by Parker Foye
Unsteady on his feet, Griffith couldn’t shove Llywelyn away. But he wanted to. And he wanted to pull him close, though not to kiss as he usually longed to, but to hold him like Llywelyn should be held. He wanted his arms to learn Llywelyn’s shape, to discover if their frames fit together.
Griffith untangled himself awkwardly, needing Llywelyn’s support as his ankle throbbed with the movement.
“This is my land too, you know.”
“For whatever that’s worth. You’re already hurt. Do the sensible thing. Walk away.”
“I think I’ve walked away enough. Don’t you?” Griffith picked up the lantern. “Now show me the way out, please. I’ve wardings to make.”
Griffith would never understand what it was to be pack, but he’d been part of a family once. He’d left Aberarth in an attempt to make them stronger. It had been a mistake.
He was tired of walking away and tired of letting Llywelyn go. Time for another approach. If a warden had designs on Hywel land, a warden needed to push them back. Griffith was ready. And damn anyone—any wolf—who got in his way.
* * *
After helping Griffith out, knowing further words wouldn’t be heard, and checking no other wolves were sniffing around the lines, Llywelyn returned to his den and curled in blankets that held the faintest trace of Griffith’s scent. His head rang with thoughts he’d been trying not to think, and words he’d bit back soured on his tongue. Griffith had been flushed with energy as he left, like the prospect of a fight made him come alive.
Llywelyn wasn’t sure he liked it.
Burying his face in blankets, trying to draw off the heat, he amended his thought. I might like it too much.
He wanted to tell Griffith to leave. Chase him somewhere safe, as if anywhere could be safe without a place to come home to.
And the warden. Llywelyn kicked a well-chewed pillow, his chest rumbling with snarls. A warden was cheating. He wasn’t sure he believed Griffith’s old master had come, but he didn’t put it past Keeley to have bought a warden with their deep pockets, like they’d tried to buy Ifanwy. But Hywel pride was priceless, and they’d turned the Keeley pack away.
If Llywelyn had been alpha, he would’ve sold the land in a heartbeat. The shame of his certainty lived as a canker in his heart. He would’ve left Aberarth a hundred times, when the pack had been strong. In their weakness, duty compelled him to stay—more powerful than any warding.
Ifanwy had said they could try linking pack and warden, if it would solve their problems. But Llywelyn didn’t want to chance hurting Griffith, either physically, if it worked, or mentally, when it didn’t. He just wanted Griffith to leave.
“Isn’t that hurting him? And you?” Ifanwy had asked.
Llywelyn hadn’t said anything. He’d been left behind before.
Maybe one day he’d get used to it.
Chapter Four
Resolution beat hard in Griffith’s heart. If the pack wouldn’t protect themselves, he would. The land had been Jones’s long before it was Hywel’s, and Griffith refused to surrender it to some interloper without a fight.
If a nagging voice at the back of his mind pointed out he’d left years ago with nary a glance, Griffith didn’t want to hear it. Not until Llywelyn and his family were safe.
The same nagging voice suggested Morgan could take Griffith apart with his eyes shut. Griffith ignored that too.
“First point of order,” he told the birds nesting in the broken window of the cottage, who were proving to be excellent listeners. “Fortify the boundary.”
If the old lines were unreliable, Griffith would make new ones. Somehow. Rising with dawn, he’d searched the cottage for anything to use for loci and dragged the assorted jumble outside. The sky frowned with grey, but rituals were better worked in open air, and Griffith glanced at the growing clouds as he sorted through his findings. The birds were his audience, watching with unblinking marble eyes.
When he’d been apprenticed, Griffith had spent what felt like months bleeding over a succession of random objects while his master stood silently by and judged. Though he had birds in place of Morgan, and Welsh weather rather grimmer than continental sun, Griffith could have been nineteen and desperate again. With hindsight, he doubted there’d been a time when he wasn’t desperate. The difference came in the degree of honesty he afforded himself.
Griffith cleared his throat. Silence had been Morgan’s way. Griffith didn’t want to be anything like Morgan.
“Stone won’t do,” he told the birds, imagining their shuffle of feathers signalled agreement. “Or wood. Or anything like that. Over-representation of the base elements, see.” One of the birds cooed, like Griffith had done a trick. He pulled a face. “All right, no need to be patronising.”
A twist of metal caught his eye. A misshapen nail, scrounged from the hearth. Plucking the nail from the pile, Griffith turned it over in his hands. Not much to look at, a cheap thing likely left over from wood used for kindling. His grandmother had never let anything go to waste; near everything in the cottage had once been something else, which might be why Griffith’s sleep had been restless since returning. History left scars.
The nail wasn’t right, either, but Griffith’s mind twisted as the nail did, and he looked at the puzzle from a different angle. Morgan had taught him about resonance, matching loci with intent to better produce a result, like the graveflowers and their grief. Practising wardings on his own, limited by experience and necessity, Griffith had broadened his approach to “resonance.”
He flicked the nail into the pile and rested on his heels, eyeing the birds. “I have an idea.”
One of them left a streak of white splattered against the cottage as it took off. Good luck, Griffith decided.
Bundling the items in his jacket, he entered the cottage and poured them carefully into a corner. Nothing suited his current task, but there were things he might use for smaller wardings. No such thing as lesser wardings. Grandmother had taught that lesson when he scarcely reached her knee.
Returning outside, Griffith tucked his coat close against the cold. The promise of the grey sky grew closer to fulfilment, and Griffith grimaced as the first drops of rain began to fall. Home sweet bloody home. If it wasn’t an interloping pack, it was the rain. Griffith snorted. He’d tried to lessen the threat with the comparison, but failed. Forces of nature, all, and him the idiot in the middle getting soaked.
He glanced over his shoulder, hoping for moral support, but the birds had flown.
Griffith didn’t wonder what type of omen that might be. Yanking his collar up, he ducked his head and made for the hill.
* * *
“No.”
Llywelyn had become succinct over the years. Griffith sighed, wiping the rain from his face—a futile gesture, immediately thwarted—and tried to catch Llywelyn’s eyes. Difficult, as Llywelyn seemed to prefer staring through the rain.
“But it won’t work without your help. All of your help.”
“Didn’t I tell you to leave? Only yesterday?” Llywelyn asked the rain.
Griffith shifted in place, hoping the gloom disguised his guilt from keen wolf eyes. Even so, Llywelyn could likely smell it. For miles, probably. Guilt followed Griffith like cheap cologne.
“You did and I didn’t, and I won’t,” Griffith said, speaking fast. Trying to get his words in between raindrops. “So you may as well help me. And yourself. There’s a full moon coming, isn’t there?”
Llywelyn’s jaw flexed. “Two days from now,” he conceded.
“Then that’s when I’ll make the warding. A carving or a charm, I don’t know yet, but big enough to create a protection over the territory. If I do it right, it should build on the old lines.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “That’s the idea, anyway. But I need your help.”
Griffith squ
irmed with unease at asking Llywelyn for help. Asking anyone, but Llywelyn specifically. What did he owe Griffith? Nothing but a kick in the teeth. Yet there Griffith stood, with brass-faced cheek he felt his grandmother judging from her place under the stones. Or wherever death had taken her. The next great adventure.
Some of us haven’t gotten through this one yet.
“What do you want us to do?” Llywelyn asked, like duty dragged the question from him.
There’s the rub. “I’m not sure. Yet! I’m not sure yet.” Griffith held out his hands when Llywelyn looked as if he’d leave. “I’ll be sure in two days. Reasonably sure. Look, you’d have to come as wolves, I think, and—”
“We’re always wolves,” Llywelyn interrupted, his gaze drifting over Griffith’s shoulder. He shook his head and stepped away, toward the hill’s covered entrance. “The answer is no.”
Griffith watched Llywelyn leave. They kept leaving each other and he’d become used to the loss, if not inured against it. Regret stung like a wasp, not having the decency to die like the noble bumblebee would. No sense of drama with a wasp. Vicious buggers.
It took Griffith a few moments to realise the emotion conjured by the sight of Llywelyn’s back wasn’t regret but irritation. Annoyance. Frustration. A gamut of spiky feeling that hardened his resolve to protect the damn land whether the occupants liked it or not.
He had two days. He’d done more with less.
* * *
Fresh nicks tracked Griffith’s wrists and forearm in a bloody procession. He’d walked the lines after seeing Llywelyn, though he couldn’t feel the magic as wolves did and the rain hadn’t stopped. Completing the circle, he returned to the cottage and dripped across the floor like a drowned ghoul from a Victorian novel. His coat didn’t hang across the chair so much as slump wetly into place.
Quickly changing wet clothes for dry, Griffith set his warding kit on the kitchen table. He’d made his kit from the body of a broken concertina he’d found in London, after he’d left Aberarth with naught in his pockets but dust. With some creativity and rather more cursing, he’d contrived a case for items needed for his craft. A pocket for cardstock in one of the handles, ink in the other, and the bellows stuffed with loci. Not the most elegant of warding kits, but it had travelled as far as he and aged with considerably more grace.
Withdrawing a piece of cardstock and the red ink, Griffith scratched a well-practised design into the paper using his flint. Flicking flint against still-damp ink, he tossed the warding toward the fireplace and grinned when it lit the kindling in a burst of orange flames. He glanced at the nest in the window, but the birds hadn’t returned.
Realising he’d been looking for approval from pigeons, Griffith rubbed his face and took a seat at the table, picking up the jar he used for warding-light. He lit another warding and dropped it in, frowning to find two remaining. Light and heat were basic wardings he tried to keep in stock; only practise and his charms, crafted over months of work, made the magic seem as simple as it did.
Griffith reshuffled his priorities. First, restock. Then to make something new.
The day stretched into evening as he worked, creating with ink and will. Will had been the element his grandmother focused on, while Morgan preferred to go the alchemist’s route in gathering the correct combination of elements and items. Griffith worked somewhere between the two, letting instinct guide his hand more than either would approve. Though his methods kept him fed and watered, for all they seemed arbitrary.
He snorted, making the light sputter. Wardings had been considered an art, once.
But even artists need to eat.
Absorbed in his work, a knock at the door made Griffith startle and elbow over a pot of ink. Swearing, he shoved from his seat and swept everything from the table before the ink could spoil it.
“If that isn’t ominous I don’t know what is,” he muttered, plucking the light-jar from the table.
He didn’t ask who knocked at the door. It’d be Llywelyn, playing silly buggers, or one of the birds flying straight into the door, misled by the storm he could now hear. Morgan had said Griffith could tune out the devil himself when concentrating on something. And Morgan would’ve known.
Griffith opened the door. Blinked.
“Are you going to invite me inside, then?” Ifanwy asked.
Alpha of the Hywel pack, Griffith reminded himself. Or near enough. Ifanwy didn’t need for manners when she had the pack behind her.
And she’s never been the most polite, anyway.
Griffith stepped aside and gestured with his free hand. “Of course. After you.”
He dropped his hand to check the charms at his belt, finding no danger. The stiff lines of Ifanwy’s body as she paced the small cottage, and the drawn expression on her face, suggested otherwise, but his charms had never been wrong. Even before he understood what he’d created—the arrowhead had smouldered in Morgan’s presence for months—they’d never been wrong.
“Can I hel—”
“You’re living here?” Ifanwy interrupted.
Griffith wondered how it went when the Hywel siblings spoke to one another, since none of them let a fellow get a sentence out. Crossing the room, he placed the light-jar on the table, wincing at the ink spill he’d forgotten about, and sat. Ifanwy watched him like a tiger in a cage.
“I’ve been busy,” he said.
Her mouth tightened. “So I hear. That’s what—I’m here. To help.”
Griffith jerked, bashing his knee on the table leg. “What? I mean, pardon?”
“Llywelyn told me. The full moon, he said. You want us all there.”
“And you want to help? Me?”
“I want to help my pack.” Ifanwy advanced in quick strides, jabbing at the air between them with her finger. “Do you think I want to be the alpha who abandoned the territory? See my pack bleed? My brother is stubborn but he’s not stupid. He told me what you said and here I am. What do you want me to do?”
“But Llywelyn said no.”
Griffith remembered Llywelyn saying no. Had he truly told Ifanwy about their conversation? What if he told Ifanwy about all their conversations?
God in heaven, he couldn’t have.
Something like lightness tinged Ifanwy’s expression, as if Griffith’s panic delighted her. “Llywelyn is not the problem I’m here to address. If it were, I would be less polite.”
“Right.” Griffith cleared his throat, excruciatingly aware Ifanwy could see and smell more on him than he knew to hide. “The full moon. Let me tell you about my idea.”
The flash of Ifanwy’s fangs remained like sunspots, when the warding finally sputtered out.
* * *
Llywelyn glanced at the moon and swallowed the whine threatening to spill from his throat. Any noise would give away his hiding spot in the trees, where he watched Griffith poke at things in the centre of the clearing by the lightning tree. Ifanwy paced in a circle around him, making the light flicker where Griffith had caught it in jars. Howls from the pack sang long and loud as they ran, trying to sound like more than they were. The threat of the Keeley pack made their voices shrill.
Llywelyn had been sceptical of Griffith’s plan, but Ifanwy had worked with him and they thought they could refresh the boundaries using new loci, strengthening the barrier. Not sure he believed them, but wanting to, Llywelyn had conceded to their efforts. He’d told Ifanwy about his and Griffith’s conversation in expectation she would knock him back. Instead she’d grabbed on to the chance with both hands, claws digging in, and pulled the rest of them behind her.
Alpha makes the rules.
If a small part of Llywelyn knew Ifanwy would cling to any chance presented, he didn’t intend to acknowledge it.
A bark from Ifanwy drew his attention. Playful, where she had been dour with responsibility for mon
ths. Llywelyn resettled in his hiding spot, wishing he sat with them. He should have been with the others, running the lines, but couldn’t bring himself to leave. From childhood, he’d always been fascinated to watch Griffith work: Griffith’s clever fingers and quick movements, his bright confidence, the way his attention occasionally wavered as he glanced at Llywelyn. As if Llywelyn might be more interesting than magic.
A heady drug. One Llywelyn had been addicted to unknowingly. The withdrawal had near destroyed him.
Daffyd had helped. He’d been the only one Llywelyn had told the truth, that Griffith walking away had felt like his soul leaving. Daffyd had kept the secret until he sank.
In his darker moments, Llywelyn fancied it had been the weight that killed him.
And then Griffith had returned. And refused to leave.
Llywelyn wasn’t stupid enough to believe in miracles, but he would admit to wishing on a few of the stars littering the clear full moon night.
“Shit!”
The shout made Llywelyn’s ears flick and he rose to his feet. Griffith had set something alight and fanned it furiously, as Ifanwy kept her distance like an ass. Why didn’t she help? Gesturing sharply, Griffith produced another of his wardings. The scent of blood spiked in Llywelyn’s nose as Griffith cut his hand and daubed the card, before twisting the warding with a sharp gesture.
Whatever result he’d expected, it likely wasn’t exacerbating the flames.
Llywelyn tore across the clearing, grateful for his four fast legs. Heat ruffled his fur and he ignored Ifanwy’s bark, which turned into a shout he couldn’t hear over the terror pounding in his ears. Griffith smelled like fire and smoke and fear. Barrelling into him and knocking aside several of Griffith’s trinkets, Llywelyn switched shapes to tuck Griffith into his arms, rolling them both from the flames. Pain seared across his back, skin blistering with heat.
When panic unclogged his ears, he realised Griffith was shouting.