Griffin slides his hand up and down my back, letting my uncharacteristic breakdown run its course. “Ee-lee-thia,” he says after a while, his pronunciation of my second middle name hesitant. “That’s nice.”
I let out a watery snort. Kind of a hiccup.Is this what love does to a person? Uncontrollable emotion?
“Eileithyia’s not bad,” I agree. It’s a lot better than Andromeda.
“Goddess of childbirth, right?”
I nod, wiping my eyes with the backs of my hands. “Prepare yourself. With a namesake like that, chances are I’m really fertile.”
Griffin has the good sense to look like that doesn’t bother him at all.
Flynn brings us a rabbit to share, not commenting on my strange behavior, if he even noticed it from over by the campfire. While we eat, Griffin cuts some of the longer hellipses grass around us, stacking the wide, dry blades into a neat pile next to him. He eventually binds the stalks with a leather cord and then carefully slips the whole stack into the bottom of his saddlebag.
“What’s that for?” I ask around a bite of admittedly succulent rabbit. Flynn’s a good cook. The meat is never dry. He even carries herbs.
Griffin smiles faintly. “There’s something I might want to make. And the grass here is good. Strong.”
I’m curious about his ability to create. I saw the grass crown he wove for Kaia. It was beautiful and intricate even though it was just for play, and I’m sure it pleased her more than all of her new jewels combined.
“Why didn’t I ever see you weaving when we spent all those weeks traveling together before?” I ask.
Griffin turns slightly and looks out over the darkening meadow. In profile, the rugged contours of his face and his aquiline nose stand out more prominently. There’s nothing delicate or bland about his strong-boned face; he’s a magnetic, masculine work of art. His gaze stops on the lake, its now smooth surface a vast shadow splashed across the center of the valley. The moon hangs low and yellow in the sky, already lighting a shimmering path across the water. Icebergs reflect the moonlight, the hulking, jagged mounds like a Giant’s stepping-stones to the snowcapped mountains beyond.
“If there’s one thing Sinta doesn’t lack, it’s dusty plains and dry grasses. There’s never a shortage of hellipses grass. It’s even here, in Fisa, and so far to the north.” He looks at me then. “Weaving reminds me of all the times our tribe had to make everything we could from something that costs nothing at all.”
“Because royal soldiers kept stealing everything and burning your homes?”
He nods. In the fading light, his features are like the granite peaks in the distance, angular and hard. “Tax collecting wasn’t just about taxes in the south. It was about pillaging, meaningless destruction, and instilling fear. My father built an army big enough to get them to finally cease those types of raids, at least in our corner of Sinta, but no victory will ever make me forget those endless days of weaving after the royal soldiers came. The stinging cuts. The bloody hands. The work songs with their plaintive, sliding tones. The smell of sheaves upon sheaves of freshly cut hellipses grass in whatever was left of the house.” He brushes his long, strong fingers over the thick blades next to him, watching them bend. “The lifeless. The mourning. The girls, some younger than Kaia is now, leaving for the nearest city to sell whatever they could, even their bodies, for Charon’s obol to pay their loved ones’ passage to the land of the dead.”
I unconsciously press my hand against the coin that’s always in my pocket, the one I’ll never spend. We all carry one. With the lives we lead, we’d be insane not to. There’s no crossing the Styx without paying the ferryman first, and the Shadowlands are no place to end up for all of eternity.
I’ve sometimes wondered how the Griffin I know could have slaughtered Sinta’s entire royal family, men and women alike. Luckily, they were an unfruitful lot, and there were no children in the castle because when he brought his army to their gates, he wiped them out, just like they’d callously wiped out so many people before that, victims of royal greed and senseless violence, people who weren’t just nameless and faceless to Griffin.
“Why weave at all if it brings back those memories?” I ask.
He shrugs. “It’s a part of me. It always has been. I don’t know how to stop.”
“Then why didn’t I see you weaving before? There was hellipses grass everywhere. You could have made an entire supply of household goods in the time it took us to reach Castle Sinta,” I tease, trying to take some of the new grimness from his expression.
Griffin’s teeth flash briefly in the growing dark. “There was no time. You were distracting—and that’s putting it mildly—and I was always busy making sure you didn’t escape or maim me for life.”
I roll my eyes, although he does have a point. “Then what are you making now?”
He looks at his empty hands, studies them, flips them over, frowns… “Nothing, as far as I can tell.”
Giving him a sour look, I turn my voice as dry as Sintan dust. “You’re a thespian wonder.”
Griffin leans back on his elbows, sighing dramatically. “It was a sad day when I had to choose between being a warlord and having a career on the stage.”
I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing. “I still want to know what you’re doing with that grass.”
He looks over at me in a way that makes my heart start fluttering like a damn butterfly in my chest. “Patience, Catalia Eileithyia Fisa. I’m not doing anything yet.”
I scowl. Patience isnotone of my middle names.
CHAPTER 12
IJOLT AWAKE TO THE SHRIEK OF AN OWL. THE FIVE OF USsurround the campfire, and Griffin and the others are on their feet before I can blink. I’m just tossing off my blanket when a deafening noise makes me curl in on myself. I duck my head and cover my ears as a bone-jarring, body-seizing boom rolls through the valley.
