He scrambled to his feet, far from a graceful thing, wincing against a growing headache. “Fuck!” Cursing to himself as Griff’s tall form retreated into the greenery, he started scanning their surroundings for his cast-off pants to ward against the morning chill.
Deep in a pocket of shade, a green-eyed ghost missing a few rib bones held up its hands and mouthed silently at him, pointing toward the waiting path. Scowling at it as he yanked his pants on, he then slumped down beside Alys, watching her rescue some blackened toast from the pan before she started arranging lumps of dough in another.
“He remembered you like cinnamon,” she remarked softly.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him,” Mal said lowly, poking at one of the buns until a bit of cinnamon oozed out the side. “Not like I did so many times before.” He grabbed the bun just to have something to do with his hands. “I didn’t know back then—how he felt. I had no idea.”
“But now you do,” she countered steadily. “And you both deserve the happiness you’re finding in each other, even if you hit a few bumps in the road along the way.”
He squeezed the bun. Just like kicking the teakettle, it felt like some kind of release. “You deserve to be happy too, Alys. If not with Theo, then—somebody new.”
“Who says I’m not already? Happy, that is,” Alys said lightly, making a neat ring of cinnamon buns inside the pan and leaving a hole in the center for Mal’s squished one. “The three of us are back together, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted. Well, besides being the one my babies tell all their secrets to instead of Vic. But I understand why it’s her.” She paused to swat a mosquito that landed on her cheek. “Of course, this isn’t my first pick of destinations, but Griff’s safety and your freedom matter most. And look, I know we’re taking a risk staying put this morning, but I’ll fight whatever comes our way. We’re still making good time, even if Her Dreadful Majesty is already getting antsy.”
Maybe they could rest their feet here just a little longer without consequence, but when it came to Alys’s happiness, Mal still wasn’t convinced. Ever since they had entered the Mire, there were new shadows gathering at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Maybe the swamp was wearing on her. Or maybe it was years of other people’s expectations—the man she almost but never married who wanted her to be a society lady, the mother who wanted her to be a warrior, when neither of those things was really her. Maybe she had more to learn about herself than their breakneck journey was allowing.
“Look,” he tried again. “This thing Griff and I are doing—if we’re still doing it,” he added, glancing off the way Griff had gone, “it can wait. We have the whole rest of our lives to explore that once we’re home. We don’t need to figure it out in front of you when we should all be focused on getting to the treasure.”
“Why wait?” Alys asked earnestly, no longer fussing with breakfast but really looking at him. “You two can kiss in front of me. I thought that might happen out here. Hoped it would, even. I’ve known how you feel about each other for a while now, even if neither of you has ever wanted to listen to anything I had to say on the matter. I suspect you could have figured it out for yourself if you’d paid even the slightest attention to the lines of his songs.” Her face softened as she added, “He makes you laugh, Mal, like I haven’t heard since we were kids. That’s its own kind of music.”
It took a few minutes for Mal to dredge up more words of his own as he digested this. In the quiet, Alys continued, “You expect everything of Griff. Have you ever thought about that? There’s no one alive—not even me—who could ever disappoint you the same way he does, because he’s your world, your guiding star, the one you’ve always looked to even when you could hardly stand it.”
“Alys, if you knew all that already …” He was starting to put a few things together, like her fairy-tale bullshit from the other night. “Going off on your own—were you really hoping to find more of Rhun’s things, or were you trying to give us time alone?”
“Both,” she answered without hesitation, touching her new-old cloak pin.
“And convincing me to ask Griff along on this trip like it’s somehow safer than him staying in town?” Mal asked, though once again he knew the answer.
“It can be hard to hear yourself think in Mayfair sometimes,” Alys said by way of admission. “Maybe that’s why you’re both such terrible listeners. And I just thought—after what happened to Griff, and what you had already agreed to do—this tripmight be a chance for you two. I was tired of seeing you both miserable, and I hoped if the three of us could spend some time together, maybe you and Griff would finally see what’s been clear to me for so long,” she concluded, a plea in her gaze for him to understand. “I love you both, and I thought maybe, if you realized how you feel about each other … we could all stay like this after we bring back the treasure. That we could all be as close as we used to be.”
“Alys,” Mal muttered, wishing he had the right words on the tip of his tongue. As Griff would soon learn, he hadn’t had a lot of practice at saying how he felt. “I love you too. Always will,” he finally managed. She should have let him and Griff figure things out in their own time, whenever that would have been, but she meant well. “And for the record, if you put this much energy into solving your own problems, I think you could rule the world someday.”
A frantic crashing in the bracken drew her attention then, and Mal reached for his knife as Alys grabbed her sword. The Shadow Queen’s impatience had him even more on edge than usual.
But it was Griff running toward them like a startled hare trying to escape a hound, the ends of his hair dripping as if he had found someplace to splash water on his face and scrub the cooking grease from his hands.
Mal’s tattoo prickled with extra ferocity, and he groaned.
Griff stumbled and nearly lost his balance as something shook the ground like an earthquake. In the distance, a few trees swayed before cracking and falling. “Run!” Griff gasped as he approached. “Fuck the map, fuck the treasure, just—untie the mule and let’s go!”
But neither Mal nor Alys moved. Instead, they glared a challenge in the direction of the fallen trees. After all, they had both graduated from Wynnie’s school of never turning theirbacks on a fight. Was the queen so pissed that Mal had taken the time for breakfast that she had sent another lackey to try to eat him?
She should really be grateful he was sweating his ass off in this miserable swamp in the first place when she wasn’t willing to come get the gold and baubles herself.
Frowning as the ground shook again, Mal adjusted his stance and drew a second knife. Alys grabbed the pike that held Leo’s head with her free hand, as if the sight of it were going to scare off more than mosquitoes. Well—maybe the stench of it could.
Griff might have been upset with Mal when he left, but now he didn’t hesitate to grab his arm the moment he reached him, trying to tug him toward the trees as their terrified mule brayed and bellowed at the end of its tether.
“It’s a whole fucking—troll! It came to get a drink at the creek and it saw me, and we just—” He tugged again, harder, but Mal resisted. “Need to—” There was no outrunning something of that size, even if Wynnie’s training would have allowed him to consider it. Already he could see the looming shadow of the heavy creature with skin the color of sun-washed stone and a head like a mossy boulder growing worryingly taller as it bounded toward them. “Go,” Griff concluded on a panted breath of defeat.
He drew his maul, and Mal made sure to catch his eye and nod his approval.
Griff stood a little taller after that, those strong arms holding the maul aloft, bracing for the impact of the creature’s arrival as it tore a blackberry bush out of the earth, thorns and all, and burst into their camp.
Even Leo the Head looked a little more wilted and pitiful on his pike when the troll rolled its massive shoulders, stretched up to its full height, and roared.
Mal winced and rubbed a bit of spittle off his cheek. “Fucking fish breath,” he muttered as his tattoo throbbed, trying to coverup the fact that he knew his knives weren’t going to be much use against this thing. They would likely be more of an annoyance, and the last thing they needed was to make this creature madder.
“Hurry up already!” the troll bellowed in a voice hoarse with disuse. The rough shape of a raven on the thick skin of its shoulder marked the creature as a thrall of the Shadow Queen’s in a manner too similar to how Mal had been branded for him to look at it for long.
