A Spell for Heartsickness (The Rune Tithe #1)

CHAPTER 17

W hite light clouded his vision when he lost consciousness, and white light greeted him when he came to.

Briar squinted at the fluorescent strips overhead, reacquiring his senses one at a time. Starchy, stiff sheets. The soft hum of machines and the clip of distant footsteps. An acrid taste in his cotton-dry mouth, and the unmistakable, sterile smell of antiseptic.

He was in a clinic.

Vatii roused next to him, a low chirrup of greeting in his ear.

He didn’t have long to recall how he’d blacked out before the door opened and Sorcha’s husband appeared. It was surreal to see Connor changed out of the ugly Christmas jumper into blue scrubs. All Briar’s illusions about keeping his curse a secret dissolved. Connor would have seen it in his medical files.

“Ah, Briar. Sure good to see you’re awake.” But something in his voice said otherwise. “Not your favorite place to be on Christmas Day, I imagine. How are you feeling?”

“Exhausted. Where’s Rowan?” He knew what Rowan would have seen. Part of him was embarrassed. He’d seen his mother have these seizures. They were terrifying.

“He’s in the waiting room. He’ll give out to me in a minute for not letting him know right away that you’re up, but we have to talk. Doctor-patient confidentiality comes first ’n all that.”

Connor pulled up a chair, metal legs squealing, and sat next to the hospital bed. He folded his hands in front of him. The pose told Briar he wouldn’t like what he was about to hear. No good news could come from such a posture.

“How long have you been afflicted with Bowen’s Wane?”

“Two years. And a bit.”

“That’s all?”

Defensively. “Yeah.”

Connor looked at a loss for words, like he didn’t often have to deal with delivering terrible news, not in this small town, not to someone he’d just shared Christmas dinner with.

“Just tell me.”

Connor met his eyes. Steeled himself. Possibly, he dug into the persona he would present to any patient. “It’s as if you’ve had this curse for a long time, Briar. Your health has degenerated so badly, I don’t know what to make of it. It’s as if you’ve had it ten years, not two.”

“Ten,” Briar heard himself say as if from underwater. He expected to follow a list of things he would need to do to rectify his devolving health. A new dosage for his potion. Something.

Instead, Connor said quietly, “I’m trying to contact your specialist, but it being the holidays… I managed to speak to someone in Pentawynn, and they said some things can accelerate the curse’s symptoms. Unrelated illness. Too little sleep. Stress.” He didn’t mention the tithes, though he must have seen them while treating Briar.

“How long do I have?” Briar repeated it before the panic took his voice. “How long?”

Connor’s eyes crinkled at the corners. A kind, pained sympathy. “Months. Six, at most.”

In a wash of dread, Briar unstuck his jaw enough to move it, but words failed him. That couldn’t be right. That just could not be right. He had to look away, up at the lights, but their brightness made his eyes sting harder. He choked on a well of things rising in his chest. A roiling bile of emotion that burned and scraped like a flood full of debris was trapped in the shivering prison of his ribs.

He remembered holding his mother’s hand while she lay dying, how he’d been speaking to Vatii, because it took a long time to die. And they’d had no idea when it would happen. And he remembered thinking, It’s been a long time since Mum breathed. Those breaths had been loud in the quiet hospice room, each one a rasping struggle. He’d waited, and the room was silent.

The feeling that had come over him then, and the one that came over him now, were not dissimilar.

Connor started to stand. “If you need a moment—”

Impulsively, Briar grabbed his sleeve to stop him. “Don’t tell Rowan.” It just came out.

“Why don’t you want him to know?”

Because he had a plan to fix it. Because he didn’t want the fondness with which Rowan looked at him to change into pity. Because he had a destiny that didn’t involve dying, and maybe this—his growing affection for Rowan—had derailed that destiny. Not stress or sleeplessness or flesh tithes but an unbidden love affair, accelerating the rotting curse in his brain.

Because all of these things, and because he didn’t know how to tell Rowan.

Connor deflated. “I won’t tell him. Patient-doctor confidentiality ’n all that. But he’ll want to know. He’ll ask. And he’ll want to see you soon, like.”

“I know. I will talk to him. Just give me five minutes? To think.”

Connor nodded and left. Briar sat up, his head swimming. With the heels of his hands, he pressed at his eyes to stymie the threat of tears. Vatii hopped into his lap, and he gathered her up in his arms. Her little body weighed next to nothing, her heart fluttering fast in her chest. This prognosis was as much hers as his. If he died, she’d go with him.

She nibbled at the ends of his hair.

He had months to live. Anything could have affected the curse. Stress. Insomnia. Briar had them in great supply, but he had something else looming over him too, and now he couldn’t avoid it any longer.

He was never meant to fall for Rowan. Linden was the man with the mask, the man with a heart of stone that would turn golden, the man with all the connections to Pentawynn, fashion, and the success Briar longed for. The man searching for a cure . He’d deviated from that path.

Something else burned deeper beneath all those things: he’d come to rely too heavily on Rowan. Rowan, who fed him and kept him warm and supported him through the burnt-out wreck of his weeks leading up to Christmas. He’d come to count on it, and that dependence terrified him more than the curse. What became of you when you built the brick and mortar of your life on the support of a single person? Briar knew. He’d sat in the rubble left to him after that support strut cracked once before. Briar couldn’t let Rowan be that strut, but moreover, he didn’t want to be that strut for Rowan either. Only to die six months later.

Rowan was waiting to see him. He’d want to know what had happened, and Briar couldn’t very well hide it. But there was something else he would have to tell Rowan, and thinking back to their kiss in the snow, this alone made his chest burn.

He took a stabilizing breath. He set Vatii down in his lap and stroked her feathers. She understood without speaking what he was preparing for.

A soft rap at the door. Connor poked his head in. “Are you ready to see anyone, or do you need more time?”

“No, it’s fine. I’m fine.”

Connor nodded and shut the door. Moments later, it burst open. The room filled with the breadth of Rowan and his calming aura, though he himself was not calm. He moved swiftly to the chair Connor had vacated. Worry furrowed his brow and drove his hands to flutter aimlessly. He looked to the shut door and back, then put one hand to Briar’s cheek.

All the grief Briar had stuffed down threatened to spill out. He wanted to hold Rowan’s hand. He wanted whatever last scraps of comfort could be had, but knowing what was to come, couldn’t take them. It wasn’t fair.

“Are you all right?” Rowan asked.

“I’m fine.” His lack of dramatics proved it a lie.

“Briar.”

He raised his eyes to meet Rowan’s. How could he say it? He didn’t want to believe it. The words tasted like copper and iron as he summoned them and held them behind clenched teeth, as if chewing on them might soften the blow. When he did say it, he saw the words sink in one at a time in the splintered look on Rowan’s face, and that feeling was mirrored in his own heart.

“I’m dying.”

Like his lungs had collapsed, the air punched from them, Rowan doubled back against the chair. He took a moment to absorb it.

Briar couldn’t bear the silence. “Remember how I said my mother died?”

Rowan nodded.

“It was the kind of curse that gets passed on. I have it.” The rest of the words he squeezed out from the narrowing passage of his throat. “I don’t have a lot of time left.”

“How much time?”

“Months.”

Rowan slouched forward, elbows on his knees, and he wiped at his face like he could smother all the feelings worn on it. Even in his most open moments, Briar couldn’t be sure he’d ever seen Rowan look so untethered. He took Briar’s hand in both of his.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want it to change anything.”

He expected Rowan to push for more of an answer, but he didn’t. Perhaps it was that he, too, lived with some dark, unnamed magic that made him understand. This sort of magic meant people kept their distance. Only Rowan wore it like armor he couldn’t shed.

“What can I do?” Rowan said.

“Do?”

“To help. To stop it.”

Briar felt hollow telling him the answer. “Nothing.”

“There’s got to be something. Magic?”

“Curses like this either have to be lifted by the one who cast it, or they run their course. My mum had no idea who cursed her, but the forest here claimed it was behind it. And I don’t think it has any intention of letting me go.”

“Potions, medicine—”

“People are searching for a cure. Nobody’s found one. I take a potion to slow it down, but—”

“I will find something,” Rowan said. His surety startled Briar more than anything else.

“Rowan…”

“No.” His tone hardened. “We will find something. You’ve been helping me with my problem, now I’ll help you with yours. It can’t be coincidence we’re both connected to the woods.” He lifted Briar’s hand and pressed a kiss into the palm, then over the pulse of his wrist.

Vatii’s feather and the bell dangled against his chest, a reminder of everything Briar had done wrong to land himself here.

He’d been so incredibly stupid. So reckless. Casual fun, he’d told himself. Just something simple and uncomplicated that he could enjoy before destiny whisked him away. But there was nothing simple or uncomplicated in Rowan’s unbroken gaze. Nor in the tangle of real emotion threatening to ensnare him.

He should have ended it long ago. He should never have let it start.

Now he had to pay for his reckless stupidity.

He took his hand away. He folded it in his lap. “I think we need to stop this.”

Rowan froze. “This?”

It was cowardly, but he couldn’t look at Rowan when he said it. “Our relationship. It’s—I think it’s better—simpler—if we didn’t.”

Comprehension dawned. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no.”

“Just, there’s stuff I’m supposed to do, and I’m dragging you into my mess.”

“I understand.”

Briar looked at him finally. Rowan’s expression was unreadable. He looked at the floor as if it was very far away. If it tore at him as much as it did Briar, it didn’t show, and for a moment, Briar felt even more stupid. Perhaps the delicate feeling that had bloomed when Rowan kissed him in the snow had been one-sided. That, if anything, should make it easier.

Briar said hopefully, “We can still be friends, though, right?”

Still very far away, Rowan answered, “O’ course. O’ course.”