Griff’s hands were capable of so much. He could build a whole bakery or a home, but he couldn’t pull a soul back from death, not in whatever way Mal’s witch friend had done years ago.
Alys, who was plenty aware of why they didn’t have the right medicine to offer Mal without Griff saying a word, seemed to need a purpose as much as he did. He tasked her with fetching water from the nearest clear-running stream while he used some of the herbs he’d found near the wyvern’s lair to make a tea that could reduce fever. It was weak, but it was all they had.
She hauled buckets and rags to Mal’s bedside and held the cool cloths against his forehead and neck, muttering things like, “If you die on us now, Griff and I will join the Wardens just so your ghost will be mad enough to come haunt us forever, and then the three of us will be together anyway, like I wanted.”
Griff couldn’t stand to listen to her any more than he could Mal’s feverish mutterings and heart-wrenching whimpers, so he organized their camp despite having only one working arm, the other still in a sling and probably in need of rebinding. He kept a small fire burning despite Mal’s earlier warning, counted bandages and rations and did several loads of laundry, hanging each piece to dry while singing tavern songs that had nothing to do with elves, something he thought might welcome Mal back to the world a little more pleasantly.
At one point in Mal’s feverish babbling, as he writhed on his bedroll, he asked for a turtle. Alys went back to the stream where she’d gotten the water for Mal’s rags and trapped one in their largest cookpot, placing it near Mal’s head, as if this would be an incentive to shake off the fever and fully wake.
“Stay,” Griff pleaded, his lips to Mal’s ear, and he felt himself cracking open when Mal didn’t so much as stir. “Stay, and take me home to the old cottage.”
He strung a tarp he’d found at the bottom of his pack to make a shelter from wind and bugs.
He took inventory of each of their packs and recounted the silver in the mule’s saddlebags.
He borrowed Alys’s charcoals and made a blueprint he knew might well go up in smoke, or otherwise never materialize.
He cleaned and polished the mule’s tack.
He stitched the cut on Alys’s cheek carefully and gently.
He kept swimming, because he had learned how to stay afloat somewhere along the way, with Mal’s hot fingers wound tightly around his.
Yet it struck him that Alys was the one who needed help treading water right now, as she started trying to drown herself with the rest of the whiskey bottle.
“Griff—if he doesn’t wake up,” she slurred miserably as she mopped Mal’s forehead with one of many cool cloths they kept rotating through. She dribbled a little water into the turtle’s cookpot, too, and offered it some grass clippings. “If he doesn’t—what then?”
Griff came over to sit by her even though he didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to think about that at all. Overhead, more ravens had gathered. So many rustling wings and the scraping of beaks between throaty conversations whispered through the trees above them. Beady eyes swiveled down, as if watching Mal’s every shallow breath.
They seemed to be preparing for a funeral, perhaps—or a feast.
Overwhelmed by a sudden disgust for the creatures he knew Mal loathed, creatures that served the darkness his parents had fought against all their lives, Griff hurled a rock up into the trees and sent them wheeling skyward as they cried out at the indignity of it all. He threw another, and another, not stopping until every one of those dark shapes had scattered across the sky and they were little more than blurry blobs to his streaming eyes.
“If,” he said, finally ready to try to answer Alys. “If … then I’ll still move back to the cottage. Help you raise those kids of yours. You won’t be alone, Alys. He wouldn’t want that, and neither do I. You handle too much by yourself already, and that’s not how it’s supposed to be, no matter what lessons you took to heart.”
She nodded tearfully, seeming not to trust herself to speak. She, too, was watching the birds. Already a few were returning to roost overhead, to continue their vigil at Mal’s sickbed. Griff picked up a sharper, bigger rock, then set it down again, some of that disgust turning on himself when he knew better ways to fight than lashing out and there was still some blackened gore drying on the business edge of his maul.
“You made a mistake with the mule,” he continued into the quiet, “but I’ve made too many of those to judge, and you couldn’t have known we’d lose that medicine.” He took her under his good arm and drew her close. “You were there for me when it mattered, even though I’d done nothing to deserve it, just like I’m going to be there for you.”
“But that’s just it—I should have known better,” Alys whispered in the smallest voice. “Only, I was already high when I gave Prancer those mushrooms. And the buzz didn’t even feel that good. There are so many things I think will feel good, be enough, but they never are. I wish I could take back what I did, never have packed them in the first place, anything so Mal would be awakeand talking to us right now. I never mean to hurt him, or you, but it seems like that’s all I’m good at anymore.”
“I know plenty about that. Trust me,” Griff muttered, his heart aching for them both.
Alys tore her gaze from the birds, her blue eyes glistening as she held Griff’s instead. “I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore, if I ever did,” she confessed. “I hoped the Mire might help me figure it out, show me some other side of myself—but I don’t like most of what I’ve seen, and I have no idea what to do about that.”
He could only pull her closer and sit with her until the tears stopped. And the day after, helping her to tread water as they kept vigil along with the ravens, debating names for their new turtle rather than planning any funerals. Even if the shadow might be breathing down their necks all the while, with them unaware.
Chapter Twenty-EightBetrayal
The sight that greeted Mal when he finally stirred to consciousness was Alys and Griff huddled together by a fire under a pale-blue twilight. It was evening, the first stars just appearing, and he was parched like never before, a thirst he hadn’t known even in Thrallkeld while he was in hiding.
There was a dull ache in his side, and he briefly considered chasing that dark oblivion again to escape it. But then he smelled something other than tea or broth on the wind—had Griff managed to make biscuits from their remaining rations?—and his stomach gave a growl that signaled he wouldn’t be able to sleep again until he’d satisfied it.
Leaning up onto one elbow, he noticed that someone had left a mug of tea near his head. As he took a long drink, he stared down at a large spotted turtle in a cookpot prison and wondered just what Griff had been cooking to try to soothe his nerves while Mal was drifting between worlds.
“How long was I out?” he asked the others, drawing their weary gazes to him.
Alys answered first. Or at least, he could see that she was answering, though he didn’t hear a word of it. By watching her lips and the distress on her face as she made her way over to his sweat-crusted bedroll, he could guess at some of the words, but they were muffled. Almost like his head was underwater.
