Piers tried to raise his head to look at the fire—he barely caught a glimpse of tiny licking flames before his head fell back against the tree. The fire was dying, too. Fitting. He rolled his head to the left. At least his father was still there to keep him company.
Warin Mallory sat near the weakening fire, one knee bent to his chest, his other leg crooked under him for support. His gray hair was untied, swooping away from his forehead and falling over both shoulders. His beard and mustache were full and neat. His gaze was icy, but merry, as if death had been so startlingly bright as to have bleached his eyes, but he had enjoyed the experience. He was dressed in his typical dark green tunic, and was shelling what looked to Piers to be hazelnuts by hand, and feeding them one at a time to Layla.
Layla crouched at Warin’s knee, her little hands clasped patiently before her mouth, nibbling and watching as each shell piece fell onto the pile growing on the ground. Lord Mallory never spoke, but he did keep a gentle smile on his face. Every now and then he would look up at Piers and nod encouragingly, or hold a nut toward him as if offering it to him to eat.
Piers had managed to barely shake his head no the first time. Now he just looked away. He had tried speaking to his father when Warin had simply walked from the snowstorm and toward the fire, but his words had been garbled and unintelligible to his own ears, even knowing what he was trying to say.
Why do you haunt me?
Is it your wish to see me die?
Was it not enough to torment me with your uncaring the whole of my life?
Can you not rest until you are certain I have died a death as lonely as my life?
But his questions had only come out as pathetic sobs, and so Piers had held his swollen and dry tongue out of pride. With Warin keeping the death vigil over him, both Judith Angwedd’s and Bevan’s cruel words had ceased, and that at least was a blessing.
Piers was sorry. Sorry that he had ever met Alys Foxe and unwillingly brought her into the misery that was his mission. Had he simply abandoned her, she would have eventually returned to Fallstowe, and would not be now wandering a desolate wood populated only with myths in search of nonexistent aid for him. She deserved to live her fortunate life. Everyone deserved that, Piers thought. Poor misguided child had ended up with him instead.
Piers thought he heard a crunching in the wood beyond. Likely naught but some nocturnal forager, and so he ignored it, choosing to watch his father instead. Piers believed this was the longest he’d ever been in the man’s presence in his life. Warin looked over his shoulder and then to Piers. He gestured toward the sound with his head and then his smile widened slightly.
Piers nodded. It seemed what was expected of him. In death, Warin Mallory seemed to take great pleasure in such a simple thing as a mouse scampering through leaves in a lonely world painted with black and cold and quiet. And sharing his favorite treat—hazelnuts—with a little foreign animal.
“I’ve found him!”
The male voice cut through the night like a blade dragged through gravel. And Piers let his eyes close, knowing that now that Bevan had tracked him down at last, his moments on this earth were like the snowflakes that landed on his cheeks—little, fading miracles.
“Yes, there! I see the fire!” A woman’s voice, and eventhough shrill and hoarse, it was not Judith Angwedd’s. “Piers!”
Could it be Alys?
Piers’s eyelids felt like stiff, dried leather as he struggled to open them. The crashing sounds beyond the trees grew in volume and intensity. His chest suddenly felt crushed, and when he managed to drag his eyes open as far as they would go—barely a sliver—he saw that Layla had returned to perch upon his midsection. The monkey began to chatter in an agitated fashion, and Piers thought that perhaps she was trying to defend him from the stranger whose voice had called out. But even Layla’s slight weight was proving too much for Piers’s laboring lungs.
Alys’s little monkey was going to smother him to death.
Piers flicked his eyes toward the fire—Warin was brushing bits of hazelnut shells from his palms, his smile seeming wise and merry and damnably eternal. He stared into Piers’s eyes as Piers stared back and struggled silently to draw breath, tried to raise an arm to brush at Layla. The vision of his father began to throb as consciousness wavered.
Warin braced a palm on the ground and began to lever himself up.
Piers’s view of him was blocked as a figure rushed in front of the fire, blackening his world. Layla screamed pitifully and then Piers felt as if a boulder had been dropped onto his chest as the monkey launched herself upward. But then it was gone, and air trickled into his lungs.
A breeze fell over him as Alys—wondrous, impulsive Alys—dropped to her knees at his side, holding her pet to her bosom with one arm and leaning into Piers. Her free hand stroked his forehead, his cheek, turning his face toward hers.
“Piers, can you hear me? God, you’re burning up! I’ve found some men who are going to help us, take you back to their town.”
His eyes shifted toward the fire once more and he saw four men, but only three strangers. The newcomers were dressed in leather and rough wool, and carried an assortment of weapons and tools strapped across their bodies with thick ropes. Warin Mallory looked each up and down, and then his eyes turned to Piers and he nodded, his smile crooking to one side as if to convey that the men looked likely enough.
“Alys,” Piers tried to say, and it came out like the scratch of a fingernail against a piece of dried wood.
But she heard him, for she leaned closer, her tone anxious. “Yes? What is it?”
“I’d like you”—he tried to swallow, and raise his hand, but only one of his fingers twitched toward the men—“meet my father.”
Alys was silent for a moment, and in that time Warin Mallory’s smile grew into a proud grin. Then Alys leaned into Piers with a rush, pressing the side of her face to his, her mouth near his ear. Piers could smell the sharp scent of her sweat-wet scalp, her fear. He could feel her humid breath against his skin. He kept his eyes on his father, whose mouth now formed the words that Alys gave voice to.
“I’m sorry it took me so long, Piers.”
He felt a catch in his chest, a pressure behind his eyes and they stung, as if they wanted to weep. He blinked to rid himself of the uncomfortable sensation—he had those in spades already.
