He took mental stock of the supplies in their packs and the mule’s saddlebags rather than thinking too long on the unanswerable questions spinning in the back of his mind, ones he was too nervous to ask Mal yet, like where he was going to put the biggest bed this side of the Teeth, or that new stove. Were they moving in together? Where? What were they going to tell people back in Linden they were—together? Mal didn’t seem to care much for titles, from what he had told Griff back in Mayfair, and Griff knew better than to push him. On anything. Which was why he also wasn’t going to ask again about Mal’s punishing timeline to reach the treasure that seemed completely self-imposed.
A few brisk steps ahead, the blond man paused to pull out his flask as he gazed into the shadows that only seemed to be growing longer, pressing closer from all sides. The warm kiss of whiskey was apparently all Mal needed on his lips right now, and Griff left him to it, though he was itching to throw that flask far off into the Mire. He knew how hard it was to want to get sober, let alone stay that way.
Mal was apparently so unsettled even with the aid of the whiskey that when a raven shot out of the bracken, he grabbed one of his knives from his belt and flung it into the trunk of a gnarled, leafless tree some yards ahead of them with a wordless snarl.
Griff winced, not at the loudness of Mal’s frustration but at a certain unwelcome pain from his scar as he stared at the knife protruding from that tree. As the burning intensified, he resisted the urge to make sure the wound was still closed while the others might see. Barely.
“Your knife skills could use improvement. You missed that bird by a mile,” Alys teased Mal, trying to snap him out of his mood as she took Prancer’s lead from Griff.
Something off the path had caught Griff’s eye, and he wanted to get a closer look. Kneeling, he examined a cluster of wilted white flowers for usefulness while attempting to calm his racing heart. Yet he startled when a rabbit darted from beneath a nearby bush, scampering to its next hidey-hole as if being pursued by unseen forces.
He couldn’t shake the sense that they were caged animals in here themselves, allowed to go about their errands only while the dark queen’s servants toyed with them like predators playing with an easy supper, even if they had made fairly quick work of the revenants and tamed a damn troll. Their luck would run out at some point, and he could hardly blame Mal for wanting to get in and out of here as quickly as possible when he thought about it that way.
Off to his right, the man in question took another swig of whiskey before he finally retrieved his knife and started rummaging in the mule’s saddlebags in search of something.
Apparently, the mule didn’t like Mal’s attitude much either. The beast’s ears perked forward as if sensing danger, and he took a single step back that narrowly missed smashing Mal’s toes.
“Ever heard of personal space?” Griff heard him grumble to the beast as something deeper off in the semidark caught his eye—truffles. The thing he was certain Mal would love if he made them into a rich, velvety sauce. Maybe the delicacy would earn a smile the next time Mal deemed it safe enough to have a fire going. Another true smile, the kind that made the swamp water glisten as if each shallow pool held gold dust.
Griff made his way carefully between the trees toward the low cluster of mushrooms half hidden by grass, his boot print falling neatly into the enormous muddy claw marks left by the passing of another creature. Still, that was nothing unusual. There were tracks running all through this place. “Found us something tasty,” he called to the others over the mule’s continued noises of distress. “Something that won’t give anyone any strange visions—I’ll be right back!”
“Shit,” Mal called from behind him. “Wait, Griff—let’s go together!”
Griff intended to stop there, to turn around and pause for the others to catch up.
But before he could turn away, ahead in the dense tangle of vegetation he saw a tall, broad silhouette of a man with shoulder-length hair, straight but jagged at the ends. He couldn’t make out any of his features, but even his solid shadow was familiar despite Griff not having seen him since he was maybe twelve.
Rhun.
Finally, he was showing himself—and not to Mal or Alys, but tohim. Rhun must have something to show him, some message to share, wisdom to impart. Griff quickened his pace as best he could on his hobbled leg, but where he should have caught up to the man and found him standing over some plump mushrooms that looked rather like porous potatoes, he met a pair of strange violet eyes a few feet away instead. Eyes that narrowed as they watched him while an unseen mouth hissed.
A wyvern, Griff realized in the heartbeat before she broke from her cover. Female, judging by the color of her eyes and the higher pitch of her vocalization.
Griff had half a second to wonder if it was her nest from which Alys had gotten the strange blue-shelled eggs they’d fixed for breakfast before the sleek, scaled creature lunged forward with a soft patter of claws against earth, branches cracking beneath its weight as it leapt from its place of concealment, dark as a shadow and larger than a direwolf.
“Mal, over here!” he managed to shout just before he was thrashed by a whiplike tail, knocked off-balance by a beast with claws that might as well have been daggers, before he even had a chance to draw his sword.
Chapter Twenty-OneDrug Mule
The snapping of branches quickened Mal’s pace. So did the scream that followed, the way it stopped short being of particular concern.
He bolted through the dense tangle of green, branches whipping him in the face as his heart gave a sickening lurch. That must have been what it sounded like when Griff was stabbed in the Wood.
He couldn’t keep Griff safe, in the wilds or in a city, no matter what kind of wagers or bargains he made. He understood that now.
Still, he ran faster.
The scene that greeted him as he broke through the trees wasn’t nearly as lovely as any of Alys’s charcoal drawings. The muscular black wyvern was sinking her claws into the equally black-clad Griff, a whirl of limbs and sharp points as they struggled—Griff, by some miracle, still conscious despite the abrupt way his scream had ended—making it difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.
In the thicket where the wyvern must have been hiding, something stirred. The shadow slipped out of sight, Rhun’s spiritapparently not sticking around for the bloodbath, just turning his back on the sight of Griff in distress.
But Mal didn’t have time to dwell on whatever part he might have played here, because the wyvern was holding Griff in place so that she could unhinge her jaw, venomous teeth sinking deep into Griff’s shoulder and tearing something that made a terrible sound as she thrashed her prey in a display of dominance.
This proved to be too much for Griff. His eyes rolled back as he slipped free of the pain.
The wyvern was already backing away, attempting to drag her catch farther from whatever might threaten her meal as Mal recovered from the shock of it all long enough to draw his sword and shout, “Alys! Help me!”
The still-healing cuts on his hands twinged in protest as Mal gripped his blade and charged. He didn’t care about the wetness that signaled his dominant palm splitting open again; he simply shifted the blade to his other hand and continued to rush the wyvern. At least these things didn’t breathe fire like their larger, recently extinct cousins.
