“Thanks,” Mal muttered as he swapped his cloak for the shirts and tried not to think about how much blood Griff had already lost. “Alys, I need you to check his other wounds, and if any of them are bleeding, hold pressure with those shirts, okay?”
If he didn’t keep his composure, if he didn’t drink his flask to the bottom to steady his hands, it was all over for Griff.
“Okay,” Alys agreed, kneeling again and starting to inspect Griff’s other, shallower scratches. “But Mal, I was trying to tell you—the mule’s gone. All we’ve got is my pack.”
Mal’s voice was a quiet scrape of chisel on bone as he stared at his hands and the bloody stain once again spreading beneath them. “What do you mean?”
“I fed him a few mushrooms when you followed Griff, so he wouldn’t be so nervous,” Alys answered breathlessly, pressing a balled-up shirt to a gash on Griff’s thigh.
Mal’s curse shot birds from the trees, and Griff’s eyes fluttered open.
The dark-haired man seemed unable to speak, likely disoriented by the proximity of the ground, the position of the sky, and the terrible pain that was surely radiating from somewhere near his neck. He even tried to close his eyes again, probably hoping to fall back into a dream, but he wasn’t so lucky this time.
He groaned softly as Alys pushed the shirt harder against one of his wounds. Then, blinking up at Mal, he said weakly, “The shadow tried to kill me, didn’t it? It brought me here. Looked like … like Rhun.”
Mal stared at the pale face beneath his and shook his head. “I don’t know. I saw it, for a second, but it looked like a shadow, same as always. It was a wyvern that attacked you, and too damn bad for them both, because you aren’t allowed to leave me yet.” He used his bloody palm to sweep Griff’s hair back from his face, then let his hand fall onto Griff’s good shoulder. “You’re probably poisoned. Not the magical kind. We’re going to need you to tell us what to do. And the mule ran off with your kit.”
Griff smiled wanly, coughed, and said, “Not all of it. I split our healing supplies across my pack and the others—figured someone might try to take some of our stuff at some point. Bandits, you know.” Finally, his bleary eyes seemed to take in the gashes on Mal’s side, the deepest one still bleeding freely. “You saved me, didn’t you?” he asked and, without giving him time to answer, added, “You have absolutely no sense of self-preservation,you shit. You’re going to need stitches. Lucky for you, I’ve done it a hundred times.”
Alys and Mal exchanged a worried look over Griff’s head. He had no concept of how bad off he was.
“I just … need a quick nap first …” Griff continued, his eyes fluttering closed again. “Five minutes …” His lips formed an easier smile. “Love you, Mal … luckiest man on either side of the Teeth … So much wasted time … Always been you, for me …”
Mal’s adrenaline was still coursing through him, preventing him from feeling the worst of his own injuries. Leaning down, he rested his sweaty forehead lightly against Griff’s and murmured, “Make it to tomorrow, and then you can play healer, you sentimental fuck.” As those green eyes softly closed, Mal gave his good shoulder a firm shake, but Griff was once again drifting past his reach.
Mal knew he would be hearing echoes of everything Griff had muttered all night for many nights to come, whether Griff made it or not. “Tell me all those pretty words tomorrow too. Stay with me, no matter how much it hurts,” he pleaded with the drowsing man.
Even though Griff was already unconscious once again, Mal leaned down to give him one of the things he claimed to like most in the world, a reminder of what was worth staying for: a brush of his lips against the other’s, the mouth Griff was always going on about. He was past caring whether they had an audience or not, and sure now of what they were.
Then he was left to stare down at the shirts beneath his hands, watching the seep of crimson slow at last while Alys dug through her pack and let out a victory cry.
“What is it?” Mal glanced up, ignoring how the world had blurred at the edges.
“Elven medicine,” Alys said triumphantly, eyes gleaming as she held up a tin with strange characters printed in Griff’s neat handwriting on the lid.
“No, no, we need—” Mal started to say. This wasn’t what Griff had described.
Tossing the tin aside, Alys pulled out a vial of cherry-colored liquid, and Mal’s heart slowed enough for him to get a real breath. The other vial must be with one of the packs on Prancer, but at least they had this. They had a chance.
“We need to get this in him,” he told Alys with all the air in his lungs.
“How much?” she asked.
“The whole thing,” Mal guessed, because it wasn’t labeled and Griff hadn’t given him any instructions. If it could keep their dog alive this long, it had to be able to buy Griff some time, too, while his body worked to replace some of the blood he’d lost. He propped up Griff’s head while Alys gently and slowly coaxed the ruby liquid down his throat.
“It smells good, at least,” Alys remarked as she took a moment to wipe Griff’s mouth with her sleeve. “Should we use what’s in the tin too?”
“I guess,” Mal said, eyeing the writing on the lid warily as he picked an irritating bit of dirt from the gash in his side. “I can’t read what it says on the top, but hopefully it’s some kind of disinfectant.”
While Alys opened the tin to give it a sniff, Mal carefully raised Griff’s shirt and used a water canteen to rinse every injury he saw.
“I’m putting this stuff onyounext,” Alys told Mal in a tone that left no room for argument as she approached with the tin in hand. It smelled strongly of herbs gone soft with mildew after not being properly hung to dry.
He knew she hated to think about anything happening to him, losing him like she’d lost Rhun, but that was life: over too soon, and never gentle on the way out. Griff’s ashen face, his limp body lying in the garish, blood-spattered grass, was a stark reminder of that.
“The shadow was here,” Mal said tersely, his mind reeling, trying to find the next direction in which to strike back at their enemies. “When Griff got attacked. Then it slipped away. Doesn’t seem very Rhun-like to me, no matter what face it showed to Griff.”
“No, he would never leave us at a time like this,” Alys agreed quietly, lips pressed together in thought. “So either Griff wasn’t supposed to follow him, misunderstood somehow, or it’s not Papa after all.” As she dipped her fingers into the salve and applied it to the first of Griff’s many cuts and gouges, she glanced at Mal a few times before finally saying, “I wonder if the shadow made the wyvern attack. If it can do that. I mean—why else would a wyvern charge someone like that, in the daytime, when they usually wake at dusk?”
