“Look!” The foreman grinned, flinging his arm wide above Mal’s head.
Mal suspected he had meant to nudge him in the side and missed.
Griff pointed with his other hand this time, indicating two large scraps of fluffy cloud overhead that had collided to form the clumsy shape of a pouncing cat. “It’s Little Mal.”
“Shut up,” Mal ordered, though thanks to the berries, without his usual ire.
Griff pointed to a different one. “And there’s Whiskey, the dog.”
They used to play this game on golden afternoons after they’d had their fill of swimming or sheep tipping, a sacred outing on which Alys never joined them (on account of it being mean to the sheep, she said, though they had never actually invited her, either). As far as they were concerned, the sheep needed a little excitement now and then and never came away sporting so much as a bruise. They had even made a little game of trying to catch the sheep’s bell collar, which generally ended with bruises on their own knees and unchecked amounts of laughter, after which they would practice their cloud spotting while trying to catch a breath. For a few glorious years, they were the menace of several local farmers.
“I think that one’s a turtle,” Mal offered groggily a few minutes later, trying to pretend this was normal, that they could still share anything without the fear of Griff ruining it. “See?” He arced his body a little closer to Griff’s and pointed at a domed shape above them from which wisps of cloud protruded like a head and a tiny tail.
Griff smiled, if somewhat hesitantly.
At that, Alys finally looked up from her drawing to survey the pair of them fondly. “Isn’t this great?” she asked, her dilated eyes shimmering with sincerity. “The three of us, finally together again?”
Mal turned hastily away and retched in the grass.
Chapter NineKnights and Robbers
Once they had recovered enough to drink some water and Griff remembered how to put one foot in front of the other, they did exactly what Mal had planned. They hiked through the fields that bordered the road, using the tall grass as a screen to keep them from view, and persisted through the crisp, star-flecked night with the wind whispering secrets in their ears until sunup.
By the time they were ready to finally make camp the following night, though Griff glanced back a time or two, no cheerful chimney smoke from the houses in Linden could be seen on the horizon. In fact, there were no dwellings in this vast swath of the Plains of Plenty, only grass and the occasional rocky outcropping, some stray boulders and palm-sized stones.
… And one large ruined fortress, its roof long ago scalped by whoever had felt it would stroke his ego to conquer this unimpressive place between the Mire and Mayfair. It was to this hunched and weathered stone outcropping that Mal was leading them now, following a line of recent boot prints in the earth as darkness fell around them.
It was cold, and the constant wind stung their cheeks. Griff’s feet ached from the punishing pace; Alys and Mal might go on “business trips” like this with some frequency, but he wasn’t used to covering so much distance without a proper break, especially with a wound he could still feel much too often. No one seemed to feel much like talking, so the silence was broken only by the calls of hawks and killdeer, though Griff had noticed Alys watching him with some concern, as if there were something she wanted or needed to say.
“Are you really okay?” she finally asked him as Mal lengthened his stride and cut ahead, scrabbling up the hillside on which the old fortress crouched. The faint clunk of his scabbard against the walls could be heard as he started inspecting the place for signs of other recent visitors, like the boot prints they had been tracking.
Griff observed his movements, however faintly. Most of his attention was on Alys, on her hands twisting the end of her long braid, on her wide eyes fixed on his face with a touch more presence than what he was coming to realize was her normal state—a few mushrooms each day. Had she noticed how much his wound still pained him despite being half out of it all the time? They hadn’t really talked about it back in Linden; he didn’t want anyone thinking he was weak, or weaker than they did already after he had barely survived the attack.
“I mean,” she continued, apparently sensing the need for clarity, “do you want to go home? Do you need to? I feel like … it’s my fault you’re out here, and so far it isn’t going how I thought it would.”
Griff exhaled slowly, holding up a hand to signal that he needed a minute to think. It was a heavy question on next to no rest.
Alys nodded, glancing away from him and up toward the half-moon that watched over them with a ghostly light, barely gilding the fortress and the grass barrens to the east with silver.Small dells and tall brush dominated the west and north, eventually coalescing into the thick tangle of the Mire, which remained out of sight even as they began to climb the hill behind Mal.
“I’m no worse for the wear than I was already. Not in any way a hot bath and a long night’s sleep in a real bed couldn’t cure,” Griff said finally, scrubbing a hand over the two days of stubble darkening his jaw. “But I still don’t really understand why you asked me out here in the first place. Or had Mal do it. I’d like to know,” he offered softly.
Alys scrambled up a patch of gravel to gain the level ground of the fortress, extending a hand to pull Griff up. He didn’t need the help, but he took it all the same.
“Maybe one day soon, you will,” she answered, infuriatingly cryptic, turning away so that her face was unreadable. “Maybe being out here—you’ll start to see what I see.”
“I see that you have charcoal on your mouth,” Griff called after her as she slipped fluidly between a gap in the stones.
She giggled as she flashed out of sight.
He didn’t follow as quickly this time. Rather, head spinning and tight from lack of sleep, he dropped onto half of a well-weathered large rock hewn open and took a moment alone. Somewhere in the distance, the yowl of coyotes rose from the Mire. The sound was clearer here, where even the half-rock walls still standing provided some shelter from the unchecked winds that whipped across the plains.
Griff imagined Liam had a fire going in the hearth. It was late, but they liked staying up when the rest of the world was quiet and still. He could almost hear echoes of Liam reading a bedtime story to Badger, one of the children’s adventure books that the locksmith loved picking up from the market secondhand. Griff had been known to listen in too, adding oil to the lamp so they could get in just one more chapter before his eyes closed.
He had left behind a good relationship, and for what? A phantom of a boy he’d loved and the ghost of a man who had been a father figure for a few years? Maybe he had made a mistake, chasing shadows when he wasn’t even a Warden yet and might never be now, a thought that made him ache with emptiness as if he’d lost something vital, an organ rather than a limb.
Then a hand thrust through the gap in the stones near where Alys had disappeared, warm and real, the dark, slightly crusty lines of raven’s feathers stark on the inside of that tawny wrist where they escaped from the cuff of the sleeve.
“Planning to join us sometime tonight?” Mal asked him—not unkindly, Griff thought—as the thief made his way fully back through the gap.
