“I think this blade is enchanted to cut spirits—if it’s the one I’m thinking of,” Griff said to the others, even though Alys was staring moodily at her drawing and Mal kept gazing uneasily into the trees as if searching for something. “Rhun might have known about the shadow too, since he brought this; maybe it was never meant for fighting the troll but happened to be the weapon he had at hand. The elves must have given it to him.”
Rather than thanking Griff for remembering this kernel of potentially lifesaving knowledge while in an extreme amount of pain, Mal put his bandaged hand on Alys’s shoulder and said, “You need to go to sleep. I know what the shadow looks like now, for all the good it does us. But I don’t know what tomorrow’s going to look like if you’re too strung out to swing any kind of blade at all and summoning monsters right to our doorstep with your bullshit.”
The distress showed plainly on his face as he rounded on Griff. “Andyou—I need you to rest too. Because I still fucking love you, which means living is nonnegotiable. I’m going to take the watch. Wynnie taught me how to handle plenty on my own too.”
With that, Mal picked up the shard of Amaranth and slunk off toward the tree Alys had used earlier as a seat, stopping only to pick up the nearly empty whiskey bottle along the way and take a gulp of it, his chest heaving with every breath.
“Wynnie was always hardest on me,” Alys said softly.
Griff, who was reaching for Mal’s small book with the runes on the front—reading always calmed his nerves—realized she was talking to him. Her eyes were damp and her words harder to make out than usual. “I could fight drunker than this. On less sleep than this. Because she made me, time and again, half out of my mind, until I won. Until I won every single time. Maybe I don’t like killing things, but Ican. She made me so I’ll never break. She made me so I’ll always win. That shadow wasn’t going to win, even if I couldn’t see it.”
Griff had no idea what to say to that—certainly now wasn’t the time to appreciate all the damage he had escaped in avoiding most of those lessons—and so he was quiet for some time, just watching her. Eventually, he said, “I’m so sorry, Alys. I really am.”
He rose slowly, with effort, and grabbed his cloak to wrap around her shoulders, pointing to the nearest of their bedrolls. But rather than urging her toward it, his hand lingered on her arm. He had failed to be there for her as much as he had Mal. Let her down, too, with his inability to stay through the hard things. “I should have done something. Protected you better.”
Alys shook her head. “Maybe that line would work on Mal, but it’s just us here, Griff. Let’s be real. You couldn’t have done anything. Maybe …” She hesitated, bit her lip a little too hard so that when she next spoke, it glistened with spit and blood. “MaybeI should have learned to protect myself better from a lot of things.” Gathering Griff’s cloak tighter around herself, she stood and looked toward her bedroll. “I might sleep. Don’t try fighting that shadow yourself while I’m out, all right? You’re not Seimon, the bards won’t sing about it, and I’ve had enough of watching you bleed out for one lifetime.”
“I love you too, Alys,” he sighed. Then he resettled at the base of the tree where not that long ago the night had seemed to belong to him and Mal, the pieces of that broken blade reflecting the starlight from across the clearing where Mal kept watch as Griff cracked the cover of the leather book and started at the beginning.
He wanted, more than anything, to better understand the frustrated man sitting by himself at the edge of their camp. To understand why going home now, together, wouldn’t be enough for him. Sure, Mal would lose out on all the gold he could have made from selling the treasure, but Griff would be losing too, saddled with the pain from his stab wound for the rest of his life. Even then, didn’t they have so much more to gain by staying together?
Mal still held the fragmented blade, but he had a long stick in his other hand now and was determinedly scratching something into the dirt.
Griff glanced away, toward the spot where Alys had been. Her sketch pad was still open to that gaunt, screaming drawing of the spirit, its bony face dark and yawning like it wanted to swallow him up. Something the Shadow Queen must have woven from a nightmare, if he had to guess. He reached for the sketch pad with his good arm and hastily turned the page.
And after reading a couple of long and thought-provoking passages of Mal’s book, he picked up the pad again along with Alys’s charcoal, an idea beginning to take shape that came from his own dreams.
When he had finished, he tucked a folded-up piece of paper into the pages of Mal’s book and made his way toward the lone figure still holding his nighttime vigil, stopping just once along the way to pull Alys’s braid out of her mouth and check her breathing.
He made no secret of his approach. His bandaged ankle dragging slightly with each step would have made that a challenge anyway. When he got near enough to Mal, he wrapped his good arm around the other man’s shoulders for the second time that night and said softly, so as not to wake Alys, “I’m sorry tonight got so weird. And I’m sure Alys regrets calling out to the shadow. I’m sure we all regret a lot of things. But you’re still not alone. I’m still with you unless you tell me to be gone, and even then, I’d have to be sure you truly meant it.”
Mal stayed resolutely silent, even as Griff pressed his stubbled cheek softly into the wild nest of Mal’s hair. But the blond also made no move to pull away.
“Thought you might like a little reading material while you’re on watch,” Griff said, undeterred, dropping the book gently down into Mal’s lap. “You seem like you need your space tonight, and that’s okay—we all have plenty to think about after what just happened—but you should know that I found page ten particularly interesting.”
Mal’s bandaged hand gripped the edge of the book. “Page ten,” he repeated, though it was Griff, not the book, he was looking at. “Pretty sure I have that essay memorized. You know, Alys and Wynnie have always thought philosophy is just a bunch of—”
“Hopeless nonsense for people who love to be sad?” Griff supplied with a shake of his head, familiar with their views on the matter.
“That,” Mal muttered darkly. “But I’ve had this book since I was in Thrallkeld, and I like rereading it once in a while. Always find something new to think about.”
He relaxed slightly under Griff’s arm, turning back in the direction in which he had been keeping watch, the toe of his boot nudging a symbol he must have carved into the dirt with the stick. But he made a little room on his branch seat as he did so, and seemed to struggle to fight off a shiver.
“Your cloak—” Griff began, but Mal shook his head, and Griff dimly remembered that it had soaked up a great deal of his own blood during The Incident, and probably needed a thorough washing.
Mal’s better hand rose across his chest, reaching for Griff’s where it rested at his shoulder and gently closing over it. “Would you still consider it a waste of not dying if you just stayed right here with me a little longer?”
Leaning in to the gentle air of teasing that always seemed to flow easily between them even when nothing else did, Griff muttered, “You know … I did have other plans tonight. I was going to go find this legendary treasure no one else ever could and make us all rich beyond our wildest imaginings, then come back a hero by breakfast … but I suppose my grand plans can wait another night.”
Mal snorted softly. “It figures there’s some big nasty trying to get the treasure too. With my luck, all that’s at the X on this map is a pile of stones, or a list of everything I’ve ever stolen tucked inside an empty bottle.”
“That actually doesn’t sound as bad as some of the alternatives,” Griff said with a slight shake of his head, thinking again of Alys’s drawing and what it must have been like for Mal to see the real-life version looming before him. “We still keep on as planned, then?”
“Is that a serious question? We’ve got the spirit blade. Whatever the shadow can do, whatever game it’s playing, we can handle it,” Mal declared with his usual confidence. “Now that you’re finally up and about, we need to leave by—”
“First light,” Griff finished for him, unable to ignore the sinking feeling in his gut.
He lapsed into quiet after that, regretting having asked as he wrapped himself more thoroughly around Mal to help stave off the chill that had touched him now too. He shifted some of his weight to the branch as well, keeping his hold on Mal as he settled in, his gaze seeking upward for the swath of stars between gaps in the trees so that he could pick out familiar constellations, the sight of which always cheered him like greeting old friends.
