“The knife probably fell off his belt, and by the time he realized it—if he ever did—he was already on the road to start a new life when he met with some misfortune,” Mal muttered darkly. “Guy always was a little …” He twirled a finger in the air. “You know, not all there.”
Alys shot him a scowl.
Griff didn’t offer any ideas of his own, though he knew the full story better than either of them because he was the one who’d questioned Wynnie about it the most: Four friends rode off to war to kill a dragon—Seimon and Aurora Sayer, his parents; Garth Pryce, Mal’s father, whose wife had died fighting a giant when Mal was still a baby; and Rhun Kindrick-Mordecai, arguably the most skilled warrior among them. Wynnie had taken care of all three children while they were on that journey—and, at some point in that uncertain time when Rhun was presumed dead, met Vic—and realized she would be keeping them for a long time to come when only Rhun returned, declaring the boys his own in honor of his fallen friends.
But Rhun had come back changed. Startling at loud noises, prone to fits, sometimes unable to speak above a whisper for days at a time. Missing a couple of fingers from one hand.
The war had long been over by the time he resurfaced. He had been held captive somewhere, tortured for information about the Wardens’ plans to round up scattered bands of the dark queen’s forces, and escaped only after managing to kill one of his keepers. They patched him up in Stormveil, but not even the elves’ best healers with their centuries of knowledge could fully restore his mind.
And then, a few years into raising Griff and Mal alongside his daughter, he disappeared on this treasure-hunting trip with a couple of friends who had also survived the war—this time forgood. Griff knew that Alys needed to believe he died a hero, stalked in the Mire by servants of the dark queen and dragged off to be quietly murdered by old enemies while his friends were sleeping. He also knew that Mal had already observed enough leaving in his brief lifetime to decide that’s just what Rhun had done in the end, meeting his demise in the midst of deserting his family.
The truth, Griff suspected, lay somewhere between Alys’s and Mal’s versions of things. Rhun had probably been having one of his bad spells when he left the company of his friends unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Might have been somewhere else in his mind altogether when he did something like stumble into the lake and accidentally drown.
His friends, by their account, had searched the area for well over a day before something startled them so badly that they were forced to flee, even though they were closing in on the fabled treasure. They refused to discuss it, even with Wynnie.
Griff thought it likely that they knew what had really happened to him and simply didn’t want to cause any further pain by recounting his last moments.
Perhaps Griff and his companions were about to come close to reliving those moments as they followed Rhun’s map.
Chapter FourteenStupid Mistakes
Back in Linden, Mal’s mornings were generally uneventful. He would often greet the sun with a groan as it streamed in through the window of his childhood bedroom right at eye level and roll over to press his face deeper into his pillow, claiming a moment of peace before the patter of little feet began or a clamor rose from the kitchen as Vic attempted to cook breakfast.
Inevitably, Mags would burst into the room, making a flying leap onto the mattress to rouse her uncle and then leading him by the hand toward the kitchen—allowing him no time to pull on a shirt, though the mess of scars across his chest and back had mostly faded over the years and no longer earned so many questions from the girl. Meanwhile, he would half listen as a stream of words flowed past his ears from Rodric about some game or other he had been playing with the neighbor boy across the creek. Mal wouldn’t even attempt a response until he was at least on his second cup of tea, a splash from his flask sometimes added on a listless morning.
He would kiss Derry’s favorite doll good morning as she held it up to him. Ruffle Mags’s pale hair or Rodric’s golden head,whichever he could reach as they orbited the adults in the cottage, and rub his eyes with his other hand as he contemplated how best to spend the day. Fishing at the creek, perhaps, or better yet, waylaying a wagon brimming with silkweed that was bound for Mayfair proper. He didn’t smoke the stuff himself, but there was good money to be had from shipments like those. Later, he would consider a call for tea at the Widow Isabel’s that would surely drag on longer than he’d like.
In sleepy Linden, there were no moments of gut-wrenching fear, no glittering promises of riches and the protection they could provide. To some, such days might hold a sense of understated luxury compared to their current demanding circumstances—swapping well-tended hearths for restless campfires, favorite hand-thrown mugs for battered tin cups, quiet strolls along neatly kept village paths for the drudgery of splashing through stagnant water.
Yet Mal was more awake out here, more alive breathing in the humid air and sweating it out in this unfamiliar territory than he ever had been in a cozy town too small to contain his ambitions. Even if they might be traveling in step with Rhun’s ghost, the man as much a mystery to Mal in death as he had been in life.
At least this morning was, if nothing else, filled with purpose. They were finally gaining ground again—Little Griff’s hooves leaving deep impressions in the softening earth—toward ancient barrows brimming with riches, even if they wouldn’t get to keep what they found. Mal kept unfolding the map, turning it this way and that as if doing so might give him a better sense of direction toward Rhun’s elusive X deep in the heart of the Mire.
The edges of this swamp weren’t so different from the Wyrmwood closer to home. Mal even recognized a few of the birds making calls to one another. Sometimes Griff whistled cheerfully back at them in imitation of their unique sounds, and Mal caught his eye, impressed. Bards and their party tricks.
They had already seen two or three rotroses, the luminous scarlet-red flowers that shunned the sunlight and whispered seductively to passersby to entice them down to their level so they could consume flesh with their acid. The trio gave the bloody blossoms a wide berth, and Mal hummed softly under his breath to help drown out anything he didn’t want to hear as they passed, occasionally rubbing the mule’s neck to reassure him too.
He also spotted a handful of the dark queen’s actual servants at a distance, phantoms whose eyes glowed green—something he now recognized as the mark of her enchantment, her command over a creature or spirit. They leered at him, all ephemeral bony limbs and silently screaming blackened lips. Each time he happened to catch a glowing eye, the spirits mouthed something at him and held up their fingers—or what was left of them—counting down the time he had remaining to reach the treasure. It didn’t rile him, much, beyond the uncomfortable prickling of the feathers on his arm. He knew the terms, he knew the time, and this was the sort of behavior he expected from dead things—unlike the shadow that continued to follow them, whose eye color he couldn’t begin to guess.
For now, however, the most curious sight afforded to him was Griff, who pulled off his dark, sweaty shirt when they stopped for a moment by a clear-enough-looking pool to give the mule some water and rest. Last time he saw the other man like this, Mal’s eyes had been entranced by the way Griff’s muscles contracted as he raised his splitting maul to hew another piece of wooden beam. This time he noticed other things too, like the thin dark line of a recent scar that started below Griff’s navel and disappeared past the waistband of his pants.
The scar he was responsible for.
Griff was close enough that he could have run a finger along the uneven surface of the mostly healed wound. But he wasn’t naïve enough to think that a simple touch, even one that meanteverything, could erase his part in what had happened there or ease his own guilt.
He deserved to feel guilty about that forever.
Griff loved him, and he had nearly been the death of him. Still might be. The Mire wasn’t exactly the kind of place anyone went for a relaxing vacation. Or went at all.
Mal was just about to glance away when Griff caught him staring, and their eyes locked. “I got stabbed in the Wyrmwood,” Griff said, running a hand down his stomach, “by not-bandits. Wynnie handled it.”
Mal wanted to drop to his knees and beg forgiveness. He wanted to tell Griff what he had done and how much he hated himself for it. How he never would have imagined that Griff would be a target, or else he would have fought to secure protection for him long ago. Not that he was exactly high up enough to demand that much of Kage. This life-or-death hunt in the Mire was the best he could negotiate.
But with those green eyes looking so warmly into his, he could barely make a sound. Even Griff seemed to find the prolonged silence strange after a time, so when Mal got his tongue working again, he said lightly, teasingly, “How about that. You and Wynnie finally have something in common.”
Their former guardian had a scar in about the same place. Hers was from an orc attack that had left her with her guts spilling out between her fingers, and still she had stayed on her feet until the fight was won. She had beaten the infection that followed, too, and returned to the world no worse for wear except for a new mark on her already thoroughly decorated skin.
Griff shook his head, turning to the mule as it twitched its ears to swat away a cloud of hovering midges, and gave the creature an affectionate scratch on its hindquarters. “Figures if I got something from her, it wouldn’t be her sword skills or the stare that can frighten off anyone who crosses within a mile of her.”
