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Page 234
otherwisebut this I will have forever."
He sighed with relief and slipped off her to the side. "I, too," he assured her.
Rhiannon laughed again. "You, too, what?" she asked. "Surely you do not mean this is your first time of having."
"Not by several thousand times," Simon replied merrily, "although I assure you I have kept no real count and only reckon by the years of such doing. No, you are the first maiden I have ever lain with and will beGod willingthe last."
Rhiannon was surprised. "Am I?"
"Yes, of course," he insisted. "Do you think I am a customary raper of babes or seducer of young girls? Where would I have come by a maiden?"
"Castellans and vassals have daughters," Rhiannon pointed out dryly, wondering why Simon should think her so innocent.
"We do not treat our liegemen so in my family," Simon said angrily. "One does not win loyalty by dishonoring a man's womenfolk."
"What dishonor?" Rhiannon asked, genuinely puzzled.
First Simon gaped, and then laughed. He had forgotten the Welsh custom whereby "the son of the handmaid shall be heir with the son of the free." In Wales there was no illegitimacy with respect to the inheritance of property, and it was reasonable that a vassal would not think it a dishonor if his daughter should be deflowered and conceive a child by his liege lord.
He said, "In England it is a dishonor," and explained.
Rhiannon was somewhat confused by the legal technicalities Simon described. Property rights did not loom very large in her life, for the people of the hills of Gwynedd were essentially hunters and herders rather than farmers. Their nebulous clan right to graze

 
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