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It was more than she had ever spoken, and he did not know if this was the end of her story.

Questions rose up in him, impatient and hot, but she had said I’ll tell you a story .

He knew he was not meant to interrupt, that she must say her piece and his only task was to listen well.

So he held his breath, attuned to her smallest movement, and waited.

It was a discipline born of years spent in training fierce creatures to trust him.

“He was a very great and powerful lord. He kept me there as his amusement. It was a hunting lodge, for he had been on the hunt. Oliver served him and his men, kept the horses for them. Nor can I remember what game they hunted.” She furrowed her brow a little, like it troubled her to forget this detail.

“It were more than a week, I think, haps two. I did not count the nights.”

She sliced the onion to pieces and added it to the pot before looking him in the eye. “You would know more?”

There was no belligerence in it. She asked it a little indifferently. He wanted to say no, that there was no need to tell him. But he did want to know more. He wanted to know so many things.

“Did you kill this great lord?”

She laughed with real humor, a short yelp of a sound that broke the spell she had woven. Lines of mirth appeared at the corner of her eyes.

“Nay, I did not know how then, and would not have dared. I would never have dared. I was no more than a timid mouse.” The laughter faded from her face as she looked down at the turnip she now held.

“A mouse that he wanted, that’s what I was, and there was naught to stop him having me.

But he did not, in the end. Not in that way. ”

Gryff opened his mouth to ask how she had been spared rape, but he found he could not say the words. She saw his curiosity, though, and returned her attention to the turnip. Her knife began to cut away the peel in one slow, long strip.

“I was all over terror, every minute, until he reached for me. But each time he pulled me close, the fear died in me. It were like a miracle, though I prayed no saints to intercede. I only...” She paused, looking hard at her turnip.

“When his breath fell on me, I would think – let him do what he will, for it won’t be worse than what he done to poor Oliver, left to die and rot on the floor.

And the thought would stop my trembling, and that ruined his sport.

” Now she pulled the long curl of peel free and held it in her hand.

A look of wry amusement came over her face.

“It were a good lesson I learned: a woman without fear is like a winter wind on a stiff cock. For a man like him, anyway. If I looked him in the eye and did not cringe, it withered him without fail. And lucky for me it did.”

She cut the peeled turnip to pieces, dropped it in the pot, and picked up the other.

All the while, his mind raced. A great lord, cruel and lecherous.

Name after name passed through his mind, all men he would have thought too chivalrous for acts so vile.

But then, chivalry was reserved for ladies, not their servants.

Indeed her lack of outrage, as though her story were the most common of tales, seemed to mock his assumptions.

If he asked her to name her tormentor, would he find it was someone he had called friend?

“How came you to be free of him?” he asked, because that was an easier question.

Her hand paused. She looked into the fire and seemed to glow. “A great lady saved me.” There was reverence in her voice. “I tell you true, it was only her goodness that saved me, for I was not worthy of her regard.”

“Who–”

“It was her who taught me this, after. How to go on, I mean.” She raised her eyes to look squarely at him now.

“That’s my purpose in telling you the tale.

You ask what I see when I look at you, and I see you cringe and shrink as I did in the days after.

Not just from shadows and hares, but from your memories of it.

You look to hide from it, and that is what I call a mistake. ”

He could feel heat flare in his face. Cringing and shrinking. That was what she saw, and he would only look more foolish if he tried to deny it.

He dropped his gaze to the half-peeled turnip in her hands, too distracted by her face to think clearly. He turned her words over and over in his mind.

“A great lady taught you – what? To throw knives at villains and play the mute for days?”

Nan shook her head. “She said, ‘even do you never care to speak again in your life, Nan, you must not lose your voice.’” Her hands resumed the slow paring.

“She taught me when you run and hide from a thing, you make it into a monster that can only live in your darkest dreams. Without your running, it’s naught but a thing that happened once.

Now it is only a story for me, and not a great beast that seeks to tear me apart. ”

He raised his eyes to her face in the firelight and saw she was completely serious.

Baudry and his men – what they had done, what he had seen.

..and she thought it was a simple matter of words.

He fought against scoffing outright, but there was still a trace of scorn when he said, “This is your great wisdom, that it is but a story that needs telling?”

There was a stubborn set to her jaw. “I claim no wisdom, but I know what I know. When you make it a thing you can hold in your two hands, it belongs to you. Until then, you belong to it.”

It was better to say nothing than to tell her she was wrong.

Or even if she was not, he preferred forgetting, and was far more skilled at it.

He let the silence stretch out between them, and thought how he had spent days wishing she would speak.

He watched her hands remember their task, gripping the knife, carefully sliding the blade under the peel as she spoke softly into the hush.

“I was made to strip my clothes every night, and his men threw water on me to clean me before they took me to him. They tethered me with a rope, same as you.” Her hand faltered, a minute slip of the blade that cut the perfect curl of peel that had almost come away in one piece.

She looked at where it fell in the dirt, the only moment in all her recitation that was not dispassionate.

She pointed at him with the knife still in her hand, a faint but emphatic gesture.

“So don’t think I don’t know how it is.”

She finished peeling the turnip in quick, efficient strokes, sliced and dropped it into the pot. She gave it a stir as the quiet settled over them again.

He watched her over many long minutes as the light waned, as the forest sounds around them changed from day to night.

She had small hands, not rough or calloused like the servants he had known in Lancaster’s household.

She salvaged the turnip peels and washed them, storing them away in a jar of brine so that even the meanest scraps would not be wasted.

A serving girl. Widowed of a stable boy.

Blessed are the meek, Brother Clement would have said.

He was always urging Gryff to look on others with compassion, to see the divine in the ordinary.

Five years spent hidden in the wilds with monks, and still he struggled with humility.

Or maybe it was just her – it was that he wanted to look at her only with desire and not compassion, and thus compounded his sins.

“Never could I speak of it as you do.” He was sure of that. He stared hard at the last bit of sunlight that sifted through the trees and imagined his father, alive, hearing what had happened to his least favored son. “Never.”

The sound of her spooning the stew into a bowl did not rouse the same overwrought hunger as in the past. A week of eating every day had calmed his desperate appetite.

She had seen to that, so determined to care for him.

Now she rose from her place beside the fire and took the few steps to reach him.

“I do not say you must tell it as I do, not even to your confessor. Only that you must not look away from it.” She handed the portion of stew to him, the rich smell rising up from the bowl.

“It’s plain to see you were born to finer folk, and lived in fine estate once.

But you are in the muck now, if you’ll pardon me saying it, and none down here will shame you for being powerless. It’s only what we all are.”

She went back to her place by the fire and set about eating her supper.

He heard her words echoing in his ears and thought of his father and brothers, and of the way their lives had likely ended. He thought of his people, of what might have happened in Aderinyth since the defeat of Wales five years ago. The fear and the sorrow of it rose in a lump to his throat.

This time, for the first time, he did not push the thought away. He let it sit in his mind until the visions were too terrible to bear, and then he turned his attention to his supper as best he could.