A Spell for Heartsickness (The Rune Tithe #1)

CHAPTER 22

L inden said, “What’s this?”

Briar showed him the dried carnellas the following morning, though not much of them remained to look at.

“Remember my ghosty flatmate situation? She hid this before she died. They’re called red carnellas, and they were special somehow, but she can’t remember everything, and now they’re extinct. I wondered if you knew anything about them?”

Linden’s eyebrows reached into his hairline. With reverence, he took the box from Briar’s hands. “Where to begin? Did your, er, ‘ghost roommate’ remember anything about them at all?”

“Only that they had special properties that were difficult to harness.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Linden agreed.

“So you’ve heard of them?”

“I have. You recall I mentioned rumors of a panacea found in Coill Darragh? The red carnella was purported to be the primary ingredient.”

Hope pulsed in Briar’s heart.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Linden said quickly. “But I wouldn’t put too much faith in this. Literature on red carnellas is spartan given their rarity, but from what I understand, the use of carnellas as tithes yielded nothing. They were fragile, temperamental. Whatever magic they contained was too easily broken down.”

“Then how did anyone know a panacea was possible using them?”

“Ah, who’s to say? Rumor, local legend. Perhaps someone, once, in a fluke bit of luck, managed something with them long ago, and no one’s been able to recreate it since. I believe it’s a myth, but—” He slid a finger over the lip of the box, a slight pinch between his eyebrows. “It’s worth investigating further. Any hope of finding something that could help you, I’ll take.”

In the years since Bowen’s Wane began devouring Briar’s future, he’d avoided hope like it was a snare ready to choke his final days. It was easier to press himself to work hard and bury himself in distractions, all the while convinced he’d live what time he had to the fullest rather than pray for the impossible.

Now, hope was a feverish, desperate burn in his breast.

“May I borrow these for study?” Linden asked. “I promise to return them to you and your—friend?”

“Gretchen.”

“Gretchen.” He took Briar’s hand, kissing the knuckles. “I’ll return them to you both, whether I find anything or not. I… I very much hope I do.”

The shy sincerity in his voice compelled Briar to grab Linden around the shoulders and squeeze. After a stunned moment, Linden hugged him back. His tactility still surprised Briar every time. Linden had made advances in the bedroom, but Briar shied away from anything more intimate than a kiss, using his health as an excuse. He felt guilty, and could see it wounded Linden, but he didn’t know how else to handle his lingering flame for Rowan. But in moments like these, where the intimacy was spontaneous and emotional, Linden froze up.

When Briar drew away, Linden’s eyelids fluttered. He looked as if he wanted more, even leaned forward to—Briar’s instincts bucked, and he drew away. Seeing Linden’s guarded persona snap back into place immediately, he said quickly, “I’m sorry. It’s not—Can I tell you something?”

Cautiously. “Of course.”

“I can read auras. Have since I was little, and it’s always been comforting. It makes me feel closer to people. Like I can really see them. But with you—your amulet prevents it. I haven’t felt your aura since that first night.”

“Ah…” Linden looked even more uncertain. “I didn’t know.”

“I know why you need it. But I think it’s why I sometimes feel like I barely know you.”

Linden touched his shirt where it covered the talisman. “It’s dangerous for me to go without it. There are plenty of witches happy to curse someone for the crime of being popular.”

“I know. I’m sorry, I just thought I’d explain why I’m sometimes—”

Linden lay a hand on his shoulder. “No need to apologize, Briar. It’s understandable, and it need not be forever. When you come with me to my estate in Pentawynn, I’ll be protected there and can remove this blasted thing.”

“Come with you? To Pentawynn?”

“Of course. I assumed you’d want—”

Briar flung his arms around Linden again. What he felt—for Linden, for Rowan—it was not a simple thing to untangle. But Pentawynn, that was a dream he’d had since he was a boy.

Linden cleared his throat. “Yes, well. Now that’s settled, I best get back to work.”

As he prepared to leave, someone knocked at the door. It was not the calm knock of a person just checking in. It hammered, sending tremors through the floorboards, startling Vatii off the headboard.

It was Rowan. He didn’t even pause at the sight of Linden with Briar, just blurted, “It got Sorcha.”

Briar paled.

“It?” Linden said.

“The forest. It attacked her. Taken part of her leg—she’s barely walking. She told me not to go, but I’ll not listen. It’s my job to stop this, and I’ve put it off too long. I have to find what’s wrong with the wood.”

“You’re not going in there,” Briar said.

“I am. Came to tell you in case that spell goes off.” He touched the magpie feather and bell hanging from his neck. Linden watched the motion with scrutiny. “Needed to warn you so you know it’s not taken me and don’t come looking.”

“Bollocks to that, I’m going with you.”

In unison, both Rowan and Linden said no, then looked at one another, annoyed.

“It’s my job,” Rowan said. “I won’t risk it harming you.”

“I agree. Don’t be ridiculous,” Linden said. “You’re hardly in a fit state.”

Briar stomped back into the house to grab his cloak, tithe belt, and several vials of milk thistle elixir. Vatii knew his moods and not to argue. “I’m not letting you go in alone,” said Briar. “What if it attacks you, too?”

Rowan sputtered in protest.

“What if you need help? Or a spell, or just another pair of hands?”

Linden halted Briar’s motions, holding his wrist. “And what if your curse worsens given proximity to the very thing that cursed you?”

Though Briar hadn’t considered that possibility, Gretchen’s words echoed in his mind. Her regrets. He pulled free and said to Rowan, “I’m not dead yet, but I won’t be able to live with myself if I let you go alone and something happens to you.”

They all stood quiet long enough that the wind wheezing through the eaves sounded over-loud. Linden’s hard glare turned on Rowan. “You ought to have known he wouldn’t simply sit by.”

Rowan’s returning glare weakened a little under the rebuke.

“The charm on his necklace would have let me know he’d gone into the woods anyway,” said Briar. “I’d have gone in after him one way or another.”

He wrapped his tithe belt around his waist and donned his cloak. Linden watched, stormy and lost. Briar grappled with the ties on his cloak. Somehow, this felt like choosing between them all over again. It wasn’t the case—he didn’t need tea leaves to know that if it was Linden in danger, he’d dive in after him, too. Still…

He didn’t like to do it in front of Rowan, but he leaned in to kiss Linden’s cheek. In his periphery, he saw Rowan turn away.

“I can’t let him go alone,” Briar said. “I’ll be back soon.”

The storm clouds in Linden’s face broke. “You know me better than that. I understand you’d not leave a friend in peril, but I will not leave my lover to the wilds either. I’m coming.”

Briar’s instinct was to argue, but Linden was a powerful witch. They were more likely to succeed with his help. He relented. “All right.”

They set out together, Linden expediting their journey with a portal to the edge of the forest. Stepping through it was like entering a rainforest pavilion at a zoo. The air hung heavy, thick and muddy, the forest’s aura filling Briar’s lungs with loam as though he was at a freshly dug grave mid-burial. On his first visit, the wood had been verdant with life. Now, winter had pruned its branches, leaving low shrubs and thick fog. Beyond that, it felt different, like cloud shapes that changed the longer he looked at them.

“Are you going to inform us what we should be searching for?” Linden asked.

“Anything out of the ordinary,” Rowan answered.

“In a wood of wild magic, that hardly rules anything out.”

“Anything that could harm the forest,” Briar supplied. “Right?”

Rowan nodded.

They reached a fallen log blocking the path at hip height. Linden took Briar’s hand to help him over it and didn’t let go afterward. Rowan stared into the trees ahead while Briar’s stomach churned—he was here to help, not remind Rowan of what they’d lost.

They continued searching for anything amiss. Besides the wind and their footsteps, the forest was eerily quiet. No birds sang, no small animals scuffled in the bushes, no insects hummed. Only the trees spoke.

Ours , they said.

The Keeper.

Briar longed to wrench Rowan away from this place.

They discovered why it was so quiet with a dry crunch underfoot. Not of twigs—the tiny skeleton of an animal, perhaps a squirrel. Not so strange a thing, until they found more. A tiny tibia, the scattered remains of rodents and birds. Some were shriveled, still wrapped in tight skin, fur or feathers, others nothing more than yellow bones. What killed them wasn’t evident until they came across a mouse, freshly dead and caught in the ivy of a tree. The star-shaped leaves made a red halo around its body. Before their eyes, the mouse shriveled as the forest sucked the vitality from it.

So the wood not only attacked the people of Coill Darragh, but the animals, too. The remains, Briar sensed, were devoid of tithe magic, sapped dry.

“This place is cursed,” said Linden. “I don’t know why you don’t just burn it to the ground.”

“If you’d seen Sorcha today, you wouldn’t ask,” Rowan growled.

“Will she be all right?” Briar still couldn’t speak to Sorcha—she was frosty with him, but he couldn’t blame her for that.

“She will be, yeah. Scared Ciara something fierce, though.”

That made Briar shiver. What if the forest came for Ciara?

“What’s that?” Linden pointed ahead, where a mound of earth and twigs rose from the earth. It looked like a sleeping goliath, a bear, from afar. They picked their way toward it and found—

A hut.

It was stranger than the dead animals. A man-made construction in this forest defied logic; no one went into the woods, let alone lived here. Red ribbons hung like gore from the twigs, fluttering in the breeze, markings written along their length. Runes. The ribbons were wards like the one he and Linden used to banish Gretchen. Many no longer shone with the light of active magic, weathered and frayed. Others were naught more than scraps of fabric. The forest menaced the hut from all sides, shrubs and trees leaning in, reaching, held back from destroying the thing by the wards. But only just.

A ragged blanket hung in the doorway, obscuring the interior. Rowan’s hands shook visibly as he pushed it aside. Briar wished he could reach out to steady Rowan, but Linden still held his hand tightly.

Inside, it was too dark to see until Linden tithed a strand of hair to cast a floating orb of light. The ceiling was low. Rowan couldn’t stand straight, and things hung from the ceiling, tickling the back of Briar’s neck. More ribbons. Countless. Baskets containing tithes littered the floor. The ground was uneven beneath Briar’s foot. He scuffed dead leaves out of the way to find a sigil dug into the dirt. Wards and tithes for protection were everywhere. Whoever had occupied the hut, they’d known the danger.

“Look at this,” Rowan said.

On a table at the back were several leather tomes scrawled with runes, recipes, and treatises on old magic. Next to them, in a bowl of inky water, floated several spherical objects. Hesitantly, Rowan lifted one from the water. It was empty. No smoke swirled within, but it was clearly a siphon.

Linden said, “Use of those would be a swift way to invoke the forest’s ire, I wager.”

“You don’t think—?” Briar asked.

“Yeah,” Rowan said gruffly. “Whoever was behind it ten years ago, seems they’ve returned.”

He dropped the empty siphon back in the brew. Briar hated to think what that water might contain to empower the glass spheres to capture swathes of life from the woods.

“This is only a hypothesis,” Linden said, “but, if this exact thing happened before, then perhaps the use of these siphons is what prompted the woods to curse your mother.”

“But why ? She’d never been here, far as I know,” Briar said.

A thunderous rumble interrupted them. The forest moaned as if every tree was the mast of a great ship whose stays had snapped. Abruptly, all the silvery rune marks on the ribbons dissolved. The hut shook.

Linden said, “I think that’s our cue to leave.”

The trees said, This way.

“No!” Rowan swayed. For a frightening moment, Briar watched his eyes glaze over, the milky cataract covering them. Then he snapped from it and said, “There’s something else.”

He left the hut. Briar marched after him and was nearly yanked from his feet when Linden did not follow. At the same moment, the hut rent apart. The wards dispelled, their magic no longer powerful enough to contend with the forest, which took back its components greedily. Light spilled in through the cracks as vines crept in and tore apart the log supports. Wattle and daub fell in crumbling chunks. Linden didn’t resist this time as Briar ran. Ahead, Rowan’s back receded into the trees, following a call neither of them could hear.

Linden’s face was wan. “Where is he off to?”

Briar didn’t stop to speculate. Vatii flapped after him as he skipped over the heaving ground. Linden swore and stuck close. His amulet helped—the skittering movement of plants and wild magic shied away from him as they went.

Ahead, Rowan came to a halt in a clearing. It wasn’t a normal glade—it was a crop circle of blackened ash, as though a fire had burned within the confines of a ring. Rowan stood before the only remaining tree in the glade, a crooked thing. He stared at something caught up in a cage of branches.

It was once a man.

Like the birds and animals, his skin had pruned, sucked tight over his bones. Bright teeth bared wide. The tattered remains of clothing draped in lank folds. Though it appeared old, there was something fresh about the corpse. It dripped.

Rowan stared down at its hand. It held something tight in a skeletal grasp, something with a glassy sheen. A siphon, only this one was full. It contained all the life, all the tithes of that barren circle, and it had cost the caster dearly.

“Who is it?” Briar asked.

Rowan shook his head. No distinguishing features remained.

Linden said, “Look.” With thumb and forefinger, he picked up the arm of the corpse by its loose sleeve as if picking up a rat by its tail. The hand gripping the siphon fell open, the orb bouncing in clouds of ash. Something shiny fell from its finger. Linden bent to pick it up and dust it off. A ring. Custom made to match another one, which Aisling had happily worn on the night of Saor ó Eagla.

It was the ring Briar had sold to Kenneth.

It was difficult to extract the remains without breaking them, but Rowan managed to use his oversized jacket to bundle up the body.

Though Kenneth had been behind the chaos in Coill Darragh, it still seemed cruel to leave him there. They had to tell Aisling, but how to explain her lover had been tithing the forest, inciting its wrath against her fellows? She’d thought he’d gotten cold feet, skipped town to avoid breaking off their engagement.

At the news, she railed against her ex-fiancé as though he were alive to hear her. According to her, Kenneth’s parents were dead. It not only explained why no one had come looking for him, but aligned with the events of ten years prior. If his parents started this war on the woods, they’d probably died when the wards went up.

Perhaps he’d believed Aisling’s love would protect him from the forest. Perhaps he’d wanted vengeance for the deaths of his family. They’d never know. Nothing left in the disaster zone of his hut alluded to his motives.

It should have been a relief. The source of the forest’s ire dealt with by the forest itself.

Instead, Briar returned to find his flat in havoc. A hurricane sent the contents of his desk and kitchen cabinets streaming across the flat, a dervish of fabric and sewing materials. He had to hold his cloak up to protect himself from flying utensils. A barely human howl screeched through it all.

“Is that Gretchen?” Vatii shrieked.

Sure enough, a spectral image of Gretchen flickered like television static near the high beams of the ceiling.

Horror gripped him. “Gretchen?”

“Briar?” Her voice sounded distant and too close at once, breaking up and distorted. Her image winked out and appeared closer, her face drawn in agony. “Briar, help, I think I’m—”

She couldn’t get the rest out. Briar reached for her, grasped for her wrists and phased through them. The chill on his fingers was no longer like snow on skin; it was the sensation of coming into a warm house after you’d gone numb, the scalding pain of every nerve reawakening.

Vatii shied away, taking shelter under an upturned chair. “This isn’t right, Briar. No poltergeist has this sort of energy.”

Briar called out, “Gretchen, what’s wrong? What’s happening?”

“Feels like— Torn apart— I think someone’s trying to—” Her voice sputtered in and out.

“Trying to what?!”

The tornado of furniture and objects in Briar’s home halted, everything floating in suspended animation. Briar stood rooted to the spot. Gretchen’s screech came through slowly, like metal rent apart. Just one word.

“Exorcism!”

Her cries died. Everything in the flat crashed to the ground in a catastrophic rain. Briar dodged out of the doorway to avoid a bludgeoning. It took time for the debris to settle, the tinkle of sewing needles rolling away like delicate shrapnel.

“Gretchen?” The silence made him panic harder. “Gretchen?”

Vatii peeked out from under the chair. “Briar, I think she’s—”

“No.” Briar climbed over the wreckage of his flat, grabbing the candles he found and anything he could draw with. He cleared a space on the floor large enough for a person to stand and scrawled a circle on it in chalk.

“Briar…” Vatii said, her tone sad.

“Don’t say it. We don’t know for sure.”

He finished the summoning circle. The same one he’d used to call Gretchen on that first day in Coill Darragh, only smaller and without iron. He lit the candles, pressed his hands together, and called to her. It was more of a prayer than a call. He felt the magic of the circle drawn through him, but it stoppered up. A blocked tap.

There were no spirits here to call.

He dropped his hands, released the magic. He felt faint and took one of the potions from his pocket to drink. Wiping his mouth, he looked at Vatii with shining eyes.

“She’s gone.”