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I n his years of living in Lancaster’s household, Gryff had convinced himself of many foolish things, but none was as all-encompassing in its stupidity as his belief that Isabel was in love with him too.

He was barely seventeen, which was a perfect time to be a fool in love – that’s what Hal’s father said – and she was so beguiling that it was impossible to resist her.

“Tell me again, this word for when a Welshman misses his home.”

They were huddled together in a shadowed corner of the crumbling west tower of the keep.

He and Hal had discovered long ago that it was the perfect place to hide and now that they were grown, they employed it frequently for less childish endeavors.

Isabel’s soft curves were pressed against him, seeking warmth after the chilled air had cooled the sweat of their lovemaking.

“Hiraeth,” he answered her. After many years of swearing he would never do so again, he found himself almost eager to speak his native tongue whenever she asked.

Isabel had a seemingly insatiable appetite for stories about Wales, and since she was equally insatiable in ways profoundly more pleasing to Gryff, he did not hesitate to indulge her.

“Hiraeth,” she repeated in perfect imitation. “It means to miss your family? But I feel this too, so it cannot be true when you say there is no word in my language.”

He didn’t know her language. She came from Aragon and would return there soon, so her father could marry her to a new husband – one who might live longer than the Norman one had. She seemed determined to make the most of her freedom as a widow before that happened.

“Hiraeth is more than just missing family,” he explained.

“It is the land and the people, the smell and the sounds, and more. Like a flavor on your tongue from a fruit that no longer grows. You ache to taste it again, but you cannot, and so you are never satisfied. Hiraeth means to long for a place that is lost to you, or impossible to reach. To know a great part of your soul dwells in a place you cannot be – that is hiraeth.”

Her lips had begun to kiss his throat before he was finished, her hands moving under his tunic. “Mm, do not stop,” she sighed. “I love the sound of it.”

Belatedly he realized he had said all of it in Welsh.

It had felt entirely natural, because all the words he knew to describe hiraeth had been learned from Welsh bards.

He wanted to confess to her what he had discovered through all her questioning about his homeland, what he could barely admit to himself: he missed it.

All of it. His brothers, his mother, and even his father.

The hills and the sea, the rain and the mists, the bards and the falconers.

He did not want to miss it, but he did. He did.

He could not tell her in this mood. She was urging him down on her, and he was more than happy to oblige her. Later he would tell her all his heart, he thought. Finally there would be someone who would understand him.

The only thing that happened later was that he learned what she really thought of him.

He and Hal were strolling in the ornamental garden, in the last stages of manning a new hawk.

Gryff had spent four days patiently waiting in the dark mews with the bird, until finally it took food from his hand.

Now it must be carefully introduced to the wider world so that it was not shy among people, and the almost empty garden was a perfect place.

Near the bower of gilliflowers, they paused when they heard the voices of ladies. The sound was accompanied by soft laughter, so they grinned at each other and crept closer to hear through the thick screen of pink petals.

“He is even more satisfying than I hoped for. The only disappointment is that he is not unwashed, or even a little pagan. I was promised a true savage!”

It was Isabel’s voice, gossiping with a friend.

She went on to wonder if there was time to find an Irishman to seduce, and wondered how long to enjoy her sport with Gryff before taking a new lover.

The new lover would be Scottish, because she hoped to sample every kind of man the island offered before leaving.

Gryff thought he hid it well from Hal, the swift stab of pain she caused.

He should have walked away then, but the need to pretend it didn’t matter kept him standing there, listening while she laughed and described how satisfyingly unsophisticated he was.

She took his descriptions of his home in Wales – spoken to her at her eager insistence – and made them laughable.

Nothing but sheep shit and rain, she said, and the manor houses sounded like no more than tiny heaps of slate and stone not even worthy of the name.

“I thought the Normans were provincial! The Welsh truly are worse. But I take what amusements I can in this dung heap at the edge of the world. They will never believe me when I return to Aragon, how this little island thinks itself so important, so grand.”

The worst wasn’t even the look of pity on Hal’s face – it was the slight embarrassment, the uncomfortable manner.

Savage, backward, uncouth. Years here, living as one of them, educated as one of them, and nearly all the Normans still thought it about him.

They liked him, but they saw him that way, and she had learned this scorn from them.

Hal was different, and so was his father. When they made their silent way back to the mews, Hal’s father awaited them. He asked what ailed Gryff and when he received only a shrug in reply, he peered closely at Gryff’s frown.

“Ah, a fair maid,” he divined. The rumble of his voice was as soothing as always, despite his words. “Who has turned your head this week? Agnes again, or is it still Lady Julia?” There was no hope of hiding these things from Hal’s father, who seemed to know everything.

“I miss my home.” Gryff had not meant to say it at all, much less for it to come out half-choked, like he might weep at any moment. He burned with the shame of being Welsh, and the anger at knowing he should not be ashamed. “I do not belong here.”

Hal’s father was better than his own. He put a hand to Gryff’s shoulder and said, quietly insistent, “You belong here .”

And he was right. This mews was like the best part of home had been transported here. It was like the magical places in tales and legends, where two realms overlapped and he could briefly pass from one world into the other.

He picked up the leather strips held out to him and made new jesses for the gyrfalcon. Working with hawks required a steady hand and a quiet mind; they could sense turmoil in a man, and would not trust him if he was not calm.

Hal’s father kept him busy for days, for weeks – for as long as was needed to soothe the heartbreak, he said, for there was no better cure for it.

Hal himself suggested that a better cure would be for Gryff to seduce the friend with whom Isabel had been gossiping. “Or whichever lady at court is most likely to stir her envy.”

They narrowed it down to three friends who may have gossiped with her, and three more who would make her writhe with jealousy.

Gryff had all but one in his bed within a fortnight, and found Hal was right – it worked nearly as well to help him forget as the falconry did.

When Isabel cursed him for his faithlessness and called him a swyving whoreson, no better than a rutting beast in heat, he apologized most cordially and explained she could not expect better behavior from an ignorant savage.