Her finger pushed into Griff’s neck, seeking a pulse, but while he felt the weight and chill of her touch, he didn’t see her anymore.
He was in another part of the Wood altogether now, closer to home, and it was a riot of summer’s green overgrowth. The air was like honey, thick with humidity and sweet. Birds were singing. The muddy ground was a confusion of centaur tracks and dogs’ paw prints. Nearby, in the bracken just out of sight, one was barking.
“Griff, please.” Someone interrupted the dog’s fuss, perhaps somewhere behind him, their voice breaking.
He almost turned to see who it was.
But now, standing before him was Mal—not the twenty-six-year-old surly asshole he’d spent the last several years avoiding but the closest friend he’d ever had, a skinny boy of twelve or thirteen with tawny skin, messy blond hair, and an imp’s wide grin—and Griff had missed him more than he could put into words.
“Are you two coming or what?” Alys called from just up ahead, out of sight. She was the third in their trio, the keeper of their secrets and the only other person who knew what it was like growing up in the immense and often unwelcoming shadow of heroes.
Mal reached out a beckoning hand, and that was all the invitation Griff needed to step off into a warm, sunlit afternoon with his best friends at his side, heading to their favorite swimming hole and making plans to race their little wooden boats. Just like old times.
Chapter TwoToo Bad
It was fine, really, that the Widow Isabel’s house never smelled particularly good. Sometimes you couldn’t wait for the stars to align—you just got on with it. Blood, sweat, tears, and momentum.
Mal Pryce knew that lesson like he knew the weight of his favorite knife in his hand; he was always doing what was necessary, though it rarely felt heroic. If he didn’t, who would?
Leaning back in his chair at the widow’s small kitchen table away from his mug of untouched tea, he tried his best not to breathe in that slightly floral, nauseating cocktail of soaps and faint decay that always seemed to permeate the dwelling of anyone very old and ill. The scent of looming death caught in his shoulder-length tangles of dark-gold hair would haunt him for the rest of the night.
It was nature. It was fated.
Life was short, fast, and brutal, and no one knew it better than he did.
One day, he was seventeen and thought he had the world: the loving two-parent household (even if Vic and Wynnie weren’t his real mothers and Wynnie had a tendency to fight first and askquestions later). He had a promising line on a job (with people who had been his dead parents’ enemies, but wasn’t that just the way of things? Money was money, no matter whose pocket it came from). He had two loyal best friends—until Griff told him that he was nothing to him and left Mal breathless and shaking on the living room floor when he stormed out, the beginning of years of silence and bitterness between them, something too broken to mend.
And the next day, Alys was leaving too, their once-unshakable trio fully dissolved. She was off to carve out her own reputation and make her mother proud, and she said she needed to do it alone.
She had vowed to him that she would never leave Mayfair, but people said things all the time and rarely meant them. Griff and Alys had both promised him long ago that the three of them would always be together. That they would always keep Mal safe from the wider world.
Empty words.
They had been his world. Nothing was safe.
Blink again, and he was down in the lawless, ruined city of Thrallkeld, far south of Mayfair, attempting to make a name for himself that had nothing to do with his dead parents, his adoptive ones, or the best friends he had only thought he had.
Leaving home for a place where he trusted no one and no one trusted him made perfect sense. Down there, he was a half-starved, gold-sick boy in a thief’s den, someone’s hand always in his pocket while he was busy cutting their purse. He weathered betrayal after betrayal, because something about it had become warm and familiar after a while.
Blink, and he was under a thief-lord’s knife, screaming with the worst pain he had ever known as the gangster carved up his chest for challenging him—no, that had been the second-worst pain. Worst of all was the certainty that no one was coming for him; the death of the tiny hope he’d been holding all along that Griff would come for him. He was utterly alone.
Blink. He was half alive in a witch’s cottage, being spoon-fed bone broth while he tried not to inhale the pungent scent of the poultice packing the grisly wound on his chest and did his best to avoid looking at the shadowy figures skulking about on the lawn—the spirits he could now see after having brushed shoulders with death. A curse, as far as he was concerned: punishment from the gods for his unlikely survival.
Blink. He was back in Mayfair, a dog with its tail tucked between its legs, returning to the only home he had ever known because he couldn’t think where else to go. He had failed in Thrallkeld. Failed at his dream of becoming king of the thieves. He was lucky his former employers still had a job for him—that all the skills he had honed in that ruined city made him more of an asset than ever.
Blink. Alys was home, carrying with her the weight of a reputation she hadn’t truly earned and a highborn boyfriend who didn’t truly fit her, and somehow they found their way back to friendship. Soon after, Griff was back from living with the elves—like he was so much better than other mere mortals—and they had nothing to say to each other with missing years in the way. But sometimes they came to blows, until Mal could hardly remember all the hurt that lay underneath. Those old feelings, the trust and tenderness and something bigger, something more than he had ever felt for another living soul—he’d taken them and buried them deep, shoved them underwater where there was no light or air so he didn’t have to walk around in the worst pain he’d ever known every single day.
Blink again and he was in the Widow Isabel’s house on a chilly spring evening, dropping around for tea after dinner as he did once a week these days. The old woman had put him on the deed to all the land north of Mayfair she wouldn’t be using, and he wanted to keep it that way. He was a businessman, and that meant having leads on any number of potential sources of incomeat any time. His employers didn’t need to know about any hustling he did on the side.
The widow’s teacup rattled as she set it in her saucer, and Mal pretended to take a bite of a dusty lavender shortbread cookie as his keen gray eyes studied the crow’s-feet at the corners of her washed-out blue ones.
He had never much cared for crows or ravens, the gossipy birds who skulked in dark, hidden places and served as spies for the Shadow Queen. Even if she was, technically speaking, his boss’s boss. He had once had the fleeting and overly whimsical notion that the birds might keep him safe as long as he was working for her, but that illusion had shattered long ago. As far as he was concerned, he’d made it this far because he kept himself safe.
“You sure like my cookies, dear,” Isabel observed in her reed-thin voice, giving Mal a strained smile. “Why don’t I pack you a few for the road?”
Mal nodded, already growing restless. The moon was rising; it was nearly time for him to head in to work for the evening. His real job.
Accepting the cloth-wrapped bundle of dry cookies, he saw himself out and headed down the winding lane, a quiet shadow in the lamplit streets that led from Isabel’s place to the green-and-white-striped cloth awning of a storefront that was, like all the shops around it, dark and closed up for the night.
