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.”