Agnes pointed to the larder and said they were welcome to find one. The boy passed by Gryff on his way out of the kitchen, paused, and announced, “You’re coming.”

They found a fresh duck laid out on the cold stone and though the other boy declared it insufficiently fat, he scooped it up and said they would go to the hawk-house now. Gryff had been avoiding the place, because everyone seemed to expect him to go there. But he followed now, for lack of a good argument against it.

The boy was named Hal. He talked without stopping and walked almost too quickly and he had skin dark as night. When he demanded to know Gryff’s name and where he was from, the answer actually made him stop in his tracks.

“But the best falconers are from Aderinyth, and the gyrfalcons!” Hal said, and Gryff could not help but be pleased at the look of awe. “The peregrines too, of course, and once we had some goshawks. How many nests are there really? My father says it must be at least a hundred.”

“No one knows,” mumbled Gryff.

It wasn’t a lie, really. There might be more than the three gyrfalcon nests they knew of, and the eighty-two nesting places of other kinds of falcons and hawks that his family knew. But the number of them and their locations were a secret known only to a select few. It was the only wealth they had, and the Normans would steal it if they could.

Gryff didn’t care about keeping any promises to his father, or keeping Welsh secrets safe. But he stayed silent about the nests.

When they came to the hawk-house, Hal went immediately to his father and confessed everything about the missing duck and its replacement, then moved on quickly to introduce Gryff and say where he was from.

Gryff barely heard any of it. He hardly even noticed Hal’s father at first, though the man was taller than anyone he’d ever seen and had a voice so deep it would shake mountains loose from the moorings of the earth. He just looked at the row of birds on their perches and breathed in the familiar smell and could not move.

“That’s Amabel,” came the deep voice of Hal’s father who, he was to discover, was the master falconer.

Amabel was a gyrfalcon, snow white and in perfect health, sitting peacefully on her perch with one leg tucked up under her feathers. The price of her, when sold, might have kept a family for a year. More, even. Gryff could not help but think of Philip Walch, pointing at the place in the cliff where the nest of the whitest gyrfalcons hid, explaining how blessed they were to have such rare birds.