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“Have you never been on the sea?”

It was Marcus who asked it, one of the younger men of Lord Robert’s hired guard. She shook her head and tried to look unfriendly, though he had always been respectful of her. He began to describe the upcoming journey, reminiscing with the other men over past bouts of seasickness.

They were at an inn awaiting the ship that would take them to France, and she was surprised and pleased to see how well the men behaved in this port town.

Elias and his family were safely in their chamber above with Fuss guarding their door, and Nan had come to the common room below.

It was filled with half-drunken travelers and there was no reason for her to be here at all – and many reasons for her to avoid such a place – but she did not want to be alone with her thoughts.

Soon she would cross the sea. She would not return for months. She might not return at all.

It felt like running away because it was. She wanted to be far away when he took a wife. If France agreed with her, she might find some kind of work. She would build a life that made sense, far from all of this. She would stop thinking of green hills one day.

The sound of men speaking Welsh nearby reached her, tugged at her though she tried not to hear. In France, she told herself, there would be no Welsh to haunt her. It would not drift to her when she least wanted to hear it.

But soon she would not hear it at all, and so she listened in spite of herself. Among all their drunken chatter, she heard a name that put a dread in her. Rhodri .

It might be any Rhodri. It was a common enough name. It was none of her affair. But then: Aderinyth. The prince. Wedding. Slay him.

She calmed her breath and slowed her heart.

She did not think. She only eased away from her small party to move closer to the corner where three men sat talking.

One seemed almost sober, at least enough that he warned the other two to keep their voices down.

He was answered with laughter, and the insistence that there were no Welsh here besides them, so there was naught to fear.

He looked up at that moment and saw her.

Nan knew the look. It was always either this wolfish look or the worshipful one. Always a whore or an angel.

He called out to ask if she was for sale, his eyes moving over every inch of her, and she pretended not to hear. It terrified her, that look. It turned her knees to water every time. She concentrated on not putting a hand to the knife on her belt, the only one she wore that they could see.

“Look at her, it needs a soft touch,” said the man who was more drunk. He was older, the obvious leader of their group. “Put your eyes back in your head, for decency, if you will woo her.”

This was where she would slip away, in the normal way of things.

But they had said the prince, Rhodri, slay him .

So when the more sober man switched to English and beckoned her, she came.

She saw his face when she stepped into the light, her features no longer in shadow, and thought of what her lady had once said to her about beauty.

That it was an asset, a power, a thing that might be wielded like a weapon.

Nan had never learned to use it that way, because the power to stir a man’s lust only frightened her. She preferred a weapon that was under her control, not subject to the whims of others.

But she looked in this man’s eyes and saw he was caught. He would let her near and tell her what she wanted to know and never even ask who she was. All because she had a face he liked.

“You are Welsh?” she asked him.

After he nodded, she feigned a shyness of his friends and he came to join her a little away from them.

It was easy, except for the terrified pounding of her heart.

She filled his cup with the strongest ale and made herself smile once or twice.

She asked him if he knew of Rhodri, the bastard brother of the newly returned prince.

She said little, and his eagerness to impress her made him talk too much.

It required less than an hour and two more servings of ale to learn everything.

He and his companions were to travel to Aderinyth where Rhodri waited, their movements easily lost amid the many guests who had begun to arrive in the weeks before the wedding.

They were part of a small party of mercenaries who would be paid well to aid him in his plan to slay the prince.

“I am promised enough land that I may keep a hundred sheep,” he said, leaning close.

She did not recoil, even when he put an arm over her shoulder.

She only smiled and looked right in his eyes, and when he sighed and said she was so very comely, she swallowed her fear and asked him what was the village where Rhodri waited.

He said the name of the place three times, because her tongue tripped in trying to pronounce it, wasn’t Welsh such a strange language? How kind of him to help her learn it.

She almost felt sorry for him when she slipped from under his arm, and she heard him lose his balance and hit the floor behind her. He would probably look for her when he was sober tomorrow, if he remembered. But she would be gone.

“W hat is he like, your prince?”

It was impossible to refrain from talking with the Welsh whom she met when she crossed into Aderinyth.

They opened their homes to her, and shared what little they had, and refused to take any kind of payment.

It was their duty, they said over and over again, to welcome guests warmly and never leave them wanting if they could help it.

All they ever seemed to expect in return was her company.

So she talked when they expected it, answering their questions and asking her own.

The old man who served as her guide had brought her in four days to the heart of Aderinyth, taking her along hidden ways through the mountains, away from towns and villages.

He was so hale that she was ashamed at how much more easily he climbed the hills while she struggled to keep up.

“I have heard as he does not like to be called a prince,” said the old man. “He tells us the king in England is our true leader now, and we must remember Prince Gruffydd bows to him always. But no other man the king has sent has been so good, and the prince is one of us for all his Norman ways.”

A young girl had joined them in this last leg of the journey, having business near the village they sought. She was daughter to a falconer, and said she had met the prince many times.

“There are some bards who like him not, and some of the falconers, too,” she said now as they climbed the last hill.

“In truth, their hate is only for King Edward. And their bitterness counts as naught against the many who do love our prince well. He has made a way for us to trade with the towns more easily. It will save many from hunger when the snows come. He’ll not let it be like last winter, he said. ”

There was a reverence in the girl’s voice, the kind of bone-deep gratitude that Nan recognized easily.

The king had ordered castles built throughout Wales, and new towns founded for the English to settle.

It was forbidden for the Welsh to live in the towns, one of many laws that seemed to Nan to impose an impossible hardship.

But their lord had spent the summer in hearing their complaints and doing everything in his power to ease the pain caused by the new laws.

“Here it is,” said the old man as they crested the hill.

A little village lay below, no more than a dozen small homes.

In the distance she could see a keep – a single tower on a hill, the beginnings of a new castle.

There was movement everywhere, builders moving stone and earth, visible even from this distance.

Nan fixed her eyes on a figure standing at a wide window, just a tiny speck from here. It might be him.

This was his home. It fit him perfectly.

She paid the old man for his help in bringing her here, and watched him walk back over the hill after a lengthy farewell.

The falconer’s daughter looked suspicious when Nan had no ready answer for who she was visiting.

But the girl pointed to a spacious barn at the edge of the village and said it must be where Nan was going, as some other guests had been brought there recently.

“Strange how they keep to themselves,” she said. “Though always has it been a strange village. My father says the bastard’s mother lived here, and is mostly her kin that live here now.”

She bid Nan a farewell, and left her not far from the barn.

Even after days of travel, it seemed too sudden.

She felt too alone – she had never done anything like this entirely alone, with no armed fellows or a careful plan.

All she had was Fuss, who was like to be more trouble than not.

If there were many men and much fighting, she would worry for him when she could least afford to lose attention.

“Stay,” she whispered to him, and gave him the hand signal for the same.

He dutifully sat, hidden in this little cluster of trees at the edge of the village.

She remembered him as a pup, how he had curled into the crook of her neck, pinning her hair, his comical little snores in her ear.

He had soothed her to sleep when nothing else could, and then had learned to be useful to her in other ways – things she had taught him only as an excuse to keep him beside her.

She thought of her Welshman – no longer starving, nor captive to villains, nor flinching in fear of his own shadow. He was well and whole, soaring as high and strong as one of his falcons. But though she had wished otherwise, he was more than just her Welshman.

A prince had many defenses. He had knights and men-at-arms, a land full of people who would die to protect him. She could alert any one of them to the danger. But a prince – a good prince – would show mercy to his enemy. He would imprison him, or banish him. He would let the viper live.

“I must keep him safe, Fuss.” She rubbed a hand over the dog’s ears. “You understand.”

The sun was beginning to set, so she took off her cloak and put down her small bag of belongings.

She opened it, setting the last of the dried strips of meat before Fuss.

He gave her his hopeful but suspicious look, unsure of this sudden bounty.

She wished there was some way to tell him to go to the tower if she did not come back.

A man appeared at the side of the barn. The light was low, but she knew at a glance that he was the Welshman’s brother. The resemblance made her angry, even as she felt a lurch in her stomach to see an echo of the face she held in her heart.

He slipped into the building, and she had a brief glimpse of the other men within. There was no way to say how many were there.

She breathed deep and reached behind her to pull out the dagger Gwenllian had given her so long ago.

As night began to fall she whispered her prayers of thanksgiving, added another to ask for aid in her task, and yet another to ask forgiveness for the mortal sin she would commit.

God would surely forgive her. He loved the Welshman no less than she did.

She gave Fuss one last scratch under the chin. Then she stepped forward into the darkness.