“Don’t act like you don’t know that you’ve got enough ass for two of them, at least,” Mal teased softly.
Griff grinned, though only briefly. Now that he was seeing more clearly, he was realizing how generous Mal really was with him. Not just focused on his own riches after all. “Not sure I’ll need any horses at all, though, now that I’m never going to finish my Warden training even if I’m fully healed.”
He wasn’t Seimon Sayer, after all. He really liked being Griff, playing his lute and building places where people could make memories, in the light or dark. Maybe he wasn’t destined to hear ballads about his own heroics someday, but he would bet all his savings that in another twenty or thirty years, he would still be making a damn good egg. And he would still know how to make Mal laugh, the best music he had ever heard. Things that were all his own.
“Thank fuck,” Mal breathed. “Thank you. And you’re welcome.”
“I want the freedom to travel with you,” Griff said as more of the tension left Mal’s body and he melted into him. “I want to make our own destiny. I want to find out what that is. I want to make history with you. The kind that, when we look back on it, matters to us alone.”
“Thank you,” Mal said again, softer this time. “Because back when you left me to be the next dragon-slayer, or whatever the hell you were after in Stormveil, it left a mark worse than my scar.” Fingers trailed up Griff’s chest as Mal continued. “I can find other treasures, but I could search the world over and never meet another you.” He lowered his hand as it started to tremble, but Griff caught it in his own and curled his fingers around Mal’s.
Mal leaned in and kissed him slowly, without teeth or anything to prove for once.
Griff rather liked the taste of it.
But while he would have been content to linger there a while, Mal still had more to say. “Speaking of which—from now on, your enemies will have me to answer to.” He pressed a kiss to Griff’s temple. “You won’t have to fight if you don’t want to, not while I’m around. But,” he added, a hint of his usual scowl reappearing, “that doesn’t mean I’m about to go making friends with any elves either, even if they do let me into their special city someday.”
Griff drew Mal tighter against him, accepting it all gratefully as they stood together on this new side—their own.
“And while I’m no longer working for the Shadow Queen, I’m going to need to keep up all my other businesses,” Mal warned lowly. “So if that bothers you, I’d rather know now.” Before Griff could ask, he elaborated, ticking them off on his fingers. “The wolf business. The orchard business. The crystal business. Property acquisitions. Protection for other merchants. Whatever I come up with next—I’m thinking enchanted elixirs.”
“I’ll have dinner on the table and a fire going when you come home,” Griff assured him through a tired grin, glad to see that trudging through the swamp hadn’t dampened the ambition he had admired for so long. “Not having to worry whether you’ll come home at all—that’s the part I like, no matter what kind of business you call it.”
“Okay,” Mal agreed, tucking a dark curl behind Griff’s ear ever so gently. “But if anything starts to bother you—I want you to tell me right away, even if it’s hard. Give me a real chance not to lose you, to show you that you’re enough just like this.”
Griff leaned into that soft touch and nodded. “Understood. I don’t want to lose you either.” His hands made a suggestion then, guiding Mal toward his lap, pressing lightly against the other man’s back to see if he was willing. “Are there any ofherghosts watching us right now? Any new shadows?” he couldn’t help but ask before taking this any further.
“None.”
Mal climbed onto Griff with seemingly little effort despite his still-healing side, settling in and sliding his palms along the span of Griff’s back. They kissed for a while in the quiet, having a wordless conversation that gave Griff a great many answers until he was too tired to keep his eyes open any longer.
There in the dark with Mal, he was living, and it was everything. More than enough. Their own sort of light.
Chapter Thirty-TwoPrizes
In the morning, when Mal woke at sunup despite his exhaustion, he turned in Griff’s arms to brush a soft kiss over the pale forehead of the man sleeping soundly beside him. Then he disentangled himself as gently and quietly as he could, wrapping his own cloak around Griff so that he might not notice his absence for a while yet.
As he prowled around the smoldering remains of the fireside in search of the silver flask he had discarded sometime last night before bed to prove a point, Alys’s eyes fluttered open. She blinked a question at him, and when Mal put a finger to his lips, she nodded. One hand crept out of her bedroll to grip the cloth hilt of the broken sword—just in case any green-eyed ghosts were still lurking around and their queen got any funny ideas before they went to retrieve the treasure in an hour or two.
She kept up her silent guard as he tucked the flask into the inner pocket of his jerkin, close to his heart, beside Griff’s letters. With a golden dawn threading streaks of light through his hopelessly knotted hair, he slipped away to the nearby creek.
Picking a flat rock just wide enough to perch on, Mal sat with his bare feet touching the water, mud squishing between his toes,just him and his shadow—no extra one to speak of anymore. No burning in the lines of ink feathering his forearm. No eerie singing, just the booming call of an ordinary bittern.
There wasn’t even the flutter of a raven’s wing in the branches above. At least, none that he could see, and hearing was beyond him at this point. It was time he faced it.
Past time he faced a lot of things he’d rather not.
His usual headache was pounding between his eyes, begging for him to take a sip from his flask or at least pour a generous splash into some tea and make himself a breakfast toddy. Out of habit, he unscrewed the cap. But remembering all the things he and Griff had agreed would be different from now on, he didn’t take his usual first sip.
Instead, he turned the flask upside down and fed it to the creek as he stared at his reflection in the water’s dark, slow-moving surface. The slightly crooked nose, the sneer that seemed permanently stuck some days, silver eyes narrowed in dislike or distrust.
He sat there until the sun began to warm him enough for him to lose his shirt, continuing to wear the same hard look as he studied himself in the water. Eventually, he threw a rock at his own face, shattering that reflection, and started to remember.
Dark holes. Lice. Living like a rat while he sucked the flesh from their bones. Dreams of running Thrallkeld himself going up in flames. The carving of his own flesh, the foreign sound of his screams echoing in his ears, the witch’s small, strong hands pulling him out of the tent where they had planned to carry out his execution.
Oblivion. One, two, three failed attempts at breathing, three sharp presses of those hands against his chest, and finally, the gasp as air rushed back into his lungs and his heart shuddered back to life in time for him to catch an echo of a few whispered words, a magic older than that of most of the elves who now lived in their airy sanctuary, as the witch brought him back from death.
Salve packing his grisly wound as Tansy, the witch, fought the infection there. Knife flashing in the late afternoon sun, scraping down to his scalp as she cut off his long gold hair that was full of bugs and itching relentlessly until he hardly recognized himself—battered face, shaved head, nasty scar. For his own good. All for his own good.
