A Spell for Heartsickness (The Rune Tithe #1)

CHAPTER 7

A commotion of voices babbled outside Briar’s window.

Coill Darragh wasn’t usually bustling early in the morning. In the street, a thick knot of people crowded in front of the shop. Some held cameras aloft, flashing with the same frenetic energy as the people. All faces pointed at the front of the shop neighboring Briar’s.

Some buoyant combination of hope and intuition coalesced in Briar’s heart, sending him careering around his room in search of clothes. He recalled a teasing Alakagram video.

The other witch coming to Coill Darragh couldn’t possibly be…

Dressed so quickly that both socks were inside out, Briar flung himself down the stairs and out the door. The street heaved. No sooner had he joined the throng than he had an elbow in his ribs, the press of auras smothering him like overbearing cologne. Though the crowd was filled with all sorts, one thing every person had in common was the wardstone bracelet fastened about their wrists. Tourists, all. Briar squeezed between two men with cameras to peer on tiptoes over the heads of a number of teens. Through the vibrating crowd, he glimpsed a head of sable hair, flicked over a shoulder adorned with a feathered epaulette.

It was only a passing glance, but Briar would know the face anywhere.

Disbelief, feverish excitement, and a little trepidation all warred within him, but the excitement reigned triumphant.

It was unmistakably Linden Fairchild.

Briar had seen him once before, though in a crowd several fathoms larger.

The Fairchilds were famous for their healing potions. After a bout of illness had killed most of their family, they’d dedicated themselves to medicine. Yet, even compared to his parents, who were world-renowned for their elixirs, Linden was the jewel in the family crown.

Like Briar with aura reading, Linden had a unique talent for healing. The Fairchilds had once run a traveling miracle tour. Briar had been fifteen on the sunny day he and his mother went into Port Haven to watch Linden cure a young girl of cancer and a man of multiple sclerosis. Briar had insisted on bringing his mum. Though she’d protested she wasn’t ill, he knew different, or thought he did. Linden had asked what ailed her, and she’d looked to Briar. He’d said, “Please just check.” Linden had laid his hands on her shoulders. Briar remembered how they had looked. Long fingered and gentle. He’d admired Linden distantly before, through the barrier of a screen, but this encounter, up close, had birthed a different sort of fascination. A yearning to be as bright and world-changing.

Linden had closed his eyes. His magic quested like a tuning fork searching for discordant notes. But he’d opened his eyes and proclaimed there were none.

She wasn’t sick. Not yet. The Seer’s fortune hadn’t come to pass. Briar hoped she’d been wrong. A quack. But a year later, his mum was tired all the time. A couple years later, she had a diagnosis of Bowen’s Wane. By then, Linden’s Miracle Tour ended with a public announcement. Years of being on the road and overusing his magic without breaks had taken its toll. He’d exhausted his abilities.

Try as he might, he could never heal anyone again.

It struck Briar as criminally unfair that the one person who might have saved her had been robbed of his talent to do so.

It wasn’t unheard of. Witches could burn out their abilities, sometimes permanently, and Linden had been young—a teenager—during that tour. Linden took up fashion design afterward. For Briar, it had been a lifeline. Much of what he’d learned to sew, he’d done through Linden’s online tutorials. It allowed Briar to dress himself for success even when he couldn’t afford the flashy brands his peers wore.

Now, Linden was everything Briar remembered. He didn’t strut or gleam or preen in front of the cameras but carried himself with a quiet charisma. Effortlessly beautiful, from every angle a composition made for painting. He stopped at the stoop to the shop, emerald half cape swirling around him, the cupid’s bow of his mouth quirked in a smile. A white cat prowled at Linden’s heels—his familiar, Atticus—while an assistant tailed them, filming their arrival for Alakagram.

Briar couldn’t get a sense of Linden’s aura. It looked like he’d cast a spell to keep the crowd at a distance, but he hadn’t needed to. Rowan cut a path through the crowd, which shied from him like a murmuration of starlings around a bird of prey. He carried a single suitcase, white with gold fastenings. Too tall and blocking the view of many cameras, Rowan set the suitcase at Linden’s feet. It hit the cobblestones like a dropped anvil, spelled to contain multitudes. Rowan departed quickly.

Linden waited as the crowd held an anticipatory breath. When he spoke, it was in the crisp, clean vowels Briar had often fallen asleep to while watching live videos from his phone.

“Hello, everyone. I know you must be excited to hear what I have planned for my modest shop in Coill Darragh. Though I’m equally excited to share, I regret that now’s not the time.”

He allowed a moment for the mutters of disappointment. Many of the crowd were reporters and paparazzi raring to tell the story first.

“I won’t leave you without even a clue, of course,” Linden continued. “There’s been a lot of speculation that I might make this my first brick-and-mortar store outside Pentawynn, or that I’m about to announce a new fashion line for winter, but I can let you in on a secret. None of those rumors are true. This store will be a return to something I’ve always held a deep passion for.”

A second pause, this one peppered with feverish whispers. Briar’s stomach flipped. A return to something I’ve always held a deep passion for. Linden was prodigal, talented beyond the norm for witches. Perhaps his powers had returned. Perhaps…

Briar didn’t want to give in to the hope Linden could cure him of his curse, but seeing him here, it felt like—

Fate.

“Which brings me to the next important detail: a date,” Linden continued. “Coill Darragh holds an annual festival on the twenty-first of October. At six that evening, I’ll hold a grand opening to my shop, here on this doorstep.”

To the cheers and claps of the crowd, he said, “I’ll be getting started now. I hope to see you all very soon.”

He opened the door and swept inside. Bright banners unfurled in the interior windows, flashing the opening date and Linden’s logo of a cat in a witch’s hat in enchanted lights. The crowd’s checked enthusiasm during Linden’s speech crashed through the streets of Coill Darragh. People took photos outside the shop in front of the new banners. Many more dragged their luggage to check in to their lodgings.

The magnitude of Linden’s fame only sank in for Briar as he watched the town transform. A fanatical pulse replaced the quiet thrum of locals going about their daily lives.

Briar found it infectious. He returned to his shop. Very little daylight penetrated the pack of bodies outside his window, so he had to put lights on, but he didn’t mind. The knowledge of who lived and breathed just on the other side of his wall left him effervescent.

“His shop will make for stiff competition,” Vatii warned.

This failed to temper his enthusiasm. “Could do the opposite,” Briar said. “Maybe people will go to Linden’s and come here because they’re curious. And besides, I’ll be able to talk to him .”

There was always the risk Linden would outshine him, but he refused to entertain the notion. He skipped over it and straight to the most attractive possibility, the one that tickled at the back of his mind the moment he’d woken up to the crowds buzzing outside:

Last night, starved from his adventure in the woods, Briar had heated up Rowan’s soup and basked in the warm smells filling his small flat. He’d wondered about the man with an odd scar and an odder habit of feeding him at any given opportunity. When he’d first arrived in Coill Darragh, he’d thought perhaps Rowan was the “man in a mask” from Niamh’s vision.

Now, he doubted it.

Rowan was quiet, and he had an odd effect on the people of the town, but nothing about him seemed masked or stone-hearted. He was kind, playful with his niece, generous with a complete stranger. He’d probably saved Briar’s life. Moreover, Niamh had described a “deified pillar of the people.” Who else but a celebrity fit that description? Rowan couldn’t be the cold man of Niamh’s vision—if anything, Briar associated him with warmth.

He’d been disappointed. Now, he considered the alternative. What if this man of destiny was Linden? Getting even more carried away, Briar thought of how this man was meant to have a heart of stone that turned golden for Briar. Perhaps it was a metaphor. Perhaps Briar could unlock Linden’s blocked talent, and Linden could cure him of the curse, and—

“We are definitely going to fall in love,” Briar said. “It’s destiny. Niamh said so.”

Vatii clicked her beak. “You’re a pillock if you believe that.”

“What else besides destiny would bring someone like Linden someplace like this?”

“You should be focusing on how you’re going to make anything that can compete with a world-famous witch.”

She was right, but Briar would have to wait until Sorcha brought his fabric. For now, he had to brew Diarmuid’s elixir.

He prodded a fire to life in the wood-burning stove, setting his cauldron atop it with water to boil. As he arrayed the ingredients and scribbled the recipe on the counter, Gretchen appeared at his elbow in a waft of creeping cold, finger tapping her lower lip. She hadn’t been pleased when Briar’s return to the shop last night dragged her back, the buried fabric rejected. They still hadn’t come up with an alternative, but her inquisitive look implied she’d gotten over it for now. She’d been insufferably smug after his trip into the woods. The spectral embodiment of I told you so . Briar hesitated while crushing blackberries with his mortar and pestle, eyebrows raised.

“Do you want to help?” he asked.

“Well, you’ll mess it up without me.”

But he could tell she was pleased. Whether because she missed making potions or because she enjoyed bossing Briar around, he didn’t care. He followed her instructions, dropping in the wishbone only when the bubbling froth nearly boiled over, mixing the turmeric into the crushed berries until it made a paste, stirring the brew whenever she reminded him. The liquid in the cauldron looked gray-green and unappetizing at first, but Gretchen said it needed time to simmer.

As he retrieved a bottle to contain the potion, his arm gave a sudden jerk. His fingers seized too, dropping the bottle, glass shattering underfoot.

Vatii said, “Clumsy!”

“It wasn’t me. It was—” Briar cut himself short. Gretchen watched, eyebrows raised. He looked at his arm, at the tithe he’d made to the tree yesterday, and that sharp thing lodged in his chest hurt like he was breathing around it.

His curse had never given him muscle spasms before.

“Is there something the matter with you?” Gretchen asked.

Briar couldn’t help bristling a little. He barely spoke of his curse. Not out of any sense of shame, but because most people didn’t want to know and regretted bringing it up. The notion that he was already experiencing muscle spasms frightened him.

“I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

Gretchen didn’t press him for answers.

Briar poured the cauldron’s contents into a round bottle and wrote a label for it in curling script. He took it downstairs, setting it on the barren shelf behind the counter. It looked lonely.

He sketched garment designs, cut out patterns, preparing what he could for Sorcha’s delivery. She came mid-afternoon with a bolt of blue fabric for Ciara’s cloak and a binder full of sample inventory. An hour flashed by as they nailed down the particulars of their joint venture. Briar went through page after page of fabric squares, touching each, imagining what kind of garments he could create. Assessing the prices was less pleasant, but Sorcha made it easier by scratching twenty percent off the retail price and presenting him with a bag of scraps for free.

He placed his first order with his heart in his throat. It took most of his meager savings, but he needed to fill the store. There were things he couldn’t yet afford. Clothing racks, a dressmaker’s mannequin to make fittings and different sizes easier, hangers and frames for the shop. That didn’t even factor in tithes for enchantments. The fabric was the tip of the iceberg.

It was a start.

Briar spent the following week crouched over his sewing machine, stitching garments. Even before he enchanted them, there was a certain magic to the rhythm of the needle stamping its stitches, the glide of scissors through cloth. He loved embroidery, but his fingers ached from the press of the needle by the time he set his work aside to sleep. His drafty flat couldn’t keep out autumn’s chill, so he warmed himself with many cups of tea and lit fires in the potbelly stove.

Of Ciara’s cloak, he was particularly fond. It matched his own, except tiny. He’d enchanted the embroidered stars to animate and twinkle, and he hoped fervently she’d like it.

He charmed a few of the jewelry pieces Sorcha left with him, too. One necklace would help dispel a person’s shyness at parties. The engagement rings would prolong the emotional heights brought on by a proposal. Though subtle magic, it was the sort Briar liked best. It did not so much change the wearer as make their lives a little happier. His mother had made him smile, and that left its mark on him. He hoped his clothes could make the wearer smile, too, and leave their own marks.

He precariously balanced hangers against the edges of structural beams in the shop walls to display what he’d managed to make. A wool jacket for winter, lined with indigo silk and hand embroidered with enchanted thread to keep the wind from slipping under sleeves and down collars. A boatneck silver dress enchanted to sit just perfectly without need for fidgety adjustments.

None of this fixed a growing issue: nobody came inside his shop.

Closing time neared in the beginning of his second week, and not a solitary customer ventured inside. His eagerness to get a display together became unbearable. He’d lost hope that anyone would come through today, but at ten minutes to closing, the door chime jingled.

Rowan towered in the doorway. Briar shot up. Though he should have felt disappointed it wasn’t a potential customer, a pit of warmth opened in him instead.

Vatii said uncharitably, “Dammit, we need business!”

Briar ignored her. “Busy week?”

Rowan nodded on a huffed breath. As Coill Darragh flooded with tourists, Briar could only assume he spent a good deal of time doling out wardstone bracelets. He looked around at the few things Briar had on display and approached the jacket. If he’d wanted to buy anything, the only thing that would fit was the scarf Briar hadn’t finished. Though normally quiet, Rowan’s silence was particularly poignant today. He kept half turning to Briar then looking away.

Briar suddenly remembered. “The soup!” He sprinted upstairs and returned moments later with the empty, cleaned container to return. “Thank you again. It was really good. Really, really good. Did you make it yourself?”

“Mm.” Rowan looked at the clothes hanging up on the wall.

“You’d look ravishing in the silver one,” Briar joked, pointing at the dress.

With a rumbling chuckle, Rowan reached out to touch the fabric. Unsurprisingly, the hanger teetered off the edge it clung to and fell to the ground in a glittering puddle.

“Sorry.” He picked it up and tried to put it back but couldn’t work out how Briar had balanced it.

“It was inevitable. Don’t worry, let me.” Briar took the hanger and began the circus act of balancing it again. “Just haven’t had the chance to get the stuff together for charms, but I’ll have them on floating, invisible mannequins soon.”

“They look good.”

Briar smiled. “Thanks. Sorry there’s nothing in your size off the hanger, but I can make anything you like to measure. I’ve got a scarf on the go too. Not sure it’s your color, but…”

He trailed off. It wasn’t often he was lost for words, but Rowan’s quiet was stuffed full of something unsaid. He hadn’t stepped out of Briar’s space, still close enough that his aura brushed up like a cat arching under Briar’s chin. It beckoned him closer. He couldn’t understand how Rowan had the opposite effect on everyone else.

Rowan’s Adam’s apple bobbed, and he nodded towards something behind Briar. “Is that the one for Ciara?”

Briar didn’t have to look back. He held Rowan’s gaze for the second it took before Rowan lowered his. “Did you come to tell me something?”

“Ehm.” Rowan’s aura fizzled like a carbonated drink shaken too vigorously. The words burst out of him. “It’s Saor ó Eagla in a week’s time.”

“What’s that?”

“A festival.”

Briar’s mouth formed around an “oh” of understanding. This was the festival around which Linden would launch his store, later in October.

It then occurred to him that Rowan was trying to ask him on a date.

At least, it seemed that way until Rowan cleared his throat and took several steps away from Briar. “Just thought to tell you. In case you wanted to go.”

“Will you be there?” Briar prompted.

Rowan nodded stiffly. “Probably.”

“Then I’ll see you there.”

Rowan muttered something unintelligible, perhaps a “see you” or “okay goodbye,” then turned and ducked out the door. Briar found it left his heart hammering. If Rowan had just asked him on a date, he hadn’t said whether he’d come by to pick him up, meet him there, or what time. Had he mistaken Rowan’s intent altogether?

“He,” Vatii declared, looking pompous from her spot puffed up on the cash register, “is a very strange man.”

Briar shook it off and went to lock the door, turning the sign to “closed,” but a young man appeared from the gloom to knock on the glass. Briar opened it to the frantic words: “Sorry to bother you, mate! I know you’re closing, but you wouldn’t happen to have any engagement rings, would you?”

Stepping out of the doorway to let him in, Briar said, “Er, yes, a couple.”

Ten minutes later, Briar made his first sale.