Chapter 3

The Choice

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O nce she had been young , and hope was everywhere. It had lived in every corner of her world. It grew like wildflowers in open meadow and pushed up through rock to reach the sunlight. It was so plentiful and stubborn that it had seemed impossible to kill, once.

Eluned stared at the cold stars and tried to remember that brief moment in time, so long ago, when her world was a song.

For six months, she had lived in that song. Six months, two weeks, and two days.

"And about thirteen hours, I think," she said to the stars. How amusing, that she could remember such a thing. Even more amusing was how she had once fervently believed she would never forget a single moment of those six months, two weeks, and two days. And thirteen hours.

Whenever she thought of him over the years ("Eighteen years," she whispered at the stars), she thought mostly of the end. At first, just after it was over, she could not bear to remember the hours of lying in his arms, knowing he was lost to her forever. Then she spent a fair amount of time forcing herself to remember the bliss, to stare long and hard at every beloved moment until it no longer hurt. After that, she thought of it no more. Except for the end.

No, not the end. The decision itself, to end it – that was what she most often thought of. She recognized the weakness in herself caused by this oversight, this hole in the fabric of memory. If she was to go forward, no matter the path, she must correct this. It was an essential wisdom, to preserve the ugly facts as well as the pleasant ones, to guard against selecting and discarding details on a whim. Now, with the cold seeping into her and a decision to be made by morning – now she would make herself think of all those things that went into the ending.

But to think of the end was to remember the beginning. It was remembering the way he had looked at her with a shining admiration she had never seen from a man. "You are made of spices that tempt a man's tongue," he had said to her, and an unholy thrill had run through her. She could only dimly recall the sensation now, but she did not forget its power. He had looked at her mouth and she was filled with an aching thirst, as though she would die of it as one in a far and scorching desert.

He had seen it, and let her go. That was the moment, she thought years later. That was when her heart began to slip away from her, escaping her control and landing squarely in his hands. Why? Because he did not reach to take her, but allowed her to reach for him. Because he had not flinched from her vehement political posturing. Because he did not see her as a great lady or an obedient wife or an indulgent mother. He saw only a woman, and desired her. It was a lure she could not, in the end, resist.

"Young Godfrey could not take his eyes from you," Eluned had made a point to say to Mathilda. This was important to remember, lest she fall into a belief that she had been an innocent seduced. Also, it served to remind herself that she had always been cunning, even then.

Robert had come to Torver to woo the young Mathilda and when he abandoned pursuit, the girl seemed likely to make trouble for him. So Eluned had pushed Mathilda into the path of a boy from the household guard. She whispered to the boy that he was not wrong to hope, and she sighed with Mathilda over how handsome and gallant Godfrey was, until Mathilda was ripe for the plucking.

"Wear your red gown," she urged the girl one night, "and leave your throat bare. See if you cannot tempt him!"

And while Mathilda's eyes were thus turned to some utterly forgettable boy, Eluned slipped away from the feast and was kissed. Her first kiss, after nine years of marriage and two children. It was intoxicating. All of it, even that first time with him, naked in a patch of sunlight, when she was so nervous she shook like a leaf through it all – every moment with him had gone to her head like the strongest wine.

That was her great mistake, and her greatest delight: to have lost herself in it so completely. It had required planning and discretion, but it was easy enough to devise a way to see him. She would make the excuse of exercising her mount, sometimes, or her falcon – or she would make no excuse at all. Lady Torver was old, and there were enough other ladies to sit with her and embroider and pray the day away. Two or three times a week, Eluned would contrive to meet him, and leave the signal for him. She would take the little pink stone he had found that first time in their secret place, and put it carefully on the narrow sill under the stained glass Jesse tree.

He would find it tucked into that corner under the bright blues and reds and golds, and then bring it back to her. Every few days, he would see her and slip it into her hand as they kissed. Then her clothes came off, and for the next hour she could stop thinking of planning and hiding and hoping. When she was with him, there was no need to think about anything at all. She could give herself completely to lust.

But it wasn't all lust. This was important to remember, too. Even all these years later, she could easily recall the feel of her heart swelling when he spoke so casually of his father's disdain. Robert had been born a twin, his brother older by only an hour and dead of a fever when they were four. Yet his father had decided, for unfathomable reasons, that the younger could never be what the original heir would have been.

"No son will ever please as well as the dead and sainted one," Robert told her with a heartbreaking shrug. "I have decided it is foolish to try. He will call me wayward and useless in any case. So because wayward and useless is so much more diverting than faithful and industrious," he said with a wicked grin and a kiss to the upper slope of her breast, "and he will despair of me no matter the course I take, I have decided he can curse me while I enjoy life."

"Do you miss your twin?" she had asked. "Do you remember him?"

He directed a small, sad smile at the trees that surrounded them and answered, "I remember little of him except how wrong it felt when he died. It is a strange feeling, like there is a hole in the world that only I can see."

"Do you not think your father sees it too?"

He waited a long time in silence before he answered. "Ah yes, my clever cariad, you have the right of it. It is all he sees when he looks at me. He sees what is missing."

She had wanted to say something then, about fear and emptiness and what it meant when a child was lost. But he had kissed her throat and moved his hand between her bare legs and murmured, "All I see is you." Then she thought of nothing at all. She only felt the sunlight on her skin, the warmth and life spreading through her limbs as his hands touched her everywhere.

There were other things, too, that had naught to do with the forbidden delight of his kisses. She remembered them well. How he was ever mindful of her comfort, always solicitous and attentive to the smallest detail, forever finding new ways to take care of her. Her petty jealousy when he had singled out a shy maiden and danced with her, to still the cruel tongues of the other girls. His instinctive compassion to a scared beggar boy who had stumbled upon their hiding place, which contrasted so sharply with her own impatient reaction to the unwelcome child. Little details that were unimportant now, except that they showed he was a good man. Better than her, she knew. Less selfish, more warmhearted. She remembered him.

And she remembered the feel of those stolen hours, days and days of it, where she lost herself in him. It was never enough. She could not get her fill of it, of him, of who she was with him.

Only her daughter had anchored her to reality every day. Gwenllian was eight years old then, and looked to her mother for how to behave. So Eluned was careful, in the hours she was not hidden among the trees with Robert, to act a proper and chaste woman. Pleasant banter was accepted, courtly gestures and a certain kind of flirtation were allowed. Everything else between them was hidden in their secret meeting place, where she went while Gwenllian played with her cousins and was none the wiser.

"For you, my favorite daughter," she had said one day when she came back from an afternoon in Robert's arms. She handed Gwenllian a handful of little purple flowers.

"I am your only daughter, and your hair is different," observed Gwenllian with a small frown. Eluned told her that she preferred this new style because it was so much less fuss. And it was. That was not a lie. She did not say that it was Robert who braided her hair after she had let it down to fan all around them, that it was he who coiled the braid and caught it up in a net before laying the linen veil on it. She wore it like that all summer, because it was so easy to take down and up again.

She told Gwenllian that the flowers were bruisewort, so named because the leaves put in a poultice would help bruises to heal. Gwenllian asked what the flowers did, and the stems.

"I know not," answered Eluned, relieved that her daughter was more interested in the plant than where it came from. "But the roots of it can be given in a tea to cure a sore throat."

Then of course nothing would do but Gwenllian must have the roots. Eluned began to gather some new plant on her way to or from meeting Robert, and soon Gwenllian demanded to see where they all grew. So every day was spent gathering flowers with her daughter, or meeting her lover in their secret place. Was there ever such an enchanted summer?

That had been her life for a season. She had never forgotten it. But it felt more like a story that had been sung to her long ago, so many times that she knew it by rote. He had loved that girl who was so confident it would all turn out well, who was so happy and alive, whose world was, briefly, an enchanted place.

She had been that girl, once. Then it all went wrong.

Forget at your peril. Think back now , she urged herself, unsure if she could. Back to the time when she believed her husband was only a harmless fool to be outwitted. Back to a time when there were only wide-open possibilities in all directions, instead of scraps to be foraged in a small and airless room.

She remembered the argument with Robert, how reality had at last begun to intrude on the space reserved for their love. It should have woken her from the dream, but it did not. Instead as she rode back to Ruardean, she was only fearful he would stop loving her because she must lie with Walter. In the nights away from Robert, she relived their argument obsessively and was mortified that his last sight of her was as she walked away awkwardly, her shoe loose from a missing button and half-falling from her foot.

Then she arrived home and Walter came shortly thereafter, and the little haven in the hills she had shared with a lover seemed impossibly distant. Her husband had always been subject to whimsical moods, sometimes deeply troubled by sadness and other times so filled with a fevered energy that he barely slept. Now he was fevered, agitated with a religious fervor that was sparked by Montfort's defeat.

"God Himself has spoken at last," he told her with shining eyes. "The cause of the king is righteous, and Montfort was naught more than a trick of the Devil that would test men's souls."

She did not debate him when he was like this. But neither could she bring herself to nod meekly and agree, even if it was wiser to play that part. She only waited to see if he would come to her bed, half of her afraid that he did not and the other half relieved. They had been lucky so far, she and Robert. But to depend on luck in the matter of pregnancy was a lethal stupidity, and so she waited for a husband who never came to her bed. She should have gone to him, but somehow she never did.

Within a fortnight he was gone again, setting off on a long pilgrimage to Aix-la-Chapelle where he would see the great relics, and he never touched her. Her fear over what might happen if a babe grew in her belly while he was away was nothing to her joy at knowing he would spend all the winter in the Rhineland.

She sent word to Robert. They would have months and months together, alone. She would contrive to make him part of Ruardean, give him a place as a knight of the garrison. She would find a way to make it work.

Remember this , she told herself now as she sat in the cold darkness of her bower. Remember how sure you were, and that you schemed even before Walter came back. It was too easy to fall into the belief that Walter's actions alone had shaped her. And though she might lie to anyone else when it suited her needs, she must not lie to herself.

She had schemed. The ladies who attended her most closely were not her friends or kinswomen. They could not be trusted and so she had begun to gather tidbits about them, prepared to bribe any of them if they saw too much and sought to expose her one day. She had not known these precautions came too late, because one of the servants who traveled with Walter let slip the observation that the lady of Ruardean was uncommonly happy in her time at the Torver estate, that she had been quick to laugh and too often danced with one particular young knight. In all her preoccupation, she had overlooked the crucial detail of which servants had been at Torver with her, which would go with Walter, and what they might reveal. Above all, she had not anticipated Walter's reaction.

Walter returned to Ruardean three days before Robert arrived there. Her husband found her in the tilting yard, where she was watching the men practice while trying to explain to Gwenllian why girls could not, in fact, ever become knights. She had been saying something about the gallantry of noble men when he grasped her gown from behind, pulled her up and dragged her away. This she had remembered vividly over the years: Gwenllian running after them, clinging to her mother's belt as she was dragged along and sending vicious kicks at Walter until young Madog intervened. She could not forget, ever, the look on her daughter's face when Madog said in Welsh that they could do nothing, that they must let this happen.

"You will not tell falsehoods before Our Lord," Walter declared as he thrust her into the chapel.

What a fool he was. Of course she would tell falsehoods. How easy it was to swear innocence. It was even easier as the hours wore on. His suspicion was only sparked by a passing comment; there was no evidence to dispute. But avowals of innocence were just the beginning. He made her kneel for hours before the statue of the Virgin and dwell on wifely virtue.

"For I have seen defiance in your eyes, wife," he said, as though it caused him great anguish, "and I fear for your very soul."

So she knelt until her knees ached. At his command she lay prostrate on the stone floor through the night, her husband stretched next to her because he swore he would not abandon her to the evil spirits that he saw at her shoulder, which sought to steal her soul. He hissed at his visions that they would not take her. She turned her face to the floor and thought, My husband is mad.

Mad or holy, it did not matter which. It only mattered that she submit to his visions, and survive.

In the morning she begged him tenderly to let her go and bring them food and drink, but he would not let her interrupt their vigil. She began to feel faint at midday, but when she dared to show it Walter clutched her slumping shoulders and shook her hard, and shouted that she must fight the demons. She began to fear him a little then, because he had never handled her roughly before this. As the second night came on and she knew he would still not relent, hopelessness rose up in her. Her husband's voice was all around her, for hours. It was soft and threatening as distant thunder. It turned her joy to shame.

She thought of Robert. She saw his golden-brown hair in the sun, against her bare breast. She thought of the adoring look he gave her when he spied that same defiance in her eyes. It was sin. All of it was sin, and she felt the weight of it as Walter wanted her too.

As her lips moved to recite the Pater Noster in the small hours of the second night of prayer, she spread her knees apart under her skirt to relieve the pain of kneeling so many hours. And though it was the surest sacrilege to do so, she remembered herself on her knees under the trees with Robert, legs spread wide as he took her from behind – like animals. They were like animals and she had loved it. Her arm had clutched around a tree to steady herself against his glorious pounding as she, panting, had looked out over the lake and smiled to think there were people below, oblivious to their ecstasy. So many people who merely drifted through life's duties, obedient and safe and small. Never again will I be that , she had vowed in that moment.

In the chapel, she glanced at her husband and then back to the Virgin, reciting prayers of forgiveness on her knees, remembering that vivid scene, and it all suddenly changed in her mind. The focus shifted away from those imagined people below and moved to the landscape itself – the bright lake, the distant hills, the great wide world. In the midst of it she was but one person, one burning heart. And everywhere there were churches, cathedrals, fortresses, armies. There were men in power here and in Rome and on every inch of soil between. She knew now that all these structures, those she could see and those she could not, were built to confine her, to stop the very thing that brought her joy.

Then she had understood that it was not a world of endless possibility. Some dreams could not be made real. She could not have what she wanted.

It was at that moment that Walter looked hard at her and called on her to renounce Satan, and a great hatred burst inside of her. She screeched. She struck out at him. Her hands clawed at his face while she spewed every vile curse she knew and wished him to Hell.

But Walter was a large and powerful man. He caught her hands away from him with ease, took her throat in his fist, and called on all the saints to aid him in ousting the demon that possessed her. He let her go only when she began to swoon from lack of breath.

"Eluned?" His voice was uncertain. His look was gentle and sane. She nodded, spots swimming before her eyes, and he seemed relieved.

When he asked her to proclaim her innocence again, she only inclined her head. When he told her she must beg forgiveness for all her sins, she made no answer. His fingers tightened hard on her jaw, forcing her face up to look at him, leaving bruises that she felt years after they faded. He was so tall and broad that he filled her vision. Mad or holy, the world was built for men like him. He had all the power over her, because he was her husband and because he could crack her like an egg.

She begged forgiveness for all her sins. Over and over again, until she had no voice left. Until he was pleased.

And then she went about the business of seducing him into her bed.

H er fingertips had turned blue with the cold. She stood now, agitated, and blew on her hands as she paced the room. There was no need to remember the details of her marriage bed. Walter was not cruel to her, and she had always done her wifely duties without complaint. But she could not forget that it had made her feel possessed of a demon in truth, to carefully manipulate him into her bed while the bruises of his gripping fingers were still fresh along her jaw. It must be done and quickly, not because she might already carry a child, but because she knew by instinct it would gentle him, tame the wildness in his eyes and kill the suspicion in his breast if she bedded him in this mood. So she did it, because she valued self-preservation more than her scruples.

She had used his guilt and his godliness against him, careful hints and suggestions that his long absence from her bed left room for the Devil to enter. It was easy to make him think it was his idea, that he corrected his own bad behavior by taking her to bed as God intended for man and wife. It only took the rest of that day, between reassuring her daughter she was well and carefully sending a kinsman to intercept Robert before he came to the castle, to steer her husband to her bed that night.

And though she would not pity herself for it, knowing that women the world over must suffer the unwanted touch of their husbands, she could not stop the tears that had fallen silently. They cut a path across her temples and fell into her ears. She told him they were tears born of the overwhelming joy of their reunion in the sight of God, and then she went to Gwenllian's room to watch her daughter's peaceful sleep.

Eighteen years ago, she had sat in the dark with only a candle and the sound of her daughter's breathing, and chose. It was not out of the question to run away with Robert, to live as his lover somewhere far away. If the only cost was her wealth and status, she would have done it. But her marriage was an agreement to keep a rocky peace between the vast estate of Ruardean and the Welsh who lived along this border. Her union with Walter gave wealth and necessary influence to her brother, her uncle, all their children and their people. To abandon this marriage was to abandon them.

"Gwenllian," she whispered to the girl who clutched some leaves in her sleep. There was dirt on her faintly sweaty neck and a scratch across her forehead. "My little warrior child."

Gwenllian might not care if Eluned ran away from this life and forfeited her own future as a Norman lady. But she would care that she could no longer wrestle with her Welsh cousins. She would care if Walter would pull her from her mother's arms, which he would do if he could find them, and almost certainly send his daughter to live out her days in a convent. All the spirit in Gwenllian would be turned to sin and shame, while Eluned would perish of a broken heart without her child. Even Robert could not soothe that ache.

Or maybe Walter would not find them and they would live in a different kind of prison, one of cautious movements and timid action. One day her daughter would understand all that she had lost because of her mother's lust, and hate her for it. And if she were to have another child, Robert's child? And if Robert were to die, or tire of her, and leave her alone and penniless with a bastard or two?

No, the world was not made for lovers to be happy for longer than a season.

Eluned stared at her daughter and almost could not breathe for the pride and fear that surged in her. Such a strong girl, who would too soon be made to quail before a man and do his bidding. Eluned clenched her jaw and felt the soreness left by her husband's hand. If she must choose only one dream to make real, she would choose a fearless daughter over an adoring lover.

"Never will you cringe before a man, beloved," she whispered to her sleeping child. "If it cost me my soul, I swear you shall fear no man."

An hour later it did feel as though it cost her soul, when she told Robert that if he loved her, he must swear never to come to her again. Never to see her, or speak to her, or touch her. When he said in a voice of despair that he would risk anything to be with her, she thought of Walter's fist at her throat. She thought of Gwenllian's sweet sleeping breath, and told Robert not to be a fool. Already she felt dead to herself, standing in the dark before the dawn of the first day without him.

But she was not dead, of course. It did not kill her. Or at least, it did not kill all of her.

She left him, and in the forecourt as the sun rose she turned to young Madog. "Will you swear to me, cousin, that my daughter will have your loyalty and protection, no matter where she may go? That you will faithfully serve her – not me, not Ruardean, but her and her alone?"

He looked at her with an assessing air, this son of her favorite uncle. She saw his eyes take in the bruises her husband had given her, and the last trace of tears from her parting with her lover. He knelt before her and said, "By the grace of God, by the sword I will carry, and by my love for your daughter, I swear fealty to Gwenllian ferch Eluned, and ne'er will I swear it to any other as long as I may live."

Then she went to the master-at-arms and bribed him to teach her daughter the sword.

S o it had begun, the long and winding path of eighteen years which led from that day to this one. Now Madog was dead, and the peace her marriage had bought became irrelevant when the Welsh were vanquished. Her daughter had taken up the sword and mastered it, only to put it down again, forever, for love of a man. Walter had gotten a son on her, left on Crusade, and returned to her in a box. She had ruled Ruardean. And now she would not.

In her mind, she went over the lessons she had taken from that time. The first had been that love could make her lose her head as well as anyone, and she dismissed its power at her peril. The second had been that the world was not built for her, that it would try and try again to crush her – and no one would save her from it. She must save herself, or be ground into the dust. The last, and most lasting, lesson was this: that she must choose what she dared to desire with great care, and master the tight corners of the maze in which she was trapped if ever she was to have what she wanted.

All of it was still true.

There was light in the sky now. She must stop contemplating her yesterdays and think instead of the decision that must be made today. It was difficult, with thoughts of the long-dead past swimming in her jumbled mind. She must weigh all options with an uncommon clarity, when all she wanted to do was to take to her bed for a week, or a month or a year, and not think at all.

But despite the recoil of her spirit, her mind churned. She was built this way, or had been made this way by circumstance. She had long ago recognized that every great change was an opportunity, a rare chance to steer the course instead of being caught in the currents. Only the weak hesitate, stumble, or are so cowed by the responsibility that they do not even try.

"Love," she murmured to herself. Begin with that, find where she was vulnerable. "What love is alive in my heart?"

Eluned closed her eyes and thought of her heart, and saw only a smoking ruin.

She stood that way, weary in every bone, eyes still closed, when one of her ladies entered. It was time to start the day. It was time to decide what her life would become next, no matter the state of her heart.

"Joan," she said to the young maiden who emptied a jug of steaming water into a waiting basin. The girl had come here almost a year ago, to serve Eluned and to find a suitable husband. She was, refreshingly enough, not entirely empty-headed.

"My lady?" Joan turned from the basin and gave the tiniest of courtesies. She held a clean linen square in her hand and was so fresh and young that it was disorienting to think she was ready for marriage.

"You are fifteen, I think?" The girl nodded, then blinked expectantly while Eluned frowned. "Are you disappointed I have not found you a husband yet?"

Poor Joan looked lost, then concerned. "My lady, I am well pleased to serve you and not a husband."

"I have been..." Eluned looked at her, all pink and white and smooth. How would life devour this little morsel? "My mind has been on other matters, but I do not forget your situation. If there is a man worthy of you, I have failed in finding him. But is there any man that you wish to have, Joan?"

She should have asked it before this, of course, because Joan immediately blushed and twisted the linen square in her hands.

"Sir Heward, my lady." Having said the name, she seemed at a loss for further words for a moment. Then she burst out, eager to inform. "His rank is equal to my own and it is his fortune to be vassal to Ruardean which only last year granted him knight's fee and the land is well placed with a very fine house that he plans–"

Eluned waved her hand to stop the girl's breathless catalogue.

"Is this why you would have him? Because he is...appropriate?" Joan seemed to think this was a criticism, so Eluned hastened to assure her. "It is curiosity from me, nothing more. I wish to know how a woman chooses a husband, when she is so fortunate that she is permitted to choose."

The girl bowed her head and spoke, surprisingly, with more than a little confidence.

"It is an attractive thing, that he is not too far below or above me and that he has wealth enough. But there are other such men I might choose, and do not. Sir Heward is kind, my lady. He is not full of vain flattery."

Eluned felt a smile pulling at her lips. "And he is handsome and young. Tell me, though, why marry at all? Why choose marriage to a man and not give your keeping to the Church?"

The girl looked nonplussed. "I would – I think my temperament not suited to a life of devotion. For my family, there is more advantage if I marry well. And I have thought many times how I will strive to be like you, my lady, to ably manage a manor with authority and gain the esteem–"

"Yes, enough. Bring me bread for my breakfast, and the hard cheese." Eluned walked to the basin and dipped her hands in. She did not wish to hear more of how this sweet young girl wished to be like her. "I will wear the deep blue surcoat and have fresh linen. Thank you."

She listened to Joan leave, then wiped the warm water over her face. A temperament not suited to the Church, that was true enough. But hardly can I say I am suited for marriage. She could not depend on a new husband to take himself off to Antioch for the next fourteen years, after all. More advantage for her family, yes – that was a good reason. Is this what was left to her, then? Always had her life been defined by how it gave advantage to others.

From the basin her reflection looked back at her, and asked her what she wanted. Wales , came the answer, immediately. But Wales was lost. Wales was no more.

Revenge for Wales , came the next thought, and her heart raced.

She thought of Llewellyn in his last hours, when his head was still on his shoulders and not on a spike above London. He had trusted the Mortimers and walked into their trap.

Mortimer. She had cursed that name for half her life. It was a Mortimer who had slaughtered Montfort all those years ago, cut off the great man's head and sent it to his wife. It was that same Mortimer who led the many campaigns against the Welsh, who had claimed so many Welsh lands as his own that you could walk for days and not reach the end of Mortimer territory. And when he died in the midst of fighting only a year ago, Eluned had thought that at last, perhaps, the Welsh might win their war.

But his blood ran true in his sons, who had lured Llewellyn to his death. The older one would inherit a great chunk of Wales and likely be given even more as reward for delivering Llewellyn's head. The younger one, Roger – oh, he was a villain indeed. Depraved and degenerate by reputation, but his sins were even more grave than mere lust and violence. She did not forget that it was Roger Mortimer who had killed two orphaned Welsh boys who were the only heirs to an ancient principality. He claimed innocence of the murders and no doubt made a good show of mourning them even as he happily took ownership of all that had been theirs.

Such an appetite for violence and talent for deception these Mortimer sons had. Naturally they were beloved of King Edward, and so they would only gain more and more. More power, more riches, swollen fat as ticks off the blood of others.

Revenge for Wales. The world would do well with less Mortimers in it.

Joan returned, the blue surcoat folded neatly over her arm, accompanied by a servant with a tray of food and drink. Everything she would need to start the day.

"How useful you are," Eluned murmured almost to herself. "What a laudable aim for a life, to be put to good use."

How lucky, to live long enough to decide what use she would be. To rid the world of a Mortimer or two – what a delicious thought. She could not even be convinced it would condemn her immortal soul. It felt so very right. It filled her with a satisfying sense of purpose she had not felt for years, not since she had given up on aiding the Welsh rebellion.

As she had learned long ago, it must be done within the confines of the maze in which she was trapped. But now she had the power to change the shape of a vital corner of that maze. Shut up in a nunnery, she could only pray for justice. And she had seen how little God listened to her prayers.

"Sweet Joan, I did not say that Sir Heward is worthy of you, and you shall have him if you truly want him. I will see to it." She reached up and pulled her braids free, debating whether she would have her hair washed before she ate. But no, she was suddenly quite hungry. "There are other advantages a married lady has that you have not thought of. You may go to court, and mingle with other noble families. Yes, a great many freedoms."

Joan came forth with a comb, a happy smile on her face as she tended to her lady's hair. Eluned reached for the loaf of bread and tore off a great chunk with her teeth, chewing it with relish and wondering if her son waited impatiently outside her door to hear her answer.

"Do you know," she said as the sunlight grew brighter on her face, "I believe I am more suited to marriage, too."