“It doesn’t really feel like a person,” Mal went on. “More like … a great, big empty. Like it’s hungry. Like it could feast on me or any of us and still not be satisfied,” he explained, hitting the flask again. “Tonight it was behind you, Alys.”
“I could have gone the rest of my life without knowing that,” she said, too loudly in the otherwise quiet night.
Griff half wondered if this shadow had been trying to warn him off his recent life choices. “Sounds like some kind of omen,” he considered out loud, leaning closer to the fire. As he filled up a soup mug and set it in front of Mal, he thought of the few people he knew who had passed. There was only one shadow that really linked the three of them. “Could it be … him? Rhun, but in disguise somehow?”
He, too, darted a glance at Alys. Her other hand, he noted, had reached for one of the knives on her belt. It flashed in the firelight as she moved slightly, pointed out into the night as if to serve a warning to anything unseen that might think of approaching.
“What?” Mal blinked. “The shadow—Rhun? No. I don’t think he’d want to hide; he’d want us to witness him in all his knightly glory.”
Alys frowned but didn’t say anything.
“Then it must belong toher. To the Shadow Queen,” Griff concluded.
“What the hell would she want with a couple nobodies like us?” Mal said quickly, exchanging a glance with Alys that Griff couldn’t begin to interpret. “Besides, if itwasone of her lackeys, I’m pretty sure it would have no problem showing me exactly what it thought of me. Whatever this is, it hasn’t announced its demands yet.”
Griff nudged Mal’s mug a little closer to him, concerned by the way his eyes were starting to swim behind the glaze of all that whiskey. Without a word, the thief fell onto his back in the grass, staring up at the cosmic soup above rather than the one in his untouched cup. The flask fell from his hand and rolled toward Alys, and he started rubbing his tattooed forearm.
“Well, since you can’t hear it, have you considered offering it a quill and ink?” Griff asked, mostly teasing.
But Mal must not have heard him right, because he answered with, “Of course I want you alive. It’s why I stay away, though you haunt me like this too.”
It didn’t even make much sense. But it must have to Mal, who went on slurring as his eyes fell closed, “I’m gonna … gonna die, one day soon. Real soon. And then you all can … live free and easy … no more danger, no more shadows, no more big empty.” The words were like an exhale of relief.
Griff looked over at Alys, who didn’t seem remotely alarmed. Mal getting himself into this state couldn’t be an infrequent occurrence. But something he had said—probably the part about Rhun, who she still missed dearly—had cut a deep line of thought into her brow, and she was staring into the fire, hugging her knees to her chest.
Wishing for a sip of that flask himself, Griff swallowed some water from a canteen instead and then pulled an extra blanket from the travelers’ pack. Mal stirred as Griff covered him, blinking his silver eyes open to slits narrowed against the firelight, just enough to make out Griff’s face.
Griff had to work not to ask whether the shadow was behind him right then as he smoothed some of Mal’s hair back so it wouldn’t end up in his mouth as he slept.
“You should take better care of yourself if you want to make it home, you clumsy fuck,” Mal murmured a touch more coherently, though his eyes were closing again already. “Be more careful, or all of this will have been for nothing.”
The sour stench of the drink turned Griff’s stomach right along with the words he didn’t quite understand. “Sure, if you’ll eat some breakfast with me tomorrow, you whiskey-soaked shit. You drink too much.”
He wasn’t certain if Mal’s answering groan was a yes, and would have to try again in the morning. Still, he adjusted the edges of the blanket, lingering beside the other man long enough to confess, “All this time, I thought you left me alone because you hated me. And I understood—I’d hate me for what I said back then too.”
“I … do hate you. So much. All the time. It’s bad,” Mal mumbled—to Griff, to the darkness, or perhaps to both; Mal didn’t seem to know himself. His breathing grew heavier and his eyelids fluttered once or twice, but he didn’t open them again.
Griff rose heavily on his good leg and stumbled back to the fireside, where Alys now had the flask in hand, his mind turning over the strange day and the even stranger things Mal had seen, and said. Mal stayed away because he wanted Griff to live. It made a certain sense, the longer he thought about it. No one attracted danger quite like Mal.
But rather than staying lost in his own musings, he looked at Alys and, deciding she probably also needed some present company tonight, reached out with one arm to pull her into a tight hug. She leaned in harder, and so did he. He’d needed this as much as she had.
“I had to choose him back then, you know,” she confessed to his shoulder. He stilled his breath, listening carefully. They hadn’t really talked about it since they’d rekindled their friendship, and he’d started to think they never would. “Mal had no one to look out for him. You did, though. You were always going to be okay. And I hoped, coming out here, that both of you might finally look at each other and see how things could be better than okay …”
When he started to draw back for a better look at her, he found her eyes overly bright with a tempest of emotions yet hazy with the influence of whiskey. She went on in the quiet. “I’ve been wondering—what happened the day we left town? Is Liam waiting for you at home, or …?”
Griff heard his answering laugh distantly ring hollow. “Waiting to say ‘I told you so’ at my funeral, more like. We broke up,” he explained, his old friend’s presence easing the recounting of painful details, like the way his favorite lute had gotten mangled as Liam did some impromptu summer cleaning. “And a part of me doesn’t want it to really be over, but the part that wants to keep following Mal is still so much louder, so I couldn’t stay.” After another moment’s thought, he added firmly, “Speaking of Mal—he doesn’t need to know any of this.”
Alys’s eyes narrowed, Griff still fixed at their center. “Then how will he ever see what you gave up to be here? I do, you know. I was there at the beginning. I saw what was between you two back then, and had to watch as it all fell apart. And now I see how all the jagged edges could still fit together just so.”
Griff wasn’t entirely sure what she was getting at, but he was certain of at least one thing. “Come on, Alys, he’s never really seen me. It’s time I made my peace with it.”
“Fairy tales. Princesses and frogs,” she muttered on a gust of breath tinged with whiskey. Leaning forward slightly, she asked with the spark of an idea burning bright, “Can I kiss your cheek? Just in case it does the trick and breaks a curse, though we both know I’m no princess and you’re certainly no frog.”
Which made absolutely no sense, but then, this was Alys. He nodded, pulling her in closer with the arm he had draped around her shoulders.
And then her lips brushed soft and dry over his cheek near the corner of his mouth, full of gentle affection, though all Griff could think in the moment was how unfair it was that Mal could enjoy kissing women when he had tried but never could, that he would never be just the right shape for the one he wanted most to want him too.
“So, am I supposed to turn into a prince now?” Griff teased as they both drew back. “I don’t feel any different yet.”
