Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Knights and Robbers
Once they had recovered enough to drink some water and Griff remembered how to put one foot in front of the other, they did exactly what Mal had planned.
They hiked through the fields that bordered the road, using the tall grass as a screen to keep them from view, and persisted through the crisp, star-flecked night with the wind whispering secrets in their ears until sunup.
By the time they were ready to finally make camp the following night, though Griff glanced back a time or two, no cheerful chimney smoke from the houses in Linden could be seen on the horizon.
In fact, there were no dwellings in this vast swath of the Plains of Plenty, only grass and the occasional rocky outcropping, some stray boulders and palm-sized stones.
… And one large ruined fortress, its roof long ago scalped by whoever had felt it would stroke his ego to conquer this unimpressive place between the Mire and Mayfair.
It was to this hunched and weathered stone outcropping that Mal was leading them now, following a line of recent boot prints in the earth as darkness fell around them.
It was cold, and the constant wind stung their cheeks.
Griff’s feet ached from the punishing pace; Alys and Mal might go on “business trips” like this with some frequency, but he wasn’t used to covering so much distance without a proper break, especially with a wound he could still feel much too often.
No one seemed to feel much like talking, so the silence was broken only by the calls of hawks and killdeer, though Griff had noticed Alys watching him with some concern, as if there were something she wanted or needed to say.
“Are you really okay?” she finally asked him as Mal lengthened his stride and cut ahead, scrabbling up the hillside on which the old fortress crouched.
The faint clunk of his scabbard against the walls could be heard as he started inspecting the place for signs of other recent visitors, like the boot prints they had been tracking.
Griff observed his movements, however faintly.
Most of his attention was on Alys, on her hands twisting the end of her long braid, on her wide eyes fixed on his face with a touch more presence than what he was coming to realize was her normal state—a few mushrooms each day.
Had she noticed how much his wound still pained him despite being half out of it all the time?
They hadn’t really talked about it back in Linden; he didn’t want anyone thinking he was weak, or weaker than they did already after he had barely survived the attack.
“I mean,” she continued, apparently sensing the need for clarity, “do you want to go home? Do you need to? I feel like … it’s my fault you’re out here, and so far it isn’t going how I thought it would.”
Griff exhaled slowly, holding up a hand to signal that he needed a minute to think. It was a heavy question on next to no rest.
Alys nodded, glancing away from him and up toward the half-moon that watched over them with a ghostly light, barely gilding the fortress and the grass barrens to the east with silver.
Small dells and tall brush dominated the west and north, eventually coalescing into the thick tangle of the Mire, which remained out of sight even as they began to climb the hill behind Mal.
“I’m no worse for the wear than I was already.
Not in any way a hot bath and a long night’s sleep in a real bed couldn’t cure,” Griff said finally, scrubbing a hand over the two days of stubble darkening his jaw.
“But I still don’t really understand why you asked me out here in the first place.
Or had Mal do it. I’d like to know,” he offered softly.
Alys scrambled up a patch of gravel to gain the level ground of the fortress, extending a hand to pull Griff up. He didn’t need the help, but he took it all the same.
“Maybe one day soon, you will,” she answered, infuriatingly cryptic, turning away so that her face was unreadable. “Maybe being out here—you’ll start to see what I see.”
“I see that you have charcoal on your mouth,” Griff called after her as she slipped fluidly between a gap in the stones.
She giggled as she flashed out of sight.
He didn’t follow as quickly this time. Rather, head spinning and tight from lack of sleep, he dropped onto half of a well-weathered large rock hewn open and took a moment alone.
Somewhere in the distance, the yowl of coyotes rose from the Mire.
The sound was clearer here, where even the half-rock walls still standing provided some shelter from the unchecked winds that whipped across the plains.
Griff imagined Liam had a fire going in the hearth.
It was late, but they liked staying up when the rest of the world was quiet and still.
He could almost hear echoes of Liam reading a bedtime story to Badger, one of the children’s adventure books that the locksmith loved picking up from the market secondhand.
Griff had been known to listen in too, adding oil to the lamp so they could get in just one more chapter before his eyes closed.
He had left behind a good relationship, and for what?
A phantom of a boy he’d loved and the ghost of a man who had been a father figure for a few years?
Maybe he had made a mistake, chasing shadows when he wasn’t even a Warden yet and might never be now, a thought that made him ache with emptiness as if he’d lost something vital, an organ rather than a limb.
Then a hand thrust through the gap in the stones near where Alys had disappeared, warm and real, the dark, slightly crusty lines of raven’s feathers stark on the inside of that tawny wrist where they escaped from the cuff of the sleeve.
“Planning to join us sometime tonight?” Mal asked him—not unkindly, Griff thought—as the thief made his way fully back through the gap.
Slowly, Griff clasped that cold hand, now bereft of its mitten, and kept his face carefully blank as he rose.
Or, at least, he tried to. But he couldn’t stop his eyes from roaming over Mal’s gold-stubbled face with a glimmer of that barely concealed hope he had spoken about back when Mal appeared at his work.
Hand in hand, they passed through the open wall and into the relative shelter of the roofless old stones that had endured after all this time.
Griff swayed slightly with tiredness as he picked his way among the debris and over to where the others had already dropped their packs against the most intact of the inner walls.
Mal’s fingers tightened around his in answer, as if to steady him, brushing over some of the scars he’d asked about not long ago.
Mal paused for a moment, feeling over those rough little places again as his eyes moved from the hand in his to Griff’s face. But if he wanted to ask about the scars again, this time he didn’t give the question breath.
Before Griff could get his brain working to do anything—say, squeeze Mal’s fingers in answer, or unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth—Mal was moving on, dropping Griff’s hand and saying with his usual confidence as the leader of their small, strange expedition, “We can lay out our bedrolls here, but we’re going to need to set a watch now that we’re out in the open like this. I’ll take the first.”
Griff settled into his bedroll and tried his best to get comfortable even with a few pebbles poking him in the side.
Still, he was the sort of tired where sleep reclaimed him almost instantly despite the cold, despite the aches, despite the lingering question of why he was really here and the deepening concern that he wasn’t going to get answers anytime soon.
He awoke with a start to hazy indigo twilight, the moon hanging at half height, wondering what had disturbed his rest. Looking around, he found Mal fully out of their shelter and still on watch.
He was gazing down the hillside with his usual distaste, like a king surveying an utterly disappointing piece of his tithe, his eyes almost as silver as his flask.
Beside him, Alys was sleeping on just her cloak, her blade within reach, as if she wanted to be ready to stab someone the instant she woke.
Turning and catching Griff’s eye, Mal crooked a beckoning finger.
Adrenaline quickly had him on his feet, grabbing his cloak—and on second thought, his sword—and joining his old friend outside the fortress.
Mal turned quickly at the sound of his approach, eyeing him up and down, his gaze glinting with some fresh light as the ends of his thick black scarf, once Griff’s, danced on their own in the breeze.
“You really do look like your father sometimes,” he observed quietly, without inflection. “Maybe it’s the sword.”
The great Seimon Sayer, the Warden who’d ridden against the last living dragon on his beloved stallion Griffon and dealt the killing stroke even as the beast struck him down too.
He might not have been in Griff’s life enough for him to truly remember the man, but he cast a long shadow that Griff hadn’t yet figured how to step out of, though he’d tried—making himself bigger or smaller didn’t seem to do a thing when they shared the same height, the same features, the same breadth of their shoulders.
“You know how to use that thing, right?” Mal asked, eyes narrowed in assessment.
Griff didn’t answer but managed not to roll his eyes. He’d spent years training with the elves, and if a centuries-old general couldn’t teach him a thing or two, it was probably hopeless.
Now he followed Mal’s gaze down the hillside, watching a small orange glow in the distance. Faint noises wafted up with the wind: a clatter of iron, a few muttered words becoming a cascade of laughter, and a soft whinny.
The firelight reflected in Mal’s eyes as he spoke in hushed tones. “There’s four of them. And they have a packhorse.” He pointed at a black speck moving away from the fire toward a pocket of shadow.
“So?” Griff asked, uncertain how any of this spelled trouble for them.