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.