A Spell for Heartsickness (The Rune Tithe #1)

CHAPTER 3

T hat summer, Briar worked three jobs. One at a clothing chain, the second stocking shelves at a tithe shop, the third at an ice cream parlor—his favorite. They charmed each flavor with the sort of mundane magic he liked. Pistachio helped you tell funny jokes. Chocolate gave you the fuzzy feeling of a hug.

It was enough to pay his rent in Wishbrooke and buy back his cloak from Odell. In his meager spare time, Briar scribbled ideas for his shop in Coill Darragh. With his remaining money, he squirrelled away tithes and materials. After work one September evening, Briar returned to his cramped, smelly flat and found an envelope on the floor. Inside was a letter and a folded paper plane with runes inked on the wings. A waxy coating prevented it from dissolving in the rain.

They were from the Coill Darragh alderman. The letter read:

Briar Wyngrave,

The paper plane is charmed to lead you to Coill Darragh. Tell it “show me the way” when it’s time to go. Be sure to wait at the border, where I’ll meet you at noon. Don’t pass through the wards.

Signed, Rowan O’Shea

Briar checked on his broom. It stood in a pot of growth elixir—he had fished frogspawn out of a stream for the brew. The fractures he’d healed with bandages and salve. It took all summer, but the branch had grown a few buds on the twiggy end. It would be strong enough to fly.

Brooms were fashioned from the branch of a hanged man’s tree. Since hangings were outlawed, the trees still standing were protected and pruned judiciously. This elm broom had been passed through generations of his family, even to ancestors who’d been non-magical. In spite of hard times, they’d always resisted the urge to sell it.

It had served his mother well, and now it would carry him to his destiny. Much as he dreaded going to Coill Darragh, bittersweet as it would be to leave Wishbrooke behind, he would have to make the best of it.

The sun shone clear on the cool September morning as Briar prepared for his journey. He stood outside his flat with three pieces of luggage containing everything he owned. Ropes bound the luggage together. Vatii perched atop it all, flicking her tail.

“I still think we should have bought badger fangs to fit everything in one suitcase,” she said.

“Too expensive. Your feathers will do.” Briar kept them whenever she molted. He had enough to last the journey to Coill Darragh. Lots of floating luggage was better than one item that weighed a ton and broke his broom. He took several feathers from his belt of tithes and pressed them against the luggage, dredging magic up from the churning well within him. One by one, the cases rose and hovered above the pavement.

He unfolded the wings of the paper plane from the Coill Darragh alderman.

“Show me the way,” he whispered.

The plane glowed from within like a paper lantern, floated in front of him, then shot toward the sky.

He whispered a plea to his broom as he hopped on. It shivered before obeying his call. The chain of luggage swung below, aided by the charms of Vatii’s feathers. He lolled through the air, guiding the broom into a cautious ascent. He’d only gone for a couple test flights, preferring to give the broom as much time as possible in its healing elixir. It had paid off. Aside from a couple twitches and hiccups, the broom sailed more smoothly than before the break.

They reached the coast to the chorus of gulls and the smell of salt and brine. The sea sprawled, vast and fathomless. Vatii perched on the front of his broom like the proud statue on the stern of a ship, the glowing light of the paper plane leading the way.

Two hours into their journey, a sliver of their destination appeared on the horizon. Slate cliffs plummeted into the sea, lacy foam spraying the rocky bottom. The island was hilly and bearded with forest like a sleeping giant. Briar could make out a port where a ferry had docked. Before long, the sea was at their backs, and nothing but green hills below and before them.

Their paper plane banked into a steep dive. Briar had to pull up short, but he’d been flying too fast and overshot. As he prepared to reel around, he struck something non-corporeal. It glided over them like a second skin, thick as whale blubber. Briar’s broom slowed to a crawl. His luggage froze in its ceaseless sway. A sensation like jaws preparing to snap shut scraped against the back of his neck. Then, before he could grow accustomed to the way this strange magic clung to him, it spat him back out.

Briar, Vatii, his broom, and the string of luggage flew backward in an arc. He let out a yell, spinning top over tail, the sky and earth swooping past like on a sickening fairground ride. He had the most ludicrous thought that he didn’t know if his broom could handle another fall rather than appreciating the delicacy of his own bones, but then the magic ensnaring him peeled away like shucked corn. He righted his broom, wobbling and precarious but enough to slow his alarming descent. They fluttered to the ground, Vatii screeching angrily.

“The wards,” Briar gasped. He stepped off his broom with shaky legs. “We must have hit them. Eugh, I can still feel that slimy magic. I think it wanted to eat me, Vatii.”

“Rude!” Vatii grasped the paper plane off the ground in her talons. “Useless thing could have given us some warning!”

“Don’t wreck it, I want to keep it!”

“It nearly killed us.”

“Probably the wards mess with the charm a bit.” He smoothed out the wrinkles and fussed at the holes from Vatii’s claws. “It’s still my first keepsake from my placement.”

“You’re so sentimental. I thought you were dreading coming here.”

“I’m making the best of it.”

They’d landed on a dirt road. Hills dipped and swelled to their right. In the valley between were the shadowy rooftops of a small settlement. Coill Darragh. With the sun low in the sky, detail fell away, but the forest for which the town was named hugged the border like a crescent moon. Or a hungry mouth.

Moss stuffed the cracks of a stone obelisk on the side of the road. The engraving, which might have once been the town’s name, was weathered to illegibility.

“We wait for the alderman.” Briar flipped open his phone to check the time. “We’re on schedule, at least.” He took a seat on the dry stone wall framing the lane.

Vatii landed beside him. “This would be a good place to take up hiking.”

“Absolutely not,” Briar said. “I’m delicate and not too proud to admit it.”

“Coward. These aren’t even mountains, they’re steep hills.”

Though absent of the bright lights and bustling streets of Pentawynn, the countryside exuded its own charms. The air carried an autumnal scent of bonfire, and the tree leaves were gilded with gold. The quiet seemed to sing with growing, breathing things. He might have enjoyed it if Vatii hadn’t pecked some foul insect out from the cracks in the stone wall.

“Ew, Vatii!” Briar shot up and away from the wall, dancing into the road and brushing off his backside.

Vatii cackled. “It’s only a centipede.”

Briar turned away as she tossed back the wriggling thing and ate it, snapping her beak.

The crunch of nearby footsteps drew their attention. A figure came around the bend in the road, tall and broad. His countenance struck a strange resemblance to the dry stone walls and the obelisk and the craggy hillsides. Square-jawed and bearded, he looked carved of rock and softened by moss. The closer he got, the larger he seemed.

“Now that’s a mountain I would climb,” Briar whispered to Vatii.

“And you call me disgusting.”

“Briar?” said the mountain man.

He crossed through the wards, and his aura washed over Briar. It was the taste of hot stew on a rainy night; it was soft like hand-knit mittens. Carved through it was a magical scar with a signature all its own. Like a shadow in a dark room when you couldn’t quite place what made it. From within the collar of his wool cloak, a visible scar—the source of the one that marred his aura—crawled up his throat, over his face, and branched up into his hairline. The hair it touched was threaded with white.

Briar put on his most charming smile. “That’s me. What’s your name?”

“Rowan. Here.” He held something out in his hand. A bracelet of leather cord and copper wire, woven through a wardstone with a rune engraved on it. It would grant Briar passage through the wards.

He took it with a coquettish tilt to his head. “For me? You could ask me out to dinner first.” At Rowan’s confused look, he elaborated, “A gift of jewelry is very forward.”

“It’s for the wards.”

“I know. I’m teasing you.”

Vatii nipped his earlobe. “You’re incorrigible! Stop flirting, you’re making him uncomfortable.”

Briar didn’t think so. “Could you help me put it on?” He held out his wrist. Rowan tied the bracelet on with surprising dexterity for his big hands. “And now the wards won’t try to eat me?”

“No.”

“And this bracelet won’t fall off?”

“Charmed not to.”

“So you’re the alderman?”

“Mm.”

“You seem young to be. How old are you? Twenty-five? Twenty-six?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“How did you become alderman?”

“Long story.”

Briar remained undeterred by the monosyllabic responses. They provided brief tastes of a lilting accent like Niamh’s, with syllables that pitched upward and downward.

He looked back at his broom and the pile of luggage strewn across the road. “Is it far, the rest of the way to town?”

“No,” Rowan said. He passed Briar to heft each case, using the ropes as handles.

Briar stared. “Oh, all of them.” Even Vatii’s chirp sounded impressed.

“This way.”

Briar followed, pausing briefly at the space where he could feel the wards prickling against his skin. He stepped through one foot at a time, marveling at the way the magic that once clung to him now slid off like oil separating from water. He’d paused long enough that Rowan stopped, a question in his arched brow.

Briar flexed his fingers. “The wards feel weird. Juicy.”

Rowan said, “This way.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to carry at least one of those?”

“You’re grand.”

They set off into town. Built into the hills, the thatched cottages stumbled into one another haphazardly. The streets twisted such that you could never see all the way down a lane. There was something nostalgic about the place. Old and yearning, stretched across time. Few cars parked along the lanes, and even fewer neon lights lit the storefronts. People walked at an amble, unlike the brisk, purposeful strides of city-goers.

Rowan and Briar reached the square, with a fountain and a statue of a man holding a potion bottle in the center. A church stood tall and proud behind it, a bas-relief of elaborate knotwork over its lintel. Magical scars pocked and streaked its stone walls. Briar could make out gouges in the stone and bloody purple magic coiling through them. Their auras coiled through Briar too, coarse like steel wool. All living things had auras, but sometimes significant moments in time left signatures of their own. Briar could read them too. These ones set his teeth on edge, made his heart ache. Though he wanted to, he didn’t ask how the town came to bear the marks. They resembled Rowan’s scar, which made it feel like too personal a question.

Rowan stopped outside two empty shops, their glass displays vacant. Both had doors painted with the universal sign of a Reded witch—an acorn. Setting the luggage down, Rowan fished in his pockets for the key.

“Here you are.” He unlocked the door to one, gesturing Briar inside.

A naked light bulb illuminated the bare interior. The space was empty except for a dusty rug. A rusty cash register perched on an island counter, the noises it would make a spectral echo in the vacant room. Built-in shelves begged to be filled with curios, potion bottles, and pretty rocks in velvet pouches. Only a dusty bottle, containing something coagulated and the color of infection, sat there now.

Briar opened a back door to a staircase.

“Is the flat upstairs?”

Rowan nodded. Inside, he seemed larger, like the world wasn’t built for him. Briar offered to take a case, but Rowan shrugged him off.

The stairway felt like a funhouse or a death trap for drunks. Narrow, steep, each step slanted, the wood sagging from wear. Briar would be going up them on all fours when company wasn’t around. He paused at the top to see if Rowan needed help. Though the alderman and the luggage filled every inch of space in the stairway, he managed with an undue amount of grace.

Briar explored the flat. A wood-burning stove in the kitchenette gave the room a smoky smell. The bed, with its sunken imprint in the mattress, told the story of how many witches had served out their placements before him. As he stepped into the room, something crunched underfoot. A sprinkling of white granules across the floor. Sugar or salt, perhaps.

Though modest and old, it was his, and it didn’t smell like meat. Despite his reservations, Briar’s mind swam with ideas of how he might decorate. Candles were a must.

Rowan set Briar’s luggage at the end of his bed. He brushed his hands on his pants and turned to Briar, but seemed to lack anything to say, and just watched Briar investigate the contents of each kitchen cabinet.

“What do you think about a rug there, where you’re standing?” Briar asked. “Autumn tones? Or maybe faux fur to go with all the rough wood?”

“Ehm…”

“Is there a store in town that does rugs?”

Rowan sounded uncertain. “There’s a fabric shop.”

“Even better!”

Briar didn’t know why he asked. He couldn’t afford luxuries and would make do with what he’d brought from home or could scrounge together. Still, inspiration felt good.

“I’ll let you settle in,” Rowan said. He shuffled past.

Feeling like it was only courteous to see him out, Briar followed.

“Thanks for coming to get me. And leading the way. And for the ward charm. And for carrying all my luggage.”

At the door, Rowan turned to him and held out the keys to the shop.

“And thank you for the shop! I’ll make it homey. Light some candles.”

Rowan nodded. “Good.”

“So, I’ll see you around? You could come visit and tell me how I’m doing. Oh, wait!” Briar reached into his pocket to pull out his phone, flipping it open to his contacts. “Can I get your number? Just in case I have any questions about the town, settling in.”

“Ah, sure.”

“Great!” He handed over his phone, watching Rowan painstakingly tap each number in with his overlarge fingers. “How many times a day can I call you before it’s too much? Five? Fifty?”

“Ehm…”

“I need limits. Boundaries. I’m a lot, so just name a figure. I won’t be offended.”

Rowan’s gaze turned inward, perhaps performing the mental maths of how much time he had to spare for an enthusiastic-but-utterly-out-of-his-depth witch.

He said, “As many times as you like.”

Briar thought, You’ll rue this day. But he found himself too captivated by the softening of Rowan’s stern face to say so out loud as he accepted his phone back, and Rowan ducked out the door.

With the place to himself, Briar returned to rummaging. In the shop drawers, he found scraps of paper, faded inventory notes. Vatii landed on the counter but quickly sprang up in a flurry of feathers at Briar’s howl when a spider the size of his palm skittered out of a drawer, across the floor, and halfway up a wall. Briar looked at it. It was large enough he could see it looking back. It only occurred to him then to look up at the ceiling too, where cobwebs, gray with dust and thick with insect bodies, still clung.

“It’s only a spider,” Vatii scolded, but Briar had already run for the door. He hadn’t locked up, so it was a straight shot out into the open air of the street.

“Kill them, Vatii!” he shouted behind him, nearly tripping over the cobblestones in his haste.

“I am your familiar, not a harbinger of death. And I’m not hungry.”

Breathing hard and whirling on his heel, Briar considered the shop in a different light. His first instinct was to cleanse it with fire. His second was to find some useful spells that required dead spiders.

His third was to look to his left, where he felt eyes on him.

Rowan hadn’t gotten far. He stood in the middle of the street, brows reaching for his hairline.

“Spiders,” Briar said by way of explanation. “Just, so many spiders.”

Rowan tilted his head, stoic and considering. He padded back toward the shop, though, and without explanation, went inside. A moment later, he returned with something cupped in his enormous hands.

To Briar’s horror, he knelt to put the spider in the flowerbed just outside the shop.

“No, no, uh, farther away? Maybe? How about the flowerbed across the street?”

Rowan met his eyes. He didn’t quite smile, but his mouth tilted as he passed Briar to put the spider where instructed.

Then he went back inside, where he caught and gently relocated all the squatters from Briar’s residence one by one.