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.