Immediately, vehemently, she shook her head. "It's nothing to do with you!" she exclaimed, frowning. "I -- I don't know what others would say if they knew we'd been intimate, we're intimate, and I don't care."

That was true, in the abstract sense. That she'd been intimate with the future queen of the realm was perhaps not something she wanted known, but while she knew many considered lying with someone of one's own sex a sin, theirs were irrelevant opinions to her.

But that reassurance given, she had to turn to the other matter. "It's -- my family, they'd fallen out of fashion, as it were," she murmured. "Out of their minds, to hear tell. There's always someone looking at me wondering if I'm one of the mad ones. Always growing up there was someone looking at me thinking I didn't really belong there."