Alys’s pale hair blown back by a sudden strong wind that didn’t quite seem to reach across the campfire, her braid gusting over her shoulder as she floated there and kicked fiercely at nothing.
Mal bolted across their campsite, grabbing the shard of broken sword so he could have the option to stab with both hands. He had been expecting something like this for days now, eversince the wyvern attack had forced another, longer halt to their progress, more revenants or trolls or worse—whatever “worse” might be.
There wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to numb his nerves when there were so many of the Shadow Queen’s green-eyed ghosts gathering at the edges of their camp each night since the attack, leering at him and counting down the precious days and hours he had remaining to reach the treasure before the other undead in the Mire had permission to kill him.
But he still had over a week left. Eleven days, to be exact. He’d kept careful count, pushing them to hurry as often as they could because he always expected the worst.
They could harasshim, sure, but trying to kill Alys was completely out of bounds. Her Dreadful Majesty really needed to work on her idea of motivation.
As Mal hastily cleared the fire, he saw it: not one of the queen’s servants after all but the damned shadow that most definitely wasn’t Rhun, finally standing still enough as it lifted Alys off the ground, claws digging into her shoulders, for him to get a long look at its true face. He almost wished he hadn’t. He wished it didn’t have one after all.
It was even taller than it had appeared in shadow form; gaunt, nearly skeletal but for some ragged bits of flesh stretched thinly over its bones. It might have been human, once, or an elf; the circlet of what looked like long iron spikes on its head might have been a crown. It seemed to howl with rage through blackened teeth, though Mal couldn’t hear anything but the faint rustling of wind moving the leaves on the trees.
He wouldn’t let this thing have Alys.
He raised the blade—the broken one, using his dominant hand without thinking—and the transparent figure’s lightless, hollow eyes locked on his.
No, not on his—even he might have frozen and forgotten how to fight for a second if he was fixed in the gaze of such a powerful spirit. It was staring at the blade.
It seemed to hiss at the shattered weapon, cracked lips pulled back as far as they could go to expose the many gaps in its teeth, like a snarling, feral dog.
And as Mal blinked against the cold wind rolling over him, the figure vanished. Sweeping his gaze around their camp, he realized that at some point in the moments since Alys had screamed, all the other ghosts that had gathered to nag him about his lack of progress had disappeared for the first time in days too.
Alys dropped at once, shaking where she landed in a puddle of spilled whiskey, and he tossed the blades aside to kneel and wrap her in his arms. His hands were bleeding again, leaving smears of crimson where he brushed a palm over her hair to try to smooth it, but he only cared that she was okay.
“Did you see it?” Alys tried to whisper, hiccupping at the end.
Mal nodded. It was now right up there with the list of things he never wanted to see again, like Griff bleeding out in his arms. “Didyou?” he asked when he found the breath. “You stay put!” he added quickly and sternly to Griff, noticing the other man trying to climb to his feet. The last thing they needed was him falling apart now that they had no wonderful elf medicine to make anything okay when they were out of other options.
“No, I just saw—the Mire. But I felt it, and it’snotPapa,” Alys hiccupped, resting her chin on Mal’s shoulder for a moment. “What was it? What made it let go?” Lower, so that Griff wouldn’t hear, she added, “Was it—something else ofhers? It has to be, right?”
“I don’t know what the hell it was. Not human, though,” Mal said, his mind still reeling. Usually ghosts looked like people or dwarves or elves; this spirit had been so much bigger, distortedfrom whatever it once was, that he couldn’t be sure. It certainly seemed like something the Shadow Queen would create, but then why was it unaware of his deal when everything else out here seemed to know? “Think you could draw it for me, if I describe it?”
It might give them both something concrete to focus on, a chance to let their heartbeats slow while they tried to figure out what exactly their shadow was. If it wanted the treasure too, they were in for a hell of a fight to claim it when they got there. But who wanted easy? For Griff’s safety, for his freedom, he would give everything he had until his last breath.
As Alys got to her feet, collecting her sword and the whiskey bottle, Mal tried not to look at how little of its contents were left—especially now that he needed a drink more than ever.
“This seemed to scare it off,” he said as he studied Amaranth, the shard of a sword that had survived a long-ago troll attack. Wiping a thin trail of red from his palm on his pants, he wrapped the blade in the end of his shirt and walked with Alys to join Griff by the tree.
They watched together, Mal sipping liberally from his flask, as Alys took out fresh paper and charcoals and began to sketch what Mal described for her.
When she had finished, they all looked quietly at the drawing for a moment. Mal much preferred the noisy ravens, the hungry revenants, the usual mocking but ineffective ghosts, and even the troll to this new horror. He had no idea how he was going to keep Griff and Alys safe from this thing unless he was the one with the broken blade and always on watch, always keeping both of them within his sight until they had the treasure and had dumped it all into Kage’s muscular, greedy arms. And that was assuming this gruesome spirit left them alone once this whole affair was settled—after all, Mal had first seen it back in Mayfair, at Griff’s job site.
He was aware that he shouldn’t be thinking that far ahead yet. Because the closer they got to the treasure, the closer he kept coming to losing the only man he could even halfway trust. Now it seemed like Alys wanted to leave him alone out here, too, and become a victim of her own recklessness.
Interrupting his thoughts, she hiccupped and said, “That’s the ugliest ghost I’ve ever seen. Still think I could have fought it, though.”
“Alys,” Mal said in his calmest voice. “Whatever that thing is, whatever it wants, you’re going to get us killed if you call it back here. You’re going to die, and watch both of us die, and then we’re going to hang around with you in this damned Mire for all eternity, telling you that we were right.”
He didn’t want to hear another word about spirits tonight. Still, they needed to figure out what they were dealing with, because they had to reach the treasure alive. Taking a breath to steady himself, pulling his eyes away from the black pits of the creature’s eyes on the page, he asked Griff, “Have you ever seen anything like this in a library book?”
“I’m not sure,” Griff admitted, his face tight with pain again; his shoulder must be bothering him. “But … can I see that, just for a minute?”
He motioned to the shard of sword beside Mal, who wouldn’t be letting it out of his sight for the remainder of the trip, until the Mire was well at their backs, and Mal carefully held it out to him, not missing the way Griff winced as he took in the rough state of his hands.
Chapter Twenty-FourAmaranth
The longer Griff looked at the blade, the more certain he was that he’d seen an illustration of it before, in Stormveil’s library. Only then it had been whole, complete with the designs and gems on the hilt that would have made it easily identifiable, which had long since been lost in Rhun’s battle with the troll.
