He woke at dawn with the image of Brother Clement lingering in his mind and dread choking him. But when Gryff turned his face into the bed linens, he remembered where he was. He remembered that she had slept in this bed, and that gave him a kind of comfort, as though a part of her remained here in his friend’s home.

Her words came to him, as they always did now in these moments of dread. She had insisted it was a mistake to hide from memory, and already he had learned she was right. He made himself open his eyes and listen to the distant sounds of the waking house while he carefully summoned his last memory of Brother Clement. Somehow the sound of Hal’s child crying downstairs made it more bearable.

When the dread had subsided, he took himself down to the main room to find Hal’s daughter smeared with porridge and smiling broadly at him. At the sight of it, all the melancholy in him vanished as though by magic. He suddenly felt himself the most fortunate man in Christendom. Only weeks ago he’d had nothing but a pair of birds, a belly full of hunger, and certain death breathing at his neck. Now he had choices he might make, and a fast friend, and the agreeable sight of a smiling child to greet him.

Hal’s wife Sara was intercepting the little girl on her way to Gryff, holding the baby boy in one arm and attempting to wipe the girl clean with the other. Gryff laughed at the sticky hands reaching up at him, which delighted the girl so much she squealed and stamped her feet.

“God save, is there any maiden you will not woo?” Hal came from the yard and scooped his daughter up, wiping her hands and face clean. “Beware your heart, little one,” he said to his daughter. “He is too old for you.”

The instant Hal let the girl go, she came straight at Gryff, who lifted her off the ground. “Too old,” he affirmed to her shining face. “And unworthy of a maid who is born of the line of Sir Morien himself.”

It was an ancestral claim that had been invented as a jest when they were boys, but Gryff had not expected Hal’s wife to laugh quite so much. Patting the baby on the back, she said, “Those were some of his first words to me, that he is descended from Sir Morien himself! As though I would surrender my virtue sooner if I could imagine him a knight of the round table. Did it work on many maidens when he was young?”