Slowly, Griff clasped that cold hand, now bereft of its mitten, and kept his face carefully blank as he rose. Or, at least, he tried to. But he couldn’t stop his eyes from roaming over Mal’s gold-stubbled face with a glimmer of that barely concealed hope he had spoken about back when Mal appeared at his work.
Hand in hand, they passed through the open wall and into the relative shelter of the roofless old stones that had endured after all this time.
Griff swayed slightly with tiredness as he picked his way among the debris and over to where the others had already dropped their packs against the most intact of the inner walls. Mal’s fingers tightened around his in answer, as if to steady him, brushing over some of the scars he’d asked about not long ago.
Mal paused for a moment, feeling over those rough little places again as his eyes moved from the hand in his to Griff’s face. But if he wanted to ask about the scars again, this time he didn’t give the question breath.
Before Griff could get his brain working to do anything—say, squeeze Mal’s fingers in answer, or unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth—Mal was moving on, dropping Griff’shand and saying with his usual confidence as the leader of their small, strange expedition, “We can lay out our bedrolls here, but we’re going to need to set a watch now that we’re out in the open like this. I’ll take the first.”
Griff settled into his bedroll and tried his best to get comfortable even with a few pebbles poking him in the side. Still, he was the sort of tired where sleep reclaimed him almost instantly despite the cold, despite the aches, despite the lingering question of why he was really here and the deepening concern that he wasn’t going to get answers anytime soon.
He awoke with a start to hazy indigo twilight, the moon hanging at half height, wondering what had disturbed his rest. Looking around, he found Mal fully out of their shelter and still on watch. He was gazing down the hillside with his usual distaste, like a king surveying an utterly disappointing piece of his tithe, his eyes almost as silver as his flask.
Beside him, Alys was sleeping on just her cloak, her blade within reach, as if she wanted to be ready to stab someone the instant she woke.
Turning and catching Griff’s eye, Mal crooked a beckoning finger.
Adrenaline quickly had him on his feet, grabbing his cloak—and on second thought, his sword—and joining his old friend outside the fortress.
Mal turned quickly at the sound of his approach, eyeing him up and down, his gaze glinting with some fresh light as the ends of his thick black scarf, once Griff’s, danced on their own in the breeze. “You really do look like your father sometimes,” he observed quietly, without inflection. “Maybe it’s the sword.”
The great Seimon Sayer, the Warden who’d ridden against the last living dragon on his beloved stallion Griffon and dealt the killing stroke even as the beast struck him down too. He might not have been in Griff’s life enough for him to truly rememberthe man, but he cast a long shadow that Griff hadn’t yet figured how to step out of, though he’d tried—making himself bigger or smaller didn’t seem to do a thing when they shared the same height, the same features, the same breadth of their shoulders.
“You know how to use that thing, right?” Mal asked, eyes narrowed in assessment.
Griff didn’t answer but managed not to roll his eyes. He’d spent years training with the elves, and if a centuries-old general couldn’t teach him a thing or two, it was probably hopeless.
Now he followed Mal’s gaze down the hillside, watching a small orange glow in the distance. Faint noises wafted up with the wind: a clatter of iron, a few muttered words becoming a cascade of laughter, and a soft whinny.
The firelight reflected in Mal’s eyes as he spoke in hushed tones. “There’s four of them. And they have a packhorse.” He pointed at a black speck moving away from the fire toward a pocket of shadow.
“So?” Griff asked, uncertain how any of this spelled trouble for them.
Digging into his pocket, Mal pulled out a length of twine and began to tie back his unruly, knotted hair. “You feel alert enough to make some bad decisions?” he asked Griff casually as he did so. His smile wasn’t warm; the glint in his eye made it something else entirely.
Griff studied the unhurried motions of that black speck a few moments more before observing softly, “You’ve always wanted a horse, haven’t you?”
Mal started unraveling the scarf around his neck as he answered. Wrapping it differently, covering his face with it so that only his eyes were visible, before he pulled up his cloak hood and adjusted the toggles. “It’s not about that,” he insisted, as though Griff had offended him. “When we grab that treasure”—he gestured vaguely in the direction of the Mire—“we’re going to needa way to carry it all back. Although,” he added, a crinkling around his eyes suggesting that he was grinning beneath the scarf, “I also want one just so I can name it Griff.”
With that, he put a foot down onto the rocky incline that made up this side of the hill, casually beginning his descent like he hadn’t just goaded Griff, knowing full well that he had always resented being named after his father’s stallion.
“Shouldn’t we wake Alys?” Griff called softly after him, choosing to ignore the slight.
Something sailed toward him, and he caught it instinctively: a crimson scarf, the one that had been Mal’s when the black one had been his.
“Wrap your face with this,” Mal instructed. “It’ll be just like sheep tipping. But better, because you’re doing it with the best in the business. The king of the thieves—well, one day.”
Griff had his answer, then. And he couldn’t resist being part of Mal’s scheme, not when it included him.
He picked his way quietly down the rocky hillside behind the other man, careful with where he was placing his feet so as not to send any stones falling ahead of them to announce their presence.
Partway down, Mal met him with a steadying hand that gripped his arm. “Careful on the job,” he said, slightly muffled by his scarf.
Confusion flitted through Griff’s eyes, the only part of his face visible beneath the crimson wool. He’d very much had the impression that Mal would only laugh if he did something like trip over one of these rocks—but then, there was a horse at stake. Something Mal wanted, something of value.
“Let’s go get that horse,” Griff muttered, taking a few more steps down the hillside and out of reach. “So I can listen to you argue with some other creature named Griff for a change.”
“ ‘Griffon was a really good horse,’ ” Mal quoted as he descended the final few steps back onto level ground, something Wynnie had told Griff often over the years when he complained about his name, even after he ultimately shortened it.
