He exchanged pleasantries with the Watchmen at the west gate. Had he heard about the centaur spotting over by Tassel’s farm? they wondered. How about the battle out west, and those poor bastards holed up in Castia? Rotten, rotten business.
Clay followed the track, careful to keep from turning an ankle in a rut. Crickets were chirping in the tall grass to either side, the wind in the trees above him sighing like the ocean surf. He stopped by the roadside shrine to the Summer Lord and threw a dull copper at the statue’s feet. After a few steps and a moment’s hesitation he went back and tossed another. Away from town it was darker still, and Clay resisted the urge to look up again.
Best keep your eyes on the ground, he told himself, and leave the past where it belongs. You’ve got what you’ve got, Cooper, and it’s just what you wanted, right? A kid, a wife, a simple life. It was an honest living. It was comfortable.
He could almost hear Gabriel scoff at that. Honest? Honest is boring, his old friend might have said. Comfortable is dull. Then again, Gabriel had got himself married long before Clay. Had a little girl of his own, even—a woman grown by now.
And yet there was Gabe’s spectre just the same, young and fierce and glorious, smirking in the shadowed corner of Clay’s mind. “We were giants, once,” he said. “Bigger than life. And now …”
“Now we are tired old men,” Clay muttered, to no one but the night. And what was so wrong with that? He’d met plenty of actual giants in his day, and most of them were assholes.
Despite Clay’s reasoning, the ghost of Gabriel continued to haunt his walk home, gliding past him on the road with a sly wink, waving from his perch on the neighbour’s fence, crouched like a beggar on the stoop of Clay’s front door. Only this last Gabriel wasn’t young at all. Or particularly fierce looking. Or any more glorious than an old board with a rusty nail in it. In fact, he looked pretty fucking terrible. When he saw Clay coming he stood, and smiled. Clay had never seen a man look so sad in all the years of his life.
The apparition spoke his name, which sounded to Clay as real as the crickets buzzing, as the wind moaning through the trees along the road. And then that brittle smile broke, and Gabriel—really, truly Gabriel, and not a ghost after all—was sagging into Clay’s arms, sobbing into his shoulder, clutching at his back like a child afraid of the dark.
“Clay,” he said. “Please … I need your help.”
Chapter Two
Rose
Once Gabriel recovered himself they went inside. Ginny turned from the stove and her jaw clamped tight. Griff came bounding over, stubby tail wagging. He gave Clay a cursory sniff and then set to smelling Gabe’s leg as though it were a piss-drenched tree, which wasn’t actually too far off the mark.
His old friend was in a sorry state, no mistake. His hair and beard were a tangled mess, his clothes little more than soiled rags. There were holes in his boots, toes peeking out from the ruined leather like grubby urchins. His hands were busy fidgeting, wringing each other or tugging absentmindedly at the hem of his tunic. Worst of all, though, were his eyes. They were sunk deep in his haggard face, hard and haunted, as though everywhere he looked was something he wished he hadn’t seen.
“Griff, lay off,” said Clay. The dog, wet eyes and a lolling pink tongue in a black fur face, perked up at the sound of his name. Griff wasn’t the noblest-looking creature, and he didn’t have many uses besides licking food off a plate. He couldn’t herd sheep or flush a grouse from cover, and if anyone ever broke in to the house he was more likely to fetch them slippers than scare ’em off. But it made Clay smile to look at him (that’s how godsdamn adorable he was) and that was worth more than nothing.
“Gabriel.” Ginny finally found her voice, though she stayed right where she was. Didn’t smile. Didn’t cross to hug him. She’d never much cared for Gabriel. Clay thought she probably blamed his old bandmate for all the bad habits (gambling, fighting, drinking to excess) that she’d spent the last ten years disabusing him of, and all the other bad habits (chewing with his mouth open, forgetting to wash his hands, occasionally throttling people) she was still struggling to purge.
Heaped upon that were the handful of times Gabe had come calling in the years since his own wife left him. Every time he appeared it was hand in hand with some grand scheme to reunite the old band and strike out once again in search of fame, fortune, and decidedly reckless adventure. There was a town down south needed rescue from a ravaging drake, or a den of walking wolves to be cleared out of the Wailing Forest, or an old lady in some far-flung corner of the realm needed help bringing laundry off the line and only Saga themselves could rise to her aid!
It wasn’t as though Clay needed Ginny breathing down his neck to refuse, to see that Gabriel longed for something unrecoverable, like an old man clinging to memories of his golden youth. Exactly like that, actually. But life, Clay knew, didn’t work that way. It wasn’t a circle; you didn’t go round and round again. It was an arc, its course as inexorable as the sun’s trek across the sky, destined at its highest, brightest moment to begin its fall.
Clay blinked, having lost himself in his own head. He did that sometimes, and could have wished he was better at putting his thoughts into words. He’d sound a right clever bastard then, wouldn’t he?
Instead, he’d stood there dumbly as the silence between Ginny and Gabriel lengthened uncomfortably.
“You look hungry,” she said finally.
Gabriel nodded, his hands fidgeting nervously.
Ginny sighed, and then his wife—his kind, lovely, magnificent wife—forced a tight grin and reclaimed her spoon from the pot she’d been tending earlier. “Sit down then,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll feed you. I made Clay’s favourite: rabbit stew with mushrooms.”
Gabriel blinked. “Clay hates mushrooms.”
Seeing Ginny’s back stiffen, Clay spoke up. “Used to,” he said brightly, before his wife—his quick-tempered, sharp-tongued, utterly terrifying wife—could turn around and crack his skull with that wooden spoon. “Ginny does something to them, though. Makes them taste”—Not so fucking awful, was what first jumped to mind—“really pretty good,” he finished lamely. “What is it you do to ’em, hun?”
“I stew them,” she said in the most menacing way a woman could string those three words together.
Something very much like a smile tugged at the corner of Gabe’s mouth.
He always did love to watch me squirm, Clay remembered. He took a chair and Gabriel followed suit. Griff trundled over to his mat and gave his balls a few good licks before promptly falling asleep. Clay fought down a surge of envy, seeing that. “Tally home?” he asked.
“Out,” said Ginny. “Somewhere.”
Somewhere close, he hoped. There were coyotes in the woods nearby. Wolves in the hills. Hell, Ryk Yarsson had seen a centaur out by Tassel’s farm. Or a moose. Either of which might kill a young girl if caught by surprise. “She should’ve been home before dark,” he said.
His wife scoffed at that. “So should you have, Clay Cooper. You putting in extra hours on the wall, or is that the King’s Piss I smell on ya?” King’s Piss was her name for the beer they served at the pub. It was a fair assessment, and Clay had laughed the first time she’d said it. Didn’t seem as funny at the moment, however.
Not to Clay, anyway, though Gabriel’s mood seemed to be lightening a bit. His old friend was smirking like a boy watching his brother take heat for a crime he didn’t commit.
“She’s just down in the marsh,” Ginny said, fishing two ceramic bowls from the cupboard. “Be glad it’s only frogs she’ll bring home with her. It’ll be boys soon enough, and you’ll have plenty cause to worry then.”
“Won’t be me needs to worry,” Clay mumbled.