She hadn’t recognized him before, or perhaps she hadn’t looked closely enough. But ’twas most definitely Will there, sharing the most prominent seat in the hall with the prince as though he was his closest crony.

He, at the least, wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he leaned closer to John and spoke intimately to him while lifting a chunk of meat to his mouth on a small eating knife. Even from here, she saw the tension and harshness in a face tanned the color of deer hide, and made even more shadowy by the dark hair that brushed against it. And then the sudden gleam of a humorless smile.

“Why does he sit with the prince?” she asked. “In such a place of honor?”

“Oh,” said the lady who’d asked about him in the first place, and whose name Marian had forgotten, “he and the prince are inseparable companions.”

“Indeed,” Marian said, feeling her brows draw together in a frown. “Does the sheriff seek favor from the prince, then?”

“Nay, ’tis not so much that he seeks boons from the prince, but that the prince finds him amusing,” replied Sir Roderick, who had barely taken his eyes from Marian since she sat across from him. “The prince must include de Wendeval in all his amusements and activities or he is displeased by his absence.”

Will and Prince John? She looked again at the acquaintance of her youth and his royal companion. The depravity and lust shone unabashedly in John’s eyes, and though Will’s face was half-turned away, she recognized anew the hardness there. Unrelieved and stoic. Emotionless.

’Twas most definitely not the young man she’d known. If he and John had become constant companions, he must no longer be merely quiet and brooding, but as brutal and cruel as the unloved prince.