Chapter 13 #2
“Gods, why now?” Mal hissed suddenly, releasing Griff’s shirt. He started fumbling at his belt with a bandaged hand, trying to grab his hunting knife while glaring at something over Griff’s shoulder and demanding, “What do you want? Just show your face or fuck off already!”
But when Griff turned, heart lodged in his throat, all he saw was the breeze stirring the grass, the morning shadows of the bramble and dell, and the waiting Mire.
And Alys, clutching something small and pointed that gleamed dully in her hands like steel hidden beneath a solid layer of caked-on dirt.
“What is it?” she called as she strode quickly over to them, her gaze darting every which way and—like Griff—apparently finding nothing of note.
Her eyes eventually settled on Griff’s, the worry in them for once undisguised as Mal answered, “It was the shadow again. Right with you, Alys, while you were grabbing whatever the hell that is.”
Griff’s back stiffened with a chill despite the heat given off by the dying embers of their fire. He believed Mal, even without proof.
“But it’s gone now?” Alys asked, her voice sharpened by nerves.
“Yeah,” Mal said, still struggling to draw his knife with his bandaged hands. “It disappeared when you started walking over here.”
“You mentioned that stabbing the ghost in the cottage hadn’t done much good—you think whatever this is can be killed or frightened off with a blade?” Griff was able to find words much more easily knowing the thing was no longer around. For now.
“I hope so,” Alys said passionately. “I’ll even do it, as I won’t have to see it.”
Mal sighed and stopped trying to draw his knife.
“I don’t think a blade will work, no. But—I’m also not just going to sit here and let it hurt you, either of you.
Maybe it hasn’t even made up its mind what it wants to do, but it’s going to have to get in line behind some much-bigger problems if it wants a piece of me.
” With a frustrated breath, he gave a dark look to the mud on his boots.
“You two could turn around here. I can handle this myself. In fact—that’s what I should be doing. ”
“It’s just some shadow. It can’t be that scary if it doesn’t even have a face,” Griff insisted—he wasn’t ready to go home yet, to abandon Mal and his bandaged hands that could hardly grip a knife out where wargs and trolls and orcs hunted.
He actually wanted to stay. “Whatever it wants, Mal, it hasn’t hurt any of us yet, so perhaps it can’t, or perhaps it doesn’t even want to. ”
Mal didn’t look convinced by the sudden show of bravado. “Seems like shadows cling to me these days. A wiser man might consider seeking sunnier climes.”
A grin flickered across Griff’s face. “Good thing no one ever said I was wise, then. You saw the way I ran down that mule.”
“I’m sorry I missed it,” Alys said, but despite the teasing in her voice, she didn’t quite smile. Instead, she held out the item she was cradling. “You two should look at this. I found it just over there—kicked it, or I might not have seen it.”
She pointed to a patch of earth that was more mud than grass as Mal peered over her shoulder at the dirt-crusted dagger. “Found yourself a bit of … bit of treasure … already?”
His voice faltered as he took in the shape of the dagger in Alys’s hands, and Griff quickly saw why.
The weapon was muddy and worse for having been out in what was surely years’ worth of weather, but there was no mistaking the silver raven etched atop the hilt.
The three of them had only ever seen one other piece like it—one that belonged to Rhun.
It was also, according to Wynnie’s inventory, one of the weapons he’d had on him when he and his friends departed for the Mire.
And now here it was again, looking as if it had been lying in wait for quite some time before Alys’s boot trampled over it.
Waiting for them to find it—unless something or someone had wanted them to?
“Huh. Maybe our extra shadow actually is Rhun,” Mal muttered, though Alys was stubbornly shaking her head, like she wasn’t even willing to consider the possibility that her father had been reduced to nothing more than a faceless phantom.
“Guess it would make sense that he’s trying to stick so close to us, maybe look out for us. ”
Griff half wished he could see the spirit too, if only to say a more final goodbye.
To thank him for the dagger, which was perhaps his way of offering them some closure.
But then he thought of Vic’s bait traps that she set in the Wyrmwood to hunt, a little morsel inside to encourage some creature or other to come closer.
He wasn’t normally given to such flights of fancy, but he couldn’t entirely shake the thought as he watched Mal wipe away enough of the mud to read the initials etched faintly just below the bird’s talons: R.K.M.
“What do you think happened out here?” Alys asked haltingly, cradling the dagger to her chest as if it might bring her some comfort.
“Do you think his friends were lying and they killed him—or someone did—before he ever set foot in the Mire?” She only had Griff and Mal to ask, after all.
Rhun’s friends had passed away some years back, and Wynnie had never been interested in looking for answers.
She had been more focused on bloodying any of his enemies in Mayfair she could get her hands on.
“The knife probably fell off his belt, and by the time he realized it—if he ever did—he was already on the road to start a new life when he met with some misfortune,” Mal muttered darkly. “Guy always was a little …” He twirled a finger in the air. “You know, not all there.”
Alys shot him a scowl.
Griff didn’t offer any ideas of his own, though he knew the full story better than either of them because he was the one who’d questioned Wynnie about it the most: Four friends rode off to war to kill a dragon—Seimon and Aurora Sayer, his parents; Garth Pryce, Mal’s father, whose wife had died fighting a giant when Mal was still a baby; and Rhun Kindrick-Mordecai, arguably the most skilled warrior among them.
Wynnie had taken care of all three children while they were on that journey—and, at some point in that uncertain time when Rhun was presumed dead, met Vic—and realized she would be keeping them for a long time to come when only Rhun returned, declaring the boys his own in honor of his fallen friends.
But Rhun had come back changed. Startling at loud noises, prone to fits, sometimes unable to speak above a whisper for days at a time. Missing a couple of fingers from one hand.
The war had long been over by the time he resurfaced.
He had been held captive somewhere, tortured for information about the Wardens’ plans to round up scattered bands of the dark queen’s forces, and escaped only after managing to kill one of his keepers.
They patched him up in Stormveil, but not even the elves’ best healers with their centuries of knowledge could fully restore his mind.
And then, a few years into raising Griff and Mal alongside his daughter, he disappeared on this treasure-hunting trip with a couple of friends who had also survived the war—this time for good.
Griff knew that Alys needed to believe he died a hero, stalked in the Mire by servants of the dark queen and dragged off to be quietly murdered by old enemies while his friends were sleeping.
He also knew that Mal had already observed enough leaving in his brief lifetime to decide that’s just what Rhun had done in the end, meeting his demise in the midst of deserting his family.
The truth, Griff suspected, lay somewhere between Alys’s and Mal’s versions of things.
Rhun had probably been having one of his bad spells when he left the company of his friends unexpectedly in the middle of the night.
Might have been somewhere else in his mind altogether when he did something like stumble into the lake and accidentally drown.
His friends, by their account, had searched the area for well over a day before something startled them so badly that they were forced to flee, even though they were closing in on the fabled treasure. They refused to discuss it, even with Wynnie.
Griff thought it likely that they knew what had really happened to him and simply didn’t want to cause any further pain by recounting his last moments.
Perhaps Griff and his companions were about to come close to reliving those moments as they followed Rhun’s map.