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separated this world from Annwn. One look at her, with her eyes the color of the Welsh winter sky, and all he could think was that such a young woman would cringe at the sight of him. Her revulsion would cut him to the bone.
    For a flash of a moment, he had been of a mind to step back into that boat and leave that wretched island without a word. But his feet had stuck in the mud. In all the years of pilgrimages, at all the saint’s shrines, in the stinking huts of women–charlatans, and under the bleeding–knives of too many physicians, he’d never once felt so gripped by the presence of the unworldly.
    What difference would one more sin weigh upon his soul?
    “Rhys,” Dafydd said, “you must treat her kindly.”
    “You always were overburdened with conscience.”
    Rhys sighted down the level field to the target swaying in the wind. He envisioned that stuffed linen with a wild mane of hair, with stormy gray eyes and a mouth full of venom. That was a witch, indeed, who could strike so close to the heart of the problem without even knowing its name. Rhys heaved the spear back and hurled it toward the target. The lance fell wide of the mark.
    Rhys said, “I won’t take her off bread and water.”
    “At least stop calling her a witch.” Dafydd ignored, as usual, what he didn’t want to hear. “At least not aloud, in Welsh. The bondswomen would have her burnt to a crisp before Sunday if they thought you harbored a witch under your roof.”
    “Who else but a witch would a demon send me across the seas to fetch?”
    “No one but us knows about our Midsummer’s Night visitor. Marged has been uncharacteristically silent.” Dafydd twisted one end of his mustache between two fingers. “So I’ve spread the truth instead: Aileen the Red is a healer.”
    Rhys swiveled on one foot and bundled a fistful of his brother’s silk tunic in his hand. “I warned you to stay silent.”
    “There hasn’t been a woman–healer in this house since old Gwenffrewi died three years ago.” Dafydd’s steady gaze glittered over Rhys’s knuckles. “Now you’ve brought one back for us. Better they think that, than think their great lord makes a habit of stealing women from their homes.”
    If he were another man, oh, another man, he’d have knocked Dafydd onto the muddy ground in all his silks and all his oils. Instead he bit his fingernails into his palm hard enough to draw blood through the calluses and dirt. There’d be no satisfaction in beating a man who spoke only the truth.
    He thrust his brother away. I am such a fool. Rhys would mock himself if the whole world wasn’t already laughing into their beards.
    “The bondsmen are beginning to wonder,” Dafydd added, as he smoothed the wrinkles in his tunic, “why you’re treating her so badly.”
    “Think of some lie.” Rhys’s sword flashed as he scraped it off the rock.
    “There are other ways to bring a woman around.”
    You would know them, wouldn’t you, my brother? You with your bright silks and easy smile, you with a list of conquests so long as to rival that of the Prince of Wales’s best bull, in spite of that handless arm—perhaps because of it.
    Rhys thumbed the edge of his sword. “You think the tricks you use on the she–vipers of Llywelyn’s court will soften the will of a witch?”
    “I think,” he said, as a few drops of rain splattered in the mud around them, “you might try a gentler persuasion.”
    Gentleness? He remembered the word, vaguely, a sense of soft woolen blankets on a woman’s bed.
    “Some good food, a bath, a soft place to sleep,” Dafydd continued, “they can work wonders on any woman’s disposition.”
    Dafydd was wrong. There would be no making a kitten of that lioness, Rhys knew that. He’d felt the sink of her claws. She knew nothing at all, yet when she stared at him so full of loathing, he thought surely hellhounds couldn’t muster so much scorn. It was as if she knew already what he was and all that he had