A Spell for Heartsickness (The Rune Tithe #1)

CHAPTER 9

B riar opened the shop the next morning in a dreadful mood, convinced he’d offended Rowan with his aura babble and deprived himself of a kiss goodnight in the process.

It should not have been his focus. He needed a strategy to better acquaint himself with Linden, but from their interaction yesterday, he didn’t know how. Linden was an enigma. Fame elevated him. Without good reason to strike up a conversation, Briar’s attempts could look sycophantic at best and self-serving at worst. Grasping for a piece of his power, a touch of his fame. Briar couldn’t very well say Hi, a seer told me we’re destined to be together, so how about a kiss? either. The tithe of silence forbade it. Plus, he’d sound like a numpty.

The stiff competition left Briar hurting for work. He spent a good deal of time hunched over a sewing machine. He’d scraped the bottom of his ingredient stores for enchantments and started resorting to flesh tithes. It was exhausting, so Briar interspersed his work with something he found easier: moping.

Gretchen appeared at fifteen minutes to noon looking uncharacteristically cheerful. At the sight of him, she blanched. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. I’m just an unkissable failure who couldn’t sell a carrot to a hare, and my entire future hinges upon my relationship to a man who doesn’t know I exist. No big deal.”

“Yeesh.”

Vatii yawned. She’d been kept up late by his whining.

Gretchen said, “Well, I’m feeling great, thank you for asking.”

“How was your roam around town while I was at the festival?”

“Wonderful. I searched the town for clues on how I died. Do you know what I learned?”

“I thought you didn’t care about that?” Though he had wondered.

“I don’t. I mean—just listen! I found out I can—”

The bell tolled to announce a customer. Briar looked up from his work just as Gretchen blinked out of existence. Rude of her to leave him guessing, but she did have antisocial tendencies when it came to customers.

Linden Fairchild stood in the door. He wore pinstripe pants and a waistcoat with an emerald cravat. A traditional witch’s hat, dripping a single string of crystals from the brim, tilted smartly on his head.

He looked too elegant in Briar’s humble store. With a cursory scan of the room, he spotted Briar and smiled. “Ah, hello. I believe we met briefly yesterday. Briar?”

Briar suppressed a scream. He remembered my name. “That’s me.”

“I was wondering, I’ve just filmed a little tour of my shop for Alakagram, and I wanted to introduce my followers to the other places in town. Do you mind if I stream a tour in here?”

“Of course, make yourself at home.” Briar glanced at Vatii to confirm she was hearing all this. She rolled her eyes at his exuberance.

Linden’s grin broadened. He tapped open the app on his phone, held the camera aloft, and spoke to his followers with casual familiarity, showing them around the shop, saying, “This winsome place belongs to Briar Wyngrave, another Reded witch next door to me. Looks like we have ourselves an enchanted clothes shop. Man after my own heart.”

Vatii muttered, “Kill me.”

Linden joined Briar behind the counter, a sweet fragrance like lilacs perfuming him as he sidled close, holding his camera up in selfie mode. A number on the screen showed half a million viewers were already watching. Their commentary scrolled past, along with a spray of stars whenever they tapped the magic wand icon. Briar spotted a few complimentary messages. One person wrote, Is it just me, or is he kind of cute? Another replied. It’s not just you.

A few disagreeable watchers said, I don’t see it , but Briar paid them no mind. Despite very little sleep, he did look good.

Linden beamed. “This is Briar, owner of—”

“Briar’s Bewitching Boutique,” he answered, creating the name off the cuff. “That’s a working title. I could give you the tour?”

Linden glanced into the camera as if sharing a secret with his fans. “Isn’t he charming?” Then, to Briar, “Lead the way.”

Briar tried to appear calm, but internally he vibrated with enthusiasm. “I’m only getting started, but here’s what I’m working on for my winter line.” He led Linden to the window display, gesturing to the garments with a flick of his wrist. He reeled Linden closer to show him the embroidered detail, or to run the fabric between his fingers and comment on its quality. He dropped Sorcha’s name, insisting Linden check out her textiles. He spoke quickly and energetically, doing his best to keep the tenuous attention spans of Linden and his fanbase. Lastly, he pulled up the cloak he’d been working on.

“Not to be cheeky, but you inspired this one.” Briar took a step back and whirled the cloak around his shoulders. It still needed hemming, but he was quite proud of it. The emerald green was a trademark of Linden’s, and the high collar gave it an interesting silhouette. “I’ll be adding embellishments to the hem with a charm to repel rain.”

Linden touched the front of it, his long-fingered hand playing along the buckle. Briar hoped he couldn’t feel his heart thumping. He’d jumped to showmanship, and the pause awaiting judgment felt infinite. So many eyes on him through the lens of that camera. This could highlight his work or condemn it, depending largely on Linden’s opinion. In a private meeting, Briar might have been brave enough to turn up the charm, to lean in, to enjoy his proximity to a star upon which he’d made wishes from the time he was a boy.

Linden’s eyes met Briar’s. “I can see you’re incredibly talented.” On his phone, stars exploded, and a number of people gushed, That would look soooo fab on Linden . “You know, I’ve been looking for something fresh. What do you think about making something for me?”

Briar matched the sly smile with one of his own. “You’ll have to give me your measurements.”

Someone in Linden’s chat typed, DID HE JUST? Someone else said, Oh my God, are they flirting??? Another person just put loads of crying emojis.

A shocked laugh bubbled from Linden. “Oh, I like you. As bold as your taste in clothes.”

Briar held his breath while watching Linden jot down his measurements.

Finished, Linden held the paper out to him. “I look forward to wearing it.” Briar ensured his hand brushed the tops of Linden’s fingers, long enough to be deliberate, brief enough to feel casual. Linden said quietly, “I’ll see you again later, then.”

He returned to filming, giving his fans one last look at the shop. Briar waved to them with a theatrical curtsy.

The doorbell echoed after Linden’s departure, leaving Briar with the sense that he’d just cheated on a very complicated exam and gotten away with it. His short-circuited mind refired with a single thought. “Did that just happen?” he asked the empty shop.

Vatii said, “He’s better without the cat. But still a ponce.”

“Did that just happen, though? I have a job.”

“Is he even going to pay you for it?”

“A job from Linden ,” Briar continued. “Half a million people just got a good look at my designs.” The significance hadn’t sunk in. He deflated into his chair, still holding the cloak that had won him Linden’s business.

This could change everything.

For the rest of the day, Briar cut patterns to the sound of rain pattering against the windows.

At closing time, the hazy sun tucked itself behind the rooftops. Gretchen poked her head through the stairwell wall. “So, do you want to see what I learned yesterday or not?”

Briar thought he should spend the evening making clothes, but he’d felt bad his conversation with Linden had seemed to scare her off. And he wanted to see what had Gretchen so excited.

He locked up and put a sign on the door, tying the curtain-cravat around his neck on his way. They walked out to the failing light and bone-cold drizzle. The street was a sea of umbrellas. The weather in Coill Darragh had taken a cold turn, wind and the nip of winter on the air. It blustered through his clothes, making him wrap his cloak tighter. A few residents cleared up litter and decorations from the festivities the night before.

In the town square, the statue wore a pile of leaf crowns. The statues of Briar’s hometown got a similar treatment with traffic cones, but the wreaths looked more dignified. Tokens of respect.

Gretchen floated over to the wall of the church. A chunk gouged from the stone pulsed with a magical scar, exuding an aura of pins and needles.

“Watch this,” she said, and touched the scar.

The question of how Gretchen could see the scars died on Briar’s tongue.

The town square transformed. A hazy vision superimposed over it, a memory made manifest. It looked so vivid, Briar stumbled into the wall to make way for the witches stampeding through. There were three, hands raised to enchant deflective shields. The wail of something high and horrifying droned in the air. Terror rendered the apparitions hollow-faced, the whites of their eyes shining wide around their irises. These visions collided with the real residents of Coill Darragh, only revealing their phantasmal natures as they phased through the living, who didn’t respond with more than a slight shiver.

With a whining, reverberant song, a wave of magic reared after the fleeing witches. It ripped through the square, stripping paint from doors and shutters, chipping the walls. Briar cringed as a fist-sized chunk of stone tore off the spot Gretchen touched and collided with the shoulder of a witch. She hit the ground on hands and knees, scrabbling away, but a glut of magic climbed over her like the vines had done to Briar in the woods. Drowning, smothering.

She evaporated like smoke. Briar knew he’d just watched her die.

The vision ended. Gretchen retracted her hand, looking gleeful despite the horror they’d witnessed. “Isn’t that cool?”

Briar felt queasy. “Gretchen, that was awful.” Clutching his chest, he looked away from the spot where the witch had collapsed. Vatii ruffled her feathers. “Did we just watch a woman die?”

“Oh, that.” Gretchen crossed her arms. “I forgot how squinchy you lot get about dying. Once you’ve done it, it’s no big deal. Besides, the dying lady wasn’t the point. The point is, I can access the history of Coill Darragh this way! We could find out more about what happened, what’s going on now with the woods, maybe even learn how I died.”

Briar touched the stone, the rough edges of the divot worn semi-smooth with rain. The magic there turned his veins icy. “I didn’t know you could see the auras of these scars too,” he said.

“See? No, I don’t see anything, I just kind of… felt like this spot was weird? I don’t know, I touched it, and this happened. You can see something here?”

Briar nodded. He could see the scars’ auras. Perhaps Gretchen felt them because the magic tethering her was somehow linked to what had happened. Much as she insisted death hardly mattered, the hazy details around her own seemed like a thorn that needed excising.

“You said things are going on here now ?” Briar said. “What do you mean?”

“Do you think roots destroying bits of fabric and eating hares is normal?”

He didn’t. Vatii looked uncomfortable but didn’t comment. Though he didn’t understand much from that glimpse, Briar felt the draw of it, too. Something stirred in Coill Darragh that went deeper than a few strange phenomena. They had to investigate, even if the notion made him long to curl up at home with a cup of tea instead. It could lead him to answers about why the forest had cursed him. He could help Gretchen.

“There’s another scar here,” he said.

Between the gaps in the cobbles, a slash of magic fizzled, fainter than on the church. He pointed to it, and Gretchen hovered near. She asked if he was ready before kneeling to touch the violet aurora.

The vision didn’t last long. In Gretchen’s place, a witch took to his broom. A siren scream of magic roared through the square, and the same pulse that had taken the first victim snatched this one from the air, dashing him apart like dandelion seeds.

The vision left him clammy and corpse-cold. It seemed to drain Gretchen too, her apparition flickering. This vision was no less unnerving than the last, for all its brevity, but it offered nothing new, except—

“His shoes,” Briar said. “The witch had beetle-wing embellishments on his shoes. Those were in fashion ten years ago, before people boycotted them because the beetles were endangered. It gives us a time frame.”

“Of course the thing you notice is his shoes ,” Gretchen said. “We should try another location.”

They traveled through town and paused at intervals to survey scars marking a street sign and a garden wall. Both played out the same. Witches running. A wave of malignant magic. A death, and the vision ended.

There was one anomaly—a vision wherein a civilian’s arm erupted with roots—but Briar couldn’t tell whether this was a misfired spell or a result of the magic wave.

One thing became clear. The wave discriminated in who it killed. Some perished in its grasp, others remained unscathed.

Beyond this, they learned little. The noise of the cataclysm set Briar’s teeth on edge. He despaired at the devastation. With no sign of its cause or new information, he wondered if they’d wasted their evening. And he was keenly aware he had less time to waste than most.

On a stone footbridge, leading over a brook and out of town, there was a smear of magical scarring along the left parapet. It looked no different from the others. When Gretchen touched it, though, the ringing noise Briar expected didn’t come. Instead, footsteps of an encroaching figure pounded closer. A witch blocked the bridge, casting a web of magic that walled off passage, spreading over into the brook, stretching several meters in either direction. Her fingers flexed as if drawing upon a well of magic from deep within, except that couldn’t be possible. To create such a barrier, she would require a tithe of enormous power, yet her arms were unmarked, her hands empty.

Beyond the barrier, a running figure got close enough to see. A man with a jutting chin, his hair flying away from its leather twine, and his eyes alight with desperate rage.

He was unmistakably the man in whose likeness the statue in the square had been built.

Gretchen said, “éibhear.”

Briar didn’t have the breath to ask how she knew him. All the air was stolen from his lungs as he watched the two witches on their collision course. If éibhear ran into that barrier, it would eviscerate him, much like the wards should have done to Briar when the woods broke his bracelet.

éibhear did not slow. He drew one arm back like a lance. As he did, thorny vines rose from the bedrock of the brook. They reared back and punched through the other witch’s ribs like a serpent’s strike.

Her barrier dissolved. She hit the parapet. The vision ended.

They’d just seen éibhear, the man commemorated with a statue, murder another witch.

Hot bile rose in Briar’s throat. He didn’t know how the vision was significant, only that it made his skin crawl to see two witches wield magic like that.

Vatii whispered, “I don’t like any of this.”

“Me neither,” Briar agreed. “How did they do all that without a tithe?”

“I don’t know.” Gretchen’s hands clenched in fists. “I don’t know how, but I don’t know why either. I remember éibhear.” Her voice came out gritty and frustrated. “Or at least, I think I do. He was my mentor. He could be a strict teacher, but he was kind to me.”

Briar struggled to reconcile that description with what they’d just witnessed. “What else do you remember about this battle? That magic wave thing?”

Gretchen scowled, clenching her jaw. “I…” She hesitated, squinting into the middle distance, a look of growing consternation in her dark eyes. “I don’t know. It’s like the memories are all locked up. I remember something éibhear told me about the forest? He said it was special, that there were other ancient sources of wild magic a long time ago, but ravaged for tithes, those places weakened in power. But here, in Coill Darragh, it’s different. Protected and protector.” She squinted, searching for the memories, the details. “I… That’s all I’ve got.”

She sounded scared, and that scared Briar too. Not even death frightened her, but this did.

He searched the fields beyond the bridge, the woods within sight. The vines that killed the hare and destroyed the curtain scrap looked ominously like the vines éibhear used to murder his foe. This forest claimed it had cursed Briar’s mother. Now they’d discovered some terrible event had transpired ten years prior, around the time his mother was cursed.

Briar wanted to help Gretchen, but deep down, he understood this involved him, too. He feared the woods and what secrets they contained, but curiosity pulled him toward those woods anyway.

They crossed the bridge and followed the dirt lanes into the fields, following the direction éibhear had run from in the vision, misty rain pestering their progress. The path split left and right ahead. Beyond that, grassy knolls bowed before the towering trees of Coill Darragh. At the edge of the wood, a line glowed in the reeds. The closer they got, the greater a sense of malaise settled over Briar. The scar blazed a swath in front of the woods, six meters across, grass growing over the crater.

Briar paused, the forest’s voice echoing in his ear. You, soon. Your mother.

He bristled. He didn’t want to get any closer, so he skirted around it, but Gretchen had to touch it to weave her strange brand of magic. With hand extended, she hesitated. Though blood no longer pumped through her veins, and no pulse could make her hand quiver, it shook visibly. She steeled her resolve, clenched her fist, and plunged it into the grass.

éibhear appeared. Unlike the other vision, he stood alone. His shoulders rose and fell with harsh breaths, gaze cast up into the looming canopy. A moment of paralyzing indecision wrote itself in the sweat of his brow. After a beat, he shucked his cloak into the grass. Then his shirt.

Briar gasped. Even Vatii ruffled in surprise.

Across éibhear’s arms were rune tithes.

Countless, more than triple the number Briar had accumulated. They coiled up both arms, several more along his lower torso. Briar jolted with a nauseating thrill. He wanted no comparison to this man who killed witches with impunity, couldn’t ever imagine using his magic the way éibhear had.

Yet a powerful and celebrated man bore the same sordid tithes Briar did.

éibhear took something out of his robes. Charcoal. With it, he drew upon his chest. He had no mirror, so the marks sometimes went awry. He smeared these away by licking his fingers and rubbing. It took some time. A sigil over his chest, runes around its circumference, circles interwoven at its center, more lines and symbols arrayed down his stomach, over his ribs.

Finished, he dropped the charcoal and stared into the trees. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, lips parted. Stood frozen like that.

Nothing happened. Nothing that they could see , but something transpired. A silent communion of man and nature. The forest’s heartbeat throbbed underfoot.

Then éibhear bent backward, chest surging toward the sky as if drawn there by a needle and thread. He floated upward. The new runes on his skin glowed, and the agony of so many rent a bloodcurdling scream from him. Gooseflesh broke out over Briar’s arms. The earth below éibhear moved, bubbled, lumps of earth roiling. Roots burst forth in a shower of soil. They spiraled and coiled around éibhear, thorns biting into skin, his blood hissing where it streamed into the open earth. The roots and vines enveloped him until only his face was visible. For a moment, he was more a tree than a man.

Then the roots pulled éibhear under. Like a meteor hitting, he and the vines plunged beneath the loam. Dirt sprayed. The earth rumbled like a hungry stomach.

It went quiet. So quiet. Briar clenched his throat to keep from being sick.

Gretchen’s voice quivered. “It’s not over.”

From the tree line, a sound rose. For all its familiarity, it still made Briar shudder. A high whine, like ringing in his ears. Then a rumble. The two frequencies wove together in a sickening, undulating tune that got louder and vibrated in Briar’s core.

The trees bled. Not red, but a thick, semitransparent ooze that spread into a viscous pool. The dark purple of a bruise, it turned up bits of dead leaf and detritus from the forest floor, moved like a living deep-sea thing. Slow but picking up speed, it advanced toward the town.

The magic cataclysm swept past. Briar closed his eyes. He could feel it coursing over him, even if it was only an echo. He could envision it hemorrhaging through the town like poison through an anthill, killing with its peculiar discrimination. The purple ectoplasm covered everything as far as the eye could see and reached upward. Briar turned in a circle to behold it. A wall rose, stretching like fingers into the sky, until the wards of Coill Darragh painted the entire horizon in an amaranthine sunrise.

When the vision ended, it left them standing in the cold and the dark and the rain—in a funereal miasma. Briar clutched Vatii to his chest, where she was tucked into his robes, though they were soaking cold. He unstuck his tongue from where it was glued to the roof of his mouth.

“Gretchen, what was that?”

Her specter shivered like she felt the rain too. “We just saw the creation of the wards.”

“It killed people,” Briar said, and she nodded. “Why?”

She rubbed her eyes beneath her glasses. “I don’t remember any of this, I can’t—but I know who you can ask.”

“Who?”

Gretchen gave him a queer look. “Rowan.”

It made sense. He’d lived through it. He even had a scar reminiscent of the ones left by the wards. But something in the tone of Gretchen’s voice made Briar think that wasn’t all.

So he asked, “Why Rowan?”

“You really don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“éibhear,” she said. “He was Rowan’s father.”