14. The One Sent To Take The Hero’s Head
The One Sent To Take The Hero's Head
Like a handful of water, my world suddenly poured through my fingers.
It drained away with the high-pitched, hollow wail that erupted from my throat, and only cut off when my voice cracked and broke.
As the water beat down, I hung frozen in shock, left with only the devastating loss of what I couldn’t hold on to.
Lightning flashed, illuminating the back of the dangling boat where Griffon once stood.
Dear gods, I was alone. And within seconds, the rope would slip through my fingers, and I would follow them into death.
Movement caught my eye near the edge of the starboard gunwale where the first slashed rope attached to the hull.
Was that a hand?
Through the pouring rain, I watched in disbelief as Griffon pulled himself over the railing.
As if gravity were just a suggestion for assassins, he used the wheel pedestal to leap to the edge of the opposite gunwale and swing his way to the first rope on my side of the boat.
His long black coat whipped in the gusting wind.
Hoisting himself over the lip of the railing, he crouched on the outside of the hull.
He wove his way from one rope to the next until he was right above where I hung.
Crouching low, he held out his hand. Streams of water slid down his face as pleading eyes met mine.
“Please trust me.” His voice was just loud enough to be heard over the roar of the pouring rain.
Without a thought, I grabbed his hand.
He wasn’t just a killer, but an assassin. A very bad, dangerous man.
But my mind went quiet in my panic, and instinct took over. Deep down, I knew without a doubt that he wouldn’t drop me. In light of all the things I now questioned, that felt ironic after what I now knew. The moment of certainty was a rare clarity I hadn’t felt in days.
He wrapped his arm around my middle and pulled me back into his body.
While holding onto the rope with one hand and me with the other, he sat down, perching on the edge of the gunwale.
The hull sloped down behind us, and in front of us, there was only the open air and swirling clouds of charcoal and violet.
Ducking, he talked into my ear over the rumbling thunder. “You okay?”
I twisted to look at him. While my wet hair was plastered to my face, his curls had turned burnished gold and somehow looked artfully tousled. Like the rain had styled it specifically to torment me. His expression was carefully blank. The vulnerability I had seen only moments before was gone.
A shudder wracked my body. “I’m trying to be.”
He pulled me tighter against him.
It helped. That’s the second time he’s kept me from falling to my death. I leaned into him and took a moment to let myself soak up some of his strength. My heartbeat stuttered and wobbled in a desperate attempt to mimic his calm, steady rhythm.
The boat below us swung in the wind.
“They’re gone, aren’t they? The other men?” I asked, my voice still shaky as I wiped water from my face.
“Yes.”
My heart sunk. They made me uncomfortable, but I would never have wanted them dead.
I gripped the rope tighter, imagined falling that far, and said a silent prayer that their souls were at peace to whatever gods would listen.
The Volanti burned their dead so that the swallow could find their souls in the air and fly them up to the Aether.
There would be no pyres for those men. No swallow.
I wondered if, because they had plummeted from so high up, their souls had gone the other way—falling straight to the Abyss.
I shook my head at the thought. That's morbid, even for me. And considering I'm currently dangling over a storm cloud, that's saying something.
We sat in silence, and neither of us was in a rush to fill it.
The warmth of him against my back kept some of the shivering at bay.
It was another hour before the storm waned, the frantic flashes slowing to only a sporadic flicker.
Land was now visible through the holes in the clouds below us. It looked closer.
“Are we descending?”
“Slowly,” he nodded, “the envelope must be leaking helium somewhere. As long as it doesn’t release too fast…”
Something dug into my side. I tried wiggling to the left, but his arm didn’t budge.
“The hilt of your dagger.”
“Oh.” He turned to the side, moving it out of the way, and then locked his grip again. Tighter than before.
The weapons weren't the only things that made him dangerous. The strength of him. The speed. I had seen him fight.
It struck me, sitting against him now, that he had never once spoken about his ember. Every child I had watched manifest at the Citadel had announced theirs within the hour. Griffon never talked of his at all.
The notion that a man could have an ember capable of such violence and be draped in weapons designed to cause harm, yet still hold someone safe, seemed deeply contradictory.
The conversation with Gannet lingered at the forefront of my thoughts.
And I struggled to reconcile her words with the man sitting behind me, the same one who had just saved me from certain death.
“I know what you do,” I said, just loud enough for him to hear. “What your assignment was for the queen.”
He went completely still. For several seconds, I didn’t feel him breathe.
“I figured,” he said evenly, giving away nothing of what he was feeling. “Once we’re safe at the Sideri village, we can go our separate ways. You won’t have to—” he stopped. Then started again. “You can be free of me.”
“No, that’s…why would I want that?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” The words came out jagged.
“You mean because you’ve killed people?”
He didn’t answer.
I turned to look at him but he twisted me back away.
Frustrated, I spoke to the open air in front of us instead.
“If you wanted to hurt me, you had a zillion opportunities in the last few days.” A zillion might be a slight exaggeration, but with my current track record of near-death experiences, it was hard to keep count.
“I’m honoring our deal. It doesn’t mean I’m not what people say I am.”
“And what’s that?”
“A monster.”
The words hung in the air like the surrounding clouds.
“You left your assignment,” I said. “Why?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
He took a deep breath, shifting the hair at the crown of my head. “Because I couldn’t be there anymore,” he finally said. “I couldn’t…Not after…It doesn’t matter. I left. That’s all you need to know.”
“You didn’t want to be that any longer?”
“Wanting doesn’t change a thing. No one comes back from what I’ve done.”
“Did you ever refuse?” I asked. “An assignment?”
The silence that followed differed from the others—longer, heavier, the kind of silence a man went into rather than the kind he came out of.
“Once.” His voice was rougher than it had been a moment ago. “Early on.”
I waited.
The wind moved across us.
“I didn't refuse again.” His voice was flat. The flatness was the worst part.
There had been a him who refused. Once. And then there hadn't been.
If no one could come back from what they’ve done, we would only ever be the sum of our worst moments. Was it possible for someone to change? To decide to be someone else? Or maybe labels like monster are overly simplistic, and everyone is a little bit of a lot of things.
Because he was a paradox. There were times he spewed venom laced with cruelty. Vicious words slicing through the air like one of those blades he has strapped to his body. And at times, injuring just as much.
But that wasn’t the full story, was it? The rest was buried somewhere in the chapters behind his hardened, closed-off cover. The words hinted at a man who still clung to a shred of decency. He didn’t leave me even though I’m a liability and pulled me up here when he could’ve let me fall.
“I don’t doubt that this journey would be easier for you if you didn’t have to drag me along. And yet you do.”
“Don’t,” he snapped. “Don’t make me into something I’m not.”
“I’m not denying what you’ve done—”
“Good. Because I’m not some broken hero looking for redemption, Wren. I’m the one sent to take the hero’s head. That’s what I am. That’s all I am.”
Would a monster despise himself for what he’d done if he were truly a monster?
“As for what you are,” I said, “I’m still figuring that out.”
“You might not like what you find.” He held me tighter against the wind.
He pushed me away with his words, and yet his arm didn’t let me go.
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
I suspected he didn’t even know who he was anymore. Some kind of catalyst drove him to the decision to walk away from his assignment. He upended his life and the person he used to be. Maybe something inside him had changed.
Every puzzle piece I’d gathered about Griffon seemed to lead to the same conclusion: he hadn’t always been a good man.
But I meant it when I said I wasn’t denying what he’d done.
His actions—his real, tangible actions—revealed a far better side of him.
He carried me up that cliff on his back, saved me from falling out of a window, gave me new clothes, even found me a warm meal and a safe place to sleep.
And when I was dangling from a rope, moments away from falling to my death, he pulled me up and saved me.
The man's practically my personal catastrophe prevention service at this point.
Did he even realize that he did these things? I shook my head, unwilling to argue with him, so I dropped the subject.
The storm was all but gone as we floated toward a mountain range.
“Do you know where we are?” I asked.
He didn't answer immediately. I turned my head to find his eyes were already on the ridge line—not scanning it the way he scanned everything else, measuring exits and threats and angles. Just looking. Still in a way that had nothing to do with calm.
“Those are the Harena Mountains.” His voice came out stripped of its usual edge. “We'll be crossing into Solis.”
I watched his face. In the days since the catacombs, I'd catalogued most of his expressions—the controlled anger, the reluctant amusement, the particular blankness he wore when he was deciding how much to give away. This wasn't any of those. This was something else.
His hand moved to the dagger at his thigh. He held it a beat longer than usual.
“We're way off course,” I said, because someone had to say something.
“Yes.” He didn't look at me. “We are.”
He didn't say anything else. I let my eyes drift to the desert opening up below us—the vast plains of yellow and tan, the sand dunes and rocky outcroppings of the rain shadow stretching out toward the horizon—because looking at the landscape was easier than looking at him.
The set of his shoulders as we approached the peaks told me everything I needed to know.
Whatever waited in Solis, Griffon already knew exactly what it was.
But on the bright side, at least our clothes would dry in the heat.
And depending on how high those temperatures were, the helium would expand.
The mid-afternoon sun was still warming the dry air in the cloudless sky beyond the mountain range.
Well, almost cloudless. Those were lenticular clouds hovering over the peaks.
Oh no. That can’t be good.
“We’re going to need to hold on. It’s going to get rough really soon.”
“What are you talking about?”
I pointed. “You see those lens-shaped clouds over the mountains?”
“Yes.”
“It means we‘re going to hit mountain wave turbulence. They develop on the downwind side of peaks when strong winds rise up—never mind. That wind creates those clouds.”
We were already coming up on the ridge. The airship increased in velocity with the updraft, dangling only a couple hundred feet over its peak. He adjusted his grip and hooked his leg under the railing.
“Use both hands to hold on to the rope. If I lose my grip on you, at least you won’t slide off.”
“Oh, and I guess I should mention that, depending on how hot it is on that side of the ridge, it will speed up the balloon’s diffusion process.”
“Okay, so what the bloody abyss does that mean?”
“We’re going to descend faster.”
“Wonderful,” he deadpanned. “How do you know all that stuff?”
“I read. Like a lot.” And apparently, my penchant for obscure meteorological facts is finally paying off.
Just then, my stomach rose into my throat as the balloon dropped.
Griffon clamped his arms in a cage around me and held onto the rope.
Before we could even worry we were dropping too close to the sloping cliffs below, the balloon rose back up again with the wind.
The gondola swung with the movement, almost dislodging us from our perch.
Up. Down. Up. Down. Over and over again, as we soared further away from the mountain.
My head spun, and my stomach wanted to revolt. The waves became less violent the further out we flew until I could finally form a coherent thought again.
“Ugh. If I’d had any food in my stomach, it wouldn’t be there anymore.”
“We’re coming out of it.” His breath tickled my ear. “Hopefully, we’ll start descending faster. I don’t want to get too far into the desert, or it’ll be a really long trip back out.”
We were falling faster than when we were on the Volantia side of the mountains, but it still looked like it would drop us pretty far from the mountain range.
I wanted to get off the airship as soon as possible, but the ground rising made me realize I didn’t want it to be too fast. At this rate, it wouldn’t be a soft landing.
“We’re going to miss the dunes,” he noted with some concern. A flat, rocky outcropping stretched out in front of us, and we were heading straight toward it. “Get ready to jump.”
“What?” Oh, gods. Did he just say jump? As in, voluntarily hurl ourselves off this death trap?
Bringing me with him, he pulled himself to his feet along the edge of the gondola. After making sure I was securely holding onto the rope, he moved to my other side, his hand grasping the rope over my head.
The ground was coming up fast. Too fast.
“When I say jump, you jump out as far as you can. You don’t want to end up under the gondola.”
I couldn’t breathe.
He fired off more instructions. “Don’t try to land on your feet. Tumble forward, roll with the momentum when you hit the ground.”
I really thought the worst part of my day was already behind me. But clearly, I've underestimated the universe's commitment to proving me wrong.
Plummeting passerine, I was going to die.
“JUMP!”