Chapter 2 #2
Too bad being a hero meant certain death; just look at the parents he had never known. Look at Rhun, the most storied Warden of all. He had been Wynnie’s husband, the man who had helped raise him along with Griff and Alys until he disappeared.
Too bad nobody ever asked for Mal’s opinions on these things. He knew quite a lot for his twenty-six years.
Too bad for whoever was bleeding out right now; Mal had plotted out the attack himself.
As usual, he hadn’t been given a name, but he didn’t need one.
He had the intended victim’s dates of travel, their course (the Wyrmwood’s best trapping grounds), and their number of companions (one), which was all he needed to make it look like a petty theft.
It was one of those neat lessons he had picked up in Thrallkeld that made him so useful here.
Too bad they hadn’t asked him to do the stabbing.
Years into his service, yet he wasn’t high enough in the ranks to carry out the job.
And they had bigger, tougher thugs for that.
Still, he was quick and efficient with his hunting knife and never hesitated.
Just like Wynnie. Sure, she wasn’t his real mother, but he had listened to her all these years as if she were—listened and taken her lessons to heart, even when he knew Griff and Alys weren’t paying attention—and he had honed in himself a ruthlessness that made her proud.
Too bad for those on the mission, Mal and Guts would get first pick of everything in these crates. Even if it was all supposed to be loaded onto a caravan headed south toward the Shadow Queen’s hidden stronghold once the contents were inventoried.
“Find anything good yet?” Mal asked Guts, bumping his shoulder against hers with comfortable familiarity before he took a seat on one of the unopened crates and sipped deeply from his flask. The whiskey stung his throat like irony.
“Couple nice bits of crockery. Assorted poisons. Coffee. Some crystal flowers,” Guts listed off as she inspected some small packets of a shimmering, pale-blue powder.
Her frown made it clear that she didn’t consider the coffee or flowers much good at all, that she found them about as appealing as the packets of poison she now held in her hands.
“They’re dwarven make, though, the flowers.
Probably fetch a small fortune from the right buyer.
You going to help with any of this or just sit there looking pretty all night? ”
Mal shrugged, pulling out one of Isabel’s cookies and taking a stale bite. He laid the rest on the crate so Guts could help herself. “Where are the flowers? I’ll take them if you don’t,” he said, starting to search around for them.
Guts flipped her braid over her shoulder, cut him a knowing look, and set the packets of poison aside.
Then she pulled out a bundle wrapped in heavy muslin cloth from the crate and started to unwrap it with the air of presenting Mal with the spoils from another winning fight.
A few of the amethyst petals had small chips and scratches, but most of the flowers were in excellent shape to his trained eye.
The part of him that loved shiny things wanted to tuck them into his tattered green jerkin alongside his flask, take them home to his shelf of other such glittering trophies nicked by his quick fingers here and there over the years.
Amongst the flowers, there were even a few carved animals, the detailed grooves of their fur as realistic as only dwarven craft could be.
“How ’bout that,” Guts said softly, plucking one of the small animals from the meadow of muslin and petals and holding it aloft. It was a griffin. “Just like the mark tonight: Griffin. Must be a sign you did something right.”
She pressed the smooth crystal carving into Mal’s hand, but his fingers didn’t wrap around it like he meant them to. He couldn’t make out what Guts was saying either—something about how he ought to take this home. How he’d earned it.
The statue slid from his slick palm and shattered on the floor, but rather than curse and grab a dustpan, Mal grabbed his flask and drained it, willing the whiskey to burn every last feeling out of him.
“Kage told you his name, did he? The boss sharing insider secrets with you now?” Griffin wasn’t exactly a common name, but still, he had to be sure before the nauseating wave of agony rising up inside him could completely devour him. “Griffin … Sayer, was it?”
It had been so long since he had spoken that name out loud to anyone.
“Dunno,” Guts said, uncertainty slithering across her face as she took in the crumbs of glass on the floor in combination with Mal’s shaking hands.
“Some hero’s son, he said. I was eavesdropping from inside the tea cupboard when they were gearing up to leave, so I didn’t catch everything.
Anyway, what’s it matter? It’s done. You don’t have to fight him.
I’m more worried about you damaging the merchandise. ”
He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Guts prompted again, “Mal?” No nickname, which was unusual. He wondered if she could sense it in him, the crack that had just opened to let a little of the pain he’d been drowning in for so long scream into the world again.
She was right. He was Mister Dangerous, and there wasn’t a damn thing to admire about it.
He didn’t want any of this, this sudden, crushing guilt that made it a battle just to breathe.
He’d had no idea that Griff was the target of the attack, or he would have insisted on going with them.
Insisted just so he could slit every single one of their throats before they had a chance to raise a blade against the man who had once been his best friend, who still mattered to him even though Mal had done everything he could to strip Griff’s existence of any meaning in his life.
Griff and Alys were his world.
He couldn’t just unmake his whole world.
He was seventeen and shaking on the living room floor again.
Griff was ranting about how Mal had betrayed him.
Let his dead parents down, disgraced them all by working for the Shadow Queen, some dark sorcerer who hid her decaying features behind a gilded mask.
He did care that Griff was looking at him like he didn’t know him.
That he was telling Mal they were nothing to each other from now on, calling Mal a traitor, his eyes red and his voice full of a hurt Mal didn’t recognize.
Griff’s eyes had been red since the day before, when he’d walked in on Mal kissing some girl in his room at the cottage for the first time, trying new things.
But Mal didn’t have time to wonder what that meant, or even time to defend himself more than by shouting a few curses and petty insults back at Griff before the person he trusted most in this life was gone.
It had seemed so easy for Griff to leave him behind, like Mal had never really mattered to him at all, like he was worth nothing in the end.
Like he was just a stain on Griff’s boot.
Griff was so sure, even back then, that the Wardens were right to fight the Queen, that his purpose—and Alys’s, and Mal’s—should be to join the battle the way their parents had. Give up their precious life for it, like there couldn’t be anything else worth living for.
When they made their way back to Mayfair six years ago, Griff had been quick to judge his new scars, his new swagger, his new sneer.
Mal had wanted to fight him, had grown so used to fighting in Thrallkeld that he had found everything to insult about the other man.
His clothes, his boyfriend of the week, the elves he cared more about than he ever had Mal.
Over the site of their parents’ graves, he had mocked and goaded Griff into breaking his nose, and he had given Griff his first black eye in return.
Every time his fist landed, every time his scathing words pierced Griff’s armor like barbs, Mal somehow felt worse, until the whiskey helped him to feel nothing at all.
He had come to rely on Griff to let him down. But the whiskey wasn’t helping this time.
Maybe because this time, he was the one who had let Griff down.
“Wait, are you seriously leaving me with this mess? Where are you going?” Guts called, her voice ringing with alarm and confusion as Mal raced back up the stairs to the main shop.
“Ate something bad for dinner,” he lied without remorse. “Just gonna get some air.”
With that, he took a seat on the long counter that faced the front door, skinny legs dangling, knife in hand and not enough whiskey in the world, to wait for his boss’s return no matter how long it took.
The Shadow Queen’s agents had numbers on their side; he’d made sure of that.
Which meant that Griff was already dead.
And as far as Mal was concerned, that made Kage a walking corpse too, because Mal was going to avenge his fallen friend or die trying.
He wouldn’t hesitate. He owed Griff that much.
Too bad for his boss that unlike Griff, he was no one’s hero. He didn’t fight fair, whatever that meant. And he had figured out how to survive in the dark a long time ago. Alone.