Relationships
Throughout the story Derfel is involved with numerous women, but three are featured most prominently. His youthful relationship with an Irish girl named Lunete rapidly becomes unhappy and they part company but remain civil in later meetings. Derfel has, during most of his youth, a burning love for Nimue that is mostly not returned, and in his old age he admits that he tried to preserve her memory as the young and wild girl he loved, not the harsh and miserable woman she became as result of her obsession with magic power, and of fulfilling Merlin's own ambition of restoring the old pagan religion. He later fell in love with Princess Ceinwyn of Powys, and eventually they lived as husband and wife, and she became the mother of all his children, although they never formally married.
Read more about this topic: Derfel Cadarn