Griff swung with his maul again, not so different from chopping wood. He laughed, dry and humorless, at his own absurd observation as he discovered that severing the undead orc’s head from its neck stopped all the parts from moving. He hadn’t gotten to battling revenants in his Warden’s training yet.
“Go for the heads! Cut off the heads!” he shouted, and as soon as Alys had cut through the neck of one orc and was finally able to deal with the one tearing at her hair, he reasoned she could manage on her own and turned to look for Mal.
The other two orcs had him pinned to the ground. One was gnawing on his boot while the other drooled in his face, growling something too soft to make out, claws stabbing through his much-abused jerkin as the orc trapped his arms in place, rendering his hunting knife useless.
Griff had no idea what Mal had meant about this attack being his fault. But he couldn’t dwell on it now, not when Mal needed him.
He swung his maul again, and as the head of the orc pinning Mal flew clean off and landed somewhere near Alys, their eyes met over the stump of its neck. Mal’s were shining, coin bright, with a mix of fear and gratitude. Looking at Griff like he was more than something to be protected and worried over. Looking at him like he was a hero.
Griff smiled for a breathless second. And then, so did Mal.
Yet there was still the matter of the revenant trying to swallow Mal’s foot, boot and all. As the creature clamped its jaws down again with renewed ferocity, apparently upset at the loss of its companion, Mal grabbed his fallen knife a little clumsily in a bandaged hand and growled, “Let me have this one.”
He had gotten a good start on hewing through layers of old, leathery muscle and sinew, hacking his way toward the creature’sspinal cord with extra viciousness—as if the thing had insulted him on a more personal level than simply hungering for his living flesh—when Alys called softly, “Guys, look at this!”
Griff clutched his maul tighter and whirled around to face her. Yet all three orc corpses surrounding her were missing their heads, their remaining body parts unmoving. No more twitching fingers scratched at the earth. Alys herself looked unscathed beyond a few claw marks on her cheek slowly oozing beads of red and the tangle at the back of her head where one of the revenants had pulled out a bit of hair.
But if she was at all distressed or hurt, she didn’t show it. She had picked up the orc’s head Griff had sent flying, and now that Mal had dispatched the last revenant, she was busy admiring its features up close. When she realized her friends were staring, she grinned tiredly at them and held the head aloft.
“Darling, isn’t it?” she said of the withered head with scraps of shriveled flesh still filling the hollows of its gray cheeks. Deprived of its second life, its glassy eyes stared out dispassionately at the rainy afternoon as the wind stirred what few tufts of wiry hair still clung to its scalp. When no one agreed with her, she added, “Just needs a bit of love. A spike, maybe, for mounting, and a comb run through his hair.”
Griff was still too shaken to form words, and his scar was throbbing in a way that demanded most of his focus, but he shook his head at her over the sound of Mal pointlessly stabbing the torso of the revenant he had already decapitated.
“For the record, this isnotmotivating,” the thief snarled at the corpse.
Griff blinked a question at Alys, but she only grinned and bopped what remained of the orc’s nose.
“He looks a bit like Leo Raintree, that asshole,” she declared, and suddenly, all three of them were laughing as the features oftheir old playground bully flashed to mind. “That settles it—I’m keeping it, and I’m calling it Leo. My very own treasure.”
That’s when Griff’s knees finally buckled, a pulsing pain from beneath his scar demanding that he put down the maul and stop playing hero.
The following day dawned clear of rain, a touch of morning mist burning off as they pushed deeper into the Mire while nursing new scrapes and bruises, deeper into places where mosquitoes and dragonflies were plentiful and where covering their heads to get through clouds of midges was a common occurrence. Where the path to either side was lit by the occasional glow of rotroses, by glossy blue clusters of poisonous berries on pretty purple bushes and lurid yellow vines that wrapped and strangled the trunks of trees with increasing frequency.
They didn’t talk much, and Griff guessed they were each still working through the events of the day before in their own way. He kept pace on the mule, who, if anything, seemed appreciative of their strange surroundings as a sort of vacation from the usual dull scenery of the roadside rather than flinching from any odd cries or rustlings in the bushes.
When they happened upon a swath of relatively dry ground, a gentle slope dotted with trees that climbed high enough to rise out of the muck, they made camp early, just before sunset. The discovery of something of value out here had spurred Mal to set an even more grueling pace today, but now Griff thought even he looked ready for a chance to catch his breath.
And count their riches. Naturally. They had all been too exhausted and shaken to do so the night before, and Mal had pushed them onward until they nearly collapsed. But tonight,after a quick supper from their rations, each of them emptied their pockets until they had a large pile of star-stamped silver coins sitting in front of them.
“Wait just a minute,” Mal said, pulling out the large goblet he had taken from among the coins and filling it with amber liquid from his flask. “There. That’s better.”
Alys frowned at the cup, at its scratched gems and what looked like rust on the stem. “That thing could be poisoned, for all we know.”
“Worth the risk,” Mal declared as he knocked back a sip, toasting his companions and then toasting the coin piles, his eyes full of the metal stars but never once glancing up at the ones glimmering overhead.
“You’ll have a hard time using these anywhere near Mayfair,” Griff pointed out. “The few who recognize them will know you came by them through unusual means, and no one else will know what to do with them.”
Mal scooted a little closer to him and cracked a sharp-toothed grin, setting Griff’s pulse racing at the unexpected closeness. “All very good points. Which begs the question: How do you feel about counterfeiting? Going to turn us in to your Warden pals, or will you look the other way if we restamp these to look like Maysilvers?”
Griff didn’t even have time to think of a reply before Mal cut a look over to Alys and added, “You’re in charge of design—that is, if you’re interested in lending your artistic talents to such a worthy cause?”
She leaned toward the pile of coins, scattering a few bits of silver as she grinned and ran her fingers over the treasure spread before them. “Of course I’ll do it. I’d love to.” She turned to Griff expectantly, eyes wide and hopeful. “Well? Will you help us too?”
She seemed to think there was a chance. Seemed to think Griff was one of them again.
But Mal looked bleak and withdrawn as he watched Griff and sipped from his goblet, his body rigid with tension, the same posture he held when they fought and he was waiting for a blow to fall. Griff’s chest ached at the sight.
“I think,” he said slowly, because he was too deep in this swamp now to map himself a way out, and if he hadn’t wanted that, if he didn’t still want Mal after everything, he would have turned back well before this, “that we’re going to need to make some really big purchases to get our supply circulating in the local market, so you’d better jot down all the things you want to buy for your kids, Alys.”
