“More what? Why can’t you just tell me what you need?”
Ours.
It was no use. The forest either couldn’t communicate its needs, or it refused to.
Panting hard, three vials of potion depleted from his pack, Briar finally reached the tree.
It was the same, and yet nothing like how he’d left it. The stink of rot was an eye-watering punch. At first, Briar thought that the tree sang in a droning hum, but that was the flies. They hovered in clouds around its branches like buzzing foliage.
At its roots, Rowan lay. He stared, sightless, into the canopy with milky eyes. The forest crept over him in seeping mosses and curling vines, shredding his shirt apart, but the necklace remained miraculously intact. These were the least alarming things.
Briar crashed to his knees next to him. On Rowan’s chest, a branch had sunk into the skin. Or sprouted from it—it was difficult to tell where it began and Rowan ended. It arced up, the other end buried in the loam a few feet away. Briar seized his shoulders.
“Rowan, wake up!”
Rowan did not wake, but his chest rose, even with the branch through it. The vines crept faster to thwart Briar’s rescue. Panic set his hands shaking, or maybe that was the curse. Briar took another draft of potion—his last—and flung the empty bottle away. He scraped away the moss on Rowan’s body with his fingers, shuddering at the squelching noise it made as it lifted. Underneath, it left angry, red wheals on Rowan’s skin.
“Briar, hurry.” Vatii darted around his knees, pecking at the moss attempting to creep over him too.
Stop.
Briar drew out the knife and started cutting the vines. They shrank from the slice of the blade. Not the large branch, not yet.
Stop. Ours.
“He’s not yours,” Briar said. He tried to wake Rowan again, to no avail. The knife trembled in his grasp, and he clenched it tighter. The big branch stuck through Rowan’s chest was last, and he feared it the way he feared turning on a light when he’d heard a noise in the dark. He gritted his teeth, took the knife to it and sawed. It bit through the bark but sank no farther. He drew it back and, with all his limited strength, brought it down like an axe. A sickening burst of ichor seeped from the tiny wound, but the branch did not sever. Rowan twitched but didn’t wake.
Panic grasped Briar. He sawed at the branch but couldn’t get farther than a scant centimeter of bark, at which point it felt like trying to break through concrete. Vatii squawked in alarm as a vine tied her leg. Briar seized her, cutting the vine away, and she clawed his cloak to hang onto his back, away from the devouring forest floor.
“You have to wake him up,” she said. “Remember Orla!”
Briar remembered. He’d just hoped this would be different. If this was like Orla, then only one person could break the forest’s hold, and he was not responding no matter how hard Briar shook him. Briar could think of only one recourse. He had no tithe to bring someone back from the edge of consciousness or death, or whatever gripped Rowan now. The only thing he had on hand was his body. His weak, aching body.
He retrieved his charcoal and drew a rune on his bare wrist, cursing the shakes that made his lines wobble. He had to spit, wipe them clean and redraw them. Finally, he had a serviceable rune, and he reached into his magic well to the sense of his fingers trailing the sodden bottom. He pulled and pulled, dredged the scraps of a spell together. It drained his energy enough to make his vision spotty, but it worked.
Rowan’s lashes fluttered. When he opened his eyes, they were brown, not white. Confusion took hold as he saw Briar swaying beside him.
“Briar?” The confusion quickly slid sideways into horror when he saw what protruded from his chest. Rowan didn’t scream, but he tried to sit up, scramble away. He couldn’t. The root had him pinned. With mounting panic, “Briar?”
“Rowan.” Briar rushed to calm him, putting both hands on his cheeks and leaning in to block his view of the vine.
“It’s okay, Rowan. It’s going to be—you have to break that vine. We have to get out of here.”
Rowan made a sound somewhere between a groan and a sob. It rent Briar’s heart in two. He’d never seen Rowan look so afraid. He could do little to help, his reserves of magic so dwindled he doubted he could cast a pain relief spell without blacking out. He had enough to escape, nothing more.
“You can do this,” he said. “I’ll be right here to portal us home, you just have to break its hold.”
Rowan looked into his eyes. He was ashen-faced, clammy, shivering as if submerged in ice, but he nodded. As Briar drew away, he wrapped both hands around the bend in the branch, where he’d have the most leverage to twist and snap. The muscles in his arms flexed, testing. He looked to Briar, perhaps for confirmation or encouragement, which Briar gave by squeezing Rowan’s shoulder.
No!the forest shrieked.
The snap fractured through the air like a thunderclap. On the heels of it, Rowan’s harrowing scream.
Liquid from the severed end striped hot as blood over Briar’s arm. Black in the dark of the forest, but in flashes of dappled moonlight, it shone crimson. Itwasblood. The stump of the vine melted and congealed, molting away. Rowan’s howl was ear-splitting. Briar did his best to hold him and draw him back to the present.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, you did good. We’ve got to go, Rowan. Can you stand?”
Rowan tried. He rose up on his elbows before vines lashed around his throat to snap him back. The forest, desperate, was not going to let them go easily. Briar reached for the knife and found it gone, swallowed by the earth.
