But Rhodri was a bastard born of another woman, so Mother had been happy to see him sent away. For the Welsh, a bastard son had the same value as a child born in wedlock, with all the same rights and claims as any other child. His father loved Rhodri, but he said, “We must follow Norman ways in this matter – all the Welsh must, if we are to survive.” The Norman way was to give everything to the eldest trueborn son. Bastards did not matter at all under their law.
So Rhodri was sent to foster in England, a gesture to show that there was no ill will, that good and sensible Welshmen trusted the Normans and should be trusted in turn. Years later when there was a battle against the English king – the latest in a series of battles that stretched back generations – his father sided with the Welsh prince Llewellyn. They lost, because the Welsh always lost, and all the Welshmen of consequence who had risen up against English rule were made to give over hostages. It was normal. It happened all the time. It was how peace was kept.
If father had been more important, the English would not have let him send Gryff as hostage. They would have demanded Aiden, his first trueborn son.
“You’re not important at all,” Gryff said to him at some point in the journey that took him from his home. He’d made a point of saying very little since the scene days before when he’d shouted and wept and begged to stay. The humiliation of it was still with him. He was too old to act so childishly, but it had seemed impossible to control himself.
It was just as hard when he’d kissed his mother goodbye, but at least he’d only cried quietly. Later, on the journey, he wept for the loss of his trueborn brothers, too. He stopped being envious that the two of them could stay at home, and began to realize what it would mean not to see them every day. Maybe never again. He missed them already. How alone he would be, among the Normans.
For his father, he had naught but hatred. Never once did father say he regretted any of it, and still he stood by Prince Llewellyn no matter what price his family must pay for it. He never even said he was sorry that they hadn’t fought well enough to win their stupid battle.
“You have no power against the Normans or Llewellyn, and you can’t even win a fight.” Gryff stopped himself from saying I hate you I hate you, only because he knew it would make him sound like a baby. He was twelve, and the only thing his father said that was true was that Gryff must be a man and not a sniveling child.
Father only ignored these outbursts. When they arrived at the massive Norman castle where many great lords and soldiers waited, Gryff wanted to run. It wasn’t fair. He barely even spoke their language, and none of them would know Welsh.
“There can be no profit in fear, Gruffydd.” Father looked grim, but not sad to say goodbye. “Nor in pride. Is humility that will serve you well among the Normans. There is much to learn of their ways, and I command you to learn it well. But never forget you are Welsh.” He gripped Gryff’s shoulder hard, and looked earnestly at him. “You are Welsh. They cannot take that from you without you permit it.”
“I am your son,” he said, and pushed his father’s hand away with disgust. “They cannot take me from you without you permit it.”
He walked toward the Normans without looking back.
He never saw his father again.
Chapter Two
1288
As 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 a
gree 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.
“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.
Desire Lines (Welsh Blades, #3) Page 2