Three days. He had been out for three precious, wasted days. The wards they had drawn must have been holding, or else surely the Shadow Queen’s servants would have tried to drag his friends off to teach him a lesson. They must have been keeping the shadow at bay too.
Alys peeked into his mug, which was empty, and he supposed she was going to get him something to drink. Though if she said anything to that effect, it was just a low current rushing past his ear.
He shook his head, then glanced over at Griff, rubbing one of his ears with a growing line of concern cutting his brow.
“What did she say?” he asked. Even his own voice sounded far away, somehow muted, full of more buzzing than actual words. But he didn’t even give Griff a chance to answer before he added, “Are you going to come here?”
Griff stared at him, drawn and pale, and didn’t move.
“I won’t tell anyone if you cry. I won’t even complain about it,” Mal offered lowly, and suddenly Griff’s arms were around him, carefully holding him around the spot where his wound was restitched and finally healing while Griff sobbed rather quietly into his already hopelessly messy hair.
When the tears finally slowed, Griff repeated what Alys had said.
Mal couldn’t hear him any better. He rubbed his ear some more. “You sound like you’re underwater,” he explained, growing increasingly annoyed. “I can hear you, but it’s faint. Hell, I can hardly hear myself.”
Griff frowned. “How about now?” he asked, clearly having raised his voice. It startled a few ravens from the surrounding trees.
Mal watched the little black shapes take flight but couldn’t hear the rustle of their wings.
“That’s better,” he admitted, though it wasn’t at all reassuring. “What’s wrong with me?”
Griff scrubbed a hand over his face, looking pained, and Mal knew he wasn’t going to like whatever he was about to learn. “You nearly died, Mal. That fever was cooking your brains, and none of the usual herbs I brought or found were enough to help you fight it.” He touched his own ear and spoke slowly, giving Mal time to read his lips. “You must have lost some of your hearing to the fever—it was that bad.”
Confident he had understood more than half of this, Mal nodded. “So how long until it comes back?” he asked. Leaning closer still, he added, “I did what I said I would in the end, didn’t I? I stayed. I’m still with you.”
Griff slid an arm around his waist in answer as Alys approached with tea and biscuits.
“Your hearing very likely isn’t going to come back. That’s not how cochlear damage works,” he explained sadly, raising the hand of his uninjured arm and shaping signs near his mouth as he spoke. Sign language, Mal recalled, something they had learned together when they were younger so they could have private conversations in front of Wynnie and Vic. Griff had apparently kept up with it, and Mal still remembered enough that it made following the words easier.
“We’re lucky we got as much of you back as we did,” Griff added, eyes glistening again.
Mal kissed his cheek. “Thank you for looking after me,” he said to them both, adding the appropriate signs with one of his hands. When Griff smiled in answer, he could almost trickhimself into thinking they were simply using a secret language for old times’ sake.
“Do you feel up to eating?” Griff asked, but the words were difficult to hear again. This time thanks to Alys’s singing.
“Isn’t that the chantey Rodric brought home from school a couple weeks ago?” Mal turned to her with a tired but appreciative grin. “The kind of sad one, with the mermaids and all the dirty words? Did he teach it to you too?”
Alys frowned around a biscuit. Her lips weren’t moving, but the song continued. After a moment, she said loudly, “I’m not singing, Mal. I haven’t really felt like it lately, for reasons I’m sure you already know.”
Mal rubbed his ear again, and as the others watched silently, expectantly, he listened. While the voices of his friends were difficult to grasp, floating above his head like he was at the bottom of a pond and they were back on shore, whatever was singing sounded high and clear as the day. He didn’t have to strain to hear the words, though he realized now that while the melody might be like the one Rodric loved, it wasn’t in a language Mal knew.
It was older.
Old enough not to be dwarvish, even, or anything currently spoken, which meant the singer was also very dead.
“Great,” Mal sighed. Here was more proof he was cursed; nothing ever went his way. “It wasn’t enough that I could see the ghosts before. I must have been really close to death, because now I can hear them too. The gods sure have a sick sense of humor.”
Griff put a hand on his shoulder while Alys reached for the broken blade, its new cloth-wrapped hilt making it easier to grab. “What do you hear?” he asked grimly.
“It’s … something ancient, a song in another language, and it makes me feel cold all over. Colder than I felt when I was coming down with the fever, even,” Mal explained as the singer wenton, scanning the tree line until at last something flitted in and out of his view at the corner of his right eye.
The shadow. The gaunt, nearly skeletal spirit with blackened teeth and empty eyes that didn’t like to be seen.
Griff squeezed his shoulder, drawing his attention again. “That’s a wraith, Mal,” he said urgently. “It has to be. Wraiths are some of the dark queen’s oldest and most powerful servants. They sing songs that freeze the blood of those who can hear them. Usually, wraiths guard something in their afterlife—gold, a grave, a place—and when someone gets too near one without realizing … well, let’s just say people don’t see wraiths and live to tell about it when they get back to their cottages to finally rest their bum legs and shoulders.”
“I have, though. I’ve seen more ghosts out here than I can count,” Mal said. And what was one type of ghost versus another? “And I’m doing just fine, as you can see.”
“Are you? Are we?” Griff countered, his eyes glistening with worry. “From what I remember, wraiths are most powerful near their bones. This one is probably buried with Rhun’s treasure, or near it, since it followed us all the way here. Once we leave the safety of our warded camp and get closer to its resting place, it’ll kill us for trying to steal from it, and no one will be cured of any pain or any the richer. Maybe that’s why Rhun brought the spirit blade out here—he and his friends knew what they would be up against. And they still failed.”
