Chapter 21 #2
Griff smiled wanly, coughed, and said, “Not all of it. I split our healing supplies across my pack and the others—figured someone might try to take some of our stuff at some point. Bandits, you know.” Finally, his bleary eyes seemed to take in the gashes on Mal’s side, the deepest one still bleeding freely.
“You saved me, didn’t you?” he asked and, without giving him time to answer, added, “You have absolutely no sense of self-preservation, you shit. You’re going to need stitches.
Lucky for you, I’ve done it a hundred times. ”
Alys and Mal exchanged a worried look over Griff’s head. He had no concept of how bad off he was.
“I just … need a quick nap first …” Griff continued, his eyes fluttering closed again. “Five minutes …” His lips formed an easier smile. “Love you, Mal … luckiest man on either side of the Teeth … So much wasted time … Always been you, for me …”
Mal’s adrenaline was still coursing through him, preventing him from feeling the worst of his own injuries.
Leaning down, he rested his sweaty forehead lightly against Griff’s and murmured, “Make it to tomorrow, and then you can play healer, you sentimental fuck.” As those green eyes softly closed, Mal gave his good shoulder a firm shake, but Griff was once again drifting past his reach.
Mal knew he would be hearing echoes of everything Griff had muttered all night for many nights to come, whether Griff made it or not. “Tell me all those pretty words tomorrow too. Stay with me, no matter how much it hurts,” he pleaded with the drowsing man.
Even though Griff was already unconscious once again, Mal leaned down to give him one of the things he claimed to like most in the world, a reminder of what was worth staying for: a brush of his lips against the other’s, the mouth Griff was always going on about.
He was past caring whether they had an audience or not, and sure now of what they were.
Then he was left to stare down at the shirts beneath his hands, watching the seep of crimson slow at last while Alys dug through her pack and let out a victory cry.
“What is it?” Mal glanced up, ignoring how the world had blurred at the edges.
“Elven medicine,” Alys said triumphantly, eyes gleaming as she held up a tin with strange characters printed in Griff’s neat handwriting on the lid.
“No, no, we need—” Mal started to say. This wasn’t what Griff had described.
Tossing the tin aside, Alys pulled out a vial of cherry-colored liquid, and Mal’s heart slowed enough for him to get a real breath. The other vial must be with one of the packs on Prancer, but at least they had this. They had a chance.
“We need to get this in him,” he told Alys with all the air in his lungs.
“How much?” she asked.
“The whole thing,” Mal guessed, because it wasn’t labeled and Griff hadn’t given him any instructions.
If it could keep their dog alive this long, it had to be able to buy Griff some time, too, while his body worked to replace some of the blood he’d lost. He propped up Griff’s head while Alys gently and slowly coaxed the ruby liquid down his throat.
“It smells good, at least,” Alys remarked as she took a moment to wipe Griff’s mouth with her sleeve. “Should we use what’s in the tin too?”
“I guess,” Mal said, eyeing the writing on the lid warily as he picked an irritating bit of dirt from the gash in his side. “I can’t read what it says on the top, but hopefully it’s some kind of disinfectant.”
While Alys opened the tin to give it a sniff, Mal carefully raised Griff’s shirt and used a water canteen to rinse every injury he saw.
“I’m putting this stuff on you next,” Alys told Mal in a tone that left no room for argument as she approached with the tin in hand. It smelled strongly of herbs gone soft with mildew after not being properly hung to dry.
He knew she hated to think about anything happening to him, losing him like she’d lost Rhun, but that was life: over too soon, and never gentle on the way out. Griff’s ashen face, his limp body lying in the garish, blood-spattered grass, was a stark reminder of that.
“The shadow was here,” Mal said tersely, his mind reeling, trying to find the next direction in which to strike back at their enemies. “When Griff got attacked. Then it slipped away. Doesn’t seem very Rhun-like to me, no matter what face it showed to Griff.”
“No, he would never leave us at a time like this,” Alys agreed quietly, lips pressed together in thought.
“So either Griff wasn’t supposed to follow him, misunderstood somehow, or it’s not Papa after all.
” As she dipped her fingers into the salve and applied it to the first of Griff’s many cuts and gouges, she glanced at Mal a few times before finally saying, “I wonder if the shadow made the wyvern attack. If it can do that. I mean—why else would a wyvern charge someone like that, in the daytime, when they usually wake at dusk?”
“Hunger. Or those could have been her eggs you took,” Mal pointed out, anything to keep from thinking about whose blood was soaking his hands.
“Of course, the shadow led you to those eggs in the first place, didn’t it, with the cloak pin?
And for Griff to be in just the right place at the right time …
I don’t know.” Mal glanced down at his tattoo, thinking back to how it had prickled during the times he had seen the shadow—it only burned when one of Her Dreadful Majesty’s servants was close, but that was practically all the time out here.
“It’s probably not Rhun, with our luck.” Much as it pained him to admit being wrong, he added, “And I’d bet a lot of Maysilvers that thing is leading us to danger when it appears, not warning us. ”
Alys’s gaze met his for a moment, and he glimpsed fear mingled with hurt there as she took this in.
“That would explain why it doesn’t really feel like Papa.
Maybe the shadow wants the treasure too,” she suggested, frowning into the tin of balm.
“But … if it’s not Rhun, if it’s some ghostly thief who took his things, where does that leave us? ”
“With too many enemies on our trail, and more to come once Her Royal Awfulness realizes we’re going to stay put for at least a day or two with these injuries while our shadow competition is free to scout ahead,” Mal concluded bitterly.
All he knew was that the strange entity, which might not be Rhun despite having Rhun’s stuff, had to be his own fault somehow. Like everything else. His to handle, whether it was part of the deal he had struck with his soon-to-be-former employers or not.
While Alys finished putting the salve on Griff, Mal slid out from under him—stacking up a few more clean shirts to provide some cushion for his head—and finally examined his own wounds.
Griff had been right that the one in his side would need stitches.
But for now, cleaning it was a start. Mal dribbled some water into the wound, hardly wincing, then opened his flask and hissed a long breath through his teeth as whiskey burned into his raw flesh.
“What are you doing?” Alys asked, darting a worried look at him.
“I’m not using that elf balm, or anything else of theirs, unless we absolutely have to,” Mal gritted out.
He would consider forgiving the elves for those lost letters only if Griff woke up again.
“If it actually worked, Griff wouldn’t have been searching for other herbs.
I don’t even know if we should have helped him drink that red stuff … ”
His voice trailed away as Alys curled over on herself, vomiting her breakfast in the grass beside Griff after tending the worst wound at his shoulder.
Mal ambled over to her, slow and stiff from the heat of the whiskey cleansing his side—he’d have to thank Wynnie for that healing lesson again—and put a hand on her back, rubbing in gentle circles. “You did really well. Better than any elven healer.”
After she stopped heaving, Mal lay down beside Griff on his good side with a grunt of pain, all the better to listen for the cadence of his breathing that would tell him whether their triage efforts and the vial of rare medicine had been in vain.
Griff stirred a little at the renewed warmth, shifting closer to Mal.
He didn’t open his eyes again, but he did trail his fingers across the ground until they found Mal’s hand.
His was stiff with cold, but the force of his grip said he wasn’t going anywhere just yet.
Letting out another deep exhale, Mal curled his hand tightly around Griff’s.
“You two should sleep,” Alys said, coming over with the balm.
Mal didn’t protest again when she started dabbing it into his wound.
“I’ll keep a watch. With all this blood on the ground, there’s no telling what might come hunting or trying to hurry us along,” Alys continued steadily. “And I’ll check back on the spot where we left the mule in a little while. Maybe he’ll miss the grain enough to come sniffing around.”
She could look all she liked, but Mal had his doubts.
Prancer was no war steed and clearly had no training for battle.
The beast probably felt no remorse whatsoever in trotting off at a brisk pace, silver coins they could have kept for themselves clinking in its loaded saddlebags as it carried their small fortune and their other vial of medicine away to parts unknown.
“Alys—” Mal said as she applied the balm to his side, an intense look of focus on her delicate features. He was glad she was here, grateful for her presence and her attempts to help, even if she had royally messed up with the mule. “You—”
“This stuff isn’t going to turn you into an elf, and it’ll help with the pain, you stubborn creature,” Alys chastised him before he could say more.
Her sticky fingers, finished with their task, came to rest under his chin.
“You’re not invincible, Mal. For all you like to say you’re cursed, that the gods are mad you came back from the dead, you sure don’t lift a finger to change the course of that fate.
And I love you. Griff loves you. Bet he wishes you’d love yourself enough to put away the flask and put down the knives …
For all that you worry he won’t be here tomorrow, you ought to consider that he feels the same about you.
” Pressing her trembling lips together, she waited a moment and then said more calmly, “What did you want to tell me?”
Mal tilted his head, studying her in the leaf-filtered light of a fading afternoon gone so far south that he didn’t know where they were anymore. “Just … I was thinking how your version of handling things is nothing like Wynnie’s. Or Rhun’s. I like your way better.”
Mal took her sticky hand in one of his, the other still clinging to Griff’s.
“Mmm,” was all she said, her eyes glistening, holding his bloody hand tighter as she gazed down at the pale, slumbering Griff. “I don’t know why people are always so quick to compare him to his father either. Griff’s the better man by far. Don’t let go of him, all right?”
She stood and released his hand.
“Are you sure you’re up to the watch?” Mal asked her, curling himself a little more around Griff, who was concerningly chilled.
Shouldn’t that stupid elf medicine have done something already?
“I can stay awake too. I’m not dead yet, as you said, and whatever troll comes out of its cave next is my responsibility, anyway. ”
“Rest,” Alys insisted, drawing her blade again.
“Wynnie taught me a lot of things I never knew I’d need.
Maybe being like her isn’t the terrible fate I always thought it was.
Because whatever nasty things come our way, I know I can handle them.
” She shifted her blade higher, letting it rest against her shoulder as she added, “Alone.”
It struck him, even through the haze of pain and panic and the worst of his exhaustion, that Alys was just as lonely as he had been before he found Griff again.
He wished he could take that loneliness from her. But he could barely even keep his head up.
Finding a comfortable place to rest his cheek in the soft texture of Griff’s hair, Mal muttered to the sleeping man in his arms, “If the shadow did this somehow, I’m going to burn it right off the face of the earth with the brightest light I can find.
I’m going to figure out what it loves and steal it all from right under its nose, assuming it has one—just so it knows what it’s like to feel helpless while everything that’s ever mattered to it gets ripped away. ”