flicked over to the hooded falcon in the cage, then roamed over the baggage strapped to the mule, an aimless wandering of her attention.

He gradually became aware that she was waiting for him to move from this place where he had turned to stone, so that they might resume their journey.

It was mortifying. She saw it in him, this outsized fear, and knew what it was.

The shame brought him to his senses, and he concentrated on forcing the memory of Baudry away.

It was quickly done; he knew how to forget better than he knew anything.

He let himself think only of the road ahead, the little dog, the freedom he finally had for the first time in his life. He would not squander it in fear.

“I’ll have you walk ahead or beside me, if you please, and not behind.”

For a long moment, he thought it was the mule that had spoken and that he was going mad.

When he finally comprehended that it was Nan, he could do nothing but blink in astonishment.

She only picked up the rope that served as the mule’s rein from where it had fallen, and began wiping the mud from it.

“You can speak.” It was a witless thing to say, but he seemed incapable of anything else.

She paused only slightly in her work, glancing up at him and giving a brief nod to acknowledge it – but no more words. He struggled to find any himself.

“But...wherefore have you played at being mute these many days?”

She looked disconcerted at the question. “It is not play.” When he only blinked at her, she said simply, “When words are needed, I speak them.”

With that, she gave a little jerk of her chin that asked him to take a place beside the mule so that they could begin walking again.

He would have refused to move until she explained more fully, but the sound of her voice still echoed in his head.

The fact of her speaking was easier to accustom himself to than the manner in which she spoke.

Even in so few words he could hear that her voice was unrefined, with none of the polished tones of Norman nobility.

It matched the way she had tucked up her skirt and gutted the birds with no squeamishness, and how she was busily braiding her own hair with quick, efficient moves.

A servant. Her speech matched exactly what she was, but her face had made him forget it.

“Do you think to pretend a higher station, and so hide your speech?”

The look of affront that crept over her was more eloquent than any words she might have spoken.

“Your pardon,” he said hastily. “I mean you no insult. I thought...”

He had thought of his own pretending, how he had spent so many years trying to hide the Welsh in his voice. But he didn’t say so. He just walked with her in silence until he could stand it no more.

“Where do we travel? What village?”

She made no answer, nor acknowledged the question. It was as though he had not spoken at all.

“What business have you there?” he tried.

But it seemed she thought words were not needed on the subject, and she only walked ahead without speaking again.

They continued all afternoon in a silence that felt both more companionable and more strained until the sun was low in the sky.

They moved off the path to find a likely place to camp for the night.

She went, as she did every evening, to bring water from the river while he built a fire and roasted the meat.

As she always did, she gave him two oat cakes to her one, and a thick slice of the hard cheese that she never seemed to eat.

He almost refused it. He did not know if she did it out of practicality – for even in his recently starved state he was considerably larger than she was – or out of pity for him. But she did it so naturally and easily that he worried he would offend her further if he refused it now.

After he had smothered the fire and made his bed on the ground, she made one of her gestures to the dog that began their nightly ritual: she would choose a spot within sight of the little camp and wait there in the dark, and the dog would do the same at a spot in the opposite direction.

They were silent sentries, keeping vigil while the night fell and then creeping back quietly after a time to sleep.

Gryff had spent the last three nights trying not to remember things that the thieves had done to travelers who wandered off the road at night.

He would wait, only able to sleep when both girl and dog returned to the camp.

As the dog trotted by him on its way to keep watch, Gryff called out softly. “God grant you a peaceful night, mighty Bran.”

The dog went on to its duty, but Nan stopped where she was. She turned to Gryff, a peevishness in her face he had never seen before.

“He’s named Fuss,” she scowled. “Nor would I never give him such a name as Bran.”

He blinked in surprise that something so insignificant would cause her to speak again. He remembered the strange huffing hiss she used to call the dog. It wasn’t a hiss. It was a word. Fuss.

“Fuss?” he asked, skeptical, and she nodded. “Is not a fitting name for such a steadfast creature. He answers well to Bran.”

Her own look was far more skeptical than his own, with more than a hint of scorn in it.

“You would have us called Nan and Bran?”

She gave a delicate snort of disgust as she walked away in the failing light.

If she had been more good-humored about it, he would have given in to his amusement and laughed.

Nan and Bran was no more absurd than Gryff and Tiff, he should have said.

But he had somehow managed to annoy her several times in just this one day, from causing her to fall in the mud to misnaming her dog, and he saw no need to antagonize her further.

He lay in the dark and remembered the feel of her hair, her throat.

In the moment, he’d been so sure that she wanted his touch.

He even thought he had felt her lean toward him.

The prolonged hunger must have addled his brain.

Or it was just her and all her contradictions that addled him.

Golden beauty and lowly manners, a dozen blades and a friendly dog, days without speaking and then breaking her silence for a trivial request. It spun his head.

When she came back from her vigil among the trees and settled on the ground a little away from him, she spun his head even more.

“I speak Welsh,” she said, in that language.

It struck his ear with a sweetness, the sound of his lost home floating toward him in the dark.

“Nor was it my intent to deceive you. If you have said aught you would not wish me to hear, I am full sorry. Be assured I will repeat none of it. Idle talk is not in my nature.”

It stunned him into silence. All of it: that she had spoken at all, that she understood Welsh, that she had heard all his meandering memories, that she was contrite.

But the most stunning fact of all was that her Welsh was perfect.

She had only the slightest accent, and every word as polished and correct as a Welsh princess.

She was at every turn a mystery and a contradiction.

“How come you to know Welsh?” he asked finally.

There was a long pause. He could hear her draw a slow, deep breath before she spoke. “I am sorry,” she said softly, reverting back to English. “Truly, I am. Good night to you.”

That was all. Explanations, it would seem, were considered idle talk.

He stared up at the branches against the clear night sky, sure he would not sleep. But he did, and when he woke in the morning he found she had left a small gift of food beside him as usual, as though nothing had passed between them at all.