No time for hearts, Robena? As though it was your choice to make. 

When she took up arms and oaths she told herself that she was a creature of fire and passion, inheritor of Lady Sandsfern's righteous anger. She told herself that she was a knight without peer, forged on foreign battlefields and beneath foreign swordmasters. She told herself that her horse for all his grand gentleness still remembered the beat of battle and his role as an instrument of perfect death. She told herself that she could defeat all of England's devils with her lance alone.

She told herself these things so that when it came time to make this charge she would not doubt.

It is a terrible thing to ride towards death. It is worse to ride with duties unfulfilled - wishes unfulfilled. To ride without discovering if the soul of Sandsfern is in fact damned? To ride without the favour of Constance? To ride without telling either of them what they mean, without telling them good-bye? No surer way of ending as yet another miserable ghost haunting England's moors, suffocated by the weight of her own wishes.

No time for hearts? As though the heart was weakness rather than strength. As though you were not going to battle unarmed.

[Leap into Action - alas, a 6]