A Spell for Heartsickness (The Rune Tithe #1)

CHAPTER 30

T hey walked, navigating cowpats, as Briar told Rowan what he’d learned in Pentawynn.

Rowan listened with a darkening scowl. If he had disliked Linden before, he loathed him now. When Briar finished, he remained silent, eyes stormy.

“You can say I told you so. You knew Linden was no good. I should have listened.”

Rowan shook his head. “I thought he was a pompous toad, I thought he was taking advantage of you, but I never thought he’d done—all I’ll say is he best not show his face here again.”

Briar didn’t think it was the last they’d seen of Linden, though.

It had only been twenty-four hours since Briar left Coill Darragh. Many of the townsfolk were still sheltered from the forest’s wrath in the church. Rowan and Briar burst inside, interrupting the pastor mid-sermon. Rowan didn’t need to raise his voice; his baritone carried to the high ceiling.

“I’m sorry, Father, but we’ve an emergency.”

From the pews, Maebh and Sorcha stood. No doubt they’d come to pray for Rowan. There was one other who stood too, near the front.

Niamh regarded them overtop her spectacles. “The time has come, I take it.”

Briar conveyed, quickly as he could, everything he’d just told Rowan.

“The forest is sick,” he finished. “It will keep taking tithes from Coill Darraghns until it returns to its former strength.”

“Unless Rowan sacrifices himself,” Sorcha said. She shook with fury. “And Da did this? He knew?” At Rowan’s affirming look, she let out a snarl of frustration. Briar remembered her, on a cold night, admitting that it would have been her, except that she’d given up her father’s mantle. She’d chosen a family. She wanted nothing to do with the responsibilities that had torn her father from his. Now they tore her brother away, too.

“I’m not letting it have him.” Briar had contemplated their problem on the way here. He had no perfect answer. If they didn’t give the forest its sacrifice, then it would continue to savage the town. There were no wards to prevent Linden returning for vengeance.

Briar’s whisper sounded loud in the quiet of the church. “I don’t have long to live.”

Rowan whipped around. “No.”

“It can have me, but I won’t be enough,” Briar said. “Not to heal it and erect the wards.”

“Briar, no .” Rowan’s voice shook. Softer this time, “No.”

Briar met his eyes. Squeezed his hand. “I brought this down on us.”

“It’s this Linden’s doing more than yours,” Maebh interrupted. “Knew I didn’t like the look of him, mind. I say we throw him to the woods.”

She wasn’t joking. Briar said, “It wouldn’t be the same. It has to be a willing sacrifice. That’s why the tithes it takes from people only help a little. The forest said there’s more powerful magic in a gift than something stolen.”

Everyone fell silent. Rowan hadn’t looked away from him, his fierce eyes drinking Briar in. It felt sacrilegious in church, where you weren’t meant to love anyone more than God.

“I won’t let you,” he whispered.

Briar said, “You can’t stop me.”

“ No .”

The conversation was quiet but impossible to keep private.

Maebh, dusting her hands on her skirt, said, “Well, that settles it. I’ll be doing the sacrificing.”

“Don’t you start,” Rowan said.

“You aren’t the boss of me. I’m your mammy. Will be always. Hasn’t changed now you’re grown up.”

“You’ve a lot of years left,” said another voice. It was Diarmuid, wearing dusty dungarees just like the day Briar fixed his gate. “Briar’s done us a few favors too many in this town, and I don’t rightly blame him for this mess. We’ve not been doing right by our ancestors if the woods are this angry. I’m old. Let it have me.”

“That’s not—” Briar started to say.

Then another older woman said, “Or me. I’m ancient. Can’t get out of bed without effin’ and blindin’ anyway. Might as well be me.”

To Briar’s surprise, Aisling spoke next. “I’m not old, but this is home to me. If my man Kenneth died ’cause of this Linden… And here I thought he’d left. I’d join him.”

Before she could finish, another person stood in a pew and said they wanted to help. And another. Briar suspected they didn’t understand it would mean the end of their life, a transformation into something otherworldly like éibhear. He didn’t know how to put voice to all this, but an idea had started to take root in his mind.

Every leaf, every twig, every branch, every tree has magic. But a forest has power beyond your reckoning.

He recalled giving a small flesh tithe and receiving an entire branch of rare lichen. He recalled standing in front of the cameras, knowing he could not face Linden alone, but with all those eyes on him…

He had no idea if it would work. He was no master; his apprenticeship hadn’t prepared him for a spell of this magnitude. With his curse, he didn’t know if he had the reserves of magic necessary.

But if it did work…

Everyone argued, everyone with a different take on who deserved more time. Niamh cut through it, her voice echoing off the high eaves.

“I think,” she barked, “Briar has an idea.”

Had she known? Or only suspected? Was this all part of her prophecies, in the end?

“Will it work?” Briar asked.

“You haven’t told us the idea.”

Briar released Rowan’s hand and drew up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing the marks beneath. “If we all gave a tithe… If everyone in the town did willingly, would that be enough?”

Niamh smiled cannily. “One way to find out, boy.”

Someone got Briar a piece of charcoal. It felt too light in his hand for what he was about to do. Rowan knelt in front of him first. He trusted Briar, even after everything. The whole town was willing to try. It moved something in Briar that had once felt unshakable. A sharp, painful support strut was now dislodged, but the people around him were enough to keep him standing.

“Should we put it somewhere less visible?” Briar said.

Rowan said, “I’d wear it proudly.”

There was no symbol Briar knew for a spell like this, so he invented one. From the hollow of Rowan’s clavicle to the bump of his Adam’s apple, Briar drew a vertical line. Then two diagonal ones, so it looked like the letter Y. From this, he added branches, making it more treelike. It seemed right. The forest was nothing without its trees, and Coill Darragh was nothing without its people, who were not unlike trees themselves. Sturdy, long-lived, entwined together.

He finished drawing. Rowan stood, and Maebh took his place. Her stern expression softened a little as Briar began to draw.

“If he’s forgiven you, then so have I,” she said.

Briar blinked back a surge of feeling. “Don’t speak or I’ll mess it up.”

Sorcha came next. Then Connor. Ciara was too young—despite her tantrum, everyone agreed only adults would give a tithe. Then came Diarmuid, Aisling, countless faces Briar recognized from his time in Coill Darragh. Some wore clothes he’d crafted himself, tinged with the familiar touch of his magic. With each tithe drawn, he felt a burgeoning need to tell them how much he’d come to love this place. He sensed they already knew.

Niamh was last. Briar hesitated. “You already tithed to help me.”

“No need to twist my arm. I’ll give another.”

As he drew, many of Briar’s burning questions rose to the surface. The wrinkles of her neck made it impossible to make the lines completely straight, though he did his best. “You were wrong,” he said. He could at least talk to Niamh about the prophecy, if no one else. As he opened his mouth, he felt magic enfolding them, their words transmitted only to one another. “You told me Linden was the man who’d lead me to success.”

“I said nothing of the like.”

“You said a man with a mask and a stone heart.”

“The prophecy refers to Rowan, not Linden.”

Briar stopped drawing. “But he’s not masked at all . Not even a little . He’s been himself the whole time. He’s not stone-hearted or difficult to read. And besides, your tarot reading said I’d die if I chose him.” He paused. “Which, I suppose, I still will.”

She waited as he finished a finicky line. “He is different with you than he is with me. Or anyone. So, I suppose, I spoke the prophecy using what I knew of him.”

“Well, how’s that helpful?” Briar muttered, finishing another stroke. “If I’m the one living the prophecy, shouldn’t it account for my perspective?”

“Perhaps it did,” she said. “It’s funny, the way Fate works. I often wonder if it misleads us on purpose. What would have become of us if you hadn’t gone to Pentawynn? If you hadn’t discovered Linden’s true nature? I believe, by the way, you already made the correct choice set out by the cards. You did go on a journey with Linden to Pentawynn, though it broke your heart to do it. There’s hope yet for your health and prosperity to follow.”

Briar could have screamed. He didn’t know if he could hold out for that hope, not with his hand shaking so badly he struggled to draw. The pitfalls of her prophecies irked him. “You made it sound like I had to choose one of them as my soulmate. Forever!”

“You interpreted it that way. It’s not what I said.”

Briar scoffed. “You’re saying I was destined to misinterpret it so I could fulfill everything properly. If it was all preordained, why give me a prophecy at all? Why not just let me walk the path set for me?”

“Who knows how much your path diverted as a result of hearing what I saw?”

Briar stopped. He only had one line left, but he was furious. “Niamh.

I hate that!” She laughed.

“It’s not funny!” He waited for her to stop laughing. When she did, he decided to have the last word. “I’m not stupid just because I don’t see things the same way. You shouldn’t be telling your apprentices they’re stupid.”

She hummed. “You could be right about that.” The tithe was done. Everyone had one. It was time.

As they left the church and walked together through the streets, people who hadn’t been at the church joined their throng. The charcoal was in pieces to share between them. People brought more from their homes. Some cast guilty looks at the pastor for missing Sunday Mass, and he said, “Oh, you’re forgiven, just come along.” They all helped draw the tithes.

By the time they reached the edge of town, their company numbered in the hundreds. It was most of Coill Darragh. Briar thought the air should have carried heavy solemnity or fear. The forest garnered respect, but also suspicion. Instead, everyone seemed electric, all of them filaments in something grand, and Briar was overwhelmed with gratitude to play a part in it.

They’d nearly reached the forest’s edge. A portal opened, so close Briar nearly fell into it. He stumbled back, his way barred by Rowan’s formidable arm, flung across his chest like armor.

Linden stepped out of the portal.

He looked as pristine as he had on the runway—nothing of the experience besmirched his silky clothes—but his blue eyes were wild, the pupils distant black holes. Atticus stepped out too, back arched, hackles raised along his spine. Before the portal closed, Briar glimpsed the Fairchild manor, the bedroom where he’d lain awake in fear. It was torn asunder, clothes and smashed perfume bottles strewn over the floor. Something he glimpsed lodged a stake in Briar’s heart. It could have been a spilled potion, but it could have been blood.

The portal closed. With the wards down, Linden didn’t need a bracelet or a marriage to ensure his safety while he pillaged Coill Darragh for all it was worth.

Somehow, the thing that Briar’s mind caught on, of all the jagged glass in his relationship with Linden, was only this. “Your parents?”

“They could not bear to see what you’d done to me. They went willingly.” From his belt, he pulled a dagger. In the other hand, he held his broomstick of white poplar.

Rowan started to put himself between Briar and Linden, despite Briar’s resistance. He was large, had greater reach. Rowan could disarm him. Linden was also outnumbered. His sharp gaze ricocheted between Rowan’s and Briar’s throats, to the townsfolk, all bearing the same mark. Carefully, he sheathed the dagger in his tithe belt, but his hand lingered there.

“I’m going to finish what I started,” he said.

“The hell you are—” Rowan began, but Briar cut him off.

“What for, Linden? It’s over. The whole world knows what you did.”

“I can fix it!” Linden’s words came through bared teeth.

“You don’t want to fix it, you want to cover it up and pretend it never happened.”

Linden’s shoulders rose, stiffening, holding himself back. “You don’t understand, it was never meant to go so far. None of my research said anything about curses resulting from wild magic! I know it can be tamed. I have the power now, my parents died to—”

“You killed them! You killed them, and my mother, and Rowan’s father, and who knows how many other people while you scrambled to fix it, but you only made it worse!” Briar’s chest heaved. At his words, the people of Coill Darragh formed a wall of bodies at Briar’s and Rowan’s backs.

Linden snarled. “You think I don’t understand that? I led my entire family to their deaths. I thought we would find a wealth of magic that could heal. I thought I would change the world , but this forest is malignant. It must be destroyed, and with it, all will be rectified, resurrected!”

Linden spoke with the conviction of a lie told so many times it had become ideology, a belief held to so firmly because to accept the reality would be to see himself for the first time, and to loathe what he saw. Briar could imagine a young, idealistic Linden finding rare texts about the power of wild magic. He could see the family, who’d funneled so much of their adulation and energy into this talented witch, rallying behind him in his quest to make their fortune. Charismatic, beautiful, a prodigy. He’d only been a boy, and Briar didn’t know if he could blame that boy for his terrible mistakes over the adults who enabled him, but he absolutely faulted the man before him now.

“The forest can’t be killed,” he said, “not without more suffering, maybe lost lives. Just leave.”

The mad look in Linden’s eyes subsided. That was somehow worse. He straightened, fixing Briar with the imperious expression he so often wore. “I should have known you were just like the others. Fine. I’ll prove it to you.”

Before Briar could stop him, Linden took to his broom, Atticus leaping astride it. They sped into the skies above the forest.

Briar took Rowan’s hand. “Make a line, everyone! If I can cast the spell all at once…”

People crowded nearer, everyone holding a hand or touching a shoulder, everyone connected. Briar looked to his left and right at the lines of people fanning out around him.

A crack of thunder erupted in the twilight. Briar jumped, his hand clenching around Rowan’s. The noise had not been another falling tree, and there were no thunderheads in the sky, just a small speck as something—someone—flew above the canopy.

Briar swore under his breath.

Vatii said, “He’s using the siphons.”

Linden, astride his broomstick, tossed another siphon into the forest below. Another slap of thunder like an explosion. A shower of timber and foliage spat into the air then disintegrated, a chthonic spray of snaking tendrils surging above the canopy before they, too, crumbled to ash. The forest, weakened, couldn’t reach Linden. The wards, destroyed, couldn’t expel him. He chucked siphons into the densest parts of the forest, destroying its centers of power, leeching magic out of the very ground and using the surplus to continue his path of destruction.

The forest only had one source of power to draw from. Down the line of Coill Darraghns, several voices screamed.

If Briar’s plan worked, the wards would be renewed, and Linden would perish in them just like his family had. There weren’t any tourists in Coil Darragh now; most had left after the forest’s attacks, and those remaining had wardstone bracelets.

As the forest let out another snarl of anguish, and someone cried out as a part of their body was consumed by tree roots, Briar decided he didn’t have time to consider the consequences of murder on his mortal soul.

Niamh appeared at his elbow and wrapped a hand around it. “I’ll help,” she said.

Briar nodded. It would take a lot of magic, and he had so little. He didn’t know if he had it in him to tithe so much for a single enchantment, but he had to try.

Closing his eyes, gripping Rowan’s hand tight, he let the parched wellspring of magic spread from within. Niamh’s power bolstered his own. Not only hers, but the wills of all around him. It felt unlike any spell he’d ever cast. At first familiar, the mark burned its way up his throat to take his tithe, then spread. Echoes of that flame flared and caught from one person to the other, growing into a blaze. It expanded, a scorching swell. When all the tithes were collected, the power held within was so large Briar thought he’d burn up like a sun gone supernova. Niamh and he were the dam holding it at bay, and together they released the flood.

Magic rushed into the ground, finding the roots of the trees, the interconnected web of the forest. The tide of it swept through the woods and filled in all the rotting holes, mending what Linden had broken. A noise of growth replaced the explosions of Linden’s siphons. Saplings, sprouted from acorns, matured with miraculous speed.

The power filling Briar fled him, replaced with the agony of his curse like a pike through his chest. Dizzy vertigo. Wetness on his upper lip. It tasted coppery. His body trembled. Rowan had an arm all the way around his middle now. Someone caught Niamh before she fell.

Briar thought, Was that enough?

A thunderclap of a siphon, this time, was followed by a brooding silence. Not the crack and groan of trees, but an eerie quiet of preparation. Briar couldn’t see anymore, closing his eyes and trying not to scream at the encroaching pain. Rowan kept him from pitching over. He squinted up into the sky, where Linden’s figure still darted. He threw siphons into the forest only for it to immediately repair itself. The countless gifted tithes from the town had strengthened it. Now it watched, waited, and brewed its vengeance.

“I have to warn him.” Briar’s voice came out hoarse. He coughed into his hand. It came away speckled with blood.

“No.” Rowan held him tighter. “He’ll kill you.”

“Right now, the curse might beat him to the punch.”

“Don’t—” Rowan’s voice broke. “Don’t say things like that.”

“It’s true.”

“A cure—”

“Is out of our reach,” Briar finished.

He pulled éibhear’s journal from within his vest. Beneath their feet, the ground pulsed a warning. Briar showed Rowan the page the journal fell open to naturally from its broken spine.

An Ambrosial Panacea—this brew revitalizes the sick and fatally ill. It reduces or outright erases the effects of curses. The red carnella is a key ingredient that has no substitute.

A flash of hope shone in Rowan’s eyes. Yes, they’d found the dried carnellas Gretchen had hid, but… Briar pointed to a single line. On the ingredients list, it read:

Three red carnella blooms. Written in parentheses beside it was (Fresh.)

Rowan’s face fell.

It was wretchedly, painfully unfair. The brewing instructions were otherwise simple. Steep everything in boiling water for two minutes, strain, and drink once temperate. Just a herbal tea. They were in the one place known to grow the plant, but it had long since gone extinct.

All the people of Coill Darragh still crowded the field. Rowan spoke so low that none could hear.

“But I only just got you back.”

There were tears in his eyes, and Briar couldn’t stand it. Rising on tiptoes, he swiped them away with his thumbs and kissed Rowan. It was meant as a comfort, or maybe a goodbye, but it only made Rowan hold him more tightly.

The ground gave a violent pulse again, and a cold voice broke them apart.

“How touching.” Linden hovered on his broom out of reach of anyone below. “It’s as though you’re wed already. You couldn’t even wait until the media circus around my humiliation was over?”

A burning fury kindled in Briar’s chest. He wanted to say, You used me. My mother died because of you. I’ll die because of you. All the guilt he’d felt for loving Rowan instead seemed insignificant by comparison. He could almost laugh. So much heartache over a man who couldn’t summon a single ounce of compassion for anything aside from his status.

Briar had already said his piece, and it was on camera.

Rowan’s embrace became protective. Once, Briar might have put his hands against Rowan’s chest and pushed. He might have thought he had to stand alone.

A dervish of foliage rose in eddies around Linden. His hair whipped in inky strings around him. Still poised, still impassive, like the cameras were watching. But his eyes… there was something empty about them now. His parents, gone. Everything he’d worked for, gone. It was his turn to be afraid. Magic seethed within the woods, underground, throbbing through the roots like blood through veins.

Briar didn’t want his last act to be just like éibhear’s.

“Linden.” Briar’s voice was so hoarse, he didn’t know if it could be heard. “You need to leave here.”

“Do not presume to give me orders after—”

“You’ll die!” Briar shouted, his throat raw. “The wards are going to return, and if you’re caught in them, nothing will save you.”

“Don’t be foolish! You think your tiny tithes amount to anything approaching the grand sacrifice éibhear made?”

“Ours was greater.”

“You know nothing of magic. You, who scraped for tithes and struggled through each spell.”

Briar didn’t let the petty jabs sink deep. “You need to go now .”

Linden opened his mouth with a rebuttal but paused. Something in the air changed. Murmurs from the crowd of people. The wind ceased to blow. The trees no longer groaned. Even the pulse beneath their feet faded.

Everyone looked at the forest. In the dark of it, something moved.

It seeped from the trees and out of the ground. Its music started low like a drone, then undulated high like cicada song. From every pore of the forest, magic leaked out in a viscous violet tide, until it grew too large for the confines of the wood and, with frightening speed, rushed toward them.

Linden beheld the magic coming for them, getting faster, closer. It rose like a foggy wave, smelling like fungus and soil.

The people of Coill Darragh started to step back, but Briar said, “It won’t hurt anyone Coill Darraghn, but it will kill you, Linden! Portal out, now!”

Finally, Linden reached for the pouch at his belt. He worked open the ties, but in his haste he fumbled the bag. The fine dust poured out, spreading in the wind. Linden’s face went ashen, watching his only escape slip between his fingers. Normally he could cast spells without touching the tithes, but perhaps even the great Linden Fairchild had his limits. Perhaps, after everything, even he was tired. No portal opened.

Briar lurched forward and tried to snatch some of the powder from the air, but only caught a few granules. He tried using them to open a portal, but the window now shining in the air was too small to use.

The magic swept closer, only meters away. Linden could fly straight out to the border, but his broom wouldn’t outstrip what came for him. Briar took the vial of bone powder he’d pinched from Linden’s stores. Only a tiny increment remained in the bottom. He tossed what was left at the small portal he’d made, and hoped like mad it would expand.

He hated Linden. He wished to never see him again. But he couldn’t bring himself to wish him dead.

The powder evaporated, and the portal grew just wide enough.

“Go!” Briar screamed, and Linden did. There was only the briefest pause. A look of stricken disbelief. Gratitude clouded by mutual loathing.

Then Linden streaked through the portal, low to his broom to make himself small enough to pass. Briar spat, and the portal closed seconds before the magic tide collided with them.

It washed over him in pins and needles. Rowan shuddered. A few of the townsfolk gasped. The wards swept through like a cold current, picking up speed. They flooded the town and rose in walls of light that arced and came together in a dome, protective and bright, before fading into invisibility.

Briar let out a breath. He took a step and crumpled. Brightness invaded his vision, narrowing it into a tunnel. Grass beneath his head. Rowan fumbling through his vest in search of a potion vial. Under his cheek, the earth throbbed with the healthy, beating heart of the forest.

Rowan propped him up. A glass rim touched his lips. He nearly choked. Weakness made it difficult to swallow, but he managed. A second vial followed the first. His vision came back, spotty to begin with, until he could see Rowan’s blurry, worried face. He used his sleeve to dab under Briar’s nose, which bled again.

Something about Rowan felt different. Briar reached, squinting, touching a hand to his face.

“Rowan, your scar.” The filigree white lines still furled up his cheek, but the uneasy aura had vanished. All that remained was the campfire of Rowan’s personal aura, the scent of cedar. “It’s gone. The curse is gone.”

Held in Rowan’s arms, Briar could feel his relief. It was short-lived.

“But yours…”

Rowan didn’t finish. One look at Briar was enough to see that he had one foot in the grave. Vatii crowded into their embrace. Rowan buried his face in Briar’s shoulder beside her, his cheeks damp. Briar’s vision rippled, and a cold crept through his limbs that Rowan’s aura couldn’t chase out.

It wasn’t fair. They’d lost and found one another. Wounded men whose jagged edges matched up so perfectly that, fit together, the cracks ceased to be there at all. Only to be ripped apart again. Briar felt cold, but the tears in his eyes burned hot.

Small gasps and whispers from the crowd. A ripple of shock. Rowan lifted his head. It took effort, but Briar turned to follow everyone’s gazes.

At first, he didn’t understand what he saw. The forest bled. A blanket of scarlet seeped out from the trees’ edge. Yet it looked… dappled and soft. Not liquid, not light, not magic.

Rowan supported him the few yards it took to investigate. As they got closer, hope that felt more like a knot in his throat threatened Briar with tears.

It was a carpet of blooms.

He kneeled to pick one of the red flowers, shaped like a bell.