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It began in beauty and in blood.
He saw her face in an improbable moment, amid chaos and carnage – startling blue eyes and a soft mouth set in perfect, graceful lines – and then he saw the blood. Not a drop of it touched her. It was all around her, and all of her own doing. Ferocity and beauty, that’s how it began.
At first he only saw men dropping on the road, an incomprehensible sight. Eight men, vicious criminals, who had lain in wait behind the trees and sprung themselves on the small party with whom she traveled. They had done everything as they always did, Baudry and his men. Their habit was to fall on the armed knights first, while the women and children screamed in terrified confusion. It was always over quickly.
But this time Baudry and his men only crumpled to the ground one after the other, though it was clearly not the armed knights who caused it. Gryff looked up to the trees for archers, but there were none. This was not a rain of arrows. The horses reared and the women screamed and the attackers merely fell down dead, as though from a plague.
She was the plague.
In the moment he realized it, she looked at him. Briefly, her eyes came to rest on Gryff where he stood beside the road and somehow she did not kill him too. He had raised his hands without thinking, arms extended and palms open, as though he could halt her with a gesture – or at least show he was unarmed. She saw it, just a blink down to his hands and back up to his face again before she was turning away. It was fast. She was so fast, in a way that made him think of a snake striking at its prey. Even before she had finished turning away from him, she drew a fresh blade from somewhere and threw it at Cuddy. Impossibly, it found the half inch gap in his hard leather collar and sank into his throat.
Fitting, for Cuddy to die on his knees with naught but a look of surprise. Even more fitting, that it was the hand of a woman that did it. All that violent lust was ended at last with the almost leisurely flick of a woman’s wrist, and her barely looking at him as she did it.
Gryff watched him die, trying and failing to relish it. It was all too sudden. One minute he had been bracing himself to watch as Baudry and his men slaughtered yet another group of innocent people, and the next minute – this.
Cuddy was the last to fall. Now she stood with her back to Gryff as she looked over the scene, and he did the same. Baudry and all his men were in the road, lifeless. Among the travelers, one of the knights was injured and the other appeared dead. A woman clutched two children to her while one of the unarmed men of the traveling party stumbled over bodies to reach her. The last was a monk with a bloodied eye and a stunned look.
The beautiful woman took it all in at a glance and turned back to Gryff. Now he saw she was a young maid. She wore no veil, and she was slim and straight, few womanly curves on her slight frame. There was no distress in her. No fear, no sign of what she’d just done. Months he’d spent with these murderous men, and he had learned something about this kind of unceremonious violence, and the kind of person capable of it. Her brows drew together, a look of concern or curiosity or both as she met his eyes again. It made her seem entirely human for the first time.
He tried to tell her that he wasn’t one of the thieves, but it came out as a weak and wordless croak. She was coming toward him with a purpose. He was strangely calm about it, though he didn’t want to die. Not yet. Let him go home first, just once. He only wanted to see his home again in this life.
If he died like this he couldn’t even be buried there. No one would know it was where he belonged. Even in death, he could not go home.
The panic only came on him in the moment she stumbled. It was Baudry himself – not dead after all – reaching up from his place on the ground as she stepped over him. He grasped her leg and pulled her down and Gryff saw suddenly how small she was. Baudry was more than twice her size, and she disappeared completely beneath his bulk.
“No!” Gryff shouted it over and over, as though that might do any good. He could not reach them, though he tried. The rope that attached his ankle to a tree barely allowed him up onto the road, but he strained against it anyway. He could be no help to her or to anyone, the state he was in, but he had seen her face as Baudry pulled her down. She had not expected it. She had had no weapon in her hand. She was so small. She would die and be left broken and lifeless in the road, and so he shouted, “No! No!”
But somehow it was Baudry who died. Gryff only saw the broad back, muscles contracting, undoubtedly moving to snap her neck, and then he was motionless. Baudry became a lump of heavy flesh that she struggled to push off.
In the end, she had to slide out from beneath his dead weight. Now there was blood on her. The shoulder of her very fine woolen gown was soaked in it. None of it was hers.
“By what mischance are you tied to a tree?”
The uninjured man of the traveling party had appeared beside him, completely unnoticed. He looked to be a merchant of some kind. The monk was tending to the wounded knight, the woman and children huddled near. This merchant disregarded all of it and greeted Gryff like it was a perfectly normal afternoon.
He must think of some way to explain it.
“They have held me as prisoner.” He felt on the verge of babbling. Too much relief, too much fear and uncertainty. The girl had turned back to the scattered bodies in the road, leaning down to each one in turn as a little dog scurried among them. “Since the Epiphany. Just before. Two days before.”
“They sought your ransom?” The man looked doubtful, and with good reason: Gryff knew he looked even worse than the thieves. Dirty and ragged, more bones than flesh, clothes that were never more than rags, and wearing no cloak in this cold – only a fool would think anyone would pay money for his release.
“Nay,” he said finally. “Not ransom. They kept me. As a servant, of sorts.”
He found he could not say more. There was too much to explain and a kind of creeping fear was coming over him in the calm. He watched the girl as she went among the bodies. He kept expecting another one to rise up when her back was turned, and come for him this time. It seemed impossible that Baudry and his men and all their torment were finished, in only a few short minutes.
But they were dead. She was pulling free the weapons that had killed them. They were strange short knives with no hilt, the blade a few inches long with only a flat circle of metal where the handle should be. Instead of a handle there was a small hole where she inserted something like a nail to pull the blade free. It was the only way to get enough grip, he saw, especially when the blade was slick red and buried deep.
“I am Alfred Brant,” said the man at his side, and looked at him expectantly.
Names. This was conversation. This was how people spoke to one another when they met. He remembered it. It shouldn’t be so hard to do.
“Gruffydd,” he said without thinking, swallowing the ab Iorwerth in time. But it was too late. His name was enough.
“You are Welsh?”
It was no crime only to be Welsh. Not here, anyway. So he said, “Aye, born of a Welshman. I’m called Gryff. Just Gryff.”
“Well met, Gryff, and God give you good morrow. There is a priory ahead, not two miles. They’ll bury our dead and care for Sir Gerald,” he said with a nod toward the injured knight. “And for you, do you come with us.”
Alfred had a kindly face, as though that meant anything. Gryff looked at it for too long without speaking. He knew it was too long, but he could not help it. Words seemed almost as foreign as the idea that he might be able to move among decent people again, and have food to eat and not fear he would be killed in his sleep.
“Better you share the road with us than journey alone,” Alfred advised with a patient look, and Gryff finally nodded. It was better. Safer. And he did not know where else to go. He did not even know where exactly he was.
“First I must... There’s something,” he said, gesturing to the trees behind him. “It wants only a moment. Not far. If you will cut me free of this rope.”
“There are more of your company?” asked Alfred, his kindly face turned hard. “They wait for you?”
“Nay.” He said it with a shake of his head so vehement that it likely damned him. “On my soul, I swear it. There is only what few things were theirs, and the hawks. I must bring the hawks. I cannot leave them. Go ahead if you will, only free me and I will meet you on the road before you have gone even half a mile.”
There was only suspicion in the man’s face. Gryff did not know what to do. He could not even contemplate leaving the birds behind, alone. He stared at this stranger who seemed to want him to choose between his own freedom and the hawks. But there was no choice. He could not leave them.
So they looked at each other, Alfred with suspicion and Gryff silently pleading, until suddenly the girl was there. She pulled a long and elegant knife from her boot, knelt down without a word, and cut the rope that Baudry had tied around his ankle not an hour ago. Her eyes swept over him when she stood, taking in the threadbare tunic he wore, the lack of cloak, the shoes that were hardly worthy of the name. She looked a long time at his face – silent, always silent. Was she a mute?
In her, there was no suspicion. It was something else. Compassion, he thought. It had been so long since he had seen it that he almost did not recognize it.
In the same moment he saw it, she turned her eyes to Alfred and some understanding passed between them. She had no words, it seemed, but she held sway among this party. Alfred nodded at her and walked to where the others were gathered around the injured knight. The girl went to the mule that had stood calm and imperturbable throughout the attack. She reached into a pack on its saddle and pulled out a round loaf of bread, stepped forward, and handed it to Gryff. With a snap of her fingers, the dog came to her side and she made some other quick gestures that ended in her pointing at Gryff. Then she walked away.
The dog seemed to understand whatever she meant, and sat looking up at Gryff. Little thing, velvety brown fur and ears standing up on its head, friendly face watching him curiously. The man named Alfred was lifting the dead knight onto the mule while the girl and the monk helped the injured knight onto a horse.
They were going ahead without him, leaving him with a loaf, a dog, and his life. He was free.
Gryff stared down at the bread in his hands. The smell of it was breaking his heart.
He was free.
