He stopped only once more on his way to work, to help an elderly widow cross the cobbles at a busy intersection where horses and carts were speeding past. “Where are you headed today, Miss Isabel?” he asked her kindly, intending to help her all the way to her destination before moving on.
She pointed to a striped green-and-white awning above a darkened door with faded gold lettering painted directly on the glass, and Griff’s shoulders tightened. Of course. Served With Love. Most locals knew to leave the unassuming tea shop well enough alone and looked the other way at who came and went, but there were some older folks like the widow who really appreciated the strong taste of what their shop girl put together—and none of it was poison, at the end of the day. That would be awfully bad for business.
“Have a good day. And be safe,” Griff said, holding open the heavy glass door for her without once glancing into the dim interior.
Then he finally got to work.
It felt good, sweating in the summer sun again as he swung a hammer with his crew, to have a body that more or less did what he asked of it—aside from the occasional breathless stab of pain that made him drop a tool here or there. He had missed this. Though not, apparently, as much as his crew had missed him.
All but Wills, who the others said had been out sick for the past week or so.
“What’s it like, boss?” Owin apparently couldn’t help asking as he passed by, carrying an armload of heavy beams to be cut to size. He was a rosy-cheeked, curly-haired stout young halfling, as strong as any strapping man on the crew, though he didn’t yet seem to have developed a sense for what kinds of questions might be too personal. “Almost dying and all that? Bad as they say?”
“Keep swinging those crossbeams around without looking at who you’re about to hit, and you just might find out,” Griff answered with a grin as he sharpened his wood-splitting maul. After so many weeks away, he had even missed the lad’s constant chatter. “Cool me off after you put those down, would you?”
Owin tossed some water from his open canteen, spraying Griff and everyone around him.
Griff shook his wet hair like a dog drying off from a swim, and his crew scattered, swearing and laughing and slapping him on the back as they fled.
He was back to doing what he loved, and before he knew it, the sun was sinking behind the roofs of the nearby houses. Smoke rose steadily from their chimneys in thin streams, fragrant cedar, birch, and applewood carrying to Griff on a cooling breeze. The streets were quickly clearing—a dwarven couple returning home with an armload of groceries here, a few men and what looked like some distant elf-kin there, ducking into a nearby pub for dinner and drinks. Griff had someone waiting for him at home too. It was almost time to call it a day.
First, though, he had one last pile of wood he wanted to split to prep for tomorrow. He tugged off the inconvenience of his damp shirt, cast it aside, and grabbed his maul again, his calluses fitting comfortably against worn impressions in the handle.
As he got to work, a shadow fell across his path—a familiar shadow, one that made his blood run cold and his skin prickle with certain, present danger. He was sober again, since the attack; there was no way he was seeing things. But he decided to let that shadow be a phantom for as long as it liked, focusing on the job at hand rather than calling any attention to it.
Though it surely wanted his attention.
Chapter SixJust a Job
Backlit by the fiery sky, his lanky silhouette etched in amber, Griff looked like something out of Mal’s wildest dreams. He watched for a few self-indulgent moments as Griff swung his maul into the wood on the chopping block. Followed the drip of a bead of sweat from Griff’s neck all the way down past his navel, pale skin gilded by the sunset. Touched his tongue to the corner of his mouth, thinking of all the times he had seen Griff do this when they were growing up, three best friends under one roof, every other night a party that called for a bonfire.
After Rhun’s disappearance, Wynnie was always out, always covered in someone else’s blood when she turned up again, but Mal never had to worry about being warm or where his next meal was coming from because Griff took care of the woodpile.
He took care of things. Birthday presents. Scrapes. Mending clothes. Even though Griff was only two years older, he thought of the little things while Mal’s sights were forever on the horizon.
The dull, rhythmic thud of the maul in tandem with Griff’s laboring breaths would always be a familiar tune, one from a time when Griff still knew how to stay.
Mal could never forget it. He’d tried.
Unaware that he was making any sound at all, a groan rose from the back of his throat as he watched Griff work that rather resembled the sound the family’s old dog, Whiskey, made when someone scratched behind his ears. The hound was more gray than brown now, with fur like velvet and sagging jowls, a sagging stomach to match, and failing eyes that—much like Mal’s did—glimpsed certain darting shadows and wispy figures that others simply couldn’t. Poor old dog must be cursed too, though Mal couldn’t imagine whathehad done to piss off the gods. All dogs were good dogs, after all.
He took a deep breath in through his nostrils, steeling himself. Quickly sipped from his flask, that constant silver companion flashing in and out of the breast pocket of his jerkin in a span of seconds. And then, as fortified as he was going to get, he approached.
The clip of his boots against the cobbles didn’t quite grab Griff’s attention the way Mal had expected it would. Nor did his shadow falling across the current object of Griff’s focus, or the dry clearing of his throat.
So between strikes of the maul, Mal let a few words fall from his lips: “Preparing for tomorrow when everyone else has already gone home? Whoever hired you should really raise your pay.”
At that, Griff left the heavy tool embedded in the chopping block and pushed some dark hair out of his face with a scarred hand, blinking sweat from his eyes at the intrusion.
Mal rarely glanced in a mirror, but he still had some idea from Griff’s startled expression of how he must look: like some kind of gray ghost with his woolen cloak around his shoulders. Still wearing the same style of patched and torn hunter-green jerkin over an equally mended shirt and brown cloth pants worn thin at the knee, because he had never taken great care of his things; cool gray eyes always running some calculation; the set of a jaw that was always braced for impact; crooked nose reset too many times to count; tawny skin already deepened by the start ofsummer, more like Wynnie’s than Griff’s eternally pale complexion; shaggy golden hair tied back in some semblance of a bun by a leather strap, full of so many knots that at this point he would have to cut most of it off just to run a comb through it.
He looked like death warmed over, and he felt like it too, having to stand here facing the man he’d almost put in an untimely grave. It was all he could do not to roll up his sleeve and rake his nails over the raven’s feathers on his forearm until he bled.
Griff was silent for so long that Mal was about to ask if he needed some kind of help. When he finally spoke, he said dryly, tentatively, into the air between them, “Can I get that in writing? Addressed to my employer?”
Just before the light shifted, a hint of a grin slipped across Mal’s face, echoing back across the years to a time when things were so much simpler. When it was the three of them, just them and Alys, invincible in their bond and existing in their own narrow world where they were certain that one day, they would be even greater heroes than their parents had been, writing their own legacy together.
Yet that had been nothing more than a dream, an empty promise. Mal could count on two hands the number of times he and Griff had spoken in nearly ten years.
