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“These two I kept only by chance,” he said, and it was not really a lie.

It was chance. It was all chance. These two birds had been most in his mind, so he had reached for them first and saw them safely away from the fire before returning to free the others.

It was chance that he got out of the burning hawk-house in time, despite the blinding smoke.

Chance that the snow was deep enough to quench the flames that had caught his clothes.

“And what of those brothers who lived?”

Gryff looked over his shoulder and saw only empty road. On the far side of the road there only the tip of Bran’s tail as the dog walked along. The girl was on the near side, walking a little ahead of them – not quite close enough to hear their conversation, he thought, if she even had hearing.

“Baudry,” he finally answered. “The thieves. We meant to go to the village. It was far.” He looked at her hair as he spoke, a single golden braid tied with a scrap of cloth.

The sunlight bounced off it, an impossibly beautiful color.

“They killed one brother when they attacked.” He pushed away the memory of Brother Julian’s staring eyes, the surprise still on his face in death.

Baudry’s men would not have done it if they’d seen he was a monk – some for care of their immortal souls, others because there was no profit in killing a monk with no possessions.

None of them saw any profit in preventing Brother Clement’s death.

“The other died of the cold. He was very old.”

He stopped talking. There was nowhere to look that didn’t fill him with sorrow and anger.

The wounded knight slumped in his saddle, the body of the knight who had died was tied to another mule, the weeping woman and her silent children – all caused by the same men who had watched Clement freeze to death.

Though his appetite was gone, he shoved more bread into his mouth and let his eyes wander to the girl again. Not a girl – a woman. Young, but not at all a child. He wished he could see where she had hidden away the blades she had recovered. She looked so harmless now.

“Yet did they let you live,” Alfred observed after a long moment.

Gryff wanted more than anything to ignore that and ask instead what trade Alfred was in. But he must answer lest they think him one of Baudry’s men, so he swallowed and replied.

“I know the hawks, how to hunt with them. The thieves did not, and it was a hard winter. Better to keep the birds and have meat, than to sell them and watch the coin run out.”

Baudry had enjoyed having a falcon, too, imagining it made him the equal of a nobleman.

To hunt with a peregrine meant he had come up in the world, even though he must rely on Gryff to keep the bird in good health.

He liked having a servant, too. Even one who must be kept tied to prevent escape.

Even one who he likely had planned to kill in full summer, when food was not so scarce.

“How then is it that you are so starved?”

“They wasted nothing on me except what they must.” Some weeks ago – a month, he thought – Tiffin had brought down two herons in one day, and he had had a full portion of meat.

There would be more, he suddenly realized.

At the end of this road, there would be a priory and they would offer a meal.

He could fly the birds now and they might bring down a duck, a goose, and he could eat it all himself.

Every day now, he could eat his fill and choose where he would go and what he would do. He had only to decide his direction.

Home. That was the first thought, of course.

There was no way to know if it was safe to return to Wales, and his rusty tongue could think of no easy way to ask it.

Not without saying too much. What he needed was a friend.

One who was not dead or hundreds of miles away, or overly loyal to the English king.

One who would care about keeping him safe.

That thought of safety brought the strange girl to mind again.

He raised his eyes from the bread she had given him to watch her as she walked ahead of them.

Her hair was like a candle’s flame, a glowing sliver of gold against her dark cloak.

Fine traveling clothes, good shoes, shining hair, and that fair face.

She looked like a Norman lady, one of those he had known who flirted as easily as they breathed, who sometimes had dared meet him in secret to open their mouths or their legs to him, to welcome him in for a hot moment of sin.

Then they, with their smooth skin and bright eyes, would pull the finest silks and furs over their nakedness and melt away into the night.

There was a familiar pang at the thought of that lost life.

Let the world fade away, Brother Clement had so often said.

All worldly desires and the things of the flesh, let the memory of them fade.

But Gryff was not a monk, for all that he had lived like one for years.

He turned his eyes away from the girl and his mind away from how starved he was.

Instead he tried to calculate how many years he’d lived, hidden and deprived, in the wilderness.

Four, he thought. Definitely more than three. He’d stopped counting on purpose.

When they reached the priory, he gave the birds over to the austringer and made his way to the guest house.

It took more time than should have been necessary, to scrub every inch of his skin and trim his unruly beard down to almost nothing.

Hunger, relief, fear – all of these conspired to fatigue him so easily that he almost could not keep his eyes open.

As he sat shivering, clean and wrapped only in a length of borrowed linen, one of the brothers came to say that the sheriff had recovered the outlaws’ bodies to be hanged at the crossroad and serve as the usual warning.

They had been stripped first, and the monk held out the familiar garments, shoes, and the handful of possessions that had been found on Baudry’s men.

Everything salvaged would go to the poor.

When he was offered a pair of boots, Gryff only shook his head.

He did not say that he had watched the original owner kick a man to death while wearing them.

He refused it all and instead chose clothes that had been left with the monks by some other nameless donor.

His body almost did not feel real, covered in cloth that was not stiff with dirt and sweat, the sweet sensation of the air moving across his freshly unearthed skin.

It was like moving in a dream, to walk to the little hawk-house and check on the birds with his legs unfettered.

Back in the guest house, he shared a room with the wounded knight, Sir Gerald, who was silent as Gryff curled onto his own pallet.

There was a covered plate waiting for him, set on his blanket.

It held a thick slice of cheese and a little bread, though the brothers had already given him his meal when he’d bathed.

A kindness, this extra little portion for the starving guest. He ate it slowly and was trying to convince himself that he was safe now, when the wounded knight spoke.

“Is not her usual way, to kill.” His voice was stronger than Gryff would have expected for one who looked so near to death.

“They were too many, and so intent on murder that she must kill them in all haste, that no innocents would die. More often she maims. A hand or a foot, or any wound well-placed to make a man stop fighting but not kill him – that is her way.”

Gryff wanted to ask more: how this knight knew her, if she was truly deaf and dumb, and why she had habits of maiming and killing.

Above all, he wanted to know how this man or any man could be immune to her beauty.

Haps he had forgotten how comely women could be, so long had he been away from them.

She might be only ordinarily pretty and his eyes unaccustomed.

Ordinary or not, her beauty was all the more unnerving because it came with such a casually lethal skill. Even if it was not her usual way, she had not hesitated. Sir Gerald’s words were meant as reassurance that there was nothing to fear.

Or so he thought, until the knight spoke again.

“When next you think to look on her with lust, remember it. She’ll cool your blood by spilling it, and let you live with the shame and the scar.

” He smiled a little, as though it were a pleasant thought, and looked toward Gryff.

“But if truly you are no villain, there is naught to fear of her. I vow it, and you may sleep easy in that promise.”

He did sleep, but it was not easy. It never was.