“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.”
CHAPTER 23
Linden came at Briar’s call, blanching as he took in the rubble. He climbed over it to take Briar by the shoulders and demand to know what had happened, if he was all right. Briar held in his breakdown, explaining best he could, asking if Linden knew any means to call back an exorcised spirit.
He didn’t.
Briar said, “Nobody else was here. She didn’t want to go. Fuck.” He didn’t swear often, but the moment called for it. “If you only heard her.”
Linden sat awkwardly next to Briar on the floor. “I’m sorry, Briar.”
“I managed to break her tether to the house. Do you think it weakened her connection here? But she didn’twantto go!”
Linden rubbed his shoulders. “The laws of magic don’t always obey our wants. Perhaps it has to do with what we found in the woods today. If the forest helped to keep her here, perhaps it released her.”
Though it sounded realistic, Briar was haunted by her final words, by all her regrets, which he felt he would share when his time came.
It was ridiculous to work after everything.
Gretchen’s departure left Briar lonely as he hemmed skirts and cut patterns. Kenneth’s death was not appeasement enough to release Briar from his curse, and Linden seemed no nearer an answer, but the press release party would be upon them soon, so Briar worked. It didn’t occur to him what he would wear to the party until Linden asked. He’d been too busy trying to perfect each garment, but he saw an opportunity to design something flamboyantly his own.
The idea came together on an evening when the first green buds of March showed on the trees. Briar sketched and scribbled out countless ideas. In each, he encountered the same problem, one that made him want to scream. Then he remembered Rowan’s hand trailing over his arm.
The idea felt transgressional, forbidden. It was anathema to the very problem he’d been attempting to solve with his previous designs. But once he set pencil to paper, the allure became impossible to deny.
Briar hid it whenever Linden came over to check on progress. He wanted it to be a surprise.
He finished with only a few days to spare before the press release. Standing in front of his mirror, turning this way and that to check for flaws, Briar had to admit he was proud. It was an expression of his time in Coill Darragh. A love letter to this strange place and the man he might have become if given more time.
The bell jingled downstairs to announce Linden. Briar turned to face the doorway, where Linden came to a stop, eyebrows raised, eyes skipping up and down Briar’s frame.
“Briar, that’s…”
It was a dress. A white train, dip-dyed in fading peridot, fell from his hips in an asymmetric line from a slit at mid-thigh. Flowers and sequins curled up around his hip and tapered off on their way up his waist. He wore the antler earring Rowan had given him for Christmas. White lace like frost fronds formed a sleeve down one arm and over his torso.
But his other, heavily tithed arm remained bare.
It was winter turned spring, it was entirely in defiance of fashion for men, and it was his.
And Linden said, “Is it finished?”
Briar might have felt less stung if he’d been slapped. “Yes?”
