Page 3

––––––––

A s he walked back to the thieves’ camp and chewed very slowly on the bread, Gryff gradually came to realize that the dog was meant to keep watch on him.

By the time they reached the place that Baudry and his men had days ago claimed as their own – the latest in a series of spots deemed “likely” – Gryff had seen enough signs to know it was a dog with a purpose.

A dog with a mission. Its task was to pay very close attention to whatever Gryff was doing.

It seemed a little wary of the birds, though, and kept glancing back at them suspiciously while it trotted around the clearing, investigating, always alert.

Gryff found his old, worn falconer’s bag and slung it over his shoulder so that it crossed his chest. Everything he needed was inside.

He’d learned to be efficient, always ready to move at a moment’s notice.

It was the matter of a moment to put on the glove and coax the goshawk from the branch to his hand, then transfer him into the cage.

Gryff worried the cage was too small and fretted about it every time he was forced to use it.

But it was only two miles to the priory, the merchant had said. Not long.

The dog came to investigate, darting in to sniff gingerly at the cage and then jumping back from the hawk. It caused Gryff to smile, which first felt natural, and then strange. He had not really smiled for months, and was amazed his face remembered how. But he did not want to think of that.

“Well for you that he is hooded,” he said to the dog, who spared him a dubious glance. “You are close enough and so small that he may strike at you. Keep well away from them both. If aught should happen to you, I fear your mistress would skewer me.”

Reminded of the girl and her gift, he took another careful bite of the bread before stowing it in his bag and turning to the falcon.

She came to him readily, as she always did.

Her perch was a padded mound atop a stake driven into the ground, made for travel.

Gryff pulled it up and tucked it into the crook of the arm that held her, then picked up the cage and headed back to the road.

Away from this place. He would never have to think of Baudry or his men again.

He made sure to aim a little north so he could rejoin the road far from the place where the bodies were.

Don’t see them, don’t think of them, just go on with life and one day he would find he had forgotten most of it, and struggle to remember the details.

There was an art to letting go of memories. He had learned it well.

Now the dog walked jauntily alongside Gryff, casting worried glances up at the goshawk in the cage.

“This is Ned.” Gryff decided to make a practice of civil conversation, so that he might be more coherent when he met with people again.

Besides, it distracted him from the intense longing for another bite of the bread he could not reach while his hands were otherwise occupied.

“Ned the goshawk. Nor would I have you repeat it, but I will tell you I named him for Edward the king.”

The dog looked up as though to acknowledge it before veering off to nose quickly through the brush.

Gryff tensed, the strange fear coming over him again – as though Baudry might rise from the dead and hide among the overgrowth, waiting to spring at him.

But the vigilant little dog found nothing of interest and returned to Gryff’s side again.

He kept speaking, to ease himself away from the senseless fear.

“The custom is to give the bird a meek name. It makes for a fierce hunter. A grand name tempts fate, so to give a bird a warrior’s name is to risk having the laziest hawk you ever knew,” he explained.

Now he lowered his voice as though the King of England might hear him.

“It amused me to think I might have a timid Edward, a Ned that no one need fear.

Alas ‘twas an ill plan. He is as much a killer as his namesake.”

This seemed not to disturb the dog at all. It only looked up expectantly, waiting for further introductions. Gryff turned a little as he walked to show the falcon to the dog.

“She is just as fierce, and fitting of her name. Tiffany. Named for the Epiphany. Because I trained her to give as a gift on that feast day, for the abbot.” He felt a familiar weight on his chest, a burn in his lungs.

Brother Clement had called her Theophania, the proper Latin form, until he gave in and simply called her Tiffin.

When Gryff called to her in the hunt, it was just Tiff, which Clement had said was not elegant enough.

Eager to think of anything other than Brother Clement, Gryff looked to the dog again. He didn’t know its name.

“What will I call you? A mighty name, I think. You are no hawk.” It looked cheerfully up at him, tongue lolling as it walked. “Bran. I’ll call you Bran. A giant and a king.”

A Welsh name for a long-ago king. The little dog was nothing like a giant, but the name fit him anyway. Innocent and earnest, like he and his brothers had once been when they had asked the bard to sing the legend again and again. “Does it agree with you, little Bran, or is it too Welsh?”

But Bran was running ahead through the trees, in the direction where the road should be, and disappeared quickly.

Either there was some danger, or the party of travelers was there beyond the trees.

Gryff stood, his breath suspended. There was only the sound of the dog barking in the distance and his imagination to keep him company while he tried to convince himself there was no danger.

He cursed Baudry to hell for turning him into this timid ghost of himself, and tried to make his feet move.

It was the weight of the birds on his arms, though, that finally spurred him to move in the direction of the road.

The sound of the barking grew louder until Gryff came to the road, where the travelers were tensed and watchful. The deadly girl was nowhere to be seen. Bran made more noise than he could have dreamt possible for something so small.

“The dog does not care for my birds, I think,” he called as he approached.

“He envies their beauty,” answered Alfred, looking in admiration at the falcon, and the whole party seemed to relax.

While Alfred helped him affix the cage to a saddle, the girl appeared.

Gryff thought she came from the trees, but he had not heard or seen her.

She looked warily at the birds, and he tried not to stare at her.

It felt impossible that the others could so easily keep their eyes from her.

But then, they were likely used to her. He had not been in the presence of any woman, whether plain or comely, for longer than a few minutes – not in years. Little wonder he was transfixed.

Bran only stopped barking when she stamped her foot on the ground before him and made a kind of short hissing sound.

“ Fss ,” she said, the only sound that had passed her lips in Gryff’s hearing, and then she leaned down to scratch the dog’s head.

Little Bran quieted immediately, but continued to look between her and the hawks as though nothing was more imperative than that she should know they were there and they troubled him.

He looked ready to break out into noise again at any second.

But she made another signal with her hand and pointed to the west side of the road, where the dog kept its attentive patrol as the party resumed its progress toward the priory.

The girl herself moved to the opposite side of the road, just as watchful, her eyes scanning the trees as they made their way.

“Tell us, if you will – how came you to fall in with the knaves?” Alfred asked.

Gryff had put another bit of bread in his mouth and he chewed slowly, not just to savor it but to have time before he answered.

“Months ago,” he began, and then stopped.

Months ago, only three months. It felt like years.

Maybe he should start it from that point years ago, when he’d fled.

He almost did that, then remembered in time that it would invite questions of what he had fled, and why.

Bad enough he had already given a part of his true name.

“I was at an abbey. A small place. Less than a dozen brothers. Franciscans. And me.” He heard himself, how he could not seem to say more than a few words together before pausing.

It made him sound like a liar, like he was inventing it as he spoke, but he could not make it come out any other way.

Men were harder to talk to than dogs or hawks.

“You are a monk?”

“Nay.” Once he would have laughed at that. Now nothing about it seemed humorous. “I kept hawks for the monks. They let me stay. For charity. It was deep in the wilds, away from all. It burned. All the buildings, just before the Epiphany, in the night. None but myself and two brothers survived.”

Alfred sucked in a deep breath of shock. “God assoil them,” he said, and waited to hear more.

Gryff tried to tell him the rest in as few words as possible.

The chapel and dormitory were already engulfed in flames by the time he and Brother Clement even knew it was happening.

In their tiny rooms in the hawk-house, they were woken by the shouts of the brothers who had stumbled out of the smoke.

Only three of them emerged, burned badly.

Two died in the snow before morning. The fire moved so quickly that as it spread to the hawk-house, Gryff had no time to do more than cut free two hawks.

Now there was no falconer to call them back, and so they would return to the wild.

They could easily survive there. Trained but never tamed, and God be praised for it.