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?”
“Iam.Weare 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?”
“Ididn’t.Wedid. 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,weexisted 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.”
