Feeling slightly more confident that I would at least progress in one direction under Andrei’s tutelage, I finished my day, only to find Griff waiting for me outside my door shortly before dinner—remarkable because normally all three of them just let themselves in. He leaned against the wall, a picture of composure, except for thetension in his neck and the clench of his hands in an otherwise relaxed stance.
The feelings from earlier crashed through me as I wordlessly opened the door and he followed me inside. Shutting the door more heavily than required, I crossed my arms and stared at him. For once, I was going to make him speak first.
He winced slightly at my expression and roughly ran a hand through his hair. “I apologize, Princess.”
He stood there, just staring at me, shifting his weight to his other foot, and I waited.
“I overreacted. You were right. If I had been there and she hadn’t removed her hand from you, I would have…” He trailed off, his eyes focused somewhere beyond my head.
“What would you have done, Griff?”
His eyes snapped back to mine. “I don’t know. But I would have done something.”
I uncrossed my arms and drifted toward him. “What did you ever see in her?” I asked, my voice surprisingly steady.
His eyes flicked away, then returned to my face. “It was right after my father, and… I was lonely.”
“What happened to him?”
His face shuttered. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
That list of things he didn’t want to talk about was a long and frustrating one.
“Are you lonely now?”
He hesitated, looking down at the floor. “The Champion’s road is a solo one, Princess.”
I took another step closer to him. “It doesn’t have to be.”
“Yes, it does.”
And there it was. I shoved past him. If he was going to push me away, I was done. He was my Champion. I was his princess. Done. End of story.
“Forgive me?”
There was something about the way he asked it that made mepause. I looked back at him, but as always, couldn’t decipher what that was in his eyes. “Yes.”
And I did. For this fight, at least. But there was something between us now. I didn’t know if it was his comments to Finn about us just being friends, or his defense of Aine, or something else entirely, but there was distance that hadn’t been there before.
And so when I crawled into bed later that night, I stayed on my side. And he stayed on his.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
The hardest part of this fight isn’t the constant threat of danger or the risk of death. It’s never knowing when you might say goodbye to a friend for the last time. The worry that at any moment you may greet a friend, only to watch their eyes go black as they turn to the darkness.
—From the journal of Violet Andrever
It had been four days since our fight about Aine—not that I was counting—and the distance and awkwardness between us only grew. Several times, he opened his mouth to say something, only to close it and hide behind his mask. And I wasn’t asking. He’d made it perfectly clear he didn’t want me asking questions. He still appeared for dinner, and every night to guard me from my dreams, but it was the taciturn Champion who showed up, his mask firmly in place. Griff, the man who’d laughed with me in Maraleth, was nowhere to be found.
Tonight, Griff had skipped dinner entirely, a fact commented on by both Finn and Freya. Finn had shrugged and said Griff did what he wanted to do, but Freya looked at me with a pensive expression, as though she could see through me and knew precisely why I was toying with my food. I began to falter in my resolve to just be a duty. But if I was more, why did he constantly push me away?
Finn and Freya left and I began clearing the table, wondering iftonight was the night that he simply wouldn’t appear. I had settled on the couch, convinced something was wrong, when I heard a quiet knock and the door opened. My worry fell away as he entered, only to return with a vengeance when I saw his expression.
I stood hastily and took a step toward him. “What is it? What happened?”
He quickly donned the mask once more. “It’s nothing.”
