“I always thought you loved it in Linden. Or at least in Stormveil, up above everything. I thought you hated all this.” Mal swatted at a mosquito near his ear, then swept his hand in a grander gesture to indicate the waiting dark trees of the Mire and the plains behind them. “But if you actually like being out here, I have it on good authority that there are treasures out in all this wilderness like you wouldn’t believe, not just the one we’re after …”
Griff had seen the particular gleam that lit Mal’s eyes as he mentioned treasure a few times before, when he spoke of how well certain jobs paid. It was a look that contained both passion and ambition, a dragon’s hunger for a hoard of gold and shiny things.
“Actually, the place I feel most at home is out in the Wood,” he said as he started wrapping Mal’s left hand. It was a tribute to this shaky new peace between them that he didn’t addwhen I’m not getting stabbed in the middle of the night.
“Where we used to race the dogs and try to grab the bell off the sheep’s collar?” Mal asked, looking up from his hands again and narrowing his eyes, not in anger or derision this time but as if studying something new: a face that had been present for so much of his life.
Griff nodded as he started to wrap bandages over Mal’s other hand. Those hands had done some damage to him over the years, but he was just as guilty. “Back when we didn’t fight.” He glanced up, cautiously, to the other man’s face. “I don’t want to fight with you anymore. That’s not who I want to be to you. I want …” With Mal returning that gaze, he couldn’t quite bring himself to say more than, “… so much, with you. But most of all, whether you can love me that way or not, I want you to know that you can count on me again.”
Mal pulled his newly bandaged hands back. Griff thought he might grab his mittens himself and rise. Instead, he demanded of Griff, or the Mire, or perhaps the odd shadow he kept seeing, “Who the hell am I supposed to fight, then, if not you?”
His eyes moved back to Griff’s, and something in Mal seemed to coil and shift, a serpent picking a new direction to strike. He reached out and grabbed a handful of Griff’s black shirt as if he needed something to steady himself even while on the ground. “I’m not sure I know how to stop throwing punches at any of us,” he admitted on a bitter breath. “But I do know that my world changes whenever you come and go from it. If you don’t stay …”
Caught by the front of his shirt, his heart picking up speed, Griff leaned closer. Just like the night before, blood was pounding in his ears, but he was still sure of what he had just heard from how closely he was watching Mal’s lips. “I want to stay—for good, this time.”
And while there was no further tug on his shirt, Griff kept leaning in until his lips were just brushing over the curve of Mal’s ear as he spoke—words for him alone. “I want this. You. Your problems, your cold, your foul mouth, your warmth. I’m sick of living in my head. I wasted years wishing things were different, but I’ve made my choice. I made it even before I told you the truth, when I agreed to come. Even if it’s to my own peril and youdo kill me. At least I’ll have died on my own terms. Maybe even died happy, and how many can say that?”
Mal didn’t offer him the reassurance of any words in return, but his bandaged hand shook slightly where it gripped Griff’s shirt. And as Griff’s lips grazed over his ear with steady words about wanting and staying, a low groan slipped from Mal’s throat.
Griff wondered if the Meanest Mouth in Mayfair was as soft and pliant as it looked.
“Gods, why now?” Mal hissed suddenly, releasing Griff’s shirt. He started fumbling at his belt with a bandaged hand, trying to grab his hunting knife while glaring at something over Griff’s shoulder and demanding, “What do you want? Just show your face or fuck off already!”
But when Griff turned, heart lodged in his throat, all he saw was the breeze stirring the grass, the morning shadows of the bramble and dell, and the waiting Mire. And Alys, clutching something small and pointed that gleamed dully in her hands like steel hidden beneath a solid layer of caked-on dirt.
“What is it?” she called as she strode quickly over to them, her gaze darting every which way and—like Griff—apparently finding nothing of note.
Her eyes eventually settled on Griff’s, the worry in them for once undisguised as Mal answered, “It was the shadow again. Right with you, Alys, while you were grabbing whatever the hell that is.”
Griff’s back stiffened with a chill despite the heat given off by the dying embers of their fire. He believed Mal, even without proof.
“But it’s gone now?” Alys asked, her voice sharpened by nerves.
“Yeah,” Mal said, still struggling to draw his knife with his bandaged hands. “It disappeared when you started walking over here.”
“You mentioned that stabbing the ghost in the cottage hadn’t done much good—you think whatever this is can be killed or frightened off with a blade?” Griff was able to find words much more easily knowing the thing was no longer around. For now.
“I hope so,” Alys said passionately. “I’ll even do it, as I won’t have to see it.”
Mal sighed and stopped trying to draw his knife. “I don’t think a blade will work, no. But—I’m also not just going to sit here and let it hurt you, either of you. Maybe it hasn’t even made up its mind what it wants to do, but it’s going to have to get in line behind some much-bigger problems if it wants a piece of me.” With a frustrated breath, he gave a dark look to the mud on his boots. “You two could turn around here. I can handle this myself. In fact—that’s what I should be doing.”
“It’s just some shadow. It can’t be that scary if it doesn’t even have a face,” Griff insisted—he wasn’t ready to go home yet, to abandon Mal and his bandaged hands that could hardly grip a knife out where wargs and trolls and orcs hunted. He actually wanted to stay. “Whatever it wants, Mal, it hasn’t hurt any of us yet, so perhaps it can’t, or perhaps it doesn’t even want to.”
Mal didn’t look convinced by the sudden show of bravado. “Seems like shadows cling to me these days. A wiser man might consider seeking sunnier climes.”
A grin flickered across Griff’s face. “Good thing no one ever said I was wise, then. You saw the way I ran down that mule.”
“I’m sorry I missed it,” Alys said, but despite the teasing in her voice, she didn’t quite smile. Instead, she held out the item she was cradling. “You two should look at this. I found it just over there—kicked it, or I might not have seen it.”
She pointed to a patch of earth that was more mud than grass as Mal peered over her shoulder at the dirt-crusted dagger. “Found yourself a bit of … bit of treasure … already?”
His voice faltered as he took in the shape of the dagger in Alys’s hands, and Griff quickly saw why. The weapon was muddy and worse for having been out in what was surely years’ worth of weather, but there was no mistaking the silver raven etched atop the hilt. The three of them had only ever seen one other piece like it—one that belonged to Rhun. It was also, according to Wynnie’s inventory, one of the weapons he’d had on him when he and his friends departed for the Mire. And now here it was again, looking as if it had been lying in wait for quite some time before Alys’s boot trampled over it. Waiting for them to find it—unless something or someone had wanted them to?
“Huh. Maybe our extra shadow actuallyisRhun,” Mal muttered, though Alys was stubbornly shaking her head, like she wasn’t even willing to consider the possibility that her father had been reduced to nothing more than a faceless phantom. “Guess it would make sense that he’s trying to stick so close to us, maybe look out for us.”
Griff half wished he could see the spirit too, if only to say a more final goodbye. To thank him for the dagger, which was perhaps his way of offering them some closure. But then he thought of Vic’s bait traps that she set in the Wyrmwood to hunt, a little morsel inside to encourage some creature or other to come closer. He wasn’t normally given to such flights of fancy, but he couldn’t entirely shake the thought as he watched Mal wipe away enough of the mud to read the initials etched faintly just below the bird’s talons:R.K.M.
“What do you think happened out here?” Alys asked haltingly, cradling the dagger to her chest as if it might bring her some comfort. “Do you think his friends were lying and they killed him—or someone did—before he ever set foot in the Mire?” She only had Griff and Mal to ask, after all. Rhun’s friends had passed away some years back, and Wynnie had never been interested in looking for answers. She had been morefocused on bloodying any of his enemies in Mayfair she could get her hands on.
