A Spell for Heartsickness (The Rune Tithe #1)

CHAPTER 29

B riar knew something was wrong the moment he stepped through the portal.

He’d come believing the wards could protect him since he’d broken Linden’s bracelet. Those wards should have also prevented him from portaling directly into Coill Darragh. He should have emerged on the border.

Instead, he stepped into Rowan’s living room.

With creeping dread, Briar called out for Rowan, but no reply came. Slowly, the tithe on his chest began to burn.

“No, no, no.”

His vision swam at the edges. Vatii, recognizing the signs, fluttered her wings to fan his face while he drank his potion. Standing up to Linden, escaping here, that was as far as his plan extended. He’d hoped to have a few hours to prepare for whatever counterattack Linden launched. He’d hoped Gretchen would be by his side, but she was gone.

He stumbled out of Rowan’s house to a sky of crumbling wards, their light pocked through with giant holes, held together by gossamer threads. A collapsing web instead of a shell.

“How?” said Vatii. “éibhear sacrificed his life for those wards.”

“The forest. If the forest maintains the wards, and Linden’s been destroying it… maybe the power of the sacrifice is running out.”

Which meant it would need another.

The tithe on Briar’s chest ached. He had to find Rowan.

He went down the garden path, pulled by the tithe. Ahead, he saw a figure close to the forest, too hunched and small to be Rowan.

Niamh ambled, hands behind her back, in no particular rush. The sight of her made Briar flush with anger. He had a bone to pick with her, but of course she would choose now to appear, when he didn’t have the time to rail against her stupid, deceptive, confusing prophecies.

“You’re just in time,” she said, once they were within earshot.

He moved past her. “I don’t have time, actually.”

“Of that, we’re both aware.” She kept in step with him.

“Everything’s a mess. And it’s my fault. And a bit yours! Linden’s a megalomaniac, not the man of my dreams like you said. He’s probably on his way here to kill me. I’m dying anyway. Rowan’s in danger again .”

“I know. I sent him into the woods.”

“You what ?” Briar’s anger stopped him dead. What was he going to do? Punch a ninety-year-old woman? He turned and kept marching. “You’re—you unbelievable, selfish, miserable—Why would you do that? Are you trying to get us killed, or are you just senile? You sent him in there? Deliberately ?”

“I sent him in with a message from his father. Which, I suspect, was a message from the forest. Or maybe they’re the same thing. Anyway, I don’t decide how Fate chooses to use me as its voice.”

That made for a convenient excuse. “Great. Perfect. Any more confusing pearls of wisdom before I go in after him?”

“No, no wisdom.”

“Then wha—Agh!” His ankle gave under him. He nearly rolled it, going down on his hands, grass stains on his knees. The curse sent spidering fingers of pain through his head like an oncoming migraine.

Niamh knelt in front of him with a humbling amount of grace for her age. She held a piece of charcoal.

“Fortitude,” she said, and drew a symbol on her arm. She clasped Briar’s hand, and the sharp pains turning his vision white shrank away. Strength returned to his aching limbs. It felt like drawing breath after months of drowning, like taking off heels after wearing them for a year. He’d been tired for so long.

He was still so angry with her, but as he rose to his feet without feeling it in every joint, he said, “Thanks.”

She handed him the stub of her charcoal. The forest loomed, a different beast than before, mangey, rabid, and desperate. Briar feared it, but he feared losing Rowan more.

“Are you coming?” he said to Niamh.

“No. This is your fate.”

“Fine.” He marched toward it, Vatii swooping from his shoulder.

“I do have one piece of advice for you, if you’ll have it of me,” Niamh said to his back.

He looked over his shoulder. “Yeah, all right. What have I got to lose?”

“Everything,” she said. “But Rowan, he thinks he’s already lost it. He thinks he’s alone. My advice is, don’t let him believe it.”

Briar didn’t understand her. Not her motives, not her prophecies. If he survived this, he would ask her. This piece of advice, though, this he understood.

He dove in. Navigating the forest never felt the same. In its current state, desiccated trees crumbling like columns of ash, it didn’t seem like a deep source of magical power. Farther in, he saw signs of desperate life. Foliage sprouted. Trees groaned as they grew. Brambles shot up under Briar’s feet, making him skip away. Nothing was green, not even the fresh sprouts. Everything was gray and sickly.

Magic pushed and pulled, killing the wood and trying to save it, and Briar felt something new—sympathy. Kinship. The quiet indignity of justifying one’s continued survival.

Linden’s siphons had taken too much, pushing the forest to desperate action. It drew on the townsfolk, on the power of éibhear’s sacrifice, and now on Rowan.

The tithe drew him onward. He went as quickly as he dared but still had time to think. A dangerous thing. His thoughts felt a lot like the forest—wounded, tangled, grasping, lost. They circled back to that painful moment on the pier when Rowan bared his soul and Briar burned it to ash. Regret was a sour bile in his throat. He didn’t know if Rowan could forgive him, but he wouldn’t forgive himself if Rowan lost his life to this.

He pushed onward, forging a path through brambles.

He knew where the tithe would lead him. Deep in his bones, he felt the influence of the tree. It called through the gloam and the tithe on his arm. Something didn’t feel right. Did it ever in this place? He started to run, panic rising.

He realized what was wrong. The bell. Its muffled jingle reached him as though he had gauze in his ears. Too quiet.

He burst into a clearing. Everything living had withered to ash, a crop circle of soot enclosing the tree. It stood alone, and at its roots, something gold and ringing caught the light.

Briar lurched toward it, feet kicking up dust as he crossed the infinite distance. He knew what it was, but his mind recoiled. Vatii got there first, landing next to the thing and nudging it free of blackened leaves and dirt. By no fault of the curse, Briar fell to his knees.

The bell and the iridescent magpie feather were tarnished with soot, the leather twine snapped in two, rent from Rowan’s neck.

An ugly noise, trapped in Briar’s throat, struggled free. He started to dig. His fingers made furrows through the ash until they reached soil, which squelched sickeningly in his palms. His hands came away streaked with muddy red. With another stifled sob, he stopped. Did the blood belong to the forest or Rowan?

“He can’t be gone, Vatii.” But saying it out loud made it feel real, and the tears came in earnest, watering the greedy forest that had stolen the brightest part of Briar’s vanishingly short, sad future.

His sobs became a scream. A railing, throat-shredding keen.

Vatii flew to his knees, walking up his arm to push her head against his wet cheek.

He thought that the croaking croon in his ear was her consoling him. But it was too loud, too wooden. He looked up to see the tree moving. Not uprooted and falling, not swaying and creaking in the wind. Its bark peeled back, the long scar in its trunk opening like sutures ripped apart. Strings of its meaty interior, held together by threads, snapped. From within, something stirred. A creep of moss, the flash of bone.

It emerged in stages. A leg. A gnarled arm. Vatii shrieked, and Briar backpedaled away.

The thing rose near twenty feet tall, vaguely human in shape. A skull, suspended from a vine where a man’s head would be, sprouted broad antlers thick with moss. Sticks and bark replaced eroded bone. Roots arced in a cage like ribs around the heart of the thing, which was a scrap of torso. covered in a sigil of tithes Briar recognized.

In a reedy voice like the high wind whistling through leaves and the low creak of wood, the thing said, “You. You weep for my son.”

Briar swiped tears from his cheeks, leaving streaks of dirt. His own voice was raw yet vicious. “What have you done with Rowan?”

éibhear, or what remained of him, took a long, hollow breath. As he did, some of the bone in one leg crumbled and reformed into wood.

“My influence wanes,” he said. “You must come now, if you wish to save him.”

A flicker of hope stymied all the hateful things Briar was about to say. “He’s alive?”

Already, éibhear moved. He took one long stride and passed Briar, heading for the trees. There wasn’t time to consider whether this was a trick or a trap, and Briar would risk it regardless. He followed, hastily picking his way over tree roots back into the forest. The dryadic thing moved easily, the trees bending to permit him. Briar didn’t see them move to make way, the path simply was.

Countless questions burned on his tongue. “Are you éibhear?”

“ I am. We are not.”

“That makes no sense.”

“éibhear is one of us, but he is himself, too. A tree, but never wholly of the forest.”

“Then why did you—he—ask Rowan to come here, knowing the forest would kill him?”

“ I didn’t. We did. I’ll tell you the story. You’ll need to know.”

Leaves and dead things crunched underfoot. Briar had to jog to keep up. Short of breath, he pressed on. Niamh’s tithe had helped, but fatigue bayed at his back like a pack of hounds.

The thing that was and was not éibhear spoke. “In every leaf, in every twig, in every branch, in every tree, there is magic. But in the forest, there is power beyond your reckoning. Connected by root and vine, we existed long before there were witches and tithes.

“The first witches knew this. Feared and respected us. They took tithes, and when they died, conveyed their bodies unto the loam for us to feast. Now, you bury your dead in concrete and coffins, tombs and sarcophagi. Witches take their tithes and give nothing back. We grow hungry, but not in Coill Darragh, where our Keeper kept the old ways and the people have roots. éibhear.”

Upon uttering the name, a hiss of breath issued forth in a rattling sigh.

“I was to train my son in the old ways.” The switch to a singular pronoun made Briar shudder. He’d spoken to ghosts before, but this was different. Not wholly the spirit of the man whose name it bore. “Witches came to tithe what didn’t belong to them. We fought back, but they had protection and numbers, so I did the only thing I could to protect my people and the forest. I offered myself as a willing sacrifice and cursed my son to take my place if the wards were to fail and the forest was invaded again.”

“It wasn’t your life to give!” Briar’s fury flared. Not for the forest, which seemed a mindless collective will of survival, but for Rowan’s father. “He loved you, and you marked him for slaughter.”

A twitch of wood and bone. “ You exist in minutes, hours, years, and decades. We are centuries, millennia. We have learned what it is to survive that long.”

“At the price of his life.”

“One life for many. It is an acceptable exchange.”

“And my mother? Me? Every person cursed by the siphons made from your magic?”

“Casualties of greed, from which we slowly sustained ourselves after the damage suffered in the siphons’ making. éibhear’s sacrifice was enough to create the wards, but not to heal. That is what those witches failed to comprehend. They thought what they stole came free, but in the short term or the long, a price will be paid.”

“It doesn’t make sense. You’ve attacked countless people. Surely what they’ve given you is enough. How did éibhear’s sacrifice sustain the wards for a decade, but the rest isn’t enough to heal?”

“Because,” said the woods, “there is more power in a gift than something stolen. His sacrifice was worth more than any tithe, any exchange. It is more than the commerce you call magic.”

“And now?” Briar gestured at the forest, which grew and withered. At the sky, where the wards were evanescent.

“Now, we are under attack again. We use what remains of éibhear to sustain both ourself and the wards, but it is not enough. Another sacrifice must be made.”

Briar’s voice broke. “But he didn’t agree to this! Rowan isn’t like éibhear, he isn’t giving himself to you, not willingly. You said that’s not as powerful.”

“This is true, but he is a Keeper. There is magic in his blood, in the fulfillment of responsibility, in a promise kept, even if that promise was not made by him.”

Upon saying this, it stopped and swept aside a bush, revealing a low hill on the other side, a tree atop it. Bound to the tree was Rowan.

Briar sprinted up the hill, relief chased away by worry. Rowan was unconscious, eyes closed, head drooping. Roots entombed his feet, and vines held his arms outspread so he hung like an insect caught in a web. Thorny branches had once again shredded his shirt, and upon his chest a snaking tendril of thorns cut into his skin, drawing the beginnings of a sigil. Briar seized it and tore it away, but more snaked up his calves and pulled his legs out from under him. He hit the ground, wind knocked from his lungs, and scrambled to pull the knife from his tithe belt before remembering he hadn’t worn it. He’d taken only the bare minimum to the runway.

Desperate, he turned to éibhear’s construct. “Stop! Didn’t you bring me here to rescue him?”

“ I did. We didn’t. My influence is limited.”

Briar tore at a vine and kicked the remains from his ankles. He got to his feet and held Rowan by the face, begging him to wake. More vines seized him.

“You have to do something ,” he pleaded. “He’s your son!”

“That’s why I brought you.”

Still fighting. “But I can’t do this alone! Rowan can’t either. He deserves to know you tried.”

The construct shook. “I… I—”

“You cursed him with this fate! You can undo it. You’re the only one who can.”

éibhear’s grinning skull took in the spectacle of his son’s prone body and the plaintive words of the dying witch, and it froze. It looked inanimate, a motionless tree like any other. Then the skull blackened and crumbled. It raised a hand of branch-like claws. It slashed.

Briar thought it would strike him down. But the air whistled at either side of his head, and the vines holding Rowan came apart, wind shrieking through the trees like a wail. The last scrap of éibhear, the tithed skin by which Briar had identified him at all, burned up in the last efforts of his will. The rest, sticks and claws and bark, all crumbled like a skeleton no longer wired together.

The last twinkles of purple winked out of the sky, the wards gone with their maker.

On the wind, a voice said, “Tell Rowan I…” The rest faded.

The buzzing, malignant energy of Rowan’s scar slowly, slowly dwindled. But did not vanish entirely.

The creeping ivy of the forest gave a sudden surge of motion. It wound up as far as Rowan’s waist in defiance of éibhear’s last efforts. Briar yanked them away, but it was not like the time before. The forest, ferally desperate, wouldn’t release him. éibhear might have promised his son to them, but his withdrawal of that vow was not enough, for in the moments before death, he had been as much the forest as the forest was him. Both would have to surrender Rowan.

Briar despaired. He could use a flesh tithe to wake Rowan, but his arms and legs were both encased in vines. Rowan would only be able to struggle, and he would be conscious while the forest consumed him.

Briar thought about what éibhear had told him, and wished the only option open to him wasn’t so dire. But he had so little life left. What better way to use it?

With Niamh’s charcoal in hand, he undid the buttons of his shirt to draw on himself.

“No, Briar!” Vatii cawed. She snapped at the charcoal in his fist.

“What good are we dead in a few months’ time?”

She clawed the charcoal away before he finished the circle on his chest. He swore, leaning down to look for it in the grasping mulch. He couldn’t find it, but the vines and thorns had cut him enough times. He used the blood in place of charcoal.

Ours… whispered the forest.

“I will be.” He finished drawing and grasped the vines around Rowan. “Release him and take me instead.”

The vines ceased to grow. The forest went still, considering his offer. The wind caressed his bare skin, a susurration through the leaves like a chorus of voices.

Without warning, several roots around Rowan drew back and lashed around Briar with flagellating speed. A howl of pain escaped him, cut short when he impacted against Rowan’s chest. The limbs of the forest bound them together with crushing force. Briar struggled to draw a full breath.

No , he thought, pain stealing his voice. This wasn’t the deal.

Too weak. No time left. Cursed. Ours anyway. An unfair trade. The forest’s answer chilled him through. We will have both.

He struggled. Vatii flapped and clawed at the vines, to no effect. Choking and ensnared, the last guttering candle of hope in Briar’s heart went dark. Rowan’s forehead lolled against his shoulder, but he didn’t wake no matter how many times Briar screamed his name. Locked in this last embrace, the unfairness of it all struck him.

Rowan had given Briar so many things. Simple gifts of fresh-baked pastry, help with tithes and spells. He’d invited Briar into his life, shared his family, his meals, his home. He’d opened his heart. If there was magic in gifts, as the forest claimed, then Rowan had been an incantation all his own. It seemed the most brutal of injustices that Briar couldn’t give anything back. There wasn’t a spell he knew to break the forest’s curse, he couldn’t even give his life—it was of that little value.

He hadn’t even gotten the chance to tell Rowan…

“Vatii!”

“I’m trying, Briar, there’s too many—”

“Never mind the vines. Come here. I need you to draw a rune on me. Use your beak. I can’t use my hands.”

“What? What rune?” She fluttered to his shoulder, dodging ivy. Briar described what he needed. “But what will waking Rowan do?” she protested.

“Trust me, please.”

She had to smear her beak with his blood and avoid the grasping fingers of the forest, but she managed to draw a mark on his neck of a closed eye half opening. Briar let the magic flow through him. The energy Niamh had bestowed on him went out like the tide, stealing his vitality with it. If not for the vines, he couldn’t have held himself upright. Rowan barely stirred, and for a moment Briar feared it hadn’t been enough, or that Vatii’s messy writing had skewed the spell. Then Rowan moved. Bound so tightly together, Briar felt Rowan’s heartbeat speed. His eyelashes fluttered against Briar’s shoulder.

Then he snapped awake, and a look of horrified betrayal overtook his face. “Briar?”

“I need you to listen to me.”

Angry panic tinged Rowan’s voice. “Briar, what are you doing here?”

“I came to tell you something.”

Rowan began struggling, trying to rend free of the vines. He did a better job of it than Briar, loosening them enough that Briar could get his arms up and hold Rowan’s face in his hands.

“Listen to me!”

Rowan ceased struggling.

“This is important. Remember what I said to you? On the pier?”

Rowan flinched, his eyes shutting. “Briar—”

“I lied!” With every ounce of suppressed feeling, he said, “It’s you I love, Rowan. It always was.”

Until he said it, Briar wasn’t sure it would work. Was it really a secret at all? It felt so obvious.

But for Rowan, who was hearing it for the first time, and who up until then had believed the lie, it was the most powerful secret ever told.

The vines slackened and fell away in looping coils around their feet. The forest blurred and spun around them. It snarled, a wheezing cough of impotent rage. Briar felt a wave like dizzy vertigo as the wood that had sought to lock them away was prized open, and the magic of the spell spat them out.

No! screeched the forest. Ours! Promised!

Briar and Rowan were freed of its grasp, magic transporting them.

They landed in a heap on the grass just bordering the woods. Briar rose to his knees. The aches and pains Niamh had temporarily relieved returned, but he hardly cared because Rowan was alive, whole, and looking at him with barely restrained hope.

“I love you,” Briar said again. “I’m so sorry for everything I said. I know I hurt you. I was trying to save us both, and I thought Linden had the cure, but he was a liar and a cheat just like you thought, a murderer . And he killed Gretchen and might as well have done in my mum and your da, and I don’t know if you can ever forgive me, but I will do anything to make it right. If I have to spend every day I have left making it ri—”

By then Rowan had risen, crossed the space between them, drawn Briar into his arms, and kissed him into silence.

Shock froze Briar only temporarily. Then he was grasping Rowan’s shoulders, climbing into his arms. And kissing back. Furiously, desperately kissing back. Relief washed over him. Rowan clutched him close, breathing raggedly between their parted lips. His aura was as soothing as stepping into a warm bath. Briar ached, his body barely held together by hope and dogged willpower, but he felt safe in Rowan’s arms.

“Just like that?” There was barely any space between them for Briar to speak. “You can forgive me just like that? I thought you’d be angry.”

“I’m feckin’ fuming.” One of Rowan’s big hands carded through Briar’s hair, and his brown eyes were anything but furious. “I’ll give out to you something fierce later.”

He tilted, fitting his mouth over Briar’s, and nothing was perfectly fixed, there was still so much they had to do, but for a second Briar could let his muscles go lax and slump into arms that held him steadfast. Briar might have marveled at Rowan’s willingness to forgive if there was anything surprising about it, but Rowan was not like the trees whose shadow he’d lived in. He was the sort you could sit under when you needed rest, the sort to shade you from the sun, to bear fruit when you were hungry.

Briar had rejected his help for fear of the day none was forthcoming. He thought he’d needed to achieve everything on his own to make his mother proud, but she’d never have wanted him to feel ashamed of asking for help when he needed it, like he was too burdensome.

She’d have wanted this: a man who saw his heavy heart, his scars, his dreams, his mistakes and could carry it all. Strong and brave enough to make all that baggage lighter.

Reluctantly, Rowan pulled back. A look of confusion crossed his features.

“What did you mean, Linden might as well have done in your mum and my da?”

A thunderous crack of splintering timber and the toppling of a tree sent them skipping back. The forest groaned in lament.

Briar took Rowan’s hand. “I’ll explain on the way.”