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maid or any other protection, shocked Simon a little. Even his mother was not so bold and free. Yet he found it was impossible for him to take advantage of the situation. At court he had pursued her with words of love and glances of longing. Under her mother's roof, he had made open declarations of his honorable intent to Rhiannon and to Kicva, whom he found not at all fearful, but worthy of respect. At Dinas Emrys, where Rhiannon was utterly in his power, he could find either words nor looks to express the desire that burned ever more fiercely within him. |
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Yet it was there that trouble crept into Rhiannon's eyes. At court she had fenced with him, laughed at him, and teased him with love songs. At her mother's house, she treated him as if he were a companion of the same sexnot that she expected him to weave and sew, but that she seemed to lose awareness of his maleness. Loose in the hills, Rhiannon was more than woman. Barefoot, she coursed the deer with her mother's hounds, as sure a shot with the longbow as any huntsman; she tickled fish in the streams, and snared hares in the brush. She butchered and skinned her prey, cached what was too heavy to carry, and even cooked over an open fire and slept rolled in her cloak on the ground if they were too far from home. |
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At Dinas Emrys, however, for the first time since their initial meeting, Rhiannon looked more often at Simon than he looked at her. She stood long on the walls gazing out over the Vale of Waters during the day. At night she climbed up again to listen to the wind as it whispered and moaned and howled. The men of Simon's guard, Welsh born and bred in that country, wild as the rocky crags, lowered their eyes and bowed to her when she passed, and there were both fear and admiration on their faces when Simon stood by her on the walls as she sangand the wind answered. |
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Here again she wore the barbarically rich gowns and |
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