was not easy to know, for there was always a withdrawn sadness about her, and where its roots lay, even now that her feet trod the same earth with the rest of us, I never could fathom.
On that last evening before we rode from London she took out, from the box where she kept her few ornaments, a plain silver ring with an oval seal, a deep-cut pattern of a hand severed at the wrist, holding a rose. I had never seen it before, nor, I think, had any other person among us, except, perhaps, her husband. She put it on my finger, and bade me take it with me, for it was my father's, and who knew?—it might yet bring me in contact with him. And that was the first and last time that she spoke of him to me, at least in all the time I had been of an age to understand and remember. It was long since I had even given a thought to that unknown man-atarms who had fathered me, and when first she said "your father" I own I took her to be referring to Meilyr, even though she had never before called him so. But then I knew that of him she would only have felt it needful to say: "It was his! Yet the first man who took her I do believe she loved, however briefly, and the second, the one to whom she was lawfully given, I doubt she never did, not even then, when his absence was ever-present with her as his presence had never been. For indeed she was always a strange woman.
So I promised her I would wear it, and did so, I confess, with some pride, as
though I had acquired with it a place in some legitimate line. And the next day I kissed her, and set out.
It was no easy matter being clerk and personal servant to Owen Goch, for he had grown accustomed to the English ways after his recent heady novitiate at King Henry's court, and required that servants should be servile, while I had still the Welsh habit of speaking my mind freely even to my masters. Familiarity he would not stomach now, but cut it off short, with lashing reproof, or if his mood was ill, with a ready blow, so that I learned to keep my distance in word as well as fact. But once this was accepted, we got on well enough on such terms as he dictated and I endured with an equal mind. It was less wise of him to use somewhat the same tone and manner with the English fighting men who surrounded him, or at least the lower ranks among them, for he knew well enough how to moderate his pride with the knights and their Commander. But Owen, ever over-sanguine, felt himself within grasp of the talaith that should have been his father's, and he would be a prince in every part.
To John de Rohan, who was in fact his guard and keeper rather than the captain of his escort, I am sure he ranked rather as a kind of engine of war on two legs, an expensive but hopefully valuable weapon, somewhat irritating and cumbersome to manipulate about the country, but effective once brought to the proper spot.
I was of an age then to get more profit from adventuring about the world, and in that summer weather I used my eyes and ears to good effect, and found great pleasure in the pageant of man and season and countryside. And often for days, and ever longer as time passed, I forgot my mother and the Lady Senena, and the life we had left behind, and so, I am sure, did Owen Goch. I knew well enough, if he did not, that we were no more free than we had been in the Tower, but it was hard to believe it while we rode in the sunshine thus, and fed well and lay comfortably at every day's end.
We got a ceremonial welcome in Chester, all that Owen could have wished, for they hoped much from him. John Lestrange, the warden of the northern march, received us and saw us installed in a fine lodging, and there was set up the office that was to busy itself about drafting proclamations and appeals to the Welsh, and circulating them throughout the Middle Country as far as Conway, and by means of various agents, even deeper into Eryri. I came into my own there as Owen's best scrivener in the Welsh language, for
Kimberly Elkins
Lynn Viehl
David Farland
Kristy Kiernan
Erich Segal
Georgia Cates
L. C. Morgan
Leigh Bale
MR. PINK-WHISTLE INTERFERES
Alastair Reynolds